An evening so quiet fell on the shore of Hrafnsfjord that I could hear the snow creaking under the dogs' paws and the rope on the piling groaning from the ice. From the cliff I could see the return of the longship of Jarl Thorbjörn. "The Falcon of the North" carried itself across the black water with its torn sail as if someone had run over it with a knife. The glow of the aurora danced over the water and, I would have sworn, touched the tops of the mountains like a green fire that does not burn. - 'It's not the season for returns,' muttered Knut, standing next to me with his hand tucked in his sleeve. He was the son of a ship carpenter, with eyes as bright as a frozen lake. - If the jarl returned ahead of schedule, something had gone wrong. I did not reply. My breath was still gone from my throat when the sails of our men were so ragged and the faces too silent. There was no song, no clatter of oars, just this heavy, muffled stillness, as if all that was said on board would not come ashore. Everyone was waiting on the pier: fishermen, old women with baskets, children on sledges, dogs, even the skald Audun, from whom I had studied. My master was leaning on an antler cane and looked as if he was counting the steps of the ship. When the 'Midnight Falcon' came to the piling, the men came ashore carrying something wrapped in sealskin. Not a body - it was too light for a body. In the light of the torch I saw the end - the white, worn edge of an antler into which runes had been pressed, reflecting in the fire like cold teeth. Everyone found the reason for the silence of the eyes. Jarl Thorbjörn's face tightened like skin on a drum. He was big and bearded, but that evening he looked as if he was wearing something that poked into his back from the inside. He took the pack from the warrior's hands and headed straight for the longhall. Before the crowd had time to move, the skald Audun touched my elbow. - Eiro, eyes,' he said. - They see better than the tongue will tell. Come. We slipped behind the people's backs. I felt the sizzle of the torch on my skin, smelled the smoke, the smell of tar and wet wood, salty leather. The wood crackled in the hall, and in the smoky light of the campfire the jarl nudged the sealskin with a blade and unrolled a package on the table. It was a fragment of reindeer antler, old, yellowish, smooth from the hand, with a swirling pattern of runes cut out around the opening, as if someone had sewn the hollow centre with a mark. Also standing at the table was a bard from the eastern village, grey as dawn. She didn't speak, just pulled her eyebrows together as if something didn't stick to the ground. People whispered. Words bounced off the beams: "Mora light", "Cold Threshold", "carries misfortune". When that one reluctant term was uttered, the jarl slammed his fist on the table. - 'No one will repeat what must not be called,' he said. - Whoever of you sees a whirligig sign or antlers with such a cut, bring it to me. We will burn it, and the memory too. Skald Audun watched the pack disappear into the jarl's chest. His hand, thin and bony, twitched slightly. I knew him well enough to recognise the movement: the words were beginning to run faster in him than the blood. After the rally, when the people had gone back to their angles, their anvils and their bowls of soup, and the wind had begun to howl through the cracks like a young wolf, Audun beckoned me into his chamber by the fence. It always smelled of tar and dry herbs here. The master lowered the hide that served as a door and slid something wrapped in straw out of the chamber. Inside was a second antler fragment - twin to the one in the jarl's chest, but smaller, like a key to a lock that was barely scratched. - From where... - I started. - 'Not everything lands on the same table,' he said with a thin smile. - Someone from the jarl's crew didn't want this thing in the chest. He said it sticks to our house like the thorns of a hedgehog: it will attach itself and not let go. You know the runes. You read better than I can see. I leaned over the antler. The mark was no ordinary line. It was a vortex. The rune chased the rune, repeating itself not quite the same, changing direction like a song in a circle. The words of the kenning that Audun had spent months building sounded in my head. I ran my fingers over the grooves. The sign of Tiwaza - like a spear, Ingwaza like a seed in the ground, Laguz like a wave. Between them almost hidden tiny slashes, double slashes, as if someone had put clues in the running text. - "The door at the bottom of the ice," I whispered. - "Where the fires of midnight lay like a belt on the waters, and the sun is behind a cloud, but you will find it through a stone." - A sunstone," Audun muttered. - Calcite. Do you remember what I taught about it? - It shows the sun through the clouds. - I lifted my gaze. - It's a clue. And this... - I pointed to a tiny notch next to Laguz. - "When the sea takes the air." The master's smile was extinguished. - 'There are nights when the tides do unexpected things,' he said quietly. - And there are places where the waters go, even though they shouldn't. I heard about the Cold Threshold as a child. Those who go down there come back different or not at all. - And yet the jarl has returned,' I remarked. - And he brought this. Audun chewed the words as if they were hard. Finally, he handed me a roll of birch bark and a coal. - Transcribe. Then burn the prototype. When I finished, my fingers were trembling. Not from the cold. The bark sizzled on the embers and smelled bittersweet, like roasting moss. I wrapped the bark with twine and tucked it under my shirt. The words were as heavy as an axe and as sharp as winter's laughter. The night is long by our shores. The clouds ran low, and the aurora, though it stood like a sheet of gods over the ridge, was thinner than usual, as if someone had stretched it until it cracked. I carried the secret roll to the shed by Knut's yard. I could feel every inhale creaking in my nose from the frost, and every creak of the board under my foot. Knut sat over the new keel, stroking it with his hand like the back of a horse. He raised his eyes when I walked in. - 'My father said,' he whispered, 'that the jarl is conferring with people with whom he does not sit by the fire. That he will sail out again when the moon comes in low. That he wants to get ahead of what is coming towards us from the north. I pulled out the bark. I showed him the kennings. Knut read slowly but carefully. He was always attentive when it came to wood, water, direction. When he raised his head, he had the same gleam in his eyes that I saw when he looked at the finished mast. - If this is true... - he began. - ...It's not just sailing