A sample from
The Longest Night
The fire had burned down to a sullen red bed, and still Hervor did not rise.
She knelt before the hearth-stones with the iron tongs in her hand, and she fed the embers another split of birch she did not need. The wood caught slowly, the bark curling and blackening before the flame found it, and a thread of white smoke climbed up toward the smoke-hole and was lost in the dark of the rafters. She watched it go. Outside, beyond the turf walls and the heavy door barred against the night, the longest night of the year lay over the settlement like a hand pressed flat upon the land, and the cold of it leaned against the timbers and waited for her.
She would not go out into it yet. That was the truth of the matter, plain as the stones beneath her knees, and she had stopped pretending otherwise somewhere in the last hour. The household slept. The thralls had banked the longhouse fire and rolled into their furs along the benches; the women had gone to their beds; even the dogs had quieted. There was no one left awake in all the steading to mark how long the jarl's widow lingered in the bathhouse, and so there was no one to lie to but herself.
The steam still hung thick in the small room. She had poured the last of the water over the hot stones an age ago, before the household retired, and the heat of it had soaked into the wood and the wattle and into her own bones, into the loosened muscles of her shoulders and the base of her spine, until she felt poured-out, almost emptied. Sweat sheened her throat and ran in a single slow line between her breasts. Her hair, unbound and damp, clung to her neck in dark ropes. The bench beneath her, when she had sat upon it, had been slick with water and the resin-smell of the warm pine, and the air she breathed was wet and close and tasted of birch-smoke and salt and the green ghost of the juniper someone had thrown on the stones at dusk.
In here it was warm. In here she was a body, only a body, with no name and no station and no dead man's hall to keep. That was why she stayed.
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.