They smelled the settlement before they saw it --- woodsmoke and cattle and the particular earthy sweetness of stored grain. The path widened as it descended into a river valley, joining other tracks until it became something that might generously be called a road. Fenced fields appeared on either side, properly maintained, the fences intact and the gates latched. A few sheep grazed near the path. They looked up as Ulfar and Brynja passed and went back to eating with the serene indifference of animals that had not yet learned to be afraid of the ground they stood on.

  The settlement itself was modest --- perhaps forty buildings arranged around a central longhouse, with a mill on the river and a smithy sending up a thin column of grey smoke. A working community. Not wealthy, not poor. The kind of place that existed by the hundreds across Midgard's lowlands, where people farmed and herded and married and buried their dead and got on with the business of living without requiring the world to be extraordinary.

  Ulfar liked it immediately. It reminded him of home, or of what home had been before the grove died. A place where things worked because people maintained them.

  'We should stop here,' he said. 'We need supplies. And I should speak to whoever keeps the local shrine. If there's a land-spirit still active in this valley, they'll know.'

  Brynja studied the settlement from the ridge above with the evaluating gaze of someone assessing a defensive position. 'The shrine will be at the river junction. Land-spirits in lowland valleys almost always anchor to waterways.' She looked at him. 'You will do the talking. Humans are uncomfortable when I speak to them. I have been told I lack warmth.'

  'I can't imagine why.'

  Something moved at the corner of her mouth that was not quite a smile.

  They descended into the valley. As they approached the first buildings, Ulfar opened his Wyrd-sight --- briefly, a quick check that had become reflex. The threads here were intact. Thinner than they should have been, perhaps, the same slow weakening he had seen everywhere south of the grove, but not cut. Not fraying. The web still held. The settlement's connection to the land was still live.

  He closed the sight and let the ordinary world reassert itself. People were moving between the buildings --- a woman carrying a basket of turnips, two children chasing a dog, an old man sitting on a bench outside the longhouse whittling something with great concentration and no apparent urgency. They looked up as the strangers approached. The woman with the turnips stopped walking and watched. The old man's knife paused.

  Ulfar raised a hand in greeting. 'We're travellers. Heading south to the Thing at Myrkvold. We could use water and a place to rest, if you have it.'

  The woman looked at Brynja. At the silver-white hair and the blade-edge eyes and the way the light did not quite behave correctly around her. Then she looked back at Ulfar with the expression of someone who has questions but has decided they are not worth the trouble.

  'The well is by the longhouse,' she said. 'Help yourselves. If you want food, talk to Signy inside. She'll want something for it.'

  They drew water and ate --- hard bread and salted fish, bought with the last of the dried meat Ulfar had taken from Grima's stores. Brynja ate sparingly and without comment on the quality. Ulfar suspected she did not need to eat at all but did so out of a desire to draw less attention, which given everything else about her was a strategy of limited effectiveness.

  He found the local shrine-keeper --- a woman named Aldis, younger than he expected, with work-roughened hands and a directness about her that reminded him painfully of Grima. She was not a volva. She was a farmer's wife who had inherited the shrine duties from her mother, who had inherited them from hers. She knew the old forms but not the theory behind them. She made offerings because her family always had. It was enough. Sometimes it was more than enough.

  'The land-spirit is uneasy,' she told him, standing at the river shrine --- a flat stone at the water's edge, carved with runes so old the lichen had filled them like mortar. 'It has been uneasy for weeks. The cattle won't drink from the lower ford anymore. They go upstream, even when the current is harder. And at night ---' She hesitated. 'At night the ground makes sounds.'

  'What kind of sounds?'

  'Like settling. Like a house shifting on its foundations, except it's the ground itself. And sometimes ---' She looked at him the way people looked at those they hoped had answers but expected did not. 'Sometimes I think I can hear movement. Under the fields. Slow. Like something turning over in sleep.'

  'How many people live here?' Ulfar asked. He had not meant to ask it. The question came out of the part of him that was already thinking about what would happen if Brynja was right about what was beneath them.

  'Eighty-three at last reckoning. Forty adults, give or take. The rest are children and old ones.' She looked at him more carefully. 'You know what's happening. I can see it in your face. You know what the sounds mean.'

  'I think I might. I'm not certain yet.'

  'That's more than anyone else has offered. The men I've spoken to --- my husband, the headman, the other farmers --- they say the ground always shifts before winter. They say I'm hearing things. But the cattle know, and I know, and the land-spirit knows. Something is wrong.'

