The first snow of winter shivered the coming night, made dancing patterns across the black and oily waters of the fjord and curled in webs and weaves around Hrolf as he made his way over the little bridge.

Light spilled from the jarl-house, tumbled over the rocks underneath, and made stars of snowflakes that now fell thicker and softer as though trying to still the sound. Hrolf and his brothers passed over the carved threshold. Inside, the room was red with fires, with reflected gold.

Trestles groaned under the weight of roasted pork, mutton and beef, platters of bread and pitchers of ale. Jarl Einar sat in his high chair, red-faced and grinning at something his brother was saying before they both burst into laughter that rattled the walls and made his daughter, Soma, startle at his left hand. Groups of men and women, youths and maidens, came together and parted, mingled and drifted in a glorious net of sound and noise. Patterns rose and fell, warp and weft, as alive as the people were.

The Norns do not weave their webs so plainly.

At last, when the night grew old and frail and smoke hazed the roof, she came.

Hrolf felt it as a quietening of the blood, a thickening of the smoke. Dogs whined under the tables. Women grew quiet and men went pale, and then there she was, striding out of the smoke. The hall dropped from raucous to silent, except for the thud of her metal-shod staff on the floor, the rattle of the beads and bones along its length. Smoke from the fire turned as black as ravens and curled in a Norn weave about her.

Hrolf had never seen the spae-wife so close, and now he wished he was in his bed, listening to the rustle of the cows. She seemed old, old as hills, old as gods, grey and shriveled. Then she turned her face and she was no older than his mother, a regal-faced queen who held all in her iced grey gaze, a frosted halo of hair piled on her head. Another turn and she was no older than he, with bright gold hair that fell free down her back, fresh cheeks, and a smile in her eyes.

She stopped in front of the jarl’s chair, and the staff came down again with a thud that seemed to shake the hall to its roots.

Jarl Einar sat, no longer drunk, but sober as a newborn and whiter than the snow that still fell in swaths outside. He stared at the smoke that curled about her legs, crawled up and over her in weaves and nets that defied the eye.

“Time,” she said, and the hall let out a collective breath.

Einar didn’t answer for a spell, his glance going to his several sons with a crease of worry between his brows. Finally he gathered himself, as though he didn’t know why she was here, that she hadn’t last come the night he’d been made jarl, the night he’d married Alva. “Time for what?”

The spae-wife cocked her head and laughed under her breath. “A troll is here. Time to hunt.”

The silence broke into a hundred shards, into spears of sound so that Hrolf could barely think. A chance to gain a by-name of true renown, as Einar had twenty years before. A chance to become jarl of the whole fjord when Einar was spent. His heartbeat throbbed in his eyes at the thought, but he kept quiet and still. Wait and see, his father always said. Watch and bide your time, then strike at the weakest part of your foe.

Einar pulled himself to his feet, his hand gripping the arm of his chair as though he would fall without its support. There were long words that should be spoken, of bravery and renown, of finding the luck and blessing of the gods. Einar should have spoken of the spae, of magic, of reverence for her, as one who could see the weave of the world. Einar said none of them.

He shut his eyes and said, “Choose, then. I can’t stop you.”

A slow smile crossed the spae-wife’s face, that flickered from one age to the next.

“Steini I name, in payment for his father’s life I saved from the bear trap. Arnhall for a sister that bore a son safely.”

Hrolf held his breath, shut his eyes so as to concentrate on the words, the names, and the wish that his might be among them. A chance for valor, for a great name, when there was precious little else to get that for him yet. This was a chance of fair fame, for him who earned it.

She named Ragni, the blacksmith’s daughter. Hope began to fade in him that his name would come. He cracked open an eye, and found the spae-wife looking at him with a twist of a smile on her lips.

“Hrolf I name, for the debt his father owes to me, and Soma likewise.”

The swell of pride in Hrolf was cut off with one look at Einar’s face, that hung in suddenly grey folds of fear for his only daughter.

