They left Hrafnstead at first light, walking south toward the lowland settlements where the land was softer and the people were more numerous and the sacred sites were smaller and less carefully tended. Brynja set the direction without consultation. Ulfar did not argue. They had seen what they came to see, and what they had seen was worse than either of them had expected, and staying would not make it better.

  The morning was cold and bright. Frost on the heather, a pale sun clearing the eastern ridge, the kind of light that made the landscape look etched in silver. After five days of walking together they had developed a rhythm that was not companionship but was adjacent to it --- Brynja ahead by three paces, Ulfar behind, the distance between them constant and maintained without discussion. They spoke when there was something to say and did not speak when there was not, which meant long stretches of silence broken by questions Ulfar had been assembling during the quiet.

  He was thinking about Saga-Power.

  Brynja had mentioned it on the first night --- the narrative energy that flowed from stories being lived and witnessed. She had called skalds supernaturally important, and he had filed the remark away without fully understanding it. But since then --- since the sight had opened, since the threads had become visible --- he had been turning the concept against what Grima had taught him about the old rites, about the power of words spoken aloud, about why the death-saga mattered even when no god was listening.

  Grima had said: the words are not for the listener. They are for the world. You speak them and they exist.

  That was Saga-Power. She had been describing it all along. She just hadn't used the name.

  Around midday they came upon a wayside shrine. It sat at the junction of two hill-tracks, a small cairn of stacked stones with a wooden post at its centre, carved with the names of the families who had built it and the land-spirit it honoured. An offering-bowl carved from a single piece of granite rested at the base. Unlike the crossroads markers they had passed, this one had been maintained. There was dried heather in the offering-bowl, and a smear of honey on the post that could not have been more than a few days old. Someone was still keeping faith.

  Ulfar stopped.

  Brynja walked three more paces before she noticed he was no longer behind her. She turned. 'What.'

  'I want to try something.'

  He set down his pack and knelt at the shrine. The rune on his palm pulsed as he brought his hand close to the offering-bowl --- a quickening of the steady rhythm, as if the mark recognised something in the maintained stones. Through the Wyrd-sight, which he opened without effort now, the shrine's threads were dim but present. Thin silver lines running from the cairn down into the ground, connecting it to whatever remained of the local land-spirit. Not strong. But alive.

  He placed his hand flat on the post. Closed his eyes. And recited.

  He chose the Lay of Gunnar --- one of the first sagas Grima had taught him, a short piece about a farmer who defended his steading against raiders and died at his own door rather than let them burn his family's hall. It was not a great saga. It would not be sung in Valhalla. But it was a story about an ordinary man who did a brave thing in a small place, and Grima had loved it, because she said it proved that Saga-Power did not require kings or gods. It required only a person doing something worth remembering, and someone to remember it.

  His voice was rough from disuse. He had not recited properly since the night he failed to speak Grima's death-saga over her body. The words came out halting, the rhythm wrong. He stopped. Breathed. Started again from the beginning, and this time the cadence found him --- the old muscle-memory of recitation, the shape of the verse in his mouth, the lift and fall of the lines the way Grima had drilled them into him over years of practice until they were less something he remembered than something he was.

  He recited. The Lay of Gunnar was short --- forty lines, perhaps three minutes' speaking. A man saw raiders coming across the fjord. He sent his family to the boats. He stood at the door of his hall with an axe he had used to split firewood and he held them there until his family was clear and then he died, and the skalds remembered him, and the remembering made him immortal in the only way that ordinary people could be immortal.

  Somewhere between the tenth line and the twentieth, his voice stopped being rough and became the voice Grima had spent years shaping. The recitation voice --- not louder than speaking, not performative, but carrying. Placed. The words occupied the space they were spoken into as if they had weight. He could feel it happening, the shift from merely saying words to reciting them, and with the shift came something else: a warmth in the rune on his palm, spreading outward through his hand and into the post beneath his fingers. The wood hummed. Faintly, at the very edge of perception, the way the grove had once hummed.

  Ulfar spoke the last line and opened his eyes.

  The air around the shrine was glowing.

