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it and the taste of it seemed to fizz through her, as if tiny bubbles went popping all the way down inside her from her mouth to her knees.

    The god now had the wolf’s head over his face. He peered through the animal’s bloodied lids with cold eyes. The tongue that slithered from between the dead wolf’s teeth was long and lascivious.

    ‘What is your name?’ she asked.

    ‘Names are like clothes, lady. I have many.’

    ‘And which one do you wear tonight?’

    The god smiled. She could see he liked her words. He pulled her to him, pressed his wolf lips to hers and said, ‘My name is Misery, and would you know yet more?’

    ‘Yes,’ said the girl, breathing in his scent, the scent of something beautiful, strange and burned. ‘I would know more.’

    He flicked at her lips with his tongue and whispered, ‘So is yours.’

    The next morning the traveller was gone, along with the fine wolf pelt. Around Saitada’s neck, tied in a strip of leather, was a strange stone. It was a token, the night caller had said, of his affection and protection. It didn’t seem to do her much good.

    The livestock had been slaughtered. The dogs were dead and Saitada was blamed for lying with a stranger while the wolf devoured the pigs. The farmer’s wife wanted to forgive her, to comb her hair and call her daughter again, but the farmer, brave in the wolfless light of day, wanted revenge.

    She was sold with only the clothes she stood up in and the pebble charm the strange fellow had given her to her name. The priests had bought her and told her to make a virtue of her suffering. When they discovered she was pregnant they set to chastise her but found they could not. Something about her, maybe the charm, maybe that eye that seemed to see all their sins, stopped them, and they let her live among them unpunished.

    Then Authun had come.

     
    So what stopped Authun’s thoughts of murder on the ship? The stone at her neck was no more than a pebble with the head of a wolf scratched on it. Perhaps he had seen the rough little picture - his family sign - and felt some deep-seated fear that this foreign woman was kin. Or perhaps he just felt sorry for her.

    He looked north, up into the white-capped peaks where he would meet Gullveig, witch queen of the mountains, that mind-blown child. She had been no more than ten years old when he’d first faced her the summer before. Authun knew the stories surrounding her. As the old witch queen was dying, she had appeared to Gullveig’s father, a warrior at the court of King Halfdan the Just. She had told him to take his pregnant wife to the Troll Wall to give birth. He knew better than to refuse, surrendered the girl child and gave thanks for the luck the sacrifice would bring the family. Gullveig had been a decade in the dark of the mountain caves, breathing in magic like a fisherman’s children breathe sea salt on the wind.

    Authun looked at the mother cradling her twins. No, he couldn’t kill her. He’d give her to the witches, he thought. The chosen boy would survive the journey from the Wall to his wife without feeding. The girl couldn’t even speak Authun’s language, would never know what had happened to her children. What harm could she do waiting on the witches? It wasn’t as if she was going to escape them: no one could even find their way in and out of their caves without a guide. In this way Authun the Pitiless, burner of the five towns, allowed the privilege of life to a deformed slave that he would not allow to his kinsmen, and in so doing sealed his fate.

     
    When they came ashore, the summer valley was pleasant and hummed with fertility but Authun could take no pleasure from the scenery. All his life he was a man of the necessary, someone who did what needed to be done and thought no more about it. He was pitiless but as a means to an end. The fouler the fate of his enemies, the more tribute he could exact from others without having to lift a spear. But, as the woman’s