The ice was breaking over Hjarnfjord and the village was waking up as if from a long sleep. Eira, the daughter of a ship carpenter, counted the steps to her father's workshop, feigning calm. Under her leather jacket she carried an iron raven claw, the only memento of her mother. The mother was said to have disappeared where night comes to shore. That morning, the raven sat on the bow of the new boat and cawed strangely deafeningly. Eira climbed between the beams of the hull, looking for doom, and found something else. In a crevice in the wood stuck a box containing her mother's rune, clenched with a tarred thong. With the blade of her knife, she cut the knot and pulled out a rolled-up, greasy sealskin map. On the parchment was marked in charcoal the current that ran north past the known islands. Beneath the map was a brief inscription: Go when the sky sings, and beware of silence. A familiar skald, Oddr, was accompanying the kids and glanced at Eira from under a brow. They moved away into the shadows of the boat, where it smelled of tar, resin and damp jute. "If you show this to Jarl Sten, we'll all sail there," he whispered uncertainly. "Or no one will come back," she replied, feeling the raven tapping the seat log with her claw. Oddr told the rumour of the Silent Current, which is silent when the ships are silent. In the evening, the sky streaked with green light, as if someone had shaken the curtain over the fjord. People cmoched with delight, and Jarl Sten ordered the ropes to be coiled and the hearths extinguished. Eira slipped the map behind her belt and ducked into the shade of the boat shed. She stopped as she heard two voices, too quiet for a sky holiday. "We're taking the girl's boat tomorrow before she has time to warn anyone," someone said, unbearably confident. The plank creaked under her foot, the raven swooped up, and light danced across the dagger blade. Eira tightened her hand on the claw, as if it could cut through the whispering and the fear. The footsteps drew closer, sweeping the glow from the lantern, which sounded like a drum in the silence. Water glistened between the hulls, and the current whispered exactly as it had in the rumour. Eira moved sideways, already-already about to step out onto the pier, when a shadow replaced her path. Someone's rough grip closed on her wrist before she could scream.