The year turned beneath a sky of iron.
From the Baltic to the Mediterranean, the winds came hard and cruel.
They scoured the fields bare, bent forests into groaning arcs, and swept the snow across plains and towns until the world seemed one endless drift.
Rivers slowed to crawling glass. Harbors froze so deep that fishing boats sat entombed in their own moorings. Roads vanished under ice.
It was the kind of winter that gnawed at bone and memory alike.
The fjords slept under white cliffs, their waters still dark but warm enough for the ships of Ullrsfjörðr to come and go.
Smoke rose in gentle plumes from the tiled vents of stone-built halls, the hypocaustic flues humming with heat.
Vetrúlfr had seen to that.
Years earlier, he had brought from Byzantium not just gold and silver, but knowledge, designs for vaulted cisterns and terraced gardens, aqueducts that did not freeze, and pipes of stone and clay that carried water to central basins even in the deepest cold.
