He dreamed of Grima.

  She was sitting at her workbench in the house beside the grove, grinding herbs with the stone mortar she had used for as long as Ulfar could remember. The rhythm of stone on stone. The smell of dried yarrow and something sharper underneath -- bog myrtle, maybe, or one of the dozen preparations she made that she never told him the names of because, she said, if she told him everything at once he would think he knew more than he did.

  She looked up. She was speaking. He could hear her voice -- the particular cadence of it, the way she dropped the ends of sentences when she was concentrating, the slight roughness that came from years of reciting in cold air. He could hear every quality of the sound.

  But he could not see her face.

  He knew she was looking at him. He could feel the weight of her attention, the familiar, assessing gaze she wore when she was about to say something he would not understand for years. He could see her hands on the mortar, the age-spots and the calluses and the particular way she held things -- firmly, with her whole hand, as if letting go had never occurred to her. He could see the room around her in perfect detail. The workbench with its stains. The bundles of herbs hanging from the ceiling. The lamp that smoked because she never trimmed the wick.

  Her face was gone.

  Not blurred. Not darkened. Gone. Where her face should have been there was nothing -- not a void, not a shadow, but an absence so complete that his mind could not hold it. He could look at everything else in the room with perfect clarity. The moment his gaze moved to her face, it slid away, like trying to look at something that existed just past the edge of vision.

  He woke.

  The longhouse was grey with early light. People were sleeping around him -- the settlement's families, crowded together after the night's horror, taking comfort in proximity. Someone was snoring. A baby fussed and was quieted. Outside, the sound of a rooster and the distant, patient sound of the river.

  Ulfar lay still and tried to remember Grima's face.

  He could remember everything else. Her hands. Her voice. The way she smelled -- woodsmoke and herbs and the particular sharp scent of the preparations she brewed for the shrine. The texture of her cloak, the weight of her hand on his shoulder when she corrected his recitation stance, the exact sound of her laugh on the rare occasions she found something funny enough to use it.

  Her face was gone.

  He reached for it the way you reach for a word you have forgotten -- with certainty that it is there, just beyond the surface, about to resolve. But it did not resolve. He tried to build it from pieces: the shape of her jaw, the colour of her eyes, the lines around her mouth. Nothing came. Each piece he reached for was absent, excised with a precision that left everything around it intact. He could remember sitting across from her at the table and seeing her face and he could not remember what he had seen.

  It was not like forgetting. Forgetting was gradual, a fading at the edges, a slow loss of detail. This was surgical. Complete. The memory of her face had been removed from him the way a thread is cut from a tapestry -- cleanly, leaving the surrounding pattern undisturbed but the missing piece irrecoverable.

  He sat up. The rune on his palm was warm.

  He knew. The rune-marks he had written in the field, the seventeen junctions he had broken, the power he had pushed through the Wyrd-sight into the bodies of the dead -- it had cost him something. He had felt it being spent, that unnamed currency of perception or will. He had not known what it was.

  Now he did.

  He looked at his left hand. The rune-lines were different. Not just the first mark -- the one that had carved itself into his palm at the grove. There was a second mark now, intersecting the first, smaller and finer, etched into the skin between his thumb and forefinger. It had not been there yesterday. It was there now, as if it had been there always, as if his skin had simply decided to reveal what had been written beneath it all along.

  Two runes. The first from the grove. The second from the field.

  He could feel the difference in himself, the way you feel the difference after a fever breaks -- something had changed in the architecture of how he perceived the world. The Wyrd-sight was stronger. Clearer. He opened it without effort and the threads of the longhouse leaped into focus with a precision that made him close his eyes against the brightness. He could see the fate-threads of the people sleeping around him -- silver lines connecting each person to the web, to the land, to each other. He could see the threads' quality, their strength, the places where they were frayed or thin. He could see the shrine-keeper Aldis's thread, which was stronger than most, and the children's, which were bright and unfinished and full of possibility.

  He had not been able to see any of this yesterday. The Wyrd-sight had been a tool he used with effort, opened and closed like a door. Now it was closer to a sense. A thing he had to choose not to use rather than choose to use.

  The second rune had done this. The fight in the field, the desperate application of his sight against the Draugar, the marks he had written to break the junctions -- it had crystallised something. Hardened it. Made it permanent. And the price was the face of the woman who had taught him everything he knew.

  He got up quietly and went outside.

  *

  The morning was cold and bright and terrible. The dead had been laid out in rows near the north cairn -- seventeen Draugar, returned to their graves, and one woman who would be joining them. The settlement was moving with the particular efficiency of grief -- purposeful work done by people who were not ready to stop and think about what had happened.

  Ulfar stood at the north cairn and opened his Wyrd-sight and checked each body. The junctions were gone. The dark current that had animated them was fully dissipated, the thread-channels empty and inert. Whoever had sent the Draugar was not reaching through them anymore. These were simply dead people now, awaiting proper rest.

  He spoke the rites over each one. The old forms -- the words Grima had taught him for the dead who needed releasing. He did not know if it helped. But the words cost nothing, and the people of the settlement watched him do it, and the watching mattered. He was beginning to understand that.