for skins and wood - I finished. - He wants to find the door. The silence grew low and thick. Only the water under the quay clapped lazily, as if sleepy. The aurora trembled. - 'We could be there before him,' said Knut. - My father had glued together a knarr on which to sail either east or south, they hadn't decided. He is standing under a tarpaulin. Without a big crew we won't get far, but.... - But with two there are three of us - someone in the shadows spoke up. We froze. Out of the gloom emerged a man whose face I had seen on torches and in whispers. Bjorn Ulfsson, a sea wolf, once standing by my father's side. He had disappeared after his dispute with the jarl, leaving anger and undrinkable horns of honey behind. Now he had hair tangled like nets and a tattoo of a raven on his neck. He didn't reach for his knife. He just watched as he looked out to sea just before the storm. - 'Relax,' he said, raising his hands. - I didn't come to steal. I came back because the sea gave up something that should not have lived. And because your skald sent tidings to me: that runes are again being played in the city that should not be played. - Audun? - I burnt out. - He did not say I would come for you, Eiro. But he knew I would come. - Bjorn nodded at the roll at my side under my shirt. - This needs to be read where the water hears. Not here, where wood mixes words with sawdust. My knarr will sail away at dawn. You can come with me - or watch the jarl go the way you have indicated. My heart was pounding in my ears. I knew what it meant to go with an exile whose name burns like tar. I also knew what it meant to stay and pretend I wasn't being scratched by curiosity under my skin like an innate hair. - 'If we go,' Knut said, 'you're in charge, but the helm is held by me. Bjorn parried, but respect flashed in his eyes. - The deal. - He shook hands. We shook it, both me and Knut, each with a different thought. Dawn was just a lighter version of darkness. Patches of ice oozed against the side as we slid the 'Weasel' out from under the tarpaulin. Knarr was not beautiful as a long jarl ship, but it would probably only crack under the mountain. The deck smelled of tar and smoke from a long-extinguished campfire, and the beams creaked with the contented old creak of a ship that doesn't have to prove anything to anyone. The Bjorn's crew were a handful of people the village saw with a slant: a red-haired girl with eyes faster than a knife, a man with hands burned like bark, an old man who called the sky by name as if he knew its youth. No one asked why we were going. Everyone already knew that we were sailing where one does not come for skins. I pulled out a sun stone. I rotated it in my fingers until it caught the light the way it always did: splitting it into two paths. I turned it slowly until the one true one that I could feel in the skin of my palm appeared: the sun, invisible behind the low-hanging ceiling of clouds. I gave Knut the direction. He turned. "Weasel" curled up like a fox as he takes in the trail. The fjord narrowed, the walls of the mountains rose, the ice on the banks bit the black stones. And then we emerged into wide water. The sea lay flat as a shattered shield, and above it hung a mist so white it hurt the eyes. The aurora, though it was daytime, twitched a wide, pale streak in the northern sky, like a scar on the skin of the sky. The wind had died down, but the sail did not drop, but clung like a breath stopped just before the word. - 'Something's wrong,' the redhead said, looking out over the water. - The tide is standing still. - 'It's standing,' confirmed the old man, macing the air with his fingers, as if checking the invisible tissue. - Or waiting. As we entered the fog, the world narrowed to a few mast lengths. The sounds changed; the crew's voices sounded like they were under a blanket, the lines crunched too loudly. Streaks of light appeared on the water, as if someone had spilled a glowing seed. There were more of them with each passing moment, until they merged into a murky path beneath us, like a milky river flowing in the opposite direction to us. - 'Now,' I whispered. - 'When the sea takes the air. I wasn't joking. The water under the boat suddenly dropped a finger or two, as if someone had drawn it into their lungs. "The Weasel" twitched, the mastheads squeaked. Knut gripped the rudder tighter. - 'It's opening,' said the old man, but there was no delight in his voice. The fog cleared for a moment. Ahead of us grew a black arch of basalt, like a gate torn out of the ground and driven into the sea. On its inner side, washed by salt and time, ran a swirl of runes, the same as on the antlers. The water around the arch rippled strangely - not to the right, not to the left, but inwards, as if someone had turned a river over and made it flow into the heart of the stone. - 'We're not going in there,' growled Knut through his teeth. - 'You flow in if you want to understand what has come to you anyway,' Bjorn replied, not taking his eyes off the dark gap under the arch. - 'Or you go back and watch as the jarl, having less to think about, will be the first to embrace what is sleeping here. That's when we heard it. A sound at the edge of hearing, low, from deep within the stone, like a drum beat beneath the earth. It wasn't threatening or friendly. It was confident. The next inhalation of the sea took us another layer of water from under the keel. "Weasel" slowly began to slide down, as if someone had grabbed her by an invisible rope and was pulling her towards the black throat. Knut shouted to the crew to fold the sail, but the wind, which was not blowing, suddenly began to stroke the canvas from inside, as if breathing it. The rope pulleys squeaked. The redhead threw the bareboat; it hooked, she pulled - the hook hit a stone and sprang back as if it had touched the bones of a whale. The aurora glow brightened and struck a green reflection in a black arc. Through the heartbeat I saw something on the rock walls: lines going into the depths, stairs carved into the basalt, winding down to where the water should have been but wasn't. My fingers were glued to the bark roll so tight that my nails hurt. I understood the next passage, which I had disregarded during the night: "Go when the stones are silent and the water speaks for the first time". - Now," I whispered. I didn't know whether to Knut or to myself. - This is it. Bjorn looked at me. For the first time there was no certainty at all in his eyes. And then the darkness beneath the arch moved, as if something had taken a breath there, and the knarr moved forward, pushed by a force we did not know, straight into the depths where the light ended and something began, waiting for someone to name it