The village buried its dead in the old way: on the third day, with words spoken and offerings given and the body laid in earth deep enough that the foxes would not find it. Grima had no family. She had come to the village before living memory, as far as anyone could tell --- an old woman who was already old, carrying a staff that hummed when she struck it against the ground and a knowledge of the spirit-world that the village needed and did not understand and did not particularly want to understand, as long as the well-water stayed sweet and the land-spirits left the sheep alone.

  Ulfar prepared her body himself. It was his right as her apprentice and his duty as the only person in the village who knew the proper forms. He washed her with water from the stream that ran past the grove --- water that tasted flat now, stripped of the mineral sweetness the land-spirit had given it. The stream still ran. The water was still clear. But it was just water, the way the ground of the grove was just ground --- materially correct and spiritually empty.

  He dressed her in the grey wool robe she had worn for rituals, the one with silver thread at the cuffs that she said her own teacher had stitched before the grandparents of the oldest man in the village were born. The thread was tarnished now, blackened in places, but the stitching held. He placed her hands across her chest, the right over the left, the way the honoured dead were laid. He braided her hair, which he had never done before and did badly --- the plaits were uneven and he could not make the ends stay together. It did not matter. It was the doing that mattered.

  He kept the body in her house --- the small stone-and-turf structure at the edge of the village that smelled of dried herbs and woodsmoke and the particular mustiness of old books that no one but Grima had been able to read. The house was full of her things: the carved rune-staves she used for divination, hanging from hooks along the ceiling beam. The bundles of dried mugwort and yarrow she burned during spirit-callings. The three leather-bound books that she had brought with her when she came to the village, written in a script Ulfar had spent years learning to read. He had asked once where the books came from. She had told him not to ask again.

  The village women brought food, which was the custom. Inga Haralsdottir left a pot of stew at the door on the first evening without knocking. Old Siv brought bread on the second morning, wrapped in linen, and left it on the step. They did not come inside. They had never come inside when Grima was alive, and they did not start now that she was dead. Ulfar ate what they brought. He did not taste it.

  For three days the village moved around him as if he were furniture. They were not cruel about it. They simply had no framework for him now that Grima was gone. He was the volva's apprentice without a volva. A skald-in-training with no stage and no war-glory to recite and no patron to fund the long years of learning that a proper skald required. He had the memory --- Grima had told him so, and she did not give compliments she did not mean --- but memory without purpose was just a man who couldn't forget. The village had plenty of those. Most of them drank.

  Haral, the village headman, spoke to him once. On the second morning, coming up the path from the sheep pens with his staff across his shoulders and his face set in the expression of a man about to say something he'd rehearsed and was not confident about.

  'Ulfar. The grove.'

  'What about it?'

  'People are saying things. About the sound stopping. About the stones.' Haral shifted his weight. He was a big man, competent with his hands, uncomfortable with anything he could not fix by gripping it firmly and applying force. 'Some of the women won't go near the upper path anymore. They say the ground feels wrong. And the sheep won't graze above the spring.'

  'The ground is wrong.'

  Haral waited, as if expecting more. When more did not come, he shifted again. 'Can you do what she did? The rites, the spirit-work. Is the spring still safe to drink from?'

  Ulfar looked at Haral for a long time. The headman met his eyes and then didn't.

  'No,' Ulfar said. 'I don't think anyone can fix it. I think what happened to the grove is not something that can be undone. The land-spirit isn't sleeping, Haral. It's gone. The way a fire is gone when you scatter the coals and pour water on them. You can build a new fire, but it won't be the same fire.'

  Haral nodded as if this confirmed something he had already decided to believe, and went back down the path, and that was the last real conversation Ulfar had with anyone in the village.

  On the second night he sat in Grima's house with her body lying on the table in the centre of the room, and he tried to recite the death-saga. It was the proper form --- a recitation of the dead person's deeds, spoken aloud in the presence of the body on each of the three nights before burial. Grima had taught him the structure: begin with the birth, move through the significant moments, end with the manner of death and the words the living wished to send with the dead into whatever came next. He had performed it for others --- for old Thorolf, for the twins who died in the river, for Haral's mother. He had the form. He knew the words.

  He could not get through the second line without his voice breaking.

  He tried three times. Each time the words crumbled in his mouth like dry bread, and the room was too quiet, and the herbs on the ceiling were too still, and the woman on the table was too much herself --- too specifically Grima, too precisely the person who had shaped every useful thing he knew --- for him to maintain the professional distance the form required. He gave up. He sat in her chair by the cold hearth and talked to her instead, which was not the proper form at all but was, he thought, closer to what she would have wanted.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  He told her about the sheep. About the weather. About the argument between Sigrid and her brother over the fence line that had been going on since midsummer and showed no sign of resolution. He told her the things she would have wanted to know if she had been alive, because if death was a journey then the dead deserved to begin it with current news.

  * * *

  On the morning of the burial, before the village gathered at the grave-site, Ulfar went up to the grove to find an offering.

  The proper form required something from the sacred site itself --- a stone, a branch, something that carried the resonance of the place and could be given back to the earth alongside the body. Grima had taught him this at old Thorolf's grave: the offering was not for the dead. It was for the land-spirit, an acknowledgement that the dead were being returned to ground that was still alive, still listening.

