“Home!”

The helmsman’s cry rippled down the line of ships.

And there, at the head of the bay, Harðulaz revealed itself. It was not merely a farm. It was a scar of civilization cut into the wild earth. Boathouses stood in rows, massive timber structures large enough to swallow these longships whole. Smoke rose in thick columns from multiple smithies, the scent of charcoal and roasting ore drifting over the water.

But it was not the fields of yellowing grain or the cattle pens that made Hroðigaizaz’s stomach turn to ice. It was the mounds. Great green domes of earth rose from the fields, clustering near the water’s edge. They were immense, unnatural hills where the ancestors of this lineage sat in darkness, watching the living.

“They see us,” Hroðigaizaz thought. “This kin is old. Older than mine. Their dead guard the shore.”

The ship glided toward the shallow gravel beach.

Arunz inn!

“Oars in!”

The sound of wet timber sliding over the lashed rim. The keel kissed the bottom. A long, grinding scream of gravel against oak.

Men leaped into the waist-deep water to steady the hull. Hroðigaizaz was hauled up from his bench by a rough hand. His legs, stiff from hours of cramping cold, refused to hold him. He tumbled over the upper strake and splashed into the freezing sea. The shock stole the breath from his lungs.

On the beach, the hird was assembled. These were not a ragtag flock of farmers called to a levy. These were men in uniform cloaks, their shields painted in identical quarters of red and white. The sound of Harðulaz assaulted his ears—the clang of hammers, the lowing of cattle, the chatter of hundreds of people.

It smelled different here. Not just fish and woodsmoke, but iron. The sharp, metallic tang of bog ore and coal.

Hroðigaizaz shivered, the water soaking his tunic dragging him down. He looked up at the longhouse. It was monstrous, a timber beast built to impress both gods and men. He felt small. Dirty. His father, Hroðar, had been a fool to think he could challenge this.

A man walked down from the ramparts. He wore a cloak trimmed with marten fur, and around his neck hung a heavy gold torque that caught the pale sunlight. This was Waduwarijar. The King of Harðulaz.

He stopped before the prisoners. His face was a landscape of weather-beaten skin, but his eyes were clear, pale blue like glacier ice. He walked past the weeping women without a glance. He stopped at the men.

“Sort this,” Waduwarijar said softly to his lieutenant. His voice was bored. “Keep those who can row. The wounded... give them to the wolves.”

Hroðigaizaz straightened his back. The pain in his shoulder flared, white-hot, but he locked his jaw. He forced his eyes to meet the chieftain’s gaze. He would not look down. To look down was to die.

Ek Hroðigaizaz.

“I am Hroðigaizaz, son of Hroðar of Alrekstadiz.”

He pitched his voice deep, trying to summon the authority of a king’s heir, trying to sound like the man he had not yet become.

Waduwarijar looked at the boy. He saw the bruises, the shivering, the fear masked by pride. He also saw the strong chin with bits of wool that would some day be a beard. He saw Hrodi’s height and wide shoulders.

“Hroðar’s whelp,” Waduwarijar said. It was not a question. “Your father intended to kill me.”

“He paid with his life,” Hroðigaizaz replied. His voice cracked. He cleared his throat and tried again. “The debt is paid.”

Waduwarijar smiled, but the ice in his eyes did not melt.

“Debt?”

“Your father tried to steal my luck. My hamingja,” the chieftain said, tapping his chest. “Such theft is not paid for with a simple death.”

The king drew a knife from his belt. The blade was short, functional, and very sharp. Hroðigaizaz tensed his muscles, preparing for the bite of steel.

“Let me bear your mark,” Hroðigaizaz said, desperation making him bold. “Or send me South. I can die with a weapon in my hand.”

Silence fell over the courtyard. Some of Waduwarijar’s men chuckled, low and mocking, but the chieftain raised a hand. He spoke loudly, for the benefit of the audience.

“You wish to serve me? The man who burned your inheritance?”

Waduwarijar stepped closer, smelling of expensive oil and old blood.

“A man who sells his honor so easily, I can never trust. And a man who lies to get a weapon in his hand is a worm.”

He sheathed the knife. A cruel glint lit up his face.

“The South is for men who seek gold and glory. The Romans pay well for sword-arms,” Waduwarijar mused. “You dreamed of that, didn’t you?”

Hroðigaizaz did not answer. His throat was dry as dust.

“No,” Waduwarijar whispered. “I will not send you to the sun.”

He leaned in, his voice a low r/umble like distant thunder.

“I send you where men disappear.”

Hroðigaizaz felt the cold spread from his stomach to his fingertips.

Norþr.

“North.”

The oars bit the water.

Rō.

The boat was his father’s. He knew every plank of her. She was broad in the beam and shallow-drafted. Her strakes sewn together with split spruce root through holes bored along each overlapping edge. The seams packed with tarred wool that Hroðigaizaz himself had helped caulk two winters past, kneeling in the cold mud.