  Not brightly --- not the blaze of the rune's inscription or the sharp flare of his Wyrd-sight activating. This was softer. A faint luminescence that hung in the air like mist catching dawn light. It gathered where his words had fallen --- pooling around the offering-bowl, settling on the carved names, running down the thin threads that connected the shrine to the earth below. The threads themselves were brighter. Fractionally, but visibly. As if his recitation had fed them something they had been hungry for.

  The Wyrd-sight showed him what was happening. The light was not light. It was Saga-Power --- narrative energy, generated by the act of telling a story aloud. A story about a real person who had done a real thing, spoken with intent, at a place that still remembered what it was. The energy flowed from the words into the shrine's remaining connections and from there into the ground, and the ground drank it the way dry earth drank rain.

  The rune on his palm pulsed once, warm and approving. The shrine's threads held their new brightness for several seconds, then faded back toward their previous dimness. But not all the way back. They were fractionally stronger than they had been before he spoke.

  He looked up. Brynja was standing where she had stopped, watching him with an expression he had not seen on her before. Not alarm. Not the clinical assessment she wore like armour. Something closer to recognition --- the look of someone seeing a thing they have seen before, in a context where they did not expect to see it.

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  'What,' he said.

  'Do that again.'

  'The recitation?'

  'The recitation. But longer. Something with more weight.'

  He chose the Death of Halfdan --- a longer piece, one of the great sagas, a king's fall at a battle that decided the fate of three kingdoms. Grima had made him learn it when he was sixteen and he had complained about the length and she had told him that if he wanted to recite only short sagas he should become a shepherd, because sheep did not care about narrative structure.

  He recited it from memory, all two hundred and thirty lines, and his voice grew stronger as the rhythm took hold. The words came the way they always came when a recitation was working --- not from memory exactly, but from somewhere deeper, the place where the stories lived after they had been learned so thoroughly that they stopped being knowledge and became instinct. Grima had called it the deep shelf. She said every skald had one, and the measure of a skald was how many stories fit on it and how quickly they could be pulled down.

  The light gathered again as he spoke. Thicker this time, brighter, pooling around the shrine and running down the threads into the earth. The air hummed with it. A faint vibration that he could feel in his teeth and in the rune on his palm and in the ground beneath his knees. When he reached the final stanza --- Halfdan's last stand at the bridge, the king dying on his feet because his legs had forgotten how to fall --- the light was bright enough to cast faint shadows.

  He finished. The silence that followed was thick with the aftermath of something having happened. The shrine's threads were noticeably brighter --- still dim compared to what a healthy land-spirit would produce, but the difference was visible. He had fed the shrine with words.

  Brynja crouched beside him. She studied the threads with an intensity that bordered on hunger. 'This is what I meant,' she said. 'When I told you skalds were supernaturally important. This is what I meant.'

  'Stories generate power.'

  'Stories told aloud, with intent, at places that can receive them. Yes. Saga-Power is the fuel that the land-spirits run on. It is the energy that keeps the Wyrd-threads intact. Every story told at a shrine, every saga recited at a funeral, every oath sworn at a standing stone --- they all feed the web. The sacred sites are not magical on their own. They are reservoirs. And the skalds are the ones who fill them.'

  'Grima never described it like that.'

  'Your volva described it in terms she understood. She was a practitioner, not a theorist. She knew the rites worked. She may not have known why they worked, or she may have known and lacked the vocabulary to tell you.' Brynja's voice had lost its customary edge. She was talking about something that interested her, and interest made her almost approachable. 'In Asgard, the skalds hold a rank equal to the warriors. Not because they fight, but because without them the warriors' deeds would generate no Saga-Power. An unwitnessed battle feeds nothing. A battle told and retold feeds the Realms themselves. The skalds are not decorative. They are structural.'

  Ulfar sat with this for a moment. Seventeen years of training, and he had thought he was learning a craft --- a way with words, a memory for old verses, a skill that might earn him a patron if he was lucky and a meal if he was not. The idea that recitation was not a craft but a force, that the words themselves did something to the world when they were spoken --- Grima had hinted at it. He had not understood until now.

  She looked at the shrine, then at him. 'But the amount you just generated is wrong.'

  'Wrong how?'