“Not Soma,” he said. “Take one of my sons, strong lads all. Men and near-men who might have a chance—”

“And Soma has none?” The spae-wife’s eyebrow arched. “Or is there some other reason you’d not repay your debt as I ask? That she’s the image of her mother at that age, and you have no other way to recall that face?”

Einar swayed as though he’d been struck, but said nothing.

“All of you so named,” the spae-wife said, when it was clear Einar would say no more, “come with me.”

Hrolf rose up. His father grasped at his arm as he went past, but he barely saw the face, only a golden nimbus around a mouth shaping unheard words.

The spell, if that’s what it was, ended not as they walked out into the snow but when his feet found him by the howe. Snow-covered turf ran upward from him, blocked out what little light there was until only blackness, snow and the nearness of the dead under it were left.

“You spend the night here,” the spae-wife said in a cracked voice. “In the morning, you follow the tracks.”

“What tracks?” Steini said, his quick glances everywhere betraying his inquisitive nature — he was small for his age, but made up for it by knowing everything he could find out. A fox, Hrolf’s father laughingly called him, not as strong as a wolf but more cunning.

“Do we get weapons?” Arnhall — Arni — said. He was big and bluff, with the wide shoulders of a full-grown man, not a youth, and the swagger of one who’d already raided.

“We’ll freeze to death before any of that,” Ragni muttered under her breath, sweeping one hand through hair darker than was usual. Her eyes were still darker and now fixed on the spae-wife.

The spae-wife only smiled a cryptic smile and said, “You’ll get what you need, when you need it. But first, the howe. A night with the dead will help you see what I see.”

Hrolf turned to ask her something, but she was gone in the swirl of snow.

“Odin’s arsehole.” Arni spat. “Sod this, I’m going to find a warm bed and—”

“You’ll defy her?” golden-haired Soma, pride of the village, said with a tremor in her voice. “You will? You’re a brave man, then, to do that. Anyone else thinking about it?”

The answer seemed to be no. Any one of them might have questioned their fathers, their jarl even. But not the spae-wife.

The howe was bare of anything except its scarves of snow, the wind scouring those into shapes that the dark made into monsters. Hrolf hunkered down, ready to wait out the dregs of the night in cold-soaked misery. Steini dropped next to him, and they shared a shoulder for warmth, Ragni on his other side.

“What did she mean, do you think?” Arni said, pacing like a pent-up bull. “That we’ll see what she sees?”

Hrolf shrugged — the spae-wife wasn’t of this world, his father said. She came, sometimes, to show men for who they were, to weave their wyrd into subtle nets. Those who came back from the troll hunt were never the same.

“She probably means we’ll all see you for the arse that you are, Arni,” Steini said, but his teasing tone faltered at the last.

They fell to silence, sat in a huddled circle against the cold. Snow layered them in white before it was whipped away by the wind. The howe under Hrolf was cold as death, and he fell to thinking about the man buried underneath, the first of the Troll Hunters. Olaf Trollsbane, who’d been the one of only two survivors of that first hunt — the other being Hella, who’d become his wife — who’d dragged the troll’s head back to the village and stuck it on the jarl’s house for everyone to see.

“What do you think happens on a hunt?” he asked at last. Arni glared at him, Ragni shivered, and swift Steini let out a bitter laugh, because no one knew exactly, except those who had been there.

“Soma? Did your father ever say?”

She sat a little apart from the rest, chin in the air, and Hrolf had taken it that she thought she was better than them, because she was the only daughter of the last Troll Hunter.

Now she looked at him and he saw something else there, in the quiver of a hand.

“No. Not my father, though we’ve all heard the tale — he only says that the tale isn’t the half of it. My mother did, once. She was on that hunt too.”

The others craned forward to hear her soft voice. “What did she say?” Arni asked.

Soma smiled and looked out into the falling snow. “That she’d never spend another night on this howe, not if you paid her all in cattle and gold.”

“Thor’s foreskin,” Arni said, and looked over his shoulder as though he expected the shade of Olaf to be there. Whatever it was he saw, he blanched and leaped to his feet.

The rest of them weren’t far behind, though Hrolf could see nothing except snow and the faint light of the jarl’s hall down the valley. “What?”

