Erik Bjornson stood at the edge of the burned battlefield and admitted he had lost her twice. Once with a sword, when the shieldmaiden knocked him flat and pressed her boot to his chest. And now, three days later, because he did not know where she had marched. Her war band had broken camp and moved on, and every hour widened the gap. He had never wanted anything the way he wanted to find her again. He knew what men said about a warrior who chased the woman who beat him. He did not care. She had laughed when she let him up, and that laugh had followed him through three sleepless nights. If she marched too far, he would never hear it again. Erik went to the trading hall on the coast, where warriors gathered to swap news of moving war bands. Weathered tents leaned against sturdy timber walls. Barrels crowded the porch. He asked a dozen fighters if they had seen a shieldmaiden's company pass. Some shrugged. Some grinned and told him to give up. No one knew the road she had taken. That night Erik climbed. A colossal tree rose near the shore, its trunk wide as a longhouse, its crown lost in the dark. He hauled himself up branch after branch until his hands bled. At the top the wind shoved him sideways. He wrapped one arm around a limb and looked out. Campfires. Dozens of them, scattered across the black country like fallen sparks. One cluster burned larger than the rest, far to the north along a river bend. A big company. The right size for her band. Erik counted the fires twice to be sure, then fixed the bend in his memory. He had found her. But finding was not reaching. She would break camp again at dawn, and he was a full day's march behind on foot. By the time he arrived, the fires would be cold ash and empty ground. Erik needed to send word ahead, faster than his own legs could carry it. He thought of the black falcon he kept, sleek and sharp-beaked, trained to fly to a place and wait. He climbed down, tore a strip from his tunic, and scratched a message into a scrap of bark with a knife point. Meet me at the river bend. I am coming. He tied it to the falcon's leg and pointed the bird north toward the great fire. The falcon dropped from his fist and vanished into the dark. Erik shouldered his pack and started walking. He had a direction now, and a bird flying faster than any warning. But he had also just told a woman who once beat him in battle exactly where to find him. If she wanted no part of the man she had bested, she now knew which road to avoid. He would learn her answer at the river bend, or find it empty.