The yard was quiet when they arrived, but Baldr Stoneshield was already in it. He was feeding the mounts without any apparent need for acknowledgment, large hands working through a bucket of something dense and fragrant while Geisje and Prieeltje ate from his palms with the settled calm of animals being handled by someone who knew what he was doing. He did not look up when the party came through the gate. He finished what he was doing, set the bucket down, and walked inside.
The children had been watching from the corner of the house the whole time.
One braver than the rest detached from the group and approached Yumi with the solemn directness of someone who had decided something. Could she, the child asked, pet her tail.
The answer apparently satisfied, because when Nanna called everyone in from the yard a few minutes later, the same child reappeared at Yumi's elbow before the door had closed.
The Fire That Has Not Gone Out
The longhouse was low-ceilinged and warm, its smoked beams dark with accumulated years, geothermal heat rising steady from beneath the hearthstone. A fire burned in the hearth. By the look of it, it had been burning for a very long time.
The table was long. Baldr sat at its head with the economy of motion of someone who had finished spending effort for the day. Children occupied the far end in an arrangement that had clearly been settled before the party arrived. The child from the yard had claimed the seat beside Yumi and showed no signs of moving.
Nanna had food ready before they arrived. She had food ready before they arrived because that was simply what she did.
The meal was unfamiliar in all the right ways. A large egg of unknown origin, pale and enormous, its yolk the colour of late afternoon. Fish skewers charred over stone. And something that came in a sealed crock with a cloth tied over the lid, which Nanna uncovered with the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone who did not consider this unusual. The smell reached the party before the explanation did. The flavour was what happened when fish, fermentation, and cold were left together with time and no one to say stop. Glaciolotl, she said. She said it the way you say something obvious.
The children ate like they had done this forever, which they had.
The Wall of Names
An older child had been watching the party from down the table with the quiet, accumulating intensity of someone compiling a verdict. Midway through the meal she excused herself, returned with blank wooden tablets and a small iron carving tool, and moved to each person in turn.
"Everyone who stays in Vanaheim gets a tablet," she said. "You should have one."
She wanted to know what each name meant, where it came from, whether it had been given or chosen. She offered, with total sincerity, to help write it down if anyone did not know how yet.
Some of the party wrote in their own scripts, characters she had no frame of reference for, which she studied with careful, concentrated courtesy before deciding they were probably correct. Others put in the effort to render their names across multiple languages at once, the tablets growing more ambitious than originally requested. She assessed each result with the solemnity of a young scholar encountering unfamiliar material, sounded the names aloud, failed on several of them, tried again. On one attempt, close enough to the right sounds: a pair of ears moved. The child noticed.
Before anyone had fully stood from the table, Nanna was already at the wall with a hammer, finding spaces. The wall was covered, name tablets edge to edge in dozens of hands and dozens of scripts, going back further than any of the current residents could account for. She found spaces for each new one. She did not ask where they wanted to go.
Later, with the fire low and the children in bed, Baldr spoke.
"I'll prepare some dried fish," he said. "It's good."
He went to bed.
What the Starball Carried
Sleep came quickly in the warmth of the longhouse. For Yumi, it came with something else.
The humming arrived before anything else, a low resonance in the sternum, belonging to no instrument she knew. Then the light. Then the trees, already old and already themselves, declared all at once the way dreaming works: not gradually but complete.
She was not herself.
The body she inhabited was familiar the way a word in another language is: almost the same shape, almost the same weight. The air smelled of rain before it falls and honey long after the bees have finished with it. The leaves cycled through colours that did not belong to a single season, green and amber and something almost blue, all at once on the same branch. Her bones knew the place before her mind did.
Then came the structure.
Between the trees: pale, enormous, its surface scaled, each ridge overlapping the next and curving upward until the top disappeared into the canopy. It covered the hillside the way ice covers a river. Not built. Deposited. Something was here once and is not anymore. This is what it left.
From inside: laughter. A layered music she could not name, something between strings and voice and neither. The sound of many people very glad to be somewhere at the same time.
She stepped through the narrow arch. The husk was behind her. Open sky above.
The smell of the sea reached her first, cold and salt-sharp, and beneath it deep earth and resin and wood that had been alive longer than memory. She knew this ground. She had walked it in frost and silence. But the grey rock and the cold were gone. In their place: dark soil, grass, a warmth that had nothing to do with season.
The tree filled the horizon.
Not like any tree she had ever known. Something prior to that. Still breathing. Roots reaching the sea. Around it, a gathering: Goliaths with paint-marked shoulders, elves moving in slow circles, something winged and quick, a creature translucent as river ice drifting with the music like smoke follows wind. Fire everywhere. The tree humming the same note she had felt in her sternum at the beginning.
None of them looked at her.