“There, there, can’t you see it?” Arni’s voice dropped to a whisper. He dragged out his small knife — all any of them had — and the tip hissed uncertainly through the falling snow.

“See what?” Soma said. “I see someone being a—”

A muffled scream came from behind, and they whipped around. Ragni sat sprawled on the side of the howe. Steini was gone, except for a small splash of blood by Ragni’s feet, and a set of tracks.

The first light of dawn crept over the east side of the howe as Soma grabbed Ragni up. Hrolf bent to look at the tracks, and Arni stood, licking his lips and staring up at the dark mountain that loomed, outlined in the growing light.

Soma crouched next to Hrolf. “Well?”

He didn’t spare her a glance but, like Arni, stared up at the mountain, pale with snow, dark with firs, with shadows that ran under the trees like shades. A glance the other way, to the fjord where the waters flowed sleek and black and cold, and onward to the village where his father would be sitting. Wait and see, lad. Wait and see.

“Like no tracks I ever saw before,” he said at last.

The prints were etched into the crust of snow. Like a man without shoes, only bigger, far bigger even than Eigil who was big enough he had to bend almost double to get into the jarl’s house. And a man without shoes, out in this snow….

“She said we’d find tracks,” Ragni murmured.

“She said we’d have weapons as well.” Suddenly Arni didn’t look like the brave and swaggering youth of last night.

“Then we will,” Ragni said firmly. “We have to find out what happened to Steini, even if she didn’t say to follow the tracks.”

“I thought you were the big, brave warrior, Arni?” Soma said, and maybe she was teasing and maybe not. “You told me you killed a wolf with that knife.”

“A wolf, yes. A troll?”

“We’ll have weapons,” Hrolf said, standing up and brushing snow from his legs. “Do you doubt the spae-wife?”

Arni snorted and bulled his way close, shoving Hrolf with one massive shoulder, reminding him of all the times he’d had Hrolf on his backside when they wrestled, all the sneers and boasts. Arni lowered his head to a level with Hrolf, but for once didn’t cause him to back away.

“Do you have Thor in you?” Hrolf whispered, palms slick with sudden sweat.

A fist had Hrolf in the snow before he could blink, shaking it from his eyes as Arni stomped off along the tracks, muttering, knife held in front like a talisman.

Soma and Ragni looked down at where he lay. “Maybe he doesn’t, maybe he does, but you’ve got Loki in you,” Soma said. Then she smiled and held out a hand to help him up. He took it with a shame-faced smile of his own and they headed out, following the two sets of tracks, Arni’s and the troll’s, as they blurred together in the new snow.

 

~

 

The short day was heading toward dark when they found a wind-scoured ridge.

The way up had been as silent as the trees. Ragni never spoke much, as timid as her father was strong, and Hrolf was too much in awe of Soma to get more than a few words out. So they followed the tracks, all lost in their own thoughts, up the mountain.

Hrolf had climbed this mountain many times before — his family had a high summer pasture up here for the cows. In winter they came hunting, wolves and bears and foxes for fur, hares for meat. In spring, as children, they’d raided the cliffs for birds’ eggs. The mountain and its ridges, its dark hollows and false trails, were as familiar to Hrolf as his father’s face. Yet today the tracks led him to places he’d never seen, behind ridges he’d never known, each darker than the last as the light bled down the mountainside, and it was silent as he’d never known it before. No foxes tracked this snow, no wolves padded the darkness under the towering firs, no hares scurried away as the three of them came on. No ravens mocked him from overhead.

Soma stopped in front, pulling Hrolf up short. Ragni was a small ghost beside him in the looming dark.

“Do you see that?” Soma asked.

A massive tree stump lay in a small clearing in front of them, lit by a last shaft of sunlight that faltered even as he looked. Hrolf held his breath. Weapons, Arni had said, they’d need weapons.

The three of them stepped forward as one, reaching for the stump, for the bow. Soma got there first, but her hand passed through, grabbed something else and pulled away. Ragni’s hand, too, acted as though the bow didn’t exist, yet it was solid enough under Hrolf’s hand. A good bow, too, made of smooth yew that had been carved with runes that seemed to squirm under his hand. A quiver of arrows sat next to it.

