The fjord was wider. Wilder. No dike, no fence, no path. Only water and reeds, and beyond them the forest, dense and dark, stretching to the edge of the shore.
Idhra knelt in the clay.
Her hands were cold. The morning was damp, and the wind came off the water, sharp and salty, carrying the smell of seaweed and fish and something older—the smell the earth had when you broke it open. Idhra knew that smell. It was the smell of work.
The stone lay before her.
It was as large as three men standing side by side, flat and gray, with veins of quartz that shimmered in the weak light like wet bones. Hald and the others had brought it down from the slope yesterday, on oak rollers, and it had taken the whole day and half the night. Two rollers had broken. Fynn had crushed his hand, and the blood had dripped onto the stone, and Hald had laughed and said the stone was already drinking before it was laid.
Now it lay there. Not in its place yet, but close enough. Tomorrow they would lift it into the pit, onto the supporting stones that were already standing. Then the chamber would be closed. Then the dead would have a roof.
Idhra placed her hand on the stone.
Cold. Wet. Rough beneath her fingers, like a cow's tongue. She pressed her palm harder, felt the grain of the granite, the tiny crystals pressing into her skin. And then—
The humming.
It did not come from outside. It came from within, out of the stone, through her hand, her arm, her shoulder, until it settled in her chest like a second heartbeat. Deep. Slow. Older than anything she knew.
Idhra did not pull her hand away. Not anymore. The first time, she had screamed, two summers ago, when she touched the supporting stone the men were raising for the grave on the hill. She had screamed, and the old woman had grabbed her by the arm and dragged her away and covered her mouth and said: Quiet. Not here. Not in front of the others.
Afterward, the old woman had explained it to her. Not much. Only what was necessary.
The stone remembers, she had said. Everything that has touched it. Every hand. Every foot. Every drop of blood. And some of us can hear it.
Why? Idhra had asked.
The old woman had not answered.
Now Idhra knelt in the clay and listened. The stone beneath her hand was old, older than the clan, older than the forest, older than the fjord. It had lain in the mountain, deep down, where it was hot and still, and then the ice had pushed it out, slowly, over stretches of time Idhra could not imagine. The stone remembered the ice. The pressure. The silence beneath it.
And it remembered the hands. Fynn's blood, still fresh, a bright stain in the stone's memory. Beneath that, other hands, older ones, that had touched the stone on the slope when it still lay free. Hunters who had rested in the rock's shadow. Children who had climbed on it. And deeper still, beneath everything human, the animals—hooves, paws, claws, fur rubbing against granite.
Idhra breathed out. The humming grew quieter, withdrawing like a wave, and she took her hand from the stone.
Her fingers were trembling.
She stood and wiped the clay from her knees. Behind her, by the fire, the others sat. Hald was cutting meat from a deer he had killed yesterday. Fynn held up his bandaged hand and complained. Asa, Idhra's sister, was weaving rushes into a basket and humming as she did, softly and off-key, as always.
No one looked over at Idhra. No one asked what she had been doing at the stone. She was the youngest, the quiet one, the one who was always kneeling somewhere and staring at the ground. She was strange, but harmless. That was what they thought.
Only the old woman watched. She sat at the edge of the fire, wrapped in a hide as old as she was, her narrow, alert eyes fixed on Idhra. She said nothing. She only nodded, barely perceptibly, and looked away.
Idhra sat down beside Asa and took a handful of rushes. Her fingers were still trembling, but weaving helped. The movement was simple, familiar—over, under, over, under—and she let her hands work while her mind was still inside the stone.
She thought of the grave.
Tomorrow they would raise the capstone. Then they would lay Thyra inside—Thyra, who had died in the last moon, in childbirth, with the child still inside her. Hald had not spoken for three days afterward. Thyra had been his wife. The child would have been his first.
The grave was for Thyra. But it was also for everyone who would come after her. The chamber was large enough for many. Hald had wanted it that way. A place where the dead could lie together, close enough to remember one another.
Idhra wondered if Thyra would hear the stone. From the other side.
The old woman had said the dead did not hear. They lay still. But the stone remembered them, and when someone like Idhra placed a hand on it, they were there—not as ghosts, not as voices, but as an imprint. Like a footprint in clay. The foot was gone, but the mark remained.
Idhra understood that. She understood it better than anything Hald had ever explained to her—the hunt, the sowing, the signs in the sky that told them when the rain was coming. All of that was important, but it was the surface. The stone was beneath it.
Asa nudged her. Eat, she said. You're as thin as a heron.
Idhra took the meat Asa held out to her. It was tough and smoky, and she chewed slowly while looking over at the stone. It lay there, gray and silent, waiting for tomorrow.
She would be there when they raised it. She would place her hand on the stone one last time before it became the roof. And she would hear what it had to say before it carried Thyra's darkness.
That was her task. Not because anyone had given it to her. But because the stone had chosen her.
By the fire, Fynn laughed at something Hald had said. Asa kept humming. The wind shifted, and the smoke drifted across the fjord, and Idhra sat among her siblings and was alone.
That was how it had always been. That was how it would always be.