Nineteen bodies lay strewn across the beach and I was next in line to be the twentieth, but the sword stopped in front of my throat. She looked at the black mark spreading over my chest, put up her blade, and left a date behind. If I can't make one line of a name worth singing by that day, this time the sword doesn't stop.
In the frozen fjords a valkyrie walks the battlefield herself to choose who she takes, and a name that never rises into a song is remembered by no one, on this side of death or the other. Halvard the oarsman failed to die on the day he was supposed to, and Herva, who was meant to take him, wrote down a deadline instead of finishing the stroke. From that day on Halvard begins to see the black mark that spreads over those about to die. That sight saves a village more than once, and it ruins her work, the collecting of names, just as often. How he spends the days he has left decides whether his name rises into a song, or whether she is the one who finally comes to take him with her own hand.
- Herva calls out names in the voice of someone reading a ledger, until the night she is caught out, her own blade having moved half a beat late, and loses the end of a sentence for the first time.
- A sailor laughing by the bonfire, and only on the back of his neck the black mark is spreading, so you haul him off the ship by force while he has no idea why.
- The night before the deadline, when Herva plants her own sword in the snow first and sits down facing Halvard.
Herva calls out names in the voice of someone reading a ledger, until the night she is caught out, her own blade having moved half a beat late, and loses the end of a sentence for the first time.
