Winter Song by Colin Harvey

Ragnar lost his temper.
        So the farmer nodded. "About our… guest…" He wrung his hands, and looked away.
        "What?" They were walking back toward the farms now anyway, so Ragnar decided that he might as well look in on Bera and her surrogate child.
        Orn shook his head. "The others…" His next words came in a rush. "You know that some of Bjarney's kids are a bit superstitious. Some of the others too – as our science fails, so their belief in it starts to fail as well."
        "What do you mean?" Ragnar said. "We've always had nonsense about shapeshifters and wraiths, but no one seriously thinks that 'cause we've named the locals for trolls, and called the lizards 'dragons', that they're from Old Earth. What are you getting at, Orn?"
        Orn looked even more uncomfortable. "You know that the stranger talks to himself?"
        "So? That's common in delirium."
        "His voice changes," Orn said. "It gets deeper, rougher. Some of the kids think that he's possessed. Or that he's a seidr, with the gift of second-sight."
        Ragnar made a great show of laughing. "Possession? What sort of rubbish is that? Next you'll be telling me that the Yule Lads will be calling this winter, and ghosts are rising from the graveyard. Pull yourself together!" Laughing, he clapped Orn on the shoulder, and the big man smiled, looking embarrassed. "I'll look in, see if I can catch him playing us for fools. If he's well enough to act, he's well enough to take on more physical work."
        But as he turned away still laughing loudly, inside he felt chilled. Surely we can't be facing a paradigm change? He'd heard from the Oracle, heard of the myths from before the Long Night, before that back to the Interregnum and to the dawn of the Diaspora, to have heard of paradigm changes – that sometimes enough people believing in something could start to change the way things actually were.
        As Orn went back to his tinkering, Ragnar crossed the courtyard.
        Orn the Small said, "Your friend is following you, Pappi," pointing to Grensosa trailing behind like a little woolly dog.
        Ragnar ruffled the boy's tousled hair, and wondered where the puppy Brynja was, why she wasn't chained to the tap, as he'd had her left. "Animals'll follow you anywhere if you feed 'em."
        "Good morning, Pappi." Thorbjorg's arch voice cut into his good mood. His youngest daughter-in-law was walking across the yard; he could have sworn that her hips swayed a little more as she looked over her shoulder at him and smiled a coy invitation.
        They'd talked many times after a few drinks; how it was in the nature of men to want to spread their seed as widely as possible; how the Oracle said that women naturally wanted to carry the child of the strongest male in any pack. Just chit-chat. He'd only grown angry with her once, when she'd claimed someone unnamed said that Yngi's genes might be defective. He'd shaken her by the shoulders and demanded to know who'd said such a thing. She'd only smiled, and allowed herself to lean against him, and even as he despised her for the cheap quality of the move, he'd felt his own traitorous body responding. He'd wiped the smile off her face with, "Anyway, you didn't seem to be complaining last night, from the noise you were making."
        Sometimes he fantasised about ass-fucking her as a sign of contempt, and to ensure that she didn't get pregnant. Then again, she'd probably enjoy it, or at least pretend to, ensuring that she made as much noise as possible. With Thorbjorg everything was calculated, even – especially – sex.
        He didn't doubt that she would get pregnant if Ragnar took her. She was always pregnant. He'd wondered before if all five kids were Yngi's. If she was prepared to offer herself to Ragnar, who else might she have lain with?
        Much though he loved his youngest son, Ragnar had been amazed when Thorbjorg's father had approached him at the