The north wind carried the smell of tar and seaweed as the sea lifted and lowered the critters broken up at the edge of Ravnfjord with a thin layer of fresh snow. The aurora poured over the mountain ridges, fraying like a green fire, and the longship bumped its side against the pilings at the shore. In the stone square where rallies gathered in the summer, stood a lone boulder - as tall as two men, cracked, overgrown with yellow mold and dotted with markings older than the memory of ancestors. That night it trembled, though the air was windless. Bjorn, who had returned to Ravnfjord after seven winters on foreign trails, placed his hand on the rough surface. He felt the stone was warmer than the frosty air, as if free blood flowed beneath the skin of the granite. The sound was almost inaudible - low, deep, reminiscent of the gurgling sigh of the earth. According to old stories, the stone was silent when the village was in agreement. And when it began to sing, it meant that something was approaching from the waters. - Can you hear it? - Sigrid asked quietly, appearing to his left. Her face was red from the wind, her hair twisted from the salt and her hands black from the tar. The light of a lamp shielded by a cattle bladder drew golden flecks across her cheeks. Bjorn nodded. In the half-light her eyes glittered, alert, calm. Sigrid, a sailor with a sure eye and a neck of steel, saw more than others in the mist, in the waves and in the movement of the birds. For her, the sky was a map and the wind a language she could read without words. - 'You've come back on a bad week,' she said, lowering her voice, though there was no one around. - Two days ago, jarl Eirik sailed out to hunt and did not return. His dog arrived in the morning, with ice on his whiskers and salt on his coat, and the jarl's boat was seen at dusk at the mouth of the fjord, without sails. People say there was singing on the sea. The same one. They were joined by Leif, a skald with hands cracked like old bark and a gaze that reflected the flame of every story he had ever heard. He carried with him a lyre in a linen bag and a stick with a carved raven's head. He used to sing of Eirik's victories and of nets full of silver fish. That evening he looked as if he had slept too little and listened too much. - 'I dreamt of a nine-rooted ash tree,' he said without greeting. - It was growing out of the ice and glowing from within. Someone had tied a three-stranded cord around it, and the cord hummed like a great torrent. I would have sworn it wasn't just a dream. - 'In Ravnfjord, dreams rarely come on their own,' Sigrid replied, glancing at the runes on the stone. - See. These marks... I don't remember them being so clear. Bjorn moved his hand over the gouged grooves. The scratches were fresh. Someone, not long ago, had run something sharp and hard over the ancient cuts, as if rediscovering them from under the petrified bark of time. In the jarl's long house, the benches were silent and the hearth dimmed. Souvenirs dangled from the ceiling: dried herb braids, walrus teeth, decorated splintered antlers, one of which, smooth as polished stone, belonged to Eirik - he had worn it in battles, as others wear talismans. Now the antlers lay against the wall, as if knocked off hastily. By the jarl's chair hung a map-like sheet of wood, scorched in threads of fjords and rocky bays, wedged between the pillars. At the edge of the map, where open water and blinding white should have been, a new mark appeared: three vertical dashes, short and sharp, like teeth in the beak of an unknown creature. - Does anyone know this sign? - Bjorn asked, feeling the sound of the stone under his skin still pushing a slow tremor through his veins. Leif squinted his eyes. - 'Three shadows,' he muttered. - 'I heard a song about an island that only appears in the north wind and disappears when the last feather of the aurora fades. They said that three stones stand on its shore, each casting a shadow in a different direction, though the sun and moon are silent. Out of a corner slid Torun, as old as the oaks by the river, wearing a woollen hood on which frost had settled. She was as silent as snow and as hard as steel that had been tempered many times. No one called for her, but Torun had a habit of appearing where signs thickened in the air. - 'The stone sings to you,' she said, without asking whether they believed her or not. - Not everyone can hear. You do hear. Jarl Eirik has also heard. Last night he came to me because he thought it was the wind howling in the crevices. I gave him a walrus bone horn with the sign of the three shadows etched into it. I told him to blow when he saw a glow on the water without a source. He blew. And the sea responded, as it has responded for a very long time. - What does it mean? - Sigrid scratched her head. Her composure only cracked when she had no data to read. - Where had he gone? - 'Where people go when they can no longer stand up straight in the light of their own hearths,' Torun replied. - To the north. To the border of waters and shadows. The island is not on the map. Maps only show what has already been named. And this... - she touched her finger to three lines burnt into the wood - it's a name older than your languages. Bjorn felt a small bird squat inside his chest and start flapping its wings. It was not fear. It was more something that always accompanied him on the edge of the familiar - the moment the rope bounced off the piling and the ship cut loose from the ground. - 'If the jarl has followed this chant,' he said, 'you must follow it. Sigrid only nodded. Leif smiled briefly, like someone who already knows the first words of the song, but does not yet know how it ends. Torun took the horn off the wall and handed it to Bjorn. In the light of the lamp, the smooth morse bone became milky and runes glittered like ice spikes on its surface. - 'Blow when you see a light that comes neither from the sun, nor from the moon, nor from fire,' she said. - Then know that you are passing through the eye of the needle. The longship Raven Flight glided through the waters of the fjord like a dark leaf. Sigrid stood at the helm, Bjorn at the bow, Leif took his place at the middle oar-bench, where the wood usually makes noises that can only be heard at night. Three more men came aboard: Sverre with hands like mills, Ivar with an eye as quick as a swallow and Ragna, who could stitch a rip in the sail even in a blizzard. The aurora drew wide ribbons in the sky as they sailed out of the shadow of the mountains. The sea was as smooth as spilled steel. The sky was the colour of fresh wine and