The dawn over Skardvik was sharp as a wedge, and the fjord held its breath. Sigrid, the archer's seventeen-year-old daughter, moved her hand over the cool wound of her grandfather's shield. The neighbours' sails fluttered under the salty wind, and ravens circled the longboats like faeries. In her pocket she hid a whale bone, thin as a fingernail and covered with tiny runes. From the depths of the bay came the rhythmic rasping of ropes, like the rough whisper of sails. Jarl Runi had announced a ban on voyages beyond the Gate of Mist, where the drakkar Ormr had disappeared. Fishermen's nets came back empty, and porpoises beat their tails as if to warn people. Sigrid remembered that her mother, Astrid, had disappeared right there, without a helmet or a goodbye. The bone in her hand arranged itself into a map as she touched it in the aurora light. The elders said that behind the mist, the tides retreat with the memory of kings of old. - 'This is madness,' muttered Eirik, the navigator's terminator, as she showed him the glowing features. Despite his words, he loaded his pannier with dried fish, seal hair and an old compass. A white crow sat on the ridge of the shed, leaning over as if reading our intentions. - If the map falls silent beyond the fjord, we turn back before the caves and tell no one. - Or it's a warning," he added, but he didn't turn away from the boat once. Night came quickly, and the darkness carried the sound of hammers and the breath of the sea under the ice. The harbour smelled of tar and spruce; our slender snekkar, the Shine, waited without crew. Sigrid had left a small rune of promise at the piling for the Blitz to return with a guiding hand. They pushed the boat out onto the black mirror, and the bone in her pocket grew warm. Eirik sprinkled the side with salt and muttered the old navigators' song of safe return. Beyond the Gate of Fog the waves slowed, as if someone on the other side was listening to our oars. The aurora lapped against the mast and the runes glowed green, indicating the strait between the cliffs. Then a horn sounded, deep as a well, echoless, inhumanly close and old. A crewless drakkar slid out of the milky mist, its prow in the shape of a wolf, marked with Astrid's mark. The water around it foamed gently, as if a thousand small fish were fleeing from an invisible beak. The boat slowed on its own, as if the current was pulling us towards the deck, where something shifted a shadow. Sigrid lifted a bone and the runes formed her name before someone whispered it from below. A chill gushed from inside the wolf's bow, like from an ice cave in summer. A wet braid of hair flashed on the railing that shouldn't have been there at this hour.