“What do you want of me, demon?”

She moves gracefully, fearlessly, toward him, somehow treading on the surface of the water. Her long braid swings from side to side, seeming almost to undulate with a life all its own, flicking like a serpent or the tail of an excited animal.

“I know that underneath your glamour you’re as much a monster as my son Grendel. Perhaps more so.”

Beowulf takes a step back from the edge of the pool.

“My glamour?” he asks.

“One needs a glamour to become a king,” she replies. “That men will follow you. That they will fear you.”

And now, in hardly the time it takes to draw a breath, she has reached the shore and is standing before him, her lustrous skin and twitching braid dripping onto the stones at her feet.

“You will not bewitch me,” he growls, and slashes at her throat with Hrunting, expecting to see her head parted cleanly from her shoulders and toppling back into the pool from whence she has risen. But she grabs the blade, moving more quickly than his eyes can follow. She holds it fast, and try though he might, Beowulf cannot wrest it from her grip. She smiles, and dark blood oozes from her palm, flowing onto the blade of Unferth’s ancestral sword.

“And I know,” she says, gazing directly into Beowulf’s eyes. “A man like you could own the greatest tale ever sung. The story of your bravery, your greatness, would live on when everything now alive is gone to dust.”

And now Beowulf sees that where her blood has touched the iron blade it has begun to steam and dissolve, the way icicles melt in bright sunshine.

“Beowulf,” she says, “it has been a long time since a man has come to visit me.”

And then she pushes hard against Hrunting, shedding more of her corrosive blood, and the entire blade is liquefied in an instant, spilling onto the ground between them in dull spatters of silver. The hilt falls from Beowulf’s hand and clatters loudly against the rocks, and his fingers have begun to tingle. And he feels her inside his head, her thoughts moving in amongst his own. He gasps and shakes his head, trying to force her out.

“I don’t need…a sword…to kill you.”

“Of course you don’t, my love.”

“I slew your son…without a sword.”

“I know,” she purrs. “You are so very strong.”

She reaches out, her fingertips brushing gently, lovingly, against his cheek, and already the gash in her palm has healed. Beowulf can see himself reflected in her blue eyes, and his pupils have swollen until his own eyes seem almost black.

“You took a son from me,” she says, and she leans forward, whispering into his ear. “Give me a son, brave thane, wolf of the bees, first born of Ecgtheow. Stay with me. Love me.”

“I know what you are,” mumbles Beowulf breathlessly, lost and wandering in her now. Somehow, she has swallowed him alive, and like Hrunting, he is melting, undone by magic and the acid flowing in her demon’s veins.

“Shhhhh,” she whispers, and strokes his face. “Do not be afraid. There is no need to fear me. Love me…and I shall weave you riches beyond imagination. I shall make you the greatest king of men who has ever lived.”

“You lie,” says Beowulf, and it requires all his strength to manage those two words. They are only a wisp passing across his lips, a death rattle, an ill-defined echo of himself. He struggles to remember what has brought him to this devil’s lair. He tries to recall Wiglaf’s voice, the sight of dead men dangling from the rafters of Heorot and the screams of women, the sea hag that visited him in a dream, disguised as Queen Wealthow. But they are all flimsy, fading scraps, those memories, nothing so urgent they could ever distract him from her.

The merewife reaches down and runs her fingers along the golden horn, Hrothgar’s prize, Beowulf’s reward, then she slips her arms around Beowulf’s waist and draws him nearer to her. She kisses his bare chest and the soft flesh of his throat.

“To you I swear, as long as this golden horn remains in my keeping, you will forever be King of the Danes. I do not lie. I have ever kept my promises and I ever shall.”

And then she takes the horn from him. He doesn’t try to stop her. And she holds him tighter still.

“Forever strong, mighty…and all-powerful. Men will bow before you and serve you loyally, even unto death. This I promise.”

Her skin is sweating gold, and her eyes gnaw their way deeper into his soul, and Beowulf remembers when he swam against Brecca and something he first mistook for a herald of the Valkyries pulled him under the waves…

“This I swear,” the merewife whispers.

“I remember you,” he says.

“Yes,” she replies. “You do.” And her lips find his, and all he has ever desired in all his life is for this kiss to never end.

It is only an hour or so past dawn when Beowulf reemerges from the tangled curtain of roots and the tunnel below the three oaks growing there on the high bank beside the tarn. There is a gentle but persistent tug about his legs from the languid current, all that water draining away, flowing down the dragon’s throat, gurgling down to its innards. He stands watching the white morning mists rising lazily from the tarn, this dark lake so long ago named Weormgræf by people who had heard the lay of Beow’s triumph here or by travelers who had glimpsed for themselves its awful inhabitants. And at first, Beowulf thinks that he’s alone, that Wiglaf has given him up for dead, that Wiglaf and Unferth have ridden together back to Heorot to give the king and queen the news of his demise beneath the hill and to prepare for the merewife’s inevitable return. But then he hears footsteps and sees Wiglaf coming quickly across the rocky shore toward him.

“You bastard!” shouts Wiglaf happily, and there is relief in his voice and sleepless exhaustion in his eyes. “I thought you’d swum away home without me!”

“The thought crossed my mind but briefly,” Beowulf calls back, and then he splashes to the muddy edge of the tarn and hauls himself out of the oily water. He drops the heavy wool sack at his feet, the obscene lading he’s carried all the way back up from the merewife’s hall, and sits down beside it. It’s colder above ground than it was below, and there is the raw wind, as well, and he rubs his hands together for warmth.

“I thought sure you had drowned,” Wiglaf says, standing over him. “The trees said no, you’d been eaten. There was a crow who swore you’d only lost your way and died of fright.”

“And here I’ve disappointed the lot of you.”

“I’m sure it couldn’t be helped.”

Wiglaf squats in front of Beowulf, eyeing the woolen sack, which has begun to leak some sticky black substance onto the stones.

“Is it done, then?” he asks.

“It’s done,” Beowulf replies, and Wiglaf, yet more relieved, nods his head.

“We’re going to have to walk back, you know,” Wiglaf sighs and turns to gaze out across the bog toward the distant forest. “You told him to wait until first light and no longer.”

“A slight miscalculation,” says Beowulf. “Ah, well. Likely, it will not kill us. And think how surprised they will be to see us, after Unferth has told them we have perished in the night.”

“Aye,” replies Unferth. “But I’ll not be carrying that,” and he points at the leaking sack.

“You’ve become an old woman, Wiglaf,” Beowulf tells him. “But I think we’d already established that.”

“There are no more of them? No more monsters?”

“It is done,” Beowulf says again, and rubs at his eyes. “Heorot Hall is safe.”

“And we can sail for home?”

“Unless you’ve a better idea,” says Beowulf, and he gets to his feet again. Staring out over the still, black lake and its rainbow shimmer, he wonders if Wiglaf could get another fire going, and if the water truly would burn, as Agnarr said it has in times past, and if the flames might find the path down to the belly of the beast.