Erik had nothing left to give the sea, and it kept asking anyway.
Three days out from Lindisfarne and the nausea had not stopped.
The ship heaved beneath him, bow lifting and dropping in a rhythm that should have been predictable but never was.
His stomach had emptied itself the first night.
By the second morning there was nothing left but bile and the bone-deep weariness of a body trying to purge what was already gone.
The wind carried salt and tar and the faint sweetness of stolen monastery wine going sour in the hold a smell that clung to everything, wool and wood and skin, until the whole ship reeked of fermented holiness.
He sat in the stern with his back against the gunwale and his eyes closed.
The closed eyes were a mistake.
Behind them: the old monk’s face.
The novice’s back.
The abbot’s chest.
Thirty-seven deaths in perfect detail, playing in sequence like a manuscript he couldn’t stop reading.
He opened his eyes.
The North Sea stretched gray in every direction.
No land.
No monastery.
Just water and the ship cutting through it and the voices of Vikings who had slept well and eaten their fill of stolen monastery bread.
Athelstan was in the hold.
Erik could hear the captives sometimes the prayers, the weeping, the sound of a man dying quietly of exposure while chained to a post.
The monk’s voice was distinct.
Latin.
Measured.
The rhythm of someone praying not because he expected an answer but because stopping would mean admitting there was no one listening.
Erik pressed his palms flat against the wood.
The grain was smooth.
Worn.
Oak, probably.
Well-joined.
The Vikings built ships the way Erik had once built scaffolds with the knowledge that a single weak joint could kill everyone standing on it.
A shadow fell across him.
“You’re not looking good, builder.”
Torben.
One of Ragnar’s men.
Thirty-something, broad-shouldered, built for two tasks: swinging an axe and following orders.
He had a wine flask in one hand stolen from the monastery, the wax seal still visible on the neck and the slack ease of someone who had been drinking since dawn.
Erik said nothing.
Torben crouched in front of him.
The ship rocked.
The Viking compensated without thinking, his balance perfect even drunk.
“Been watching you,” he said.
Erik’s pulse spiked.
He kept his face still.
“Three days,” Torben continued.
“Three days, and I’ve been trying to figure it out. You didn’t fight at the monastery. Didn’t take anything. Didn’t touch the women not that there were many, but still. You just walked around looking at things.” He took a drink.
“Looking at nothing.”
The Whisper-pressure built in Erik’s throat.
One word and Torben would stop asking questions.
One word and the drunk warrior would forget this conversation ever happened and Erik could go back to being seasick in peace.
The cost: Seidr-Rebound.
Rung-2.
The drunk man’s nightmares for three nights, and Erik would live them all.
That close to the last use the thrall on the docks, the cost still settling in his bones another compulsion could stack.
Three rungs deferred became one rung-4.
Erik swallowed the pressure back.
His throat clicked.
“What were you looking at?” Torben asked.
The flask lowered.
The question sharpened.
“You weren’t looking at the monks. You were looking at something behind them. Something the rest of us couldn’t see.”
Ragnar was near the mast.
Twenty feet away.
Pretending to check a rope.
His back was to them but his head was tilted the angle of a man listening without appearing to listen.
Erik opened his mouth, closed it, and when the ship rose his stomach rose with it.
“I was counting the dead,” he said.
Torben blinked.
Erik said it again, slower.
“Counting the dead. Someone had to know how many.”
It was true.
Incomplete.
The best lies were skeleton-truths the part you could prove wrapped around the part you couldn’t.
Torben processed this the way a dog processes a thrown stick that lands in water the instinct was to chase, but the terrain had changed and he wasn’t sure the retrieval was worth getting wet.
His face cycled through confusion, suspicion, dismissive incredulity.
“Counting,” he repeated.
“Thirty-seven.”
The number landed between them.
Torben’s expression shifted.
For a moment just a moment there was something in his eyes that looked like recognition.
Like he’d seen this before.
A volva in his home village, maybe.
A seeress who’d looked at nothing and counted things no one else could see.
Then he laughed.
Disbelief without conviction loud, performative, the kind meant to pull others in rather than settle anything.
The crew laughed with him.
Three Vikings near the mast, two at the oars.
The tension broke like a wave hitting a rock.
The suspicion held.
Torben stood.
Took another drink.
“Counting the dead,” he said to the air.
“The builder counts the dead.” He looked down at Erik, and the humor stopped at his mouth.
He walked away, flask swinging from one hand, and the laughter trailed him toward the bow.
Erik exhaled.
His hands were shaking.
He pressed them harder against the wood until the grain bit into his palms.
Ragnar’s eyes found his.
The earl was still near the mast.
Still holding the rope he had no reason to check.
Their gazes locked.
Ragnar’s expression was unreadable the same expression he had worn in the longhouse when he asked Erik about boats, when he watched Erik’s face at the word “Lindisfarne,” when he tucked away every contradiction for later use.
One beat.
Two.
Ragnar’s mouth twitched.
Not a smile.
An acknowledgment.
I heard your answer.
I know it wasn’t the whole answer.
We will revisit this.
Then he turned back to the rope.
Erik closed his eyes.
The old monk’s face was waiting.
Brother Cuthbert, sixty-eight, who had thought the name Edmund in the moment before the axe.
Thirty-seven.
The number sat in him like a stone swallowed whole too heavy to carry, impossible to set down.
Below deck, Athelstan’s voice carried upward in prayer, swelling and fading with the pitch of the hull.
The Latin words were muffled by wood and distance, but Erik could hear the shape of them the cadence of someone holding himself together syllable by syllable, speaking to a god who might not be listening because stopping would mean admitting he was alone.
Erik had saved him chosen not to compel, offered the monk the one thing Erik himself would have wanted in that position: a choice.
And Athelstan followed.
Three days at sea.
The captives in the hold were dying.
Exposure, dehydration, a crossing designed for warriors, not prisoners.
Athelstan was still praying.
Still alive.
Whether that was mercy or postponement, Erik could not tell.
The ship rocked.
His stomach turned.
The dead walked his peripheral vision in perfect detail thirty-seven faces that would never fade, never blur, because an atheist from Minneapolis had watched them die and his memory was the only afterlife they would ever receive.
Torben’s laugh echoed from the bow.
Other voices joined it speculative, loose, the sound of men chewing on a new piece of gossip.
Erik’s Otherness had been observable before, but only to those who watched closely.
Floki.
Lagertha.
Aldric.
Now it belonged to the crew.
Torben had given them permission to wonder, and wonder was harder to deflect than a single drunk’s suspicion because it had no throat to grab and no question to answer it simply spread, quiet as bilge water, filling every gap.
Erik pressed his palms against the oak and felt the ship carry him toward Kattegat, two days west and closing.
The dead were not two days from anything.
The dead were here.