They buried Grima at dawn, in the plot beside the grove where the village had always put its dead.

  Ulfar dug the grave himself. The ground was hard with early frost and his shoulders ached before he was a foot deep, but he kept going because this was his to do and because the physical work was better than standing still. The village gathered at a distance --- Haral and Inga and old Siv and the rest, maybe thirty people shifting their weight and not meeting his eyes. They had come because the forms required it and because Grima, whatever else she had been, had kept the land-spirit content for longer than any of them had been alive. The least they could do was stand in the cold for an hour.

  He placed the offering on her chest: a handful of dirt from the grove. The most basic thing. He had looked for something better and found nothing, and he would not pretend otherwise. He spoke the death-words in the old form, beginning with her name and ending with the direction of the journey ahead of her, and his voice held this time. It was thin in the morning air and the village listened in silence and the words went where words go when they are spoken to the dead, which is everywhere and nowhere. The words were for the world, not for him. He could be steady for that.

  When he finished, he stood at the grave-side for a moment longer than the form required. The dirt on her chest was dark against the grey wool robe. She looked small in the ground. She had been a small woman, but alive she had filled the space around her with a density that had nothing to do with size. Now the ground held her and she was just a body and the grave was just a hole and the words he had spoken were already fading into the cold air.

  Brynja watched from the tree-line, far enough from the village that no one noticed her. When the burial was finished and the people had gone back down the hill, she was standing exactly where she had stood the night before, as if she had not moved at all.

  'South and east,' she said. 'Three days.'

  He picked up his pack --- supplies he had gathered from Grima's house in the grey hour before dawn, moving quietly so as not to wake anyone, though he suspected no one would have tried to stop him. A water-skin, dried meat, a blanket, Grima's smallest carving knife. He had left the rune-staves and the books. They belonged to the house.

  They walked.

  * * *

  The country between the grove and Hrafnstead was high moorland cut by river valleys --- open ground where the wind came straight off the northern mountains and the sky was the colour of unworked iron. In summer it would be green and busy with sheep, the kind of landscape that looked gentle from a distance and was brutal up close. In late autumn it was stripped bare. The heather had gone brown. The streams ran fast and cold in their channels, fed by the first melt-freeze cycles of the approaching winter. The path was a cattle-track, worn into the peat by generations of hooves, narrow enough that two people could not walk side by side without one of them stepping into the heather.

  Brynja walked ahead. She moved at a pace that was not fast but was relentless --- the stride of someone who had covered ground across landscapes that made this one look like a kitchen garden, and who saw no reason to adjust her tempo for a companion she had not asked for. Ulfar kept up because his legs were long and because he had spent his life on hill-country and because he would rather have collapsed than asked her to slow down. Neither of them spoke for the first two hours.

  The silence was not comfortable but it was honest. They were strangers who had agreed to walk in the same direction for reasons that had nothing to do with liking each other, and silence was the appropriate register for that arrangement. Ulfar was grateful for it. His mind was full of the grave and the dirt on Grima's chest and the words he had spoken over her, and the rune on his palm that pulsed with every step as if it were counting something.

  It was Brynja who spoke first, which surprised him.

  'The land is wrong here too.'

  He looked where she was looking. They had crested a ridge and the valley below was laid out in the thin midday light --- farmland, fenced fields, a scatter of buildings around a crossroads. Normal. Except that the fields nearest the crossroads were empty. Not fallow. Empty. No livestock, no movement, and the fences on the near side were broken in a way that suggested the animals had forced their way out rather than someone letting them through.

  'They won't go near the marker,' Brynja said. She pointed to the crossroads, where a standing stone marked the junction of two paths. Even from this distance Ulfar could see that the stone had been defaced --- the carved markings on its face scraped away or painted over with something dark. 'Animals know before people do. When the land-spirit withdraws, the animals leave first.'

  'Is this connected to the grove?'

  'Everything is connected. That is what the Wyrd-threads are --- connection made visible. The question is whether the same hand did both, or whether what happened at your grove weakened the connections enough that other things are failing on their own.' She glanced at him. 'Try your sight.'

  He closed his eyes. Found the sense the rune had opened --- it came more easily now, as if the door that had been stiff the first time was loosening on its hinges. He opened his eyes and the threads were there: the web of connection that underlay the physical world. In the valley below, the web was thinner than it should have been. The threads that ran through the standing stone at the crossroads were frayed, their silver dimmed to grey. Not cut --- not the clean severance he had seen at the grove. Worn. As if something were pulling at them slowly, drawing the strength out.

  'The threads around the marker are thinning,' he said. 'Not cut. Weakened.'

  'Good. You can distinguish the two.' She did not say this as praise. She said it the way someone confirms that a tool is functioning. 'A cut thread is deliberate. A thinning thread is consequence. Something upstream is draining the strength from the connections, and the weakest points fail first. Crossroads markers, boundary stones, the small sacred sites that have no dedicated keeper.'

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  'And a grove with a keeper died first.'

  'A grove with a keeper was cut first. That is different and worse. The small failures could be natural decline --- land-spirits do fade when people stop maintaining the relationship. But a kept grove, actively tended by a trained volva, does not simply die. That was targeted.'

  They walked on. The crossroads was below them now and Ulfar could see a woman standing at the door of the nearest farmhouse, watching them pass on the ridge above. She did not wave. She did not call out. She stood in her doorway with her arms crossed and her face turned up toward them with the expression of someone who has been watching the horizon for trouble and has finally seen it arrive.

  He raised a hand. She went inside and closed the door.

  The rest of the day's walking took them through two more valleys and up onto a high moor where the wind cut across open ground with nothing to slow it. They passed a second crossroads marker, this one intact but neglected --- the offering-bowl at its base was dry and cracked, filled with dead leaves instead of the mead or milk that should have been there. Brynja did not comment on it. She walked past it with the focused indifference of someone counting evidence.