  Ulfar opened his Wyrd-sight and looked at the river shrine. The threads were stronger here than anywhere he'd seen since the grove --- bright silver, running deep into the earth along the river's course. The land-spirit was genuinely present and genuinely strong. But Aldis was right. It was uneasy. The threads vibrated with a fine, constant tremor, like a plucked string that would not stop ringing. Something was disturbing the web from below.

  He looked deeper. Past the surface threads, past the bright connections between shrine and river and earth. Down into the substrate where the deeper threads ran --- the ones that connected this site to the wider web, to Hrafnstead and the grove and every other sacred site in the region. And there, in the deep threads, he saw it.

  The threads were not just trembling. They were being pulled. The same inward tension he had seen at Hrafnstead, but fainter, further away --- a distant tide rather than a local current. The thread-anchor at Hrafnstead was drawing on the web so heavily that even here, days' walk to the south, the pull was felt. The land-spirit was not uneasy for no reason. It could feel the web thinning around it. It could feel itself becoming isolated.

  And beneath the pull, in the very deepest threads, something else. Not a presence. A disturbance. The threads down there were not just taut --- they were tangled. Knotted. As if something had been moving through them from below, pushing them aside the way a body pushes through underbrush. Something was in the deep web, beneath this valley, and it was not supposed to be there.

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  'What do you see?' Aldis was watching him with an intensity that told him she could tell he was seeing something, even if she could not see it herself.

  'Your land-spirit is right to be uneasy,' he said. He chose his words carefully. 'The sacred sites to the north have been damaged. The damage is spreading through the deep connections. Your shrine is strong enough to resist for now, but the pull will get worse.' He hesitated, then added: 'And there is something moving in the deep ground. Beneath the valley. I don't know what it is.'

  Aldis took this with the steadiness of a woman who had spent her life dealing with problems she could not see. 'Is it dangerous?'

  'I don't know that either.'

  'You don't know much, for a man who can see things I can't.'

  'No,' he said. 'I don't.'

  She looked at the river for a moment, at the water moving over the shrine-stone with its ancient runes. Then she said: 'If something comes, will you help us?'

  He thought about Hrafnstead. About the thread-anchor doing its slow, patient work. About the settlements that lay between here and the Thing, unprotected, unwarned. He thought about Grima telling him the rites were for the people, not the gods.

  'Yes,' he said.

  * * *

  He told Brynja what he had seen. They stood on the low ridge above the settlement in the failing light, the valley laid out below them, and he described the tangled threads in the deep web. The disturbance moving below the valley. The sense of something that should not be there.

  Brynja's expression did not change, but the quality of her stillness shifted. It became the stillness of a drawn bow.

  'Describe the movement,' she said. 'In the deep threads. Was it directed? Random? Patterned?'

  'Slow. Pushing through the threads rather than moving along them. And it felt ---' He searched for the word. 'Dead. Not empty, the way the grove is empty. But dead. Movement without life in it.'

  Brynja was very quiet for a moment. Then she said: 'Draugar.'

  'The risen dead?'

  'Not risen. Not yet.' She was looking at the ground beneath their feet with the focus of someone reading text. 'The Draugar of the old stories are the unquiet dead --- corpses that refuse to stay in the earth. But those are natural. They rise because their burial was wrong, or their Wyrd-thread was not properly cut at death, or they died with an oath unfulfilled. They are individual. Rare. What you are describing is different. Something in the deep web is moving dead things that should not be moving. Dozens of them, by the sound of the disturbance. And they are being moved, not rising on their own. Something is using them.'

  'Using them for what?'

  'I don't know. But Draugar in numbers are not a natural phenomenon. They are a weapon.' She turned to face him fully. In the dusk light, with the settlement's fires beginning to glow below them, her eyes were very bright and very hard. 'If there are Draugar moving beneath this valley, they will come up. They always do. And when they do, people will die.'

  She said this last part differently from how she had said anything else. Not as analysis. As fact, spoken by someone who had spent a very long time in the company of death. He remembered what she was. What she had been. The collector of the worthy dead. She had walked battlefields for centuries, choosing which of the fallen deserved to be carried to Valhalla. She had seen more death than any human could conceive of, and she spoke about it with the precision of a craftsman discussing her materials.

  'You said you could see the moment of death approaching,' Ulfar said. 'On the road. You said that was part of your power.'

  'I said I could read the tapestry.'

