Where the Shadows Lie

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Professor Agnar Haraldsson folded the letter and slipped it back into its small yellowing envelope.

He glanced again at the address inscribed in an upright, ornamental hand: Hogni Isildarson, Laugavegur 64, Reykjavik, Iceland. The stamp bore the profile of a beardless British king, an Edward or a George, Agnar wasn’t certain which.

His heart thumped, the envelope performing a tiny dance in his shaking hand. The letter had arrived that morning enclosed within a larger envelope bearing a modern Icelandic stamp and a Reykjavik postmark.

It was all that Agnar could have hoped for. It was more than that; it was perfect.

As a professor of Icelandic at the University of Iceland, Agnar had been privileged to handle some of the oldest manuscripts of his country’s sagas, copied out by monks with infinite care on to sheaves of calf skins using black bearberry juice for ink, and feathers from the left wings of swans for pens. Those magnificent documents were Iceland’s heritage, Iceland’s soul. But none of them would cause as great a stir in the outside world as this single sheet of paper.

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