  Aldis found him when he had finished. She brought bread and water and stood beside him while he ate, watching the settlement work with the tired pragmatism of a woman who had dealt with the aftermath and was now dealing with the aftermath of the aftermath.

  'The woman who died,' Ulfar said. 'What was her name?'

  'Hildr. She was a weaver. She lived alone since her husband died.' Aldis said this simply, without embellishment. Then: 'She was afraid of storms. She used to come to the shrine when the thunder was bad and sit with me until it passed. She never said she was afraid. She just came and sat.'

  Ulfar committed this to memory. Not the facts but the shape of them -- a woman afraid of storms, sitting at a shrine, never admitting the fear. It was the kind of detail that would go into a death-saga if she had been the kind of person who warranted one, and she was, and no one would write it because she was a weaver in a lowland settlement and skalds did not sing for weavers.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  'I'll remember her,' he said.

  Aldis looked at him. Whatever she saw made her nod once, as if a question she had not asked had been answered.

  She left. Ulfar sat by the cairn and ate his bread and tried not to reach for Grima's face again. Each time he tried the absence was there, precise and total, and each time the failure was a small, specific pain that did not diminish with repetition.

  Brynja found him an hour later. She approached from the south, walking with the contained stride she wore when she was not in combat, and stopped three paces away. The usual distance.

  'You have a second rune,' she said.

  He looked up. She was studying his hand, his face, the space around him -- reading him the way she read everything, with the cool assessment of someone evaluating a tactical situation.

  'It appeared this morning. I think -- I think the fighting last night did something. The marks I used on the Draugar. It crystallised.'

  'The second stage,' she said. 'Wyrd-Marked. You can hold multiple runes now. Your sight is deeper.'

  'You know what this is.'

  'I know the progression. I have seen it before, in Asgard.' She paused. 'The second stage takes decades. You have been carrying the first rune for weeks.'

  'Is that bad?'

  'It is unusual.' She looked at the settlement, at the people working in the morning light. 'The progression from first rune to Wyrd-Marked always takes something. The system does not give without cost. What did it take from you?'

  He did not answer immediately. He sat with the bread in his hands and the morning light on the cairn and the seventeen dead in their rows and the one death he had not prevented, and he tried to say it, and the saying was harder than the knowing.

  'Grima's face,' he said. 'I can't remember her face.'

  Brynja went still. Not the combat stillness, the drawn-bow readiness. A different kind. The stillness of someone who has heard something and does not know what to do with it.

  'Everything else is there,' he continued. 'Her voice. Her hands. The way she taught, the things she said, every saga she drilled into me. All of it. But I can't remember what she looked like. I reach for it and it's not there. It's been removed.'

  'Removed,' Brynja repeated.

  'Cut. Like the threads at the sacred sites. Clean. Precise. Everything around it is intact.'

  She was quiet for a long time. The settlement worked around them -- hammering, voices, the sound of a cart being loaded. Normal sounds. The sounds of people recovering from abnormal things.

  'In Asgard,' she said slowly, 'the Wyrd does not take randomly. It takes what matters. The cost is proportional not to the power gained but to the meaning of what is surrendered. The system requires that the payment hurt, because pain is the mechanism by which the inscription is made permanent. A cost that does not wound does not bind.'

  'That's a cruel system.'

  'It is the system. I did not design it. I am not certain anything designed it.' She looked at him directly, and for the first time since he had known her, her expression was not assessment. It was something closer to recognition -- the look of someone seeing a thing they have seen before but did not expect to see here, in this context, in this person.

  'Your mentor's face,' she said. 'The person who taught you everything that made you capable of doing what you did last night. The system took her face because that is what would hurt the most to lose, and it would hurt the most because she mattered the most.'

  'Yes,' Ulfar said. 'I know.'

  'And it is permanent.'

  'I know.'

  She stood there. She did not offer comfort. She did not say she was sorry. She did not tell him it would get easier or that the memory might return or any of the kind, useless things that people say to other people when they are hurting. Brynja did not do those things because she was not built for them, had never learned them, had spent centuries collecting the worthy dead and not once staying to comfort the living.

  She stayed.

  That was the thing. She did not offer comfort and she did not leave. She stood three paces away with her knife on her belt and her pale hair catching the morning light and she stayed while Ulfar sat by the cairn and did not cry, because the grief was too specific for crying. Crying was for loss. This was for absence -- the particular, surgical absence of one thing among all the things he had, and the knowledge that it was gone because something in the architecture of the world had decided that his growth required his pain.

  The morning went on. The settlement worked. The dead were buried again, properly this time, with Ulfar checking each thread to ensure no residual connection remained. Aldis supervised the rites. The headman organised the repair of the north fence. Life resumed, as it always does, with the particular stubbornness of people who have no choice but to continue.

  Brynja stayed.