the stars hung low and hard. The water beneath the keel glistened faintly, as if someone had scattered a flourish of light between the plankton specks. Sigrid took out of her skin a bright crystal, a sunstone, and turned it in her hand until a thin streak of pale radiance lay straight, without a tremor. - North-east,' she cast. - Though the night, though the stars, though everything says otherwise. Bjorn looked at the horizon. Where usually there was only a dark band of water, there was a slight glow, as if someone had enclosed the fire in their hands and held it beneath the surface. There was no moon. There were no bonfires on the cliffs. And yet something was glowing, subtly, insistently, surprisingly still. - 'That's not a reflection,' muttered Leif. - It's an indication. The oars went into rhythm. In the silence, the hull could be heard cutting a quiet rustle, the silence falling on the water and rising again, the birds not screaming, though they usually do so over the entrance to the open sea. The fog rose not from the waves but as if from the air, from somewhere between invisible veils. At first it was transparent, then thicker, until the world shrank to the length of five long benches. - Can you feel it? - Sigrid asked. - The water ... It's not so cold anymore. Indeed. Bjorn's fingers, resting against the damp beech of the hull, felt a tremor more subtle than that from the stone. It was as if the sea was breathing, drawing air in and out with invisible lungs. - 'Do you hear that, Leif? - whispered Bjorn. Skald's eyes were closed. - 'Someone is singing,' he said. - Not in our language. Not in any that I know. And yet I understand the rhythm. Three notes, pause. Three notes, a pause. Like the steps of three people walking, but each looking in a different direction. That's when they saw two black shapes on either side of them - boulders sticking out of the water, like huge hands spread out on the surface. Between them was a passage so narrow that Raven Flight could only cut through it once, without a patch. Nothing was visible from the mist hanging here, but somewhere above it the aurora still smouldered, marking the sky with green feathers. - 'The eye of the needle,' said Bjorn, feeling his fingers tremble not from the cold. - Hold it straight. Sigrid did not flinch. The arrangement of muscles on her face resembled a drawing in stone - precise, resolute, unyielding. Raven Lot slipped into the shadows between the rocks, as quiet and springy as if the water itself was giving him space. For a moment it seemed as if the world ceased to exist. Only breath, only heart, only the creaking of wood. And then the mist disappeared, as if someone had lifted it from their eyes with their hand. The sea opened wider, but it didn't look like any they had known. It was darker and denser, yet clear as glass. The bottom shimmered like polished black rock, even though they were in deep water. On the horizon loomed a low silhouette - a ball of woven grass and stone, an island so flat it seemed just a thought someone had forgotten to complete. On its shore stood three boulders. Each cast a shadow, though no source of light was visible. And each shadow fell in a different direction. - 'I see sand like glass,' Sigrid said as they approached the shore. - And footsteps. The footprints were indeed there. Small and large. Bare feet, slightly splayed toes, as if a man were stepping cautiously, not knowing if the ground would accept him. They led from the waterline to the central boulder and beyond, past it, and then.... they ended abruptly, as if someone had taken their feet off the ground and hovered. Bjorn jumped ashore. The sand cracked under his weight like a thin shell of ice, revealing a shiny black glaze. He touched the middle boulder. Under his fingers he felt again the low chant they had heard in Ravnfjord, but here it was clearer, more focused. Three notes, a pause. Long breaths between them. - 'Eirik,' he said quietly, more to himself than to the others. - Are you here? He was answered by something that was not a voice, yet had the shape of a word. He did not recognise the meaning. The feeling, however - the one that sometimes comes at night when someone says your name from the edge of sleep - was all too clear. - 'Don't touch any more,' Sigrid said, placing her hand on his wrist. - 'Listen to the water. The sea, which a moment ago had been calm as a sheet, began to work subtly. Not ripple - work, as if someone was rearranging large, slow stones inside. The Raven Flight, left in the shallows with its bow stuck in the sand, moved a few hands. Something flashed on the black sand. Leif bent down and picked up an iron ring. It had no decorations, but it had weight and the smell of sweat and smoke. Eirik's ring, worn for years on his right forearm. - It can't just lie here,' he whispered. - Someone had hung it up. Then the mist, which had hitherto hung like a delicate veil behind his back, moved differently. Not like water vapour pushed by the wind, but like something with a will of its own. From this milky matter emerged a billowing shape - an elongated, tall, tree-cut deer-horn motif, so intricately carved that you could almost hear the forest in it. A longship. No people. A sail as black as wet raven feathers, taut in a wind that didn't exist. The rope pulled through the quiver twitched, though no one touched it. The ship glided along the shore until it stopped exactly opposite them, silent, unmoving, obeying something that could not be seen. - 'Look,' Sigrid said, and her voice was truly quiet for the first time that night. On the mast, just below the rhea, hung an iron ring resembling the one Leif held. It moved slightly, though the air was still, and struck against a tree once, twice, a third time. Bjorn felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck. He was not afraid. But everything in him screamed that here they were, standing next to something that didn't know their names, and yet in a strange way recognised them. He took a step towards the side, as the silence in which the ship was stuck drew him like a vacuum. - 'Careful,' Leif reflexively held out his hand, as if trying to stop a word that had escaped his lips too quickly, 'if it's the same chant that Eirik heard, it will ask us things we don't have answers for yet. The rope hanging from the side moved suddenly, like a snake awakening to life. Without a jerk, without warning. It emerged from the shadows and fell softly on the sand, right at Bjorn's feet, then, as if it had fingers of its own, entwined around his wrist in one sure movement and began to pull him towards the dark deck.