The dream released her without a sound. She woke with the smell of the sea still on her, the pull behind her sternum pointing south, patient and certain.
Hjaldr Mossstep
Nithgrea was already at the hearth with Nanna when the rest of the party stirred, flour on her sleeves, the two of them moving in the efficient rhythm of people who had reached a wordless arrangement. The smell of something good had been in the air since before the light came.
Baldr came in from outside and set a large pile of dried fish on the table, already wrapped and bundled for travel.
"For you," he said.
Then the noise started.
It began at the edge of hearing, rose quickly, and reached the pitch of an entire children's district responding to something extraordinary. The party came out to find the yard already full.
Hjaldr Mossstep stood in the middle of it. Thirteen years old. Dried blood from collar to boot. A skull on his head, sitting crooked, which he kept adjusting with one hand. The full pelt of what he had killed hung from his shoulders. He had been awake for too many hours and he was the most awake person in the yard.
He saw the party. He straightened up. He adjusted the skull. He said nothing.
Nanna came out first. She looked at the blood, closed her eyes for one breath, opened them. "Inside. Now." Not angry. The voice of someone who had done this before.
Baldr came out behind her. He looked at the blood, the skull, the pelt. He said nothing, but he was counting things.
Saga arrived last, unhurried. She walked up to Hjaldr and studied the skull for a long moment, crouched to look more closely, then looked up at him.
"What did you kill?"
Nobody in Vanaheim could answer that. Not the scholars who assembled at the yard's edge, not the druid sent for. Hjaldr described it: four-legged, massive, claws like axe-heads, stood upright when it charged, a sound unlike anything he had heard. The scholars had no frame of reference. Whatever this was, it had never been recorded on the Isles.
The party knew what it was. They said nothing about where it had come from.
The formal question came from Baldr: the First Claim required the hunter to find, track, and kill alone. Hjaldr had been directed to the animal by travelers on the road. Did the claim stand?
The room went quiet. Children watched from the edges.
The party told the room what they had seen. Hjaldr had gone alone. He had hunted alone. He had killed alone. They had pointed at open ground. Everything after that was his.
Baldr looked at the party for a long moment, then nodded once, and deferred to Saga.
"The creature was unknown," she said. "It was on open ground. He found it, tracked it, and returned with the kill. The claim stands."
A beat.
"The three days absent without permission are a separate matter, and you will answer for them."
Hjaldr adjusted the skull. He was trying very hard not to smile.
Both Baldr and Saga looked at him differently afterward, and he knew it. He stood straighter without seeming to decide to.
When the discussion had settled and the scholars had carried off their measurements, the party put their question to Hjaldr. He was, as of that morning, an adult by Vanaheim's measure. He could do as he chose.
He disappeared inside for a few minutes. He came back with a large pack on his back, his axe in his hand, and the skull sitting slightly less crooked than before, cleaned now at Nanna's quiet insistence. He looked at the party, then at the road south. He was ready.
Strange Country
The road south ran close to the frozen waters, the sea a flat grey-white expanse to the west, the ice shelf making slow structural sounds in the cold. Hjaldr walked with the focused quiet of someone conserving, the bear skull riding steady on his head.
It appeared at a bend ahead, compact and well-formed, moving with the deliberate unhurried momentum of something that had somewhere to be. When it reached the road's edge it stopped, rearranged itself, and the party understood it was not a snowman at all. A large insect, broad and heavily built, was pushing a dense packed sphere of snow along the road with its back legs the way a dung beetle manages its work, only scaled to something considerably more ambitious. It regarded the party with the impassive attention of an entity that had decided they were neither food nor threat, then resumed its trajectory and continued past them.
"Snowroller," Hjaldr said. Then he kept walking.
Camp came at nightfall, the fire built with the practiced efficiency of people who had stopped narrating it. The frozen sea was audible nearby, a low grinding that came and went with the cold.
Tinnitus took first watch. An hour in, the certainty arrived that something was watching him back. He looked. He listened. The fire crackled. Nothing moved at the camp's edges that he could find, and he found nothing, but the certainty did not go away.
Nithgrea's watch was quieter, and then it was not.
The mound of snow at the camp's edge had not been there earlier. She was certain of it. It was there now, and it was moving, an incremental shift toward the cart too slow to track except that it was definitely happening. She crossed to it and pressed the flat of her sword against it. The mound made a sound, low and startled, and reversed direction, moving back toward the open ground with the unhurried dignity of something that had not expected to be interrupted. A glaciolotl, digging its winter cave, and this particular spot had seemed like reasonable ground.
She watched it go, then returned to the fire.
The ship came into view the following morning: enormous, frozen fast in the pack ice close to shore, its Goliath lines unmistakable at distance. Grimfeather colours flew from its deck. The Pufflins holding them showed no signs of having considered any other arrangement.