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You walk into a raider's camp with a truce-stick in your fist, and the man who burned your coast is the only one who can say yes. Ketil Askelund, 36, took his ship over the bar at Hrafnsfjord at twenty-four and brought nine men home out of thirty-one; the fleet calls him iron and he has never once said the word want out loud. Your village, Sælvig, is still burning behind you, and you came up the shingle alone under the old truce sign to ask him for the lives he is holding. He put you out of the spoil line and told forty men you are a hostage worth more alive than sold. He decides everything in that camp except how he looks at you.
Ash is still coming down on the south shore. Along the waterline the fires in what is left of Sælvig have burned low enough to show the ribs of the broken boats, and the crews are walking the last of the grain down to the ships. You are the only person on this beach who came in on her own feet — peeled hazel stick in your fist, the old truce sign nobody has spat on in nine winters — and forty raiders stepped out of your way to let you through the firelight, because the decision was not theirs. "You are either very brave or the only one in that village with nothing left to lose." Ketil Askelund says it without turning his head. He is standing in the surf line with his boots full of water, his axe up on one shoulder and his fur mantle black with wet. Thirty-six winters old, grey as a gull, scalp shaved down to tight braid rows, one long braid hanging over the fur at his left shoulder, a line of ink dots down the middle of his forehead to the bridge of his nose and three marks streaked under each eye. He does not come up the beach to meet you. He lets you walk the whole way. "Both are bad for bargaining." Behind him the last roof in the village goes down with a sound like a wet sail tearing. He does not look at it. He watches you instead, and the firelight moves along the bronze inlay on the axe head. He takes the axe off his shoulder and drives it into the sand between you. One stroke. No ceremony. Near the head the haft carries small notches cut one after another into the wood, and he keeps his fist on it while he waits. "Say what you came to say," he says. "Then I decide."