Jorunn returned at dawn, over ice that had already begun to sing.
Before the thaw, the ice begins to sing. A thin, drawn-out note rises from the depths, as though someone were running a finger round the rim of a vast bowl. It is dangerous to walk on ice like that. And still Jorunn walked over it towards the mire: a narrow figure in northern dress, her stride even, never looking down. The thin ice would hold or it would not. Nothing depended on her any longer.
The watchman in the tower recognised her and could not believe his eyes. Vyun recognised her and believed at once: he slid down from the tower and ran for the gates, shouting across the whole mire the one thing that mattered: "She is coming back! I told you!"
Kres met her at the gates. The whole mire poured out behind him. The people stood in a half-circle, silent and wary. For a month they had called her a traitor, and now they did not know how to greet her or what to do with their shame.
Jorunn offered no defence. She walked past the people, entered the smithy, swept the shavings from the workbench and spread a large sheet of birchbark across it. Three pieces sewn together, covered edge to edge in marks.
"This is the camp," she said. "All of it, as it stands. I spent three days pacing it out. Eight longships are drawn up on rollers by the bank. Two are frozen in and will have to be abandoned. Here are the grain pits and the sledges. Here are Ketil's tent, the watches and the ice hole. The men sleep in these tents, and the fires burn all night here and here." Her finger came down on the bank below the camp. "And this is the only way down onto the ice. If the jarl comes against us, he will lead his men here. Everywhere else the bank is blocked by ice hummocks."
It grew very quiet. Kres looked at the birchbark, and the old count was already turning in his head of its own accord: water, warmth, food, stores. Only now it was counting what belonged to the enemy.
"I wanted to trade my service for an end to the siege," said Jorunn, looking only at Kres. "I thought the jarl would agree to an honest bargain. But he refused. Why pay, he said, when spring would bring him you and me, the iron and the shipyard anyway? So I agreed to stay in the camp for three days. The jarl thought I was looking about me like a prisoner. I was remembering everything like a shipwright."
She straightened.
"I did not bring my brothers back. I did not regain the shipyard. I know my own price, and I will bargain over it no more. Here is the map. The rest is for you to decide, smith."
Kres looked at Jorunn in silence. The people behind him were silent too: no one knew what to say. Old Gostyona was the first to find the courage. She pushed her way forward, took Jorunn's hands in her weathered palms and pressed them to her forehead.
"Come on, make way," Gostyona barked at the others. "A traveller needs food. She crossed ice like that, and you stand there gawping!"
The people made way, all began talking at once and led Jorunn to the fire. Someone brought her hot food, someone else draped a fur coat over her shoulders. No one asked forgiveness, but Jorunn understood all the same.
That night Kres laid the tally sticks beside the map on the workbench, with their counts of men and stores of iron and charcoal. The swollen shore ice and the singing river made it plain: the thaw would begin in seven days, perhaps eight. If Jorunn was right, Gunnvald would attack over the last sound ice. Once the river broke up, bringing his war-band across would be far harder.
"This is how it will be," Kres told the council. At last he knew when the enemy would come and from where, and that made speaking easier. "The jarl will come over the ice. We will raise the chain and hold the longships in the main channel. We will draw his men towards the gates and the false causeway. We need only hold until the river breaks."
All winter the mire had been forging a great chain from the stockade to the stony islet in the main channel. All their spare iron had gone into it, including Ari's fire-blackened anchor chain. But they were still thirty fathoms short of the far bank. They could forge that much in seven days, but there was only enough charcoal left for ten fathoms of chain.
"There is charcoal in the jarl's camp," said Jorunn, tapping the birchbark with her finger. "Here is the travelling forge. He carries a supply with him."
Kres looked at her. She was not smiling. She rarely smiled at all. But her eyes were the same as they had been that night beside the Kupala fire.
They went for the charcoal two nights later, following the map in the deadest hour before dawn. Vyun, two fishermen from the watch and three young men put on skis and took hauling sledges. They skirted the ice hummocks where there was no watch and reached the store without a sound. They carried away four cartloads of charcoal on the sledges and did not wake a single dog. On the heap that remained, they left a new ploughshare in payment. The prisoners later said that Gunnvald stared at the ploughshare for a long time that morning, unable to decide whether it made him angry or amused.
They finished forging the chain in five days, working three shifts and never letting the forge go out. Jorunn marked out the links, Kres forge-welded and riveted them, and Vyun worked the bellows until another helper relieved him. Ari's fire-blackened chain was forged into the very middle, and the last links were fed through holes in the ice into the main channel.
On the last night before the river broke, Kres took the bird-wing clasp down from the stocks, brought it to Jorunn and held it out on his palm.
"It hung above the keel," he said. "I promised you would take it yourself when you returned. You have returned. Take it."
Jorunn took the clasp and slipped its cord around her neck, hiding it beneath her collar. Then she took Kres's burned palm and pressed it to her cheek for a moment. They needed no words.
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