The space beyond the Raven’s Gate swarmed with Kaldrborg warriors. They hadn’t been ready for Aurnir’s explosive entrance, but reacted with violent surety, screaming their defiance and throwing themselves at the half-giant with suicidal bravery.

Aurnir bellowed in return, the sheer volume of his voice drowning out the enemy cries in a great stertorous blast, and swung his dire flail.

Shields shattered, arms broke and were torn off, chainmail shredded, and bodies were hurled back as a great spattering of blood was hurled against those a few paces behind.

Skadi thought of Begga, Kofri, and Ulfarr, thought of Ásfríðr hung from her gods’ gate, of little Sif with her throat cut, of the hundreds upon hundreds of the Krákan dead who had filled the great hall, and screamed her hatred and fury as she plunged forward.

The world became a maelstrom of beards and shields, axes swinging at her and grunts of pain, boots on dirt, blood, eyes bulging, lips pulling back from teeth, and Thyrnir stabbing forward again and again and again.

To stay still was to die, so she flowed into the crowd, lithe and unstoppable, her rage giving her wings, her wyrd making her feel immortal. And every few moments Aurnir would swing his dire flail and sweep the space before him free of all mortal life.

The air was bruised with human sounds: cries, screams, bellows of rage, the sucking gasp of chest wounds, the sobs of the fallen, urgent shouts, grunts that were almost intimate, the heavy pants of monumental exertion. Behind her Baugr’s men were flooding in through the ruined Raven’s Gate, their advance forestalled by Aurnir and his dire flail, past whom nobody wished to run.

The dirt was becoming churned crimson mud. Bodies littered the ground. Aurnir was wailing now, as if he’d lost control of the flail, swung it now helplessly at the ever-ready warriors of Kaldrborg who seemed as unafraid of him as wheat was of the thresher.

Glámr was there, somewhere close to her left, Damian just behind. Spears flew through the air, arrows hissed by. Beyond loomed the buildings of Kaldrborg proper, the four temples clustered close and rising high into the dawn light. Was that their goal? To burn them down?

Skadi swayed aside, allowing a bearded axe to miss her head and sink deep into the mud. She stabbed Thyrnir into the warrior’s side, tore it free, moved on. A huge warrior slammed into her with his shield, lifting her off her feet for a moment but she stumbled, regained her balance as she was driven back, then rolled off it and swung Thyrnir around and behind her, slashing the man’s back as he pressed on.

A roar, different from all the rest, and a stocky man burst free of the press of Kaldrborg warriors. Bare-chested, black-bearded, eyes rolling in his head as if in an ecstasy of trance, he screamed and bit the edge of his shield, worrying at the iron rim before casting it aside and running full tilt at Skadi.

She reflexively sharpened her vision: this warrior’s threads were twisted into a great and slowly unraveling rope, five or six strong.

Berserker.

Skadi threw herself aside, barely avoiding his first axe swing. “Aurnir!”

The half-giant reared back, saw the bare-chested man, and swung his dire flail.

The berserker saw the barrel-sized flail head coming at him and screamed at it, opened his arms wide.

The flail smashed into his chest, lifted him off his feet, and hurled him across the square to slam into the wall of a building.

The berserker bounced clear off, crashed to the ground, and immediately leaped to his feet, axe still in hand.

Aurnir slowed, stopped, blinked.

Heartened, the Kaldrborg warriors pushed forward. Baugr’s warriors did the same now, and they met around Aurnir, who backed away, no longer able to swing his dire flail with impunity.

Skadi glanced up at the palisade walls. Defenders were being hard pressed to rebuff the attackers, fighting off men who leaped off ladders, the clamor of iron on iron filling the air with its din, the battlements roiling with barely rebuffed violence.

Skadi sucked in a deep lungful of air. Thrust Thyrnir into her belt, snatched up a bearded axe from the hand of a corpse, hefted it, and sighted at where the crowd was thickest.

Time to get to work.

She charged, slammed into the knot of fighting men, and started cleaving her way through. Weapons swung at her and missed, or slammed into her mail shirt and failed to penetrate.

She’d trained with the axe, but to fight with one, to swing it two-handed against living foes was another matter altogether. She felt her wyrd empower her, strengthen her arms, and the blade hewed through shields and the arms behind them, stove in chests, lopped off heads.

Hot blood splashed against her face. A blow to the back sent her staggering. She cut off someone’s arm. A blow to her shoulder dropped her to one knee. She screamed and cut a leg off at the knee. A blow rang against the back of her helm. She rose, raised her axe over her head, and cut a man’s arm off at the shoulder.

Movement. Blurred violence all around her. She was in the thick of it, in the center of the press of bodies. Mud and blood and wounds and shining mail and people shoving into each other.

“Shield wall!” someone was screaming frantically.