He looked at the others, a grin ready to spring from his lips, until he saw what they’d pulled from the stump. Soma held a spear taller than she was, and stared up at the tip with eyes red-tinted from that last gasp of sun. Ragni held a magnificent hammer. It looked almost the same size as she was, though she hefted it well enough despite her stunned face. From the shadows under the trees came the sound of laughter, and the jangle of bones and beads.

It was a good bow, maybe the best he’d ever seen, but — but they were going up against a troll, and he had the strength in his arm. Besides, Ragni was the best shot in the village and Hrolf was middling, at best.

“I think we got mixed up?” he said. “This bow’s yours and—”

Ragni threw the hammer straight at his head. He ducked back, dropping the arrows, and found Soma’s spear barring his way. The tip of it waved lazily as a thrum echoed around the trees, sounding altogether too much like the laughter.

A slap as the hammer returned to Ragni’s upstretched hand. “Want to take it from me?”

He looked from one to the other, spear wielder and hammer thrower, and reached for the arrows, brushed snow from them silently and put them back in the quiver.

The dark had crept up on them, and now it was black as Hel’s heart. Ragni dragged out her fire-steel, and between them they made a fire of popping fir branches. In short order they had a burning brand each, and enough unlit to last them half the night. Hrolf hoped they wouldn’t need them all, as they set off again.

The tracks had become strange a while ago, blending and crossing where Arni had followed them until now, where Arni must be staying within the troll tracks in the deeper snow. They began to hurry — Hrolf thought perhaps, without speaking, they were all agreed that none of them wanted Arni to win the prize and be jarl of the village.

A snow-covered pasture led up steeply to an overhung bank of cliffs that he could only make out as a darker mass against the roiling clouds. The tracks led straight there, and the three of them slowed.

“We should find Arni first,” Soma said slowly. “It’ll take all of us to do this.”

“I think he’s already gone on,” Hrolf said, crouching over the tracks. “These are definitely his, but….”

“Arni?” Ragni said with a laugh that was colder than the wind. “Arni’s afraid of his own shadow. All bluff it is, with him. Tried it with me once, when my da was out of the forge. Not for long, backed off the minute I laid my hand on Da’s hammer.”

“And that wolf he said he killed?” Soma joined in after a pause. “That wolf’d been dead two days, at least. He no more killed a wolf with that knife than I have.”

Hrolf stared at them in disbelief. “But Arni — he’s been raiding. He’s killed men…”

Soma snorted. “Pissed himself first time out, and hasn’t bloodied that fancy spear of his yet. Hasn’t got anywhere with his other spear either.”

The two women laughed, and Hrolf blushed when he realized what they meant.

“Arni’s gone that way,” he said. The tracks were blurred by snow and wind now, but there was no doubt where they led.

“Then so shall we,” Ragni replied, and strode toward the cave without a backward glance, Soma half a step behind.

Hrolf hesitated, but he wasn’t going to have it said he had milk for blood and Soma and Ragni were more Thor’s than he was.

The cave entrance soon opened out into a vast chamber that flickered uncertainly in the torchlight they’d brought with them. Stalactites glittered and shone, stalagmites sat like hungry teeth. The floor of the cave was sandy, and Hrolf knelt to look at the tracks. One huge troll. Only now, not in the snow, they looked different. Less troll-like, if not any less huge.

“Ragni, can you bring that torch over here? Look at this.”

The three of them stared down at what looked like the tracks of a troll who’d started wearing boots.

“Where are Arni’s tracks?” Ragni asked.

The rattle of beads and bones, a faint laugh. “You wanted a troll to hunt, and you’ve got one,” the spae-wife said from the dark of the cave ahead. “Now you have to kill him. If you don’t, Arni goes back with a troll’s head, and all that will mean.”

“But—” Soma stammered. “But—”

“But what? The valley needs a troll, and a troll-hunter, and someone to tell the tale. How else will they know who is jarl?”

“But I thought we’d be killing a troll!” Ragni said, a furrow of worry across her forehead. “Not Arni.”