  The land-spirit was gone. The ground was not listening. But Ulfar went up anyway, because the form mattered even when the function was broken. Grima had taught him that too. 'The rites are not for the gods,' she had said once, sharpening a carving knife by firelight while he sat cross-legged on her floor and tried to recite the lineage of the Volsung kings. 'The gods will do what they will regardless. The rites are for us. They are how we tell the world --- and ourselves --- that we still know what matters.'

  He climbed through the fallen trees. The grove looked worse in daylight than it had in the failing dusk of three days ago, worse than it had looked by the thin light of the days since. What he had taken for the natural disarray of a collapsed woodland was, on closer inspection, geometrically precise. The trees had not fallen randomly. They had fallen outward from a central point, like the spokes of a wheel, their crowns pointing away from the standing stones as if the trees themselves had been trying to flee. The pattern was clear from above --- if he climbed the ridge above the grove, he thought, it would look like a flower opening. Or a wound.

  The stones themselves --- the three great slabs of granite that Grima said were the land-spirit's anchors, the points where the spirit's awareness touched the physical world --- were cracked in identical lines, straight down the centre of each, as if the same blade had been drawn through all three in a single stroke. The crack faces were smooth. No roughness, no mineral scatter, none of the characteristics of stone breaking under natural stress. These had been parted. Separated. The way a butcher parts a joint: finding the seam and opening it.

  He picked through the debris, looking for something intact enough to serve as an offering. A smooth stone. A piece of bark with lichen still growing. Anything with life or memory in it. Everything he touched felt dead. Not dormant. Not waiting. Dead, the way the ground felt dead: present but empty, matter without meaning. He picked up a stone and it was just a stone. He broke a twig from a fallen branch and it was just wood. The spiritual resonance that Grima had taught him to feel in natural objects --- the faint hum of connection that linked every stone to the ground it had come from and every branch to the tree that had grown it --- was absent. Erased. As if someone had gone through the grove with a cloth and wiped every surface clean of meaning.

  He was about to give up and take a handful of dirt --- the most basic offering, barely acceptable, but at least honest about the poverty of what remained --- when the morning light shifted and caught something at the base of the northernmost standing stone. A glint. Not metal. Something paler, duller, half-buried in the disturbed earth where the stone had cracked.

  He knelt and brushed the soil away. It was a flat piece of what looked like bone.

  Not animal bone, he realised as he cleared more dirt from its surface. Something denser, heavier, with a grey-white grain like very old wood compressed over centuries until the rings had fused into a single mass. The surface was smooth on one side and rough on the other, as if it had been broken from a larger piece. And on the smooth side, cut deep, a rune.

  Ulfar had spent seventeen years learning the Elder Futhark under Grima's instruction. He could read and write all twenty-four runes. He knew the staves, the phonetic values, the esoteric meanings that Grima said were only half the truth and the half that most people stopped at. He had carved runes on bone and wood and stone until his fingers bled and his teacher was satisfied, and then she had made him carve them again left-handed because, she said, the runes did not care which hand held the blade. He had learned to read the rune-stones that traders brought through the valley, and the rune-posts that marked the boundaries of the old territories, and the faded marks on standing stones so ancient that the runes had been worn to suggestions. He knew the shapes of the Futhark the way he knew the shape of his own hands.

  This was not a rune he knew.

  It had the shape of one --- angular lines meeting at precise points, the strokes confident and deep, cut with the assured hand of someone who had made this mark many times. But the arrangement was wrong. Not wrong as in flawed --- wrong as in foreign. It was as if someone had taken the architecture of the Futhark, the logic of straight lines and acute angles that the Norse runes were built from, and used it to write in a different language entirely. He could feel the runic logic in it the way he could hear the grammar in a tongue he didn't speak. It was language. It was meaning. But the meaning was locked behind a door he had not known existed.

  He reached for it.

  Later, trying to reconstruct the moment, he would not be able to say whether he chose to touch it or whether his hand moved of its own accord. He would turn the question over for days and never arrive at an answer, because the moment existed in a space between choice and compulsion where the distinction did not apply. His fingers closed on the bone-piece, and the rune on its surface blazed white --- not light, exactly, but an intensity that operated on the same sense as light without using his eyes, a brightness perceived somewhere behind his visual field --- and then the rune was not on the bone anymore.

  It was in his hand.

  The pain was extraordinary. Not sharp, not hot, not any of the categories his body had for pain. It was the pain of something being written where nothing had been written before, a stylus pressing into a medium that had never been touched. The rune carved itself into his left palm with the steady deliberation of a craftsman who knows exactly what he is doing and is not in any hurry. Ulfar watched it happen. He could not look away. He watched his skin part and reform around lines of something that was not blood and not light but occupied the space where both of those things usually lived. He watched the rune complete itself --- angular, precise, locked --- and settle into his flesh as if it had always been there, as if the hand he had carried for twenty-nine years had been a draft and this was the finished version.

  He tried to scream and could not find his voice.

  The ground lurched, or he lurched, or the distinction between himself and the ground became briefly academic. He was falling. Not downward --- through. Through something that was not darkness because darkness was the absence of light and this was the absence of something more fundamental. He was falling through a gap in the world where the world had forgotten to be, and the last thing he felt before consciousness left him was the rune on his palm pulsing once, warm and patient, as if it had been waiting for a very long time and was pleased, at last, to have been found.