The berserker smashed an ally aside, saw her, screamed with such violence that ropes of spittle flew from his bloody lips.

Skadi reeled back, threw the axe aside, and drew Thyrnir. “Come on then, you whoreson!”

A space cleared around them, men and women edging back even as they fought, some primal instinct urging them to get away from what was about to happen. The berserker’s threads were unwinding much faster than Rauðbjorn’s had, his wyrd being much weaker, but still he was invincible, beloved of Odin, and when he charged Skadi she knew her remaining ten threads would avail her not.

But she’d never seen a wyrded foe strike a berserker, only regular men and women. She’d never tried to wound Rauðbjorn herself, had chosen to wait.

Perhaps berserkers weren’t completely invincible.

Skadi checked her urge to duck aside, and instead stepped in to meet the berserker’s attack. His blow was clumsy, fueled by tremulous rage and she saw it coming from a mile away. It would have cut down a sapling, but Skadi ducked under it and surged right back up to punch Thyrnir under his jaw with all her strength.

The berserker’s remaining rope of five threads burst asunder as her mythical spear cut through his tongue, pierced the roof of his mouth, and slammed up into his brain.

The man’s screams became wretched snarls then gargles. He batted at her, having dropped his axe, but then the light in his eyes went out and he fell. In one movement Skadi drew Natthrafn and slashed at the berserker’s neck as he dropped, its wicked blade cutting through muscle and sinew. A second hack and his head came clear off, the stump of his neck vomiting up blood that gouted all over her leg.

Skadi raised Thyrnir high in the air, blood pouring down her arm from the neck, and turned to face the warriors of Kaldrborg.

“Your berserkers are as nothing! You are as nothing! No glory! No honor! Just death! Death in the mud, the death of worms, the death of nothings!”

The Kaldrborg warriors drew back, pressing into each other, eyes wide as they stared at the berserker’s severed head, and Skadi simply stood there, chest rising and falling, tasting the man’s blood in her mouth, hot and salty, and a new thread burst from her chest, then another.

From nine her threads grew to ten, then flickered to eleven, twelve, thirteen. The longer she stood there, holding their attention, keeping the enemy ensorcelled with her feat, the more her wyrd recovered itself.

A man shouldered his way through the press. The Skaberi father, his black hair shot through with gray, his arms bound in blue tattoos as if great snakes coiled about him. Sober and wary, he unsheathed his huge blade, long as Dawn Reaver but twice as wide, and pointed it at her.

They were in a pocket of stillness. On the walls, warriors yet fought, but instinct had caused both sides to draw back here before the gate.

“You are wanted by my jarl,” said the Skaberi warrior, his Norse strangely accented. “Though I wish it were otherwise, I shall bring you to him. I—”

Skadi screamed, grabbed the head of her halfspear by the head and tore it free, then hurled Thyrnir at the Skaberian careless fury.

The spear flew from her hand with a hungry thrum and buried itself in the man’s left eye, punching clear through to emerge from the back of his skull. The man’s head rocked back from the violence of the blow, he took a single step back, and then collapsed, his ten threads severed as one.

Skadi stretched out her hand, expended another thread, and summoned Thyrnir back to her fist. It appeared there, glistening and gory.

“Death!” she screamed at the shocked warriors. “No honor, no glory, just death in the mud like worms. Kill them all!”

And she pointed Thyrnir at the massed enemy warriors. Aurnir let out a wail and lumbered forward, even as the remaining hundreds of Baugr’s warriors screamed their devotion and bloodlust and charged.

Skadi felt like a lightning rod, fey and perilous, a goddess of war in her own right, and didn’t move a muscle, pointing her halfspear still as the men flooded past her, her body charged with a primitive and all-consuming desire for victory.

Again her threads began to reappear. She’d used eleven to kill the Skaberi, bringing her down to two, but now they regenerated once more, the admiration of her allies and the terror of her foes bathing her, exalting her, elevating her past mere mortal to something mythic in their eyes.

The enemy had enough presence of mind to form a shield wall, a row along the dirt, a second at chest height, a third angled back over their heads. But Aurnir swung his dire flail and blasted the wall apart, opening a huge rent in its overlapping front. Baugr’s warriors ran into the rest at full tilt, slamming their shields into the enemy in turn and spearing and stabbing through the gaps.

Skadi heaved for breath as she lowered Thyrnir. She’d regained six threads, putting her at seven. Has it always been thus, the ability to regain wyrd mid-battle? The only time she’d fought in such an extended engagement had been in their assault on Grýla, but she’d not stood out there, not like this.

Was it possible to spend and regain wyrd throughout the length of an extended battle, so as to remain vital and capable of great feats throughout? Did all it take was extravagant gestures witnessed by sufficient numbers?

