“Again.”
Aldric stepped back.
Raised his axe.
Erik lifted the shield.
His arm was tired.
The rim had cracked his knuckles twice already, and his shoulder felt like someone had driven a spike through the joint.
He didn’t lower it.
The yard around them had emptied an hour ago, the other warriors drawn off to the longhouse by mead and the warmth of bodies pressed close against the cold.
Erik could hear them from here laughter, the low roar of men talking over each other, someone singing badly.
Frost had started to form on the fence posts, a thin white crust that glittered where the last daylight caught it.
He came at Erik fast.
Three strikes.
The rhythm he used against men who knew what they were doing.
The first blow landed high.
Erik’s shield met it.
The impact traveled up his forearm into his shoulder, the wood shuddering but holding.
The second came low.
Erik dropped the shield.
Barely.
The axe glanced off the rim with a sound like a branch breaking.
The third was a feint.
Erik saw it half a breath too late.
His body moved anyway.
The block was ugly too much wrist, not enough footwork but the axe skidded off the shield’s face and Aldric’s momentum carried him past.
The older warrior stopped.
Lowered the axe.
Said nothing.
Erik waited.
The shield was heavy.
He kept it up.
Sweat ran down his temple despite the cold, tracing a line along his jaw before it dripped onto the packed earth between his boots.
Aldric studied him not the casual glance of a man checking whether his sparring partner was still standing, but the slow measured appraisal he gave a shield wall before a fight, counting who would hold and who would break.
“Again,” Aldric said.
The word sounded different this time.
Erik nodded.
Raised the shield higher.
His arm was shaking.
He attacked.
Erik blocked.
The axe rang off the wood.
His knees bent.
He didn’t go down.
“Good.” He set the axe on the ground.
Leaned on it, breath clouding in the air between them.
“You moved before you thought. That’s the only way it works.”
Erik lowered the shield.
Slowly.
His fingers didn’t want to release the grip the tendons had locked around it, cramped tight from holding too long.
“You are not a warrior,” Aldric said.
“You will never be a warrior. But you are not useless.”
Erik laughed.
It was genuine not deflection, not the construction-crew sarcasm he used to fill silence.
Just the brief, startled noise of a man who had earned something small and wanted.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed like that.
Not in Kattegat.
Not in Minneapolis.
Maybe not ever.
The sound hung in the cold air for a moment, unfamiliar, and then it was gone.
The grin that split Aldric’s face was wide and sudden.
He clapped Erik’s shoulder hard enough to jar the bruised joint.
“Come on. Before your arm falls off.”
They sat on the logs at the edge of the yard, where the bark had been worn smooth by a hundred men sitting in the same spot after the same kind of evening.
Aldric passed him a waterskin.
The water was cold and tasted like leather and salt.
Erik drank until his throat stopped burning.
The sky was the purple-grey of a North Sea twilight.
The kind of light that made everything look farther away than it was.
Erik could see the threads Worldtree Sight never fully closed anymore connecting Aldric to people Erik couldn’t see.
A woman.
A child.
A dead man whose thread was grey and still, fraying at the edges like old rope.
He didn’t say anything.
Aldric didn’t need to know what Erik saw.
“I had a brother.” He wasn’t looking at Erik.
His eyes were on the water, the dark line of the fjord barely visible against the sky.
“Younger. Einar. He drowned when I was sixteen.”
Erik waited.
The waterskin was cold in his hands, the leather damp with condensation.
“He fell through ice.” The words came out flat, rehearsed by years of retelling or years of silence Erik couldn’t tell which.
“I was on the shore. I saw it happen. The crack. The way the water came up black around the edges. He didn’t scream. He just went down.”
Erik’s throat tightened.
Twelve seconds under the scaffold.
Rebar through his spine.
Knowing help was three floors away and would not arrive in time.
“I know,” Erik said.
Aldric turned.
His eyes were red-rimmed, though whether from the wind or something older Erik couldn’t say.
“You couldn’t save someone either.”
It wasn’t a question.
Erik said nothing.
He didn’t need to.
Aldric took the waterskin back.
Drank.
Didn’t ask who.
Didn’t ask how or when or whether the dead had deserved it just accepted the weight of the confession the way a man accepts a stone handed to him in the dark, by feel, without needing to see its shape.
They sat in silence.
The wind came off the water, carrying the smell of brine and wet timber.
Longhouse laughter drifted across the settlement, distant and warm and full of people who had not lost anyone today.
“When we sail,” Aldric said, “you’re on my left. Not behind me. Beside me.”
The grin was gone.
Aldric’s face had closed like a gate.
“I’m not ready,” Erik said.
“You will be,” Aldric said.
“Or you won’t. Either way, you’re on my left. That’s where a shield-brother stands.”
Erik’s chest went tight.
Not grief.
Something else a weight he hadn’t earned yet, being chosen by someone who knew exactly what he was choosing, and chose anyway, with his dead brother’s name still wet on his tongue and the full knowledge that the man beside him was no warrior, might never be one, and would stand there regardless.
“All right,” Erik said.
Aldric stood.
Picked up the axe.
Offered a hand.
Erik took it.
His arm screamed.
The pull hauled him upright anyway.
They walked back to the longhouse.
Gravel crunched under their boots, and the cold had settled in properly now, turning their breath to white threads that unraveled as fast as they formed.
The practice yard faded behind them.
The sky darkened.
Overhead, a raven called low and rough, the sound cutting through the wind like a blade drawn across stone.
Erik didn’t look up.
“You know,” Aldric said, “Floki thinks you’re touched by the gods.”
“I know.”
“Are you?”
Erik was quiet for three steps.
Four.
The longhouse door was close now.
Firelight spilled through the gaps in the wood.
“I don’t know,” Erik said.
“I don’t think the gods care enough to touch anyone.”
He laughed.
Short and bitter.
“That’s the smartest thing I’ve heard all week.”
They reached the door.
He pushed it open.
Heat and noise poured out mead, sweat, smoke, the particular smell of too many bodies in too small a space.
Someone was singing.
Badly.
Aldric caught his arm at the threshold.
“On my left,” he said.
“Remember that.”
Erik held his gaze.
Steady.
The commitment was made.
Neither man knew what it would cost.
They stepped inside.
The longhouse swallowed them.
The door closed behind them, and the practice yard stood empty under the darkening sky.
Somewhere above, the raven circled once.
Then it flew west, toward the sea.