Chapter 5: Salt and Chain

Ingrith woke on a bed of black stone covered in gray furs.

Her feet were bandaged.

Her wet shift had been replaced with a dress of dark green wool, and someone had combed the ice out of her hair.

Gray light came in through a window shaped like an arch.

Beyond it she saw a vast hall, with pillars of dark glass rising into mist.

Tall figures in long gray robes moved between the pillars, silent and slow.

Past the far arch a stair ran down into silver light, and at the bottom a tree with silver bark stood in a grove.

On its trunk she could just see a pale scar in the shape of a man's hand.

"Do not stare," said a voice at her elbow. "They are the dead. They dislike it."

She spun.

A raven sat on the bedpost, big as a cat, with a bright black eye.

It looked at her and shook out its feathers.

"I am the steward," the raven said. "Do not scream, I have heard it all before."

"You talk."

"Everyone talks down here. It is the living who are so quiet."

"Where is the man?"

"The king is attending to a mess at the gate."

"I am dead," Ingrith said.

"You are not. You would be much calmer."

She pushed off the furs and put her bandaged feet on the cold floor.

They held.

She walked to the window and gripped the stone sill.

She was standing in the Underworld.

"My mother," she said. "She has the frost. She needs the sap."

"She will have it."

"When?"

"That is for the king to say."

She turned on the raven.

"Take me to him."

The raven sighed, flapped to the door and waited.

She followed it down a corridor lined with torches that burned without heat.

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