Ygritte

Balder's stolen bride. Wife of Jarl Ivar. Mother of Harald. Dead.

Balder brought Ygritte home to Yorvik as his bride after the raids on the towns to the east. He did not keep her long. Ivar, Jarl of Cattegut, took her from him with his men, and she was the Jarl's wife from then on.

She did not live it quietly. The night Ivar came home drunk from the council and threw filth at her, she slapped him, and he knocked her to the floor in front of their son. Hours later the long-limbed things came up out of the Pit. They had not come to fight. They had come to take. The last the party saw of her was a flash of crimson and a scream of fury, going down into the wound in the earth.

The party went after her, through the catacombs and the tombs of the Thrandurassil dead, and her captors stayed ahead of them. The Speaker's book said why she had been taken: the ritual needed a vessel of Heimdall's line.

When the sealed door opened she was lying across the black stone, dead. Hannah rose out of her, and wore her face.