Thorolf's Arc

Chapter 4 of 10

The widow came back three days later, and she brought two more women with her. Thorolf set stones for them by the pool and listened. But when they finished weeping, they looked to him for something more. A word to close the grief. A rite. He had none. He feared that if he made one up, he would tear the wound wider instead of stitching it. That night he walked to find the one person who knew the old rites. He found her at the burial mound, kneeling among the grave markers. Hjördís Runedottir ran her bare fingers over a carved stone, reading it by touch. A cloth bound her eyes. Antlers rose from her headdress, dark against the evening sky. She was the seeress who had buried his people's dead for years, the one everyone feared to trouble. Thorolf had never spoken to her alone. "You breathe loud for a strong man," she said. She did not turn. "You want something you think you cannot have." "I made a place where people grieve," Thorolf said. "Now they want rites. I know none. I'm afraid I'll do them harm." Her blind face tilted toward him. "Many men would invent a rite and call it wisdom. You came to ask instead." She stood, slow, and brushed dirt from her knees. "That is the first rite. You already use it." "Sitting in silence is not enough." "It is most of it." She stepped between the markers without stumbling. "A rite does not fix the dead. It gives the living a shape to hold. A thing to do with their hands while the heart breaks." She pressed a small amber amulet into his ruined palm. It was warm, like a held tear. "Freyja takes grief and keeps it safe. Let each griever name their dead over this. Then they pour water from your pool over the stones here, and walk home. That is the shape. Nothing more." Thorolf closed his fingers around the amber. "Why give this to me?" "Because you fear hurting them. A careless man never fears that." She turned back to the graves. "Come. I will teach you the words. They are few." They sat among the markers until dark. She spoke the old lines slow, and he said them back until they held. He learned when to speak and when to stay quiet. He learned that the rite asked nothing he did not already have. At dawn Thorolf walked to the pool with the amber warm in his pocket. The widow waited with her two companions. He did not promise them calm. He showed them the shape. They named their dead over the amber, one by one. Then they carried water to the mound and poured it on the stones. The widow turned to him, dry-eyed now. "That helped," she said. "It gave my hands something to do." Thorolf had a rite. But word would spread further now, and more would come than one amulet and one pool could hold.