  Not beside him. Not close. At the distance she maintained with everything and everyone -- the three paces, the careful separation that preserved whatever it was she needed to preserve about herself. But she was there. When he moved, she was in the periphery. When he stopped, she stopped. When he sat down again, she found something nearby to lean against and waited with the patience of someone for whom time had never been a limited resource.

  She did not explain this. He did not ask her to. They both understood that asking would require an answer, and the answer would require naming what was happening, and naming it would change it, and neither of them was ready for it to change.

  In the afternoon, Ulfar went to the river shrine and recited the Lay of Gunnar again. The Saga-Power came easier now -- the second rune amplifying the generation the way Brynja had predicted. The threads around the shrine brightened and held. He recited three more pieces from memory, feeding the site, strengthening the connections that held this place in the web.

  When he finished, he turned to the shrine and tried one more time to see Grima's face. To remember the woman who had given him the words he had just spoken.

  Nothing.

  He placed his hand on the shrine-stone, the rune-lines warm against the ancient carvings.

  'I'll remember everything else,' he said. To Grima, because there was no one else to say it to. 'Everything you taught me. Every word. I'll carry all of it. But I won't be able to see your face when I do.'

  The shrine's threads pulsed once, faintly, and he chose to believe it was an answer.

  *

  They left the settlement the next morning. Aldis walked them to the edge of the valley, her shrine-keeper's staff in her hand, her expression the mix of gratitude and worry that Ulfar was beginning to recognise as the face of someone who has been helped but knows the help is temporary.

  'Will they come again?' she asked. 'The Draugar.'

  'I don't know. The ones that came were being directed from somewhere else. If the source is still active, it could happen again. Keep your dead watched. Keep the shrine maintained. The stronger the land-spirit's connection, the harder it is for the dark current to operate in the area.'

  'And if it's not enough?'

  'Then I need to find the source and stop it.'

  She nodded. 'Where will you go?'

  'South. To the Thing at Myrkvold. Whatever is doing this -- the sacred sites, the Draugar, the thread-cutting -- it's not local. It's organised. I need authority to get people to listen, and the Thing is where authority sits.'

  'The Thing.' Aldis said it the way people said the names of things they knew about but had never interacted with. 'My family has tended this shrine for four generations and no one from the Thing has ever asked how the land-spirit is doing.'

  'I know.'

  'Will they listen to you?'

  'I don't know that either.'

  She looked at Brynja, who was standing at the path's edge, waiting with the contained patience she showed when she was not in charge of the direction. 'And her? What is she?'

  'She's with me.'

  'That's not what I asked.'

  'It's what I can tell you.'

  Aldis considered this. Then she reached into her belt-pouch and pulled out a small carved stone -- a river-stone, smooth and dark, with a rune cut into its surface that Ulfar did not recognise. 'My mother carried this. Her mother gave it to her. I was told to give it to someone who could see the threads. I assumed it was a story.'

  Ulfar took the stone. It was warm, despite the morning cold. Through the Wyrd-sight it pulsed with a faint, steady light -- old power, stored and waiting, like a coal that had been banked for a very long time.

  'What does it do?'

  'I have absolutely no idea. My mother said it would know when it was needed.'

  He put it in his belt-pouch. 'Thank you. For everything.'

  'Come back,' she said. 'When you've been to the Thing and they've told you whatever they're going to tell you. Come back through here and tell me what's happening. We deserve to know.'

  'I will.'

  She turned and walked back toward the settlement. She did not look back. She was already thinking about the next problem. She was a shrine-keeper. She would keep the shrine.

  Ulfar and Brynja walked south. The valley fell behind them and the country opened up, and the sky was wide and pale and cold, and Ulfar's left hand carried two runes where there had been one, and his mind carried the absence of a face where there had been a lifetime of seeing it.

  They walked in silence for a long time. Then Brynja said, without looking at him: 'You will want to test the new rune. The increased sight. The capabilities of the second stage.'

  'Later.'

  'Now. Grief does not improve with delay, and neither does understanding. You need to know what you can do so that next time -- and there will be a next time -- you are not improvising.'

  'I was effective enough last night.'

  'You were desperate enough last night. Desperation is not a strategy. It is a temporary substitute for one.' She walked another ten paces. 'And you were hit. By a Draugar. While you were aware of its position and capabilities. A trained fighter would not have been hit.'

  'I'm not a trained fighter.'

  'No. You are a skald who runs into fields full of the walking dead and presses his hand against their chests. That is considerably worse.'

  He almost laughed. It came up from somewhere unexpected and stopped at his throat, but it was there, and the fact that it was there surprised him. He looked at Brynja's profile -- the sharp line of her jaw, the pale hair, the eyes that were looking at the road ahead with their usual intensity -- and he thought that this was the most human thing she had done since he met her. Not the staying. The insult.

  They walked on. The road stretched south, toward the Thing and the politics that Brynja had warned him would be worse than combat, and behind them the settlement receded, and the dead stayed buried, and the living carried on.

  He walked south, and he did not look back, and the threads of the world stretched around him in every direction, brighter and more detailed than they had ever been, and the price of seeing them was something he would pay every morning for the rest of his life when he woke and reached for a face that was no longer there.