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“Curious, how often unwed youngest daughters have a gift, isn’t it?”
    “Why did I never hear of you?”
    “We are meant to be unattached, to be the more dependent. That’s why they bring girls from distant villages and farms. All the seers do that. I’ve spoken to your mother, though.”
    “You have? What? Why … ?”
    The shrug again. “Frigga’s a woman. Athira gave me a message for her.”
    “You all have your tricks, don’t you?” He felt bitter, suddenly.
    “Swords and axes are so much better, aren’t they?” she said sharply. She was staring at him again, though he knew the darkness hid his face, too. “We’re all trying to make ourselves a life, Bern Thorkellson. Men and women both. Why else are you out here now?”
    Bitterness still. “Because my father is a fool who killed a man.”
    “And his son is what?”
    “A fool about to die before the next moon rises. A good way to … make a life, isn’t it? Useful kin for you to have.”
    She said nothing, looked away. He heard the horse again. Felt the wind, a change in it, as though the night had indeed turned, moving now towards dawn.
    “The snake,” he said awkwardly. “Is it … ?”
    “I’m not poisoned. It hurts.”
    “You … walked out here a long way.”
    “There’s one of us out all night on watch. We take turns, the younger ones. People come in the dark. That’s how I saw you on the horse and told her.”
    “No, I meant … just now. To warn me.”
    “Oh.” She paused. “You believe me, then?”
    For the first time, a note of doubt, wistfulness. She was betraying the volur for him.
    He grinned crookedly. “You are looking right at me, as you said. I can’t be that hard to see. Even a piss-drunk raider falling off his horse will spot me when the sun comes up. Yes, I believe you.”
    She let out a breath.
    “What will they do to you?” he asked. It had just occurred to him.
    “If they find out I was here? I don’t want to think about it.” She paused. “Thank you for asking.”
    He felt suddenly shamed. Cleared his throat. “If I don’t ride back into the village, will they know you … warned me?”
    Her laughter again, unexpected, bright and quick. “They could possibly decide you were clever, by yourself.”
    He laughed too. Couldn’t help it. Was aware that it could be seen as a madness sent by the gods, laughter at the edge of dying one hideous death or another. Not like the mindlessness of the water-disease—a man bitten by a sick fox—but the madness where one has lost hold of the way things are. Laughter here, another kind of strangeness in this dark by the wood among the spirits of the dead, with the blue moon overhead, pursued by a wolf in the sky.
    The world would end when that wolf caught the two moons.
    He had more immediate problems, actually.
    “What will you do?” she asked. The third time she’d seemed to track his thoughts. Perhaps it was more than being a youngest daughter, this matter of having a gift. He wished, again, he could see her clearly.
    But, as it happened, he did know, finally, the answer to her question.
    Once, years ago, his father had been in a genial mood one evening as they’d walked out together to repair a loose door on their barn. Thorkell wasn’t always drunk, or even often so (being honest with his own memories). That summer evening he was sober and easy, and the measure of that mood was that, after finishing the work, the two of them went walking, towards the northern boundary of their land, and Thorkell spoke of his raiding days to his only son, something that rarely happened.
    Thorkell Einarson had not been a man given to boasting, or to offering scraps of advice from the table of his recollections. This made him unusual among the Erlings, or those that Bern knew, at any rate. It wasn’t always easy having an unusual father, though a boy could take some dark pride in seeing Thorkell feared by others as much as he was. They whispered about him, pointed him out,