the Völva's Gambit: A Seeress Who Lied to Gods Save Her Village

In 870 AD, on the Norwegian coast, Jarl Sigvard Ironteeth arrives at the village of Fjordvik with forty warriors and an impossible demand.He wants the silver. The winter stores. The longship. Two thralls the village does not own. The demand is designed not to be met it is designed to be refused, so that what comes next can be justified.The village has no silver to spare, no warriors to fight, and no road out that does not run through Sigvard's territory.What it has is Astrid Völvadóttir.For twenty-two years Astrid has been Fjordvik's völva, its seeress and spiritual authority, a practitioner of the ancient art of seiðr, the trance-working by which the Norse accessed knowledge unavailable to ordinary perception. She has read the runes. She has sat in the sacred grove and asked what is coming. She has received, with the terrible clarity that the practice sometimes delivers, an answer she cannot ignore.There is one path through. It requires her to lie.Not to the jarl. To the gods themselves or close enough to it that the distinction may not hold.The Völva's Gambit is the story of one woman's decision to invoke sacred authority she does not entirely possess in service of forty-three people she cannot bear to lose. It is grounded in the real archaeology of the Oseberg völva burial, now held at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, and in the best available scholarship on Norse seiðr and the extraordinary status of the völva in Viking Age society. The moral struggle at its center is imagined; everything surrounding it is historically faithful.Astrid's apprentice Brynhildr is watching, learning things no training could have taught her. Gunnar the headman is holding his fear like a tool and using it. Old Heidrun, eighty years old and prepared for every eventuality, is ready with a fire mixture no one else in the village knows how to make. Sigrid, the headman's daughter, has her hand near her axe and is waiting for the signal. And somewhere above the ridge, three ravens are about to lift from the birch trees at exactly the moment when everything is decided.A sweeping, intimate, and morally unsparing novel about power in its oldest form the power of a woman who knows something that a warband does not, and who is willing to carry, for the rest of her life, the cost of using it.The most interesting things never happen in the clean stories.