Extraits

“I feel like…” I caught the sob in my chest and swallowed it, suddenly embarrassed. He leaned in closer to me. “Like what?” My eyes ran over his face. The scruff on his jaw. The dark lashes around his blue eyes. “Like I’m a flame about to burn out.” My voice was so thin it sounded like I could reach out and break it with my fingers. “Like I’m going to disappear.”

“Vegr yfir fjor.” Honor above life.”

“We find things, just as we lose things. If you’ve lost your honor, you’ll find it again.”

Myra reached down to close the woman's eyes with her fingertips. She gently brushed the hair back from her face before she began, the words coming softly. "Aska, you have reached your journey's end."

In the next breath, I joined with her, saying the ritual words we knew by heart. "We ask Sigr to accept your soul into Solbjorg, where the long line of our people hold torches on the shadowed path."

My voice faded, letting Myra speak first. "Take my love to my father and my sister. Ask them to keep watch for me. Tell them my soul follows behind you."

I closed my eyes as the prayer found a familiar place on my tongue. "Take my love to my mother and my brother. Ask them to keep watch for me. Tell them my soul follows behind you."

''We can get to him,but we can't get the others'', I whispered. ''There are too many of them.''

He looked at the snow, thinking. ''We'll take Halvard. We'll come back for the others''.

I noodded. ''And then we'll kill every last one of them.''

“What are you thinking?” He took my hand.

“I’m thinking I don’t want to fight anymore.”

His fingers tightened around mine. It seemed so foolish now, all the fighting.

All the death and loss and mourning.”

“The writhing, bleeding hole inside of me closed up. I let him erase it. I let him make it go away.”

“Home felt an entire world away.”

“I was the ice on the river. The snow clinging onto the mountainside.”

“The fog sat on the field like a veil, but we could hear it. The blades of swords and axes brushing against armor vests. Quick footsteps in sucking mud. My heart beat almost in rhythm with the sounds, pulling one breath in and letting it touch another before I let it go.”