In truth, his spellbinding song captivated everyone - there were shivers and gasps at the right places, as he foreshadowed and then related the horrors - but for himself, the true awfulness was not in the dread entities he described nor the sacrifice of the war-god’s hand. For the saga, in order to place Loki’s children high in the hierarchy of evil, foretold events that had not occurred; and so it was the place to describe those dread sisters, Fate, Being and Necessity: the Norns who guide destiny.

After the saga was done and the cheering was over, it was natural that he should find a quiet corner in which to talk with the woman who was so fascinated by him. Her name was Anya, she was little Hildr’s sister, and she was neither married nor betrothed.

‘You’ve seen so much,’ she said. ‘I wish you could show me, with your magical words, all of the Middle World.’

‘I can show you, sweet Anya, but yours is the truest magic of all. The magic of touch.’

In the night, he held her. Wrapped in their cloaks, they made quiet love, softly gasping and shuddering when they came. Finally, she kissed him and slipped away, for little Hildr could not sleep without her older sister beside her. Not since their parents’ death some months before.

He fell asleep and dreamed of axes, blades bright as they whirled in firelight, flying toward their bound victim, the warrior-youth Jarl with lips as sweet as Anya’s, with skin almost as soft, his need as great.

But then his dreamscape shifted and he moaned, for everything that followed was exactly true.

As the dream began he had two eyes.

There was blood on his hands and sleeves as he staggered along soft ground. Heathland, clad in dull greens and purples, beneath a sky swept with greys and reds and violet: harsh, cold and beautiful. Behind him were strewn the corpses whose death he had caused.

With words.

Only with words. That was the magic and the horror of it.

How did I do that?

For he had found the inspiration in himself, the ability to subtly alter his tone and mark out certain words, to create the effects on warriors’ and warrior-women’s minds that he had desired, as if he had painted a scene and brought it to life, using only voice. It had been so easy to intensify jealous fantasies, to bring forth molten rage and make it spill over, and then back away from the swirling madness of blades and fists and teeth, and a well-remembered hammer crashing down and down, again and again, spattered with brains and blood.

But everyone had died, even the hammer-wielder, in a fury of mutual stab and thrust, of hack and smash, which only Stígr escaped.

He was a journeyman poet, but he had never dreamed of doing that: of the inspiration and the horror, the part of him that was in awed ecstasy, and the part that howled inside.

For an unknown time, he stumbled along that cold magnificent landscape, until he found himself on the cusp of an ice-patched dell, where on the far side a solitary ash-tree grew.

‘Are you the World-Tree?’ he whispered. ‘Can you be Yggdrasill in truth?’

Perhaps it was a manifestation of the true world-joiner that ran through all three realms, a small shoot springing from the greater reality, so that one who could travel its length might leave the middle world and climb to the gods’ realm in Asgard, or join the dark and the dead in Niflheim.

Before the tree stood a simple well, a few broken stones ringing a hole of blackness.

‘No.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘It cannot be his. Not Mimir’s.’

Surely this was ordinary, a well built by men who had moved on or died away, nothing more.

Not his.

Stígr was a wanderer, yes, but that was all he was. Wanderer and poet, singer of sagas, master of words, keeper of memories. It was a blasphemy to think of anything else, of the other who wandered the middle world and sought wisdom regardless of the price.

The painful, bloody price.

No. Don’t ask this.

A sacrifice, offered with determination, garnished with suffering.

I will not.

But still his feet stumbled down toward the well’s black centre, where he stopped.

‘Please . . .’

His right thumb, crooked and tensed, rose toward his face. Sinews trembled as he fought the movement, warring against himself; but the motion was inexorable. Slowly, slowly, his hand ascended, growing large to dominate his sight, then touched his nose, the bridge of his nose—

Please. Please, no.

—with his thumbnail scratching into the skin, sliding left, into the eye socket and down, to the inner corner of his eye—‘NO!’

—and pressed in with enormous strength, pushed inside, slickness coating his thumb as he ripped outward, a slick pop as it came free and half his world went dark forever.

Sweet All-Father, no.

But he had done it, as he had been commanded.

‘Why me? Why me?’

He sobbed with pain, hating himself. Then his dagger was in his hand and he made the final severance, cutting it free, changing his world for always.

The worst part was afterward, when it was too late to revert to his previous life, and he could not fight the motion of his hand again, this time as it held out his eyeball over the well - white, bloodied, glistening - and let it drop.

His eye fell forever into darkness.

Pain raging in his head, he could hardly see with his remaining eye, as he strained to focus through blood-mist on the ash-tree, where it stood in silent observation. So this was the first agony, not the last ordeal.

His tunic was belted at the waist with braided leather cords. Hands shaking as if palsied, he undid the cords, unravelling them. Then he carried them to the foot of the ash-tree, tears flooding down his right cheek, blood and fluid down his left.

Climbing the tree was torture.

When did it happen?

Twice he slipped, formed his hands into desperate hooks, and found a grip, tearing his skin. No matter: the ascent was everything.

When did the darkness take me?

His early childhood was happy. He thought he remembered that, through the roaring chaos of present pain. Or perhaps all his memories were false, and all of his existence was this: pure and bloody agony.

Two loops, with sufficient play, he placed around a branch. This was going to be it.

The other sacrifice.

For the eye, given to Mimir, was not enough. Nine days and nine nights: that was what the ordeal demanded. He knew it now, and felt the tiniest of respite from pain with the knowledge of giving in, accepting what was happening.

Turning outward, back against the trunk, he slipped one wrist inside a loop to his left, then the other to his right. Arched back, he could not maintain the pressure for long. Slowly, he worked his heels down the trunk, aware that a sudden slip now would wrench both arms from his sockets, dislocating them, and causing him to strangle as his damaged shoulders squeezed his neck.

For now, his body cruciform, he hung in place, his every sinew etched in pain.

By my own will.

If not his, then whose?

Or is it mine? Why are you making me do this?

When the wind rose, its passage through the tree was a metallic rustle that quickly magnified and then became lost in the tidal howl that grew up all around, and when the lightning flashed he felt no surprise.

The storm banged and growled, twisted, and tore the world away.

There was light in the world when something pushed him into wakefulness—

‘Stígr? My sweet?’

—but for a moment he was back there, at the beginning and at the end, nine days and nine nights, as he hung there ever closer to nothingness yet unable to die, wishing for cessation but knowing that it held a price, did knowledge, a price that every wandering poet should be prepared to pay, a tribute of pain, a toast of blood, a meal of eye-flesh, a sacrifice—‘It’s morning, and you should wake.’