The spae-wife rapped the steel-shod shoe of her staff on a rock. “Did you think this was a game? Did you never think that sometimes a jarl has to sacrifice part of theirself for the good of the men and women they lead, or must do a bad thing to make things right? Did you think it was all killing something that looks like a monster, about being brave in the face of ugliness? Because some monsters will wear a fair face, and sometimes brave people run while fools remain. Sometimes stout heart’s better than sharp sword, and oft times a sword is all that will do. This fjord needs a jarl who knows the difference, and a tale-teller who knows that one person’s tale is only half the tale. A tale-teller who will tell it true this time.”

The ring of steel on the rock, and the spae-wife was gone, leaving only disturbing words and the jangle of bones in her wake.

“Now what do we do?” Ragni said.

Soma looked hard at the end of her spear. “Hrolf, you were always the one for all the stories, all the pretty words all bound up in knotted ribbons. Untangle this.”

He stared at the both of them, at bright Soma with her golden hair and the tremble in her hand, and at little dark Ragni, who held her hammer like she was Thor himself.

“A test,” he said. “The gods always loved their tests. This is hers. To see who has it in them to be the jarl.”

“And which way do you think we should pass?” Ragni swung the hammer, seemingly mesmerized by the way it moved.

Hrolf looked around, for a sign, a portent, something. Anything. Wait and see. No time for that, no time for anything but a decision. One he didn’t want to have to make.

“When I was seven,” he said, unaware what he was going to say until the words fell from cold lips. Unaware, even, where the memory came from except that it came into view from a blackness at the back of his mind. “My parents went to the Thing, and left me with Arni’s family. Nine days I spent there, and nine nights. It took Arni that long to kill the cat, kept it in a cage out behind the barn so no one else would see where he had it. He said he’d do the same to me, if I told anyone.”

Ragni’s brow furrowed, deep-thinking it. “But… what about the fjord, with someone like Arni as jarl?”

“What do you think?”

She flinched at that, but then her face turned hard. He looked at her dark eyes, the black sweep of her hair, and thought that she was a shady place under spreading trees, gratefully sought, but who was eclipsed by the searing noon of the sun that was Soma. Yet the sun goes down, and the shady trees remain.

“What do we do?” she said.

He had no answer but a shake of his head. And then she showed him that the shady place had hidden rocks within it.

A deep breath, a firm hold on the hammer that seemed to burn her skin, and then her head came up, and he was afraid of her. Afraid of the fire in her eyes, the determination that shone out of every part of her.

“Well, then. I won’t have that… nithing as jarl. Not in my fjord. If it means we go to Niflheim, then I say it’s worth it. And you can be jarl and I can tell the tale. What do you say, Hrolf?”

He stared at Ragni with a sick feeling of dread in his stomach. He’d never used a weapon in anger, never even raised a hand to anyone. Had borne everything, listened to his father say wait and see until it felt like he could do nothing against Arni and his petty vindictiveness, his less petty cruelties, nothing about how he felt about Soma, nothing to show he had Thor in him, that he was red blood and iron. He was nothing.

The bow burned in his hands, the arrows itched in their quiver, and the thought of Arni as jarl, taking what he wanted, doing what he wanted with no one to stop him…

Wait and see could go to Hel.

He looked up, and realized he was too late.

The troll came lumbering out of the darkness, twice as tall as a man, skin like the rocks under the waterfall in the village, hard and sleek and black.

Hrolf looked at the thing’s face, saw eyes hard and glittering as gemstones, hulking shoulders, and something in the curl of the mouth that told him, yes, this was no ordinary thing. This was Arni shown from the inside, his heart laid bare, all its black and twisted workings.

Ragni stood before it, hammer whirling. She was red blood and iron, not him, standing before the darkness, seeming to push it back with a light that came from inside. The bow hung from his hand, forgotten as Ragni strode forward, unafraid and shining.

The light flickered across glimmering cave walls, sparked off particles within the rock, gleamed from the dark and shiny skin of Arni-Troll. His mouth opened into a gash, a broken-toothed smile that shriveled Hrolf’s heart inside.

