I head straight for Helga’s office, not wasting any time. I have to do what I should have done weeks ago. She needs to know about Irina. I find myself standing in front of her door once again, but this time not to break in. I give a sharp knock instead.
“Enter,” Helga calls.
The door swings open on its own.
Helga is sitting at the desk in her chaotic office, reading by candlelight, her raven perched beside her. “Amund.” She leans forward when she sees me, her chair creaking. “Have you caught the killer?”
“Irina,” I tell her, closing the door behind me. Her raven ruffles its feathers as I near her desk. “One of the witches. She’s also a seer. Her aunt died in the Tragedy.”
“Is that so?”
“She was also Emilía’s roommate. She must have killed her because Emilía found—”
“And what is this book?” Helga asks, interrupting me.
“Her aunt’s research,” I say, handing it over to her. “The ritual she’s attempting is inside. She’s trying to summon a spirit—probably heraunt—but we aren’t clear on exactly how yet, other than it’s connected to the killings.”
Bright flames dance in Helga’s dark eyes as she reads the page.
Heavy silence settles over her office while I wait for her to say something. As uneasy as I feel, I don’t let myself look away. Helga slams the notebook shut. The flame flickers, leaping higher in the air.
“I see,” she says at last, setting the notebook aside. “Well, I believe I can offer you more insight.”
She slides the tome she was reading earlier across the desk.
My heart pounds when I see the symbol on the page. Three interlocking triangles tightly fastened together.Valknut, the caption reads.Also known as the knot of the slain, it represents life, death, and the afterlife.
“What is this?” I ask her.
“After Edith told me about the symbol she saw—and I confirmed it was on both our victims—I began to investigate myself. This is an ancient seer text, the only one of its kind still in Skallagrim. It’s part of my family’s private collection.”
“We saw the same symbol at the seer school,” I tell Helga. “At the site of the Tragedy.”
Helga doesn’t seem surprised. “Do you know its purpose, though?”
I shake my head.
“After Egill lost both his sons, he began experimenting with the darker side of his spirit power, determined to bring them back. Of course, he had one problem: He could commune with their spirits, but their bodies had already been destroyed. Böðvarr drowned during a storm—his body lost to the sea—while Gunnar died of fever and was burned. So Egill devised a ritual to transfer their souls into new bodies.”
Helga opens her desk drawer and removes a slip of paper. “I’ve been busy working on translating his musings into something coherent. This is what I’ve come up with so far.”
Soul Transference
Three people must be slain: a practitioner of each branch of seiðr. Every victim must be marked with the valknut. Their entrails must then be harvested and used to fashion the valknut in order to complete the rite. Each victim’s entrails forms its own triangle, or knot; together, they represent life, death, and afterlife.
“Wait… each branch of seiðr. So far only a hunter and a witch have been killed. Does that mean two more people are going to die? A berserkr and a seer?”
Helga shakes her head. “At the time this was written, there were onlythreebranches. Hunters are more recent, a product of witch hunts that took place long after Egill died.”
“Idris is a hunter, though.”
Was, I silently correct myself.
She shrugs. “Hunter or seer, I suspect it matters not. Either would do. Seers are few and far between here, but there are plenty of hunters to pick from.”
Cold spreads through me. “If you’re right, then that would mean… a berserkr is next.”
“It would seem so.”
