On the Cold Coasts

grow apprehensive, and then fear seized her completely. Surely such a strange vision was a sign of terrible events to come—bloodshed and death.
    Slowly Ragna drew her arms toward her body and laid them protectively over her chest. She felt the hard ground beneath her and the moisture that in places had seeped through the linen of her dress. The moon gradually returned to its normal state, though it retained a rosy hue in its shadows and outer edges for a moment. A dog howled somewhere in the distance, lonely and frightened of the unknown, just like her.
    A chill passed through her and she stood up, brushed off her skirts, and walked quickly back to the houses. She was not sure how long she had been gone—her sense of passing time had vanished in the dark—but she saw in the faint green glimmer that shone through the small glass windows embedded in the front walls of the great hall that men were still awake.
    She hesitated for a moment, uncertain of what to do, but then decided to retire. Why should she alert these men to what she had seen? They would hardly believe her warnings anyway, not after she had so openly expressed her animosity toward them. She did not care to be further humiliated. Whatever will be, will be, whether one is prepared or not.

OSWALD THE SAILOR
    “How many? Twenty?! Thirty!” Michael exclaimed as the English sailor showed by alternately closing and opening his fist how many adversaries he and his fellow crewmembers had fought against in Adaldalur Valley. This band of superior strength had nonetheless been chased off in a most valiant manner; the boy was sure of that, despite the fact that the man telling the story did not seem terribly threatening, emaciated as he was, with concave cheeks and foul-smelling bandages wrapped around his injured right arm. His name was Oswald Miller, and for the past five summers he had been sailing to Iceland.
    “Better to be a fisherman off Iceland than forced into battle with those French mongrels,” he told Michael in his native language, chuckling. “Though there’s not much of a difference, since you Icelanders have become such godforsaken hooligans.” The boy smiled and nodded, grasping barely half of what the man said, though his comprehension was growing by the day. The injured sailor did not have much other company available to him as most of the domestics ignored him, being fully aware of how he had received his injuries. A few of his countrymen from among the bishop’s attendants had made brief visits to the hall in the first few days, before the other sailors returned to their ship, but few took the trouble to come after that. Not many of those men were of the same ilk as he, despite being from the same country.
    Michael, however, sought out Oswald Miller’s company, using every opportunity to talk to him in a strange mixture of Nordic and English, supplemented with various forms of hand-waving and gesturing.
    The vessel Bartholomew sailed from King’s Lynn, but Oswald had been born and raised in London and had travelled far and wide before beginning his voyages to Iceland. He had even fought for his heredetary king in France, and he’d escaped from great battles in Leirudalur Valley with only minor injuries. There the English had won a glorious victory after he himself had slain at least a dozen men.
    “By then old Oswald considered himself to have done his duty in France and thought it best not tempt fate anymore in that godforsaken land,” he said with a grin, revealing his decaying, gapped teeth, laugh lines appearing around his eyes. Michael involuntarily ran his tongue along his own teeth, all of which were whole, just as they were in everyone else he knew. Many of the English had black teeth. Might his own turn that color too, since he was half English?
    “Anyway, a year later the wind turned,” Oswald went on, spitting energetically into a spittoon on the floor through the holes in his teeth. “The goddamned French tortured nearly half our soldiers to death near Montargis. That was the same legion from which I’d been discharged after my heroic deeds.”
    “But the English are better now because they have sulphur from Iceland to make explosions and scare the living daylights out of the French,” Michael said reverently in broken English.
    The sailor shook his head with a grimace. “The sulphur is fine as far as it goes, but it hasn’t helped us when it comes to the sorcery of the French. Black magic is the only thing