On a fogbound island, Eirik and Solveig uncover a rune-marked chain in the moss, and the darkness beyond the rocks seems to know they are there.
Fog lay over the fjord like a burial shroud, blurring the drakkars drawn up along the shore and swallowing the island beyond the camp. The people of Skjoldby had been sailing for a week in search of new land and old riches, but the only thing they had found so far was cold salt wind, thin game, and a growing silence at their backs.
Eirik hated that silence. At fourteen, he wanted movement, noise, trouble he could name and fight. Solveig, one year younger, had the steadier gaze and the sharper tongue, and she never let him forget it.
They sat together on a fallen log near the fire, watching the others drag tents into place between the black pines. The smoke curled low and useless in the damp air.
"Do you think the berserkers will come at night?" Eirik asked, lowering his voice as he glanced toward the trees.
Solveig gave the empty cooking pot a long look. "If they do, let them bring supper. We’ve barely enough dried fish to survive a mouse."
Eirik snorted, though his stomach tightened at the thought. For three days they had eaten less and less. The hunt had gone badly. The sea had turned stingy.
A gull cried overhead, harsh and lonely. Solveig stood first.
"Come on," she said. "If we stay here, we’ll only end up listening to men complain about the weather. Let’s scout the island before dark."
Eirik was already on his feet.
They moved north along the rocks, where the island narrowed and the pines grew thicker, their trunks slick with mist. The ground softened underfoot, thick with moss and old needles. Every branch seemed to drip. Every shadow seemed to watch.
Then Solveig stopped so abruptly that Eirik nearly walked into her.
"Did you hear that?"
He held still. At first there was only the wind pushing through the trees. Then, faintly, a metallic scrape beneath the earth.
Solveig crouched and brushed away the moss with her fingers. A shape shone in the damp dark: iron, green with age, marked with tight lines of runes.
Eirik knelt beside her and dug deeper with his hand. The metal was attached to a chain, thick as a wrist, disappearing between two split boulders ahead.
Solveig looked up. The fog had crept in behind them, and the camp was already gone from sight.
"Eirik," she whispered, "there’s something in there."
A breath of cold air slid from the crack in the rocks, carrying a sound too soft to be called a word, too old to be called a voice.
Neither of them moved.
Then, from somewhere inside the cleft, something shifted in the dark.