A Viking brother and sister find a strange trunk on the shore as an unknown ship appears in the storm off Skjoldheim.
It was evening, but the sky over the fjord already looked bruised, smeared with purple and iron-grey cloud. Einar, the jarl’s son, stood on the black rocks with his feet planted wide, watching the waves slam into the shore. Beside him crouched his sister Runa, a whale-bone knife tucked in her hand, and between them sat a heavy sack of crab bait they had brought as cover.
Skjoldheim clung to the hill above the beach, its turf roofs crouched against the wind. Smoke drifted from the huts and carried the smell of roasting meat, but down here the salt stung the air and the surf never stopped muttering. They should have been back among the firelight by now. Instead, they had come to the coast before dawn and stayed hidden in the rocks, because Einar had heard something in the night: a slow, dragging scrape from deep in the bay, as if iron had been pulled across stone beneath the water.
Runa had not mocked him when he woke her. That was worse than mockery.
"Do you hear that?" she whispered, her eyes fixed on the dark water. "Those are not waves."
Einar nodded once. The sound came again, faint but certain, threading through the wind. Then the horizon flashed.
Not lightning. Fire.
A pale light burned low over the mouth of the fjord, moving where no fire should move. A ship followed it out of the dark, long and lean, but wrong in its shape, wrong in the way it rode the water. It was no drakkar Einar had ever seen. Before he could make sense of it, the surf hurled something black onto the rocks between them.
The trunk hit hard and slid to a stop at their feet. It was iron-banded, wet with sea foam, and cold enough that Einar felt the chill through his boots. Strange metal fittings gleamed along its sides. Runa stepped back, but Einar reached for the lid anyway.
The moment his fingers touched it, blue light leaked through the seam.
The air changed. It tightened, thickened, and a whispering began inside the trunk, a low murmur in a language neither of them knew. Runa drew in a sharp breath. Far out on the fjord, the strange ship turned toward them, and thunder split the sky so violently that the rocks seemed to jolt under Einar’s knees.
He lifted the lid.