  'Can you see it now? Here? If people are going to die ---'

  She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, something had changed in the way she looked at the settlement below. She was not seeing the buildings and the people and the cattle. She was seeing something laid over them, a pattern he could not perceive even with the Wyrd-sight.

  'Yes,' she said. 'Some of the threads below are already marked. The death-moments are gathering. Not certain --- death-moments rarely are, until the last few breaths. But likely. Probable. Like clouds that have not yet rained.' She looked at the longhouse, at the smoke rising from its roof, at the faint movements of people inside. 'If nothing changes, people in that building will die within two days.'

  'When?'

  'I don't know precisely. Hours. Days. The disturbance you described could be them gathering, or it could be them in transit. Either way, this settlement is not prepared for what is coming.'

  He looked down at the valley. The longhouse fires. The penned cattle. The children he had seen earlier, chasing the dog through the buildings. Aldis at her river shrine, making offerings to a land-spirit that was trying to warn her.

  'Then we prepare them,' he said.

  Brynja looked at him for a long time. Whatever assessment she was making, he could not read it. Then she said: 'You understand that you cannot fight. You are a skald with a rune in his hand, not a warrior. If the Draugar come, you will be standing between the dead and the living with nothing but your sight and whatever rune-marks you can improvise.'

  'I know.'

  'And you are going to do it anyway.'

  'I told Aldis I would help.'

  Brynja made a sound that was almost a laugh and was entirely without humour. 'Of course you did.' She drew the knife from her belt. In the fading light it looked less like a knife and more like a piece of the dark given an edge. She held it the way she held everything --- as if it were an extension of her body rather than a thing she carried. 'Then we should start. I need to see the terrain. The approach routes. The places where the ground is weakest. Where the Wyrd-threads are most disturbed.'

  'You can't see the threads.'

  'I don't need to see them. I can read ground. I can read lines of approach and points of failure and the places where something coming from below would find the least resistance. I was doing this when your ancestors were learning to stack stones.' There was no anger in it. It was the flat certainty of professional competence, and it closed the subject.

  She started down the ridge toward the settlement, and for the first time since Ulfar had known her, she moved like what she was. Not the careful, constrained walk of a woman trying to pass for human. Something else. Something faster, more precise, more dangerous. Her shoulders changed. Her weight shifted. The ghost-shimmer at her back flickered in the dusk, the memory of wings responding to something they had not responded to since she lost them.

  This was Brynja when the prospect of violence made her honest. This was the Valkyrie, stripped of her wings but not of what the wings had been for. She was a weapon walking down a hillside toward a fight that had not started yet, and she was completely, terrifyingly at home.

  She reached the settlement's edge and began walking the perimeter, assessing. Ulfar could see her eyes moving --- the fences, the buildings, the gaps between them, the open ground to the north where the barley fields lay fallow. She knelt once and pressed her hand to the earth, fingers spread, the mirror image of what Ulfar did when he listened for the land-spirit. But she was not listening for the spirit. She was listening for the dead.

  'The north field,' she said when she returned to him. 'The ground is softest there. The river has undermined the subsoil and the burials are shallow --- I can see the markers. That is where they will come through, if they come. The river cuts off approach from the east. The ridge protects the south and west. North is the vulnerability.'

  'What do we need?'

  'Fire. Blades. And people willing to stand in the dark and not run.' She looked at the settlement, at the longhouse with its smoking roof, at the penned cattle, at the barley fields stretching away to the north. 'Will they listen to you?'

  'I'm a stranger.'

  'You are a stranger who can tell them what is under their feet. That is more than they have now.'

  Ulfar followed her. He was aware, in a way that did not require the Wyrd-sight, of everything he was not. Not a warrior. Not a fighter. Not someone who knew how to stand between the living and the dead and hold the line. He was a skald. He could see things and he could speak things and he could, apparently, feed shrines with old stories. None of that would stop a Draugar from tearing through the wall of a longhouse where eighty-three people slept.

  But he could see the threads. He could see the cuts. The severed fate-threads at Hrafnstead, the clean cauterised endings in the dark pool. If the Draugar carried something like that --- if their movement through the web left the same kind of mark --- then maybe he could do something the sword-hand could not. Not fight. Cut. End what the thread- anchor had already ended, if he could find the seam.

  He did not know. But the rune on his palm pulsed in a rhythm that had quickened to match his heartbeat, and beneath his feet, in the deep ground where the threads were tangled and wrong, something that had been still was beginning to move.