He remembered complaining. His father had cuffed him. Without anger. A blow the way you correct a dog that does not yet understand what it is being taught.

The boat flexed, working with the swells, the planking breathing along its sewn seams. Alive. He could feel it through the planks where he sat in the bottom of the boat. The give. The conversation between timber and water. Around him, the thralls rowed. His hands were still tied behind his back.

They were his father’s thralls. He had known their faces his whole life: Ósk, who smelled of the pig-pens he tended. The two brothers from the east whose names he had never learned to say correctly. The old man, Grimaz, who had been taken in a raid before Hroðigaizaz was born. They did not look at him.

He was cargo now, the same as them. The same as the sheep penned at the prow, the smell of wool drifting back with the wind.

His father’s sheep. His father’s boat. His father’s thralls.

All of it belonged to the men of Harðulaz now. Eira too. She was in another boat ahead of them.

The fjord was dark. The sky above was grey and the mountains to the east had swallowed the dawn. There was no warmth in the air, only the promise that warmth had once existed and might, in time, exist again. His tunic was drying.

He did not think about his father. He thought about the sun.

He thought about what he knew of it, which was what every man in Alrekstadiz knew: that it moved. That it moved from east to west, and that south of the mountains and south of the sea the days were long and the earth was different. He had heard this from traders.

Men who came up the coast with soft leather goods and strange beads of coloured glass, who spoke with accents that made the familiar tongue sound like a foreign language. They told stories the way men do when they know their stories are the most valuable thing they carry: slowly, with pauses, watching to see what the listener would offer.

He had listened. He had always listened. His father’s hall had been a place where listening was taught by example, where his father sat at the high seat and weighed every word spoken to him before spending one of his own.

But his father had not listened to the traders’ stories about Rome. His father had poured their wine, taken their beads, sent them south again, and turned back to the fjord, to the cold, to the ordinary wars of the coast.

That was his mistake, Hroðigaizaz thought. One of many.

He had heard the stories. The city that had swallowed the world. Roads of flat stone running from one end of the earth to the other, straight as a thrown spear, so that an army could march from morning to night and never lose its way. Walls so tall that men standing at their feet looked like children. And the emperor — the man who sat at the centre of it all like a spider at the hub of an enormous web, except that spiders were patient and quiet and this man, by all accounts, was neither.

Constantinus. That was the name the traders used. They said it with a particular weight, the way you say the name of a god or a powerful chieftain when you are not certain how much distance you need to keep from it.

He had a god too, this emperor. A new god, or so the traders said, though gods were rarely new. Usually they were old gods in new clothing, the same hunger wearing a different face. This god had a symbol. The traders had drawn it in the ashes of the hearth: two lines, one straight, one curved, crossed and layered. The sign the emperor’s soldiers painted on their shields.

Chi. Rho.

But he had looked at the mark in the ashes of his father’s hearth and felt something he could not name. Not piety. Not belief. Something colder and more practical. The mark of a man who had decided what he served and then conquered half the world behind it.

An army marches better when it knows what it fights for, one of the traders had said, and his father had grunted and refilled his cup, and Hroðigaizaz had stored the sentence away in the silent archive he kept, the one place in himself he had never shown anyone.

Rō.

The oars. The water.

Grimaz, the old thrall, was watching him now. The old man’s face was unreadable, grooved deep by decades of salt and cold. He had been a free man once. Somewhere,

Hroðigaizaz looked away. He looked south.

The fjord ran roughly north to south here, and the pale smear of the sky was brightest in the south, where the sun was climbing somewhere behind the clouds. He knew, with the knowledge in his bones like any other man of the coast, that Rome lay south and east. South and east, across the grey water, across the lands where the trees grew tall and thick, across rivers he had no names for.

“Chi Rho!”

He said the words out loud. As if to summon the god he did not know. His eyes followed the path of the wake of the boat. He looked as the sun god peeked through the cloud and covered the hills behind them with golden light. He knew his course. His direction. It was calling him.

“Chi Rho!”

Hwat?

The sound that woke him was not the clamor of battle. No war cries. No steel ringing against steel. It was a groan, deep and resonant, of dry timber surrendering to heat.

Hroðigaizaz sat up in the darkness. Beside him, Eira breathed heavily in the straw of the pit-house, a weaving shed dug half-deep into the earth where the air always tasted of damp soil and sheep’s wool. Earlier that night, he had merely held her until her shivering ceased and sleep took her. Now, the danger was something else entirely.

He stood, his head cracking against the low roof beams. In the last year, his growth had been violent; his body felt like a borrowed tunic three sizes too large. He stumbled against the upright loom, and the warp-weights of burnt clay chimed like warning bells.