  'Too much. A trained skald reciting at a maintained shrine would produce a fraction of what you just did. What you generated should have required a full ceremony --- witnesses, offerings, the proper forms. You knelt at a wayside cairn and spoke a saga and the threads lit up.' She straightened. 'The rune is amplifying it,' she said. 'Whatever you carry in your palm is taking your natural capacity for Saga-generation and multiplying it. A trained skald with years of practice could not do what you just did alone.'

  Ulfar looked at his hand, the lines warm against his skin. 'Is that dangerous?'

  'Everything about you is dangerous. This is merely a new way.' She stood. 'But it is also useful. If you can feed the shrines, you can slow the damage. Not stop it --- the thread-anchors will continue their work regardless. But you can buy time for the sites that are still alive. And time is not nothing.'

  She turned south and started walking. After a few steps she stopped without turning around.

  'Your teacher,' she said. 'The volva.'

  'Grima.'

  'She trained you well.'

  It was the second kind thing Brynja had said about Grima, and the first kind thing she had said to Ulfar directly. He did not know what to do with it. Neither, apparently, did she. She resumed walking at her usual pace and did not look back, and the moment passed the way a patch of sunlight passes through a room --- there and then gone, leaving only the memory of warmth.

  They walked on through the afternoon. The country softened as they moved south --- the high moor giving way to gentler hills, the heather to grass, the bare ridges to scattered copses of birch and rowan. It was better land, kinder land, the kind of country where people settled and stayed. They passed farmsteads that were occupied and working, smoke rising from turf roofs, dogs barking at their approach. Normal life. Ulfar found it strange to walk through it now, as if he were looking at it through glass. These people had no idea what was happening to the sacred sites. They went about their days and the web that held their world together was fraying, and they could not see it, and he could, and the distance between those two things was a kind of loneliness he had not anticipated.

  Brynja walked beside him now, not ahead. It had happened without either of them commenting on it. The path had widened and she had not moved forward, and they had walked side by side for perhaps a mile before Ulfar noticed the change. He did not mention it. He understood that mentioning it would end it.

  She was quiet for a long time, and then she said: 'When I was first sent to Midgard, I could not understand why humans told stories at all. In Asgard, a thing happens and it is known. There is no gap between event and record. The Saga writes itself as the world moves. Here, a thing happens and then it fades unless someone chooses to speak it. I thought it was weakness. The need to hold things that were slipping away.'

  She looked at the sky, at the thin afternoon light cutting through cloud.

  'I was wrong about that,' she said. 'It is not weakness. It is choice. The choosing is the point. In Asgard nothing is lost, which means nothing is chosen. Here, everything is lost unless someone fights to keep it, and the fighting --- the speaking, the remembering --- is what gives it weight.'

  It was the longest voluntary thing she had said to him that was not an explanation or a warning. Ulfar felt the warmth of it and knew better than to press against it.

  'Grima would have liked you,' he said.

  'Your volva would have found me exasperating.'

  'Yes. She would have liked that.'

  Something passed between them. Not warmth exactly --- the way heat builds in a room after the fire has burned down. Then Brynja's stride lengthened and she moved ahead again, and the distance between them was restored, and neither of them pretended that the last five minutes had not happened, because pretending would have been its own kind of acknowledgement.

  In the late afternoon they passed a cluster of standing stones at the edge of a barley field --- old clan-markers, similar to the ones he had felt the presence at the day before. He slowed as they approached, opening his Wyrd-sight out of what was becoming habit.

  The presence was there again. Not at the stones this time --- further off, at the edge of his perception, hovering in the threads like a half-heard voice in another room. Watching. Patient. It withdrew as his awareness touched it, pulling back into the deeper weave the way a fish moves from a shadow.

  He said nothing to Brynja. She had dismissed it as ancestral residue, and perhaps it was. But it had been there at the boundary stones near Hrafnstead, and it was here now, a day's walk south, and it felt the same both times. The same quality of attention. The same careful distance. Whatever it was, it was following them.

  Or following him.

  He closed the Wyrd-sight and walked on. The rune on his palm was warm, and the standing stones fell behind them, and the presence --- if it had been a presence --- was gone again.