  In the late afternoon they crossed a stream where the stepping stones had been carved with runes --- old protections, the kind Grima had taught him to read. Safe passage. Clean water. Welcome to the traveller. The runes were worn almost flat by centuries of boots and weather, but they were still legible to someone who knew what to look for. When Ulfar stepped on the first stone, the rune on his palm flared with a brief warmth, and for a moment he felt something beneath the stone that was not emptiness. A faint pulse. A land-spirit, still present, still listening, but dim. Fading.

  'This one is still alive,' he said.

  Brynja turned back. She looked at the stream, at his hand on the stone, at his face. 'How faint?'

  'Very. But there.'

  She said nothing for a moment. Then: 'Good. That means the damage has not reached here yet. We are moving ahead of it.'

  They crossed the stream and walked on. Ulfar did not say what he was thinking, which was that moving ahead of a tide was only useful if you could find higher ground.

  An hour later they passed a row of standing stones on a ridge-top --- old boundary markers, three of them, spaced at intervals along the crest. They were smaller than the stones at the grove or at Hrafnstead, hip-height and rough-hewn, the kind of markers that clans set at the edges of their land to tell the land-spirits where one family's territory ended and another's began. Through the Wyrd-sight they were dim but intact, their threads running down into the earth in thin, steady lines.

  As Ulfar passed the middle stone, the rune on his palm flared. Not the slow pulse he was accustomed to --- a sharp, sudden warmth, as if it had been touched by a finger. He stopped. Looked at the stone. Opened his Wyrd-sight wider than he had before, pushing the sense until it ached behind his eyes.

  Something was there. At the very edge of perception, in the threads around the boundary stone, a presence. Not the land-spirit --- something smaller, lighter, barely there. A whisper in the weave. It was watching him. He was certain of that without being able to explain how. Something in the threads around these old stones knew he was here and was paying attention.

  The warmth faded. The presence --- if it had been a presence --- was gone, dissolved back into the ambient threading like a breath into cold air.

  'What did you see?' Brynja was watching him from ahead, her head turned, her eyes sharp.

  'I'm not sure. Something near the stones. A presence. It felt like it was watching.'

  She studied the boundary markers for a long moment. 'I see nothing. But these are old clan-stones. Old boundary markers sometimes hold echoes of the families that placed them. Ancestral residue. It is probably nothing.'

  She turned and walked on. Ulfar followed. But he looked back once at the standing stones on the ridge, dark shapes against the fading sky, and the rune on his palm held its warmth for several steps after, as if remembering something it could not yet name.

  * * *

  They made camp that evening in the lee of a stone wall, where the wind dropped enough to keep a fire from being torn apart. Brynja built the fire with a competence that suggested she had done it thousands of times and found the task beneath her but necessary. The flames behaved strangely around her again --- leaning slightly away, as if the fire was unsure about the surface it was being asked to warm.

  Ulfar watched her across the flames and thought about what he knew. She was from Asgard. She had been sent to Midgard as punishment --- he was guessing at this, assembling it from the cut threads at her shoulders and the way she spoke about the higher Realms with the precision of someone describing a home she could no longer enter. She had wings and they had been taken. She was alone in a way that went deeper than solitude.

  He did not ask about any of this. Instead he asked about the system.

  'The frequency model,' he said. 'You said Midgard is the lowest note. If I'm being attuned to something higher, what happens to the parts of me that are still at Midgard's frequency?'

  She looked at him with something that might have been the beginning of respect, though it could equally have been surprise that he had asked a useful question. 'They change. Or they break. The inscription process rewrites your soul-substance at the new frequency. The parts that can be rewritten, are. The parts that cannot ---' She paused. 'Have you noticed any changes since the rune inscribed? Beyond the sight.'

  He thought about it. The rune on his palm ached constantly, a low pulse that had become background. His perception felt wider --- not just the Wyrd-sight but ordinary awareness, as if someone had turned up the contrast on his senses. Colours were slightly sharper. Sounds carried further. And there was something else, something harder to name: a feeling of weight, as if his body had acquired a density it had not had before.

  'I feel heavier,' he said. 'Not physically. As if there's more of me than there was.'

  'There is more of you than there was. The rune is adding structure to your soul-substance. Think of it as ---' She stopped, visibly irritated at having to find metaphors for someone who could not perceive the underlying reality directly. 'Your soul was a single note. Now it is beginning to become a chord. The additional frequencies are weight. They are also vulnerability. A chord can be disrupted in ways a single note cannot.'

  'What does disruption look like?'

  'Death, usually.'

  He absorbed this. The fire crackled between them and the stars were very bright overhead and the moor stretched away on all sides, dark and featureless. He was sitting on a hillside in a country he had never left, talking to a being from another Realm about the architecture of his own soul, and four days ago the most extraordinary thing in his life had been a three-thousand-year-old humming tree.

  'You're very reassuring,' he said.

  'I am not here to reassure you. I am here because you are carrying something dangerous and I would rather it were carried by someone who understands what he is holding.' She poked the fire with a stick. The flames leaned away from her hand. 'Ask better questions.'

  He tried to think of one. Nothing came. The fire settled into itself, and after a time she moved to the far side of the camp and settled against the stone wall with her back to it, facing the dark, and neither of them spoke again.

  Ulfar lay down and looked at the stars. Somewhere in the distance a fox barked once and was answered by nothing. The moor stretched away on all sides, wide and black and utterly indifferent. He lay awake for a long time, watching the cut threads at her shoulders catch what little light the fire gave, wondering what question would have been better.