Hrodi! Skaiwa!

“Hrodi! Look!”

Eira was awake now, sitting up in the straw. Her finger pointed toward the low gap at the threshold. A flickering, orange light danced across the earthen floor, mocking the darkness.

Hroðigaizaz crawled out of the opening. The cold grass stung his bare feet, but the heat struck his face like a physical blow. The longhouse, the seat of his line, was ablaze.

Shadows of men moved against the firelight, silhouettes armed with round shields and spears. They had wedged heavy logs across the doors. They had barred his father, his brothers, and the entire hird inside their own sanctuary. From within the inferno came the first screams. Hollow. Desperate. The sound of men who know the gods have looked away.

Hroðigaizaz stood frozen.

Fadīr.

A figure burst through the turf roof of the longhouse, a human torch shrouded in flame. Hroðigaizaz could not tell if it was one of his brothers or a sworn warrior before the arrows took him. The figure jerked and fell back into the fire. Nausea rolled through Hroðigaizaz’s gut, tightening every muscle in his body. He took a step forward.

“No!”

Eira hung onto his arm. She was small but sinewy, her hands hardened by the kind of labor his soft palms had never known.

It was night, yet Alrekstadiz shone like the midday sun. The longhouse, the smithy, the storehouses. Everything burned with ravenous flames. Just yesterday, they had been kings here. He had stood atop the peak of Alrekr with his father and his brother, Alawaldaz. The next kuningas of Alrekstadiz. The wind had torn at his cloak, and the fjord had lain steel-grey and submissive beneath him.

His father had handed his brother the wine, that sour, red Roman drink.

“This is the world, boy”, he had said. “And we take what we want.”

They had been celebrating a victory not yet won, the planned murder of a neighboring king. The longhouse was filled with confidence and laughter. The certainty of victory filled the cups of the hird, the king’s warriors. Long into the night they drank and sang, and the king had chosen Eira to please him before they all passed out.

Hrodigaizaz looked at the burning building and felt nothing. A sharp yank on his arm pulled him back. He turned to Eira, but beyond her, three men were closing in.

They carried broad axes and short swords suited for the crush of a shield-wall. Their leader, a man whose face was a landscape of scar tissue, stopped and stared at Hroðigaizaz.

Saih!

“See here! A large calf has strayed from the pen!”

Hroðigaizaz clenched his fists. He felt the surge of power in his limbs, that same strength that made him clumsy indoors but now roared to be unleashed. He threw himself forward, leading with his shoulder.

The impact was solid. The man, clad in leather and iron, flew backward, losing his breath with a grunt. The man dropped his spear. Hroðigaizaz lunged for it. This was his weapon. It was part of his name. A part of his body. He had trained with the hird. Learned how the ash shaft became an extension of the will, growing in reach and lethality. This was his moment.

His knees gave in. He collapsed on the ground. Something hard struck the back of his head. The world tilted violently on its axis as Hrodi’s face met the ground.

“Strike him!”

Another blow. This time across the back. He was lying in the mud. A spearpoint pressed against his neck. He waited for the cold bite. For the steel that would send him to his ancestors.

“Stop!”

A commanding voice. Rough.

“Do not kill him.”

A hand gripped his hair, forcing his head back. A stranger’s face loomed over him, smeared with soot, gold rings glinting in his beard.

Saih þō!

“Look at those shoulders,” the man said, spitting to the side. “Look at the teeth. He is young and strong.”

Hroðigaizaz gathered his remaining strength. He had to say it. He had to tell them who he was.

Ek...

“I am...”

A foot stopped his words..The heavy, rawhide sole slammed into his mouth. Pain ignited his anger, white-hot and blinding. He tried to shout again, but his mouth flooded with warm, salt fluid. He spat blood onto his father’s courtyard.

“Silence! Thralls have no name.”

They bound his hands behind his back with rawhide strips. Tight. The wet leather would shrink as it dried, cutting into the meat of his wrists. They hauled him up.

He looked around for Eira. He spotted her among the other thrall-women. They were not bound. They did not flee. She looked at him, one last glance the way she used to, before turning to follow her new owners.

He was shoved forward, down toward the bay. Down the gailu, the narrow road between the walls Hrodi had helped build of stone and earth. They were driven like cattle toward the dark ships waiting in the black water.

On board, he was stowed among the other thralls and stolen sheep. The smell of wool, pine tar and brine mixed with the acrid stench of smoke.

Rō!

“Row!”

The oars bit into the water. The boat moved outward.

Hroðigaizaz watched Alrekstadiz recede. The great longhouse. His home. His family. The roof collapsed inward, sending a pillar of sparks rushing toward the stars, as if the very soul of the house was fleeing the earth.

He turned away and stared into the void ahead. There was no one left to claim him. No father. No clan. No god.

“Fate is mine,” he whispered to the darkness.