“I found Steini,” he said, and the voice was Arni’s, cruelty sliced thin and deep. One massive hand reached out and opened, let Steini’s shattered body fall to the sandy floor, where his red blood and iron soaked away as though it had never been. “But he wasn’t strong enough to be jarl.”

“I suppose you think you are?” Ragni’s voice seemed weak and frail beside Arni’s.

“I will kill the Hrolf-troll that hides behind you, take his head and my prize. I will be jarl, and Soma of the golden hair will tell the tale.”

It was only then Hrolf realized Soma was no longer with them. He never even thought to lift the bow as the troll came on — he was mesmerized by Ragni, her flying hair, the light shining from her as she went for Arni.

The hammer was a blur, a flash of lightning in the dark of the cave, and she was a blur with it. The hammer took Arni in the side, made him stagger back and lose his laugh. A hand almost the size of Ragni swept for her, claws out, but she batted it away, leaped back and crouched. It must have been only Hrolf’s imagination that drew wings on her back, a helm on her head, a spear in her free hand. Arni came for her, hands outstretched to dash her against the wall, to crush her in his grip, and Hrolf couldn’t move, knew at last that the iron was weak in him. He fumbled for the bow, for the arrows, but they were arrows no longer, only a knife. A rune-carved knife.

Back and forth they fought, and Hrolf could only watch as Ragni forced the troll back, as Arni swiped at her until, with a cry to Thor, Ragni threw the hammer. Arni caught it in one giant hand and laughed so that the cave shook.

“Choose,” Arni-Troll said. “That milk-for-blood boy who can’t even gather the courage to shoot a troll stood in front of him, who loves pretty words more than the feel of good steel, choose him for your jarl. Or me, choose Arni, stronger, older, wiser. With the heart of Thor and red blood and iron in his veins. Choose me, and you’ll live.”

Ragni wavered in front of him, and Hrolf wanted to move, to hold out a hand that seemed larger than he was, but his heart quavered in him as he watched her choose.

“Where’s Soma?” Ragni asked, her voice small and echoing in the vastness of the cave.

Arni-Troll laughed, a great booming sound that made answering bells in Hrolf’s ears. Arni waved a massive hand behind him, and there stood Soma, all her light quenched, her eyes downcast. She looked up briefly when Arni said, “She made her choice, now make yours,” and looked despairingly at Hrolf before she turned away, her face twisted with shame.

Arni moved forward, blocking his view, towering over little Ragni. She didn’t flinch, but slid a look toward Hrolf and smiled before she turned back to Arni.

“I’d never choose you.” Her head rose imperiously and she reached out to Hrolf. Without quite understanding, he gave her the knife, and what good was a knife against a troll?

Arni must have thought the same, because he laughed again and reached down to her. But she’d seen what Hrolf had forgotten and Arni had never known. The knife arced out in front of her, a quick gleam before it buried itself up to the hilt in Arni’s arm. The troll made to pull it out, mouth shaping some retort, but he never got the chance. Black began to work outwards from the knife, raced up his arm, writhed and tangled over his face, strangling the words that struggled to be said. Within heartbeats he was on the floor, his movements growing slower and slower as the knife dissolved in his arm and sent ever more blackness into him.

“A rune knife,” Hrolf whispered.

“That she gave to you,” Ragni said.

Soma crept toward them, the light of her still dimmed. He thought perhaps she would never shine like the sun again. Ragni’s hand slipped into his.

“Ragni Trollsbane,” he said at last.

She reached up and planted a light kiss by his lips. “And someone to tell the tale. If you will.”

They left the cave, Soma stumbling silent behind them, and sat in a clearing, holding hands and watching the sun come up over the mountains.

 

 

 

 

Julia Knight Biography

 

Julia Knight is married with two children, and lives with the world’s daftest dog that is shamelessly ruled by the writer’s obligatory three cats. She lives in Sussex, UK and when not writing she likes motorbikes, watching wrestling or rugby, killing pixels in MMOs. She is incapable of being serious for more than five minutes in a row.

Follow her on twitter @Knight_Julia