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John zooms in on the lead longship from the cliff edge. Sinuous dragon-headed prow, a dozen rowers each side, mostly unarmoured men with a single chainmailed figure on each boat; well-groomed, with long brushed hair and trimmed beards. He notes, with the wrong amount of distraction for the moment, that there is an ethereal-looking woman standing at each ship's prow. Ealstan has gone pale. *Murderers*, he whispers. Raiders who laugh as they kill and harder as they take the survivors. *Hordamen*, he says — John tries *Vikings* and gets no recognition. They come from Hordaland across the eastern sea, Ealstan says; Sefawynn supplies the older names — Norweg once a kingdom there, Dansic nearby, both enslaved by the Hordamen; only the Geats still hold, by their runestones. The three ships are heading north. Toward Stenford.

Ealstan's runestone, he says, mostly still works. *Unless they've brought skops.* John asks what skops have to do with it. Ealstan explains: a Hordaman skald can intimidate the local landswights with her boasts and negate the runestone's protection. Neahtun was burned to the ground three months ago that way, with a stronger stone than Stenford's. John, watching, confirms what Ealstan can't see at distance — there is indeed a woman standing at the front of each of those ships.

Ealstan rises as if to ride for his horse, then stops. By his duty he should warn the earl of the cartel weapon, who would tell him to leave Stenford to its fate in the face of the greater threat. But he is, he admits with tears in his eyes, no longer strong enough to leave Rowena and his people to die. Sefawynn tells him to go anyway; it is the right choice. He asks her, if she rescues Wyrm, to continue on and ask the earl to send people to bury Stenford's dead. Then he kneels in front of John and asks plainly: can the aelv do anything against three ships? Sefawynn says quietly that John cannot; she wishes her boasts could. John, watching the slump in Ealstan's shoulders and hearing Sefawynn's resignation and remembering the news of Jen's death, finds he can't leave it there. He asks: will the Hordamen speak English? Yes — their skalds will. *Then I need madder root, a feather, and somewhere I can watch them for a few minutes.*

He settles at the cliff edge with a quill, madder-root ink, and the surviving handbook pages, and starts sketching the three captains from his magnified view. He discovers that his optical augments can hold an image still — he has an internal camera, in effect — and works faster for it. The drawing helps with his hands, which are shaking; he activates a finger-stabiliser to hold them steady. He notes, surprised at himself, that he can't actually remember being in a firefight. He has the muscle memory, presumably; he just doesn't have the experience. Ealstan stands near him, axe in hand, *like a heavily armed puppy*, trusting and patient.

Looking for cover and instinctively building a fallback plan, John asks if the horses know their way home; they do. They could send a warning to Stenford on the packhorse if this goes sideways. He notes, glumly, that no-one back home reads. He explains to Ealstan and Sefawynn what runestones do as best he can guess — *trap fairies?* — and Ealstan corrects him: a runestone offers wights peace and binds them inside the village's bounds, where they are empowered to defend and protect; if neglected they may turn into bogs, destructive and full of bad wyrd. Once the old runestones could drive a turned wight away. Not anymore. Skops do that work now.

John asks why Woden forbids writing, and Sefawynn settles in to tell him. Friag gave writing to mortals, was wife to Woden, mother to Thunor. The Waelish war with the Weswarans was nothing to the gods until the Bear turned to darkness — land blackening at his touch, landswights corrupted, barghests coming out of shadow and flame at his call. The gods stood with men until the Bear chained Fenris — the wolf once bound by Tiw — and brought him to the field with the implements of *metodgodas*, the end of gods. The gods retreated. Friag, hearing men dying, returned alone. Her boasts drove the Bear back and bound him to his own land as if he were a wight, saving humankind in every direction. Fenris, weakened or no, consumed her; with her last breath she bound the wolf to the Bear's hill, to sleep until the death of the gods. By rights, Sefawynn says, that fate should have been Tiw's — it was his hand the wolf had taken, his blood it had tasted — but Friag's sacrifice changed everything that should have been, and made hope possible. Woden, who wanted love rather than hope, forbade writing in penance. His sons enforce it. Only Logna dares disobey. The skops are Friag's heritage, doing what the runes once did.

Ealstan goes to set up the packhorse with his bloodied seal — a last warning to Rowena should they fall. Sefawynn lingers and finally calls John on the bluff: he isn't an aelv prince. He admits it. He is a regular human with a few special advantages — and he's still going to try this. She doesn't try to talk him out of it. She offers, instead, to help. The trick she invents on the spot: a *reverse binding*, where a faeigerman overpowers a skop by her true name. He need only order her around and call her *thrael* — slave. The rest she will sell. John nods, lets the last sketch dry, hands her one of her own offering bowls full of red ink for safekeeping. *Carpe diem*, he mutters. *Seize the fish.*