. . .
From there it is easier.
Vaenwode has found himself in a realm of gentle, rolling hills and growing things and among the houses of the svart-alfar. He walks their roads. He tastes their grapes. He marvels at their wonders and the triumphs. He plucks a great gourd from a gourding-stone and he smashes it and he drinks its juice. He finds grass with which to treat and seal his wounds. He steals across the way, sneaks late at night and in, and makes his way to Hans’ pantry and further down.
The wolf-gold staggers him.
. . .
There is too much of it.
He cannot possibly take all of it: not up the stairs to Hans’ pantry, not out the door, not across the realm of the svart-elves; certainly not up and past the army of the dead.
Vaenwode takes a few of the coins. He puts them in his coin-bag.
He wanders out and up.
He stares aimlessly around the horizon. He looks at the overhanging stalactites and the yawning farm. Then he makes his way to a rivulet and fills an little iron pot with water. He steals into the chicken-coop; grabs a sun-bird; smothers its startled flame in a treated sack.
These things he carries back down below to Hans’ sea of gold.
. . .
Vaenwode ties down the sun-bird. He boils water over it in his little iron pot. He stirs the water with a golden rod, and he whispers as he stirs it:
“Gold, gold, go in.”
The water bubbles. The water roils.
“Gold, gold, go in,” he whispers as the hours pass. “Gold, gold, go in.”
The water sparks.
The rod sinks suddenly deep, as if the pot had lost its bottom.
It startles a snort from him; then a grim urgency possesses his lanky frame. He begins to feed Hans’ gold into the pot.
. . .
A sixth; a quarter; a third —
A third of the gold he plunges into his little iron pot, and a little more, before a distant explosion rings out.
Somewhere a sun-bird has woken. Somewhere a sun-bird has risen, and broken its head upon the cavern roof.
It is the dawn.
. . .
For a moment Vaenwode is lost in the man-wroth, the disordered thinking that afflicts a thief at such a time; he imagines that he could plunge himself likewise into the boiling water and be gone.
He shakes it off.
Instead he shoves the pot over on its side, scrambles up the stairs and through the secret panel and out, and runs.
A watch-wren sees him; calls raucous warning.
It is dawn.
Hans’ farm is awake.
. . .
Vaenwode runs, long and lank in the sun-bird’s light, beneath the surfaces of things.
Hans turns; Hans sees him fleeing across the way-fields; Hans sniffs the air, takes in a deep breath of it, and catches the waft of the wolf-gold in Vaenwode’s purse.
For a long moment Hans considers; then he comes to a decision.
He takes eight great strides, pulls down a bar, and loosens the enclosure of the goat.
. . .
He even stops for a moment before the cell of space’s wicked god, as if to free it.
He does not free it.
He chooses not to free it; but it is too late. It has slid a tendril of nothingness through the gap in his attention, caught the key from him already, and it will later slip its locks.
Then Hans mounts up on his storm-horse and he charges out.
Vaenwode runs. He staggers. He runs.
. . .
An alarum spreads.
Svart-elves come out of their houses and their smithies. They stop their farming. They turn and they look at Vaenwode as the man runs past. But they are not, it would seem, a sociable people; or not a xenophobic one; or, perhaps, they simply trust that Hans can manage his own affairs.
One svart-girl whistles, sharply, to attract attention; other than that, they do not mark or obstruct his path.
. . .
The goat is difficult to aim but still Hans manages.
The lady of winter is aware that this is a bargain, and of its price.
Thus Vaenwode finds his path blighted, again and again, by sudden snowfall; he slides and his gait grows stuttering on slicks of ice; he cannot walk the public roads, but must slip through the hedgerows and run on tended soil, where winter is uncertain if it should strike.
— after all, it would do no good to please Hans and earn her freedom by freezing Vaenwode, if the complaints of other svart-elves then displease him and he finds it better after all to bind her back.
The goat has no such fine sensibilities.
It tears through a line of trees like a razored wire. It is slowed only by the sharpness of its hooves, which occasionally mire it down into the solid stone. It tumbles towards Vaenwode like an apocalypse; and behind it, coming fast, is Hans.
. . .
Vaenwode reaches a terrible chimney — miles deep, it is, cut all the way from the surface to the farm, and sharp and twisting and slippery every man’s-height of its path — and he looks up and he whistles, sharply, echoing, three long notes.
. . .
Vaenwode seizes the rope.
He laughs, helplessly, in the face of Hans and his storm-steed. He clings to the rope with hands already growing slick with ice.
He can’t help it. He frees one hand to salute.
Then the rope jerks sharply. It hisses. It is like a living thing; somewhere high above him, Gunfrid has bound it to the water-wheel, and it lashes and it draws him up.
. . .
Hans slows his horse. He stares up into the distance. He sighs.
“Priorities,” he reminds himself, and he attempts —
Albeit in failure —
To recapture his ravening goat.
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