Skadi sharpened her vision so as to find her friends. Glámr and Damian had drifted out wide, pushed by the tides of battle to the far-right flank where they were engaged in a back and forth skirmish with a mess of spearmen. Aurnir still held the center, while Úrœkja was in the center of the fray, laying about herself with a slender blade, her scarred face pulled into a mask of fury.

She saw her uncle gain the wall on the far right, and drive enough warriors back so that more men of Kráka could follow.

Skadi’s heart swelled. They had done it! They had breached Afastr’s defenses! It had cost them a horrendous number of casualties, but they were in!

“Onward!” She raised her spear high and thrilled at the sensation of power, of being so terribly alive, of so much death all around her, the taste of blood on her lips, the knowledge that her wyrd hadn’t failed her yet. “Onward!”

She sprinted toward the remnants of the shield wall. Glámr, drawing away from the spearmen, saw her approach and snatched up a shield, dropped to one knee right before the wall, and propped the shield against his shoulder at an angle toward her.

For a second Skadi couldn’t fathom what he was doing—why was he facing her? Then she laughed at the sheer madness of his intent, put on a final burst of speed, and leaped.

One foot went on Glámr’s shield. She pushed off it with explosive force and jumped high, over the first two rows of the wall to place her foot on a tilted enemy shield. Momentum carried her past even as the enemy beneath braced against the sudden weight, and then she was over. She dropped to the frozen earth, landed hard, but rose smoothly to turn and throw herself at the enemy’s rear.

Natthrafn and Thyrnir slashed and stabbed, opening ribbons of blood across backs and necks. Men screamed, flinched, spasmed, fell.

The shield wall before her crumbled.

Glámr led the charge through, Úrœkja by his side, both hacking and slashing. Before the wall could squeeze them between both broken sides, Aurnir swung his flail through a segment, sending a half dozen men flying.

The shield wall collapsed.

“Onward!” screamed Skadi again, making eye contact with her uncle, who raised Dawn Reaver as the last of Afastr’s men were cleared from it and his forces swept over and into view.

Baugr’s men roared as they followed her into Kaldrborg, but only now did she note how few there remained: of Havaklif forces almost half were absent.

Down the sloping road, Skadi ran. There was nobody to contest their assault. The buildings were just like those at Kráka, the same peaked roofs, but here so far north there was no sign of little gardens. Pig pens, small barns, large buildings, small ones—and then they emerged into the town’s center where the four temples arose around a central enclosure, each made of black wood and tiered so that they rose higher than the greatest fir trees, shingled and dragon head adorned. Sweet smelling smoke rose from the chimneys of all four buildings, and Skadi caught a glimpse of the enclosed square where a huge altar stood, its white stone gripped by ancient roots of a withered tree, several human bodies splayed out over roots and stone both, their chests hacked open, their blood frozen into crimson crystals.

And there, front and center, standing massively before the covered pathway that led into the temple enclosure, was Afastr.

By his side stood his son, Aldulfr, bare-chested and massively muscled, looking older than Afastr had back in Kráka, his muscles ridged and covered in thick veins, his features almost inhuman in how striking and fierce they were, his eyes sunken and dark.

Skadi had forgotten how truly huge Afastr was. His black chainmail glimmered with fresh blood. His cloak was sumptuous, a waterfall of ebon fur. His helm sported its twin auroch horns, iron tipped. Bigger than Marbjörn had been, almost of a size with Aurnir, he held a huge axe in one fist, awaiting them with his breath pluming out from the vertical slit in his helm.

In his other hand, he held four slender chains. Each of these extended to a metal collar worn around the neck of a woman in the garb of völvas, though their eyes betrayed nothing but harrowing loss and horror, their lips puckered as if they had no teeth in the jaws.

And there, one step behind Afastr, face pale and drawn, was Astrilda. Her crimson hair hung lank and unwashed, and lines of pain radiated from the black eyepatch she now wore over her left eye. She met Skadi’s gaze, flinched, and looked away.

Skadi slowed to a halt and extended her arms to either side. Her heart was pounding, pounding, and for all the wyrd gathered in the individuals before her, she had hundreds at her back.

“This fight is over, Afastr.” Her voice rang out in the crystalline air. “Throw down your weapons and surrender.”

Afastr tossed the chains up into the air. They were all of them fastened to a gold circlet, and this rose and then failed to fall; runes of fire appeared along its circumference, and a golden flame ran down each chain to burn upon the collars the four wretched völvas wore.

Afastr hefted his huge axe.

It wasn’t the weapon he’d brought to Kráka.

Skadi’s breath stole away when she recognized it: Dauðakoss, the cursed axe from her uncle’s hoard, the weapon that could make a simpleton into a genocidal force.

Afastr laughed and lowered his chin. “Surrender, Skadi? Why, the slaughter has just begun.”