At the end of the fjord the ice cracked like thin glass, hissing under the late winter sun. Eira, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a ship's carpenter and a vanished seidr witch, stood on the platform. In her fingers she spun a talisman made of whale bone, chipped to the exact spot of a single rune. In Hrafnstad, a long house under a steep rock, tar was being boiled and sails patched. Everyone was getting ready for the first expedition, and she could still hear the silent question: where had her mother's boat disappeared to? Jarl Asgeir was burning a torch by the pledge stone and speaking of courage. But a whisper circulated between the shields: someone had seen a drakkar without oarsmen, with a wolf's prow and a black banner in the night mist. "Children's tales!" - snorted the jarl, though his ash-stained ring twitched in his hand. Eira remembered that same wolf's prow; that was the boat Sigrun had sailed in when she had forfeited Jotun's Teeth. Fjord had known their names better than they knew their own, forever. In the evening, a raven crashed onto the windowsill, heavy with salt and the north wind. It dropped a copper ring with an engraved mark on the board, half scratched off, as if someone didn't want it to be recognised. A kaunan rune flashed inside, matching exactly the missing piece of her talisman. "This is no coincidence," said Kjetil, a young skald who had long been writing down other people's dreams. He had ink and fear under his fingernail, but his eyes shone with curiosity all the same. The corridor reeked of tar, and from the gloom someone closed the door too carefully. At night they snuck out to the boat shed where old knarra Seal slept. They packed a dried fish, a leather behemoth and a modest bundle of arrows, though they hoped more for a map than a battle. "If there is a gate, it will open at the third stream," Kjetil muttered, quoting an inscription from the centre of the ring. The raven flew low over the water, guiding them towards the throat of the dark reefs. Jotun's teeth stood out black, and a green glow danced on the current, like the shadow of an aurora trapped in the waves. At the very entrance, the talisman in Eira's hand warmed as if touched by fire from the forge. Carved marks emerged from the bottom between the rocks, as bright as fresh snow on a basalt threshold. The seal trembled as the water reversed course, even though the wind had almost ceased. A wolf's prow slid out of the mist, wet and silent, and a disc without colour swayed overboard. "Sigrun?" - whispered Eira, as someone called out her name from under the mirror of the water. Then something moved between the shields, and a shadow climbed the rail.