Erik kept his eyes on the mud and his hands in his pockets, because looking away would be noticed, and notice was dangerous.
The gallows stood in the center of Kattegat.
Oak, recently cut.
The wood still smelled green.
He wanted to be anywhere else.
The entire settlement had gathered justice as theater, death as spectacle.
A thief from a neighboring village.
Caught stealing grain from Ragnar’s stores during the Lindisfarne absence.
The sentence was already passed.
The rope already tied.
The thief stood on the platform.
Hands bound.
Face pale.
Thirty, maybe.
Thin.
The kind of thin that came from months, not days.
Ragnar stood to the left of the gallows.
Lagertha to the right.
The Earl and the shield-maiden.
Witnesses to their own justice.
Erik kept his eyes down.
Focused on the planks beneath the thief’s feet.
The grain of the wood.
The iron nails.
Anything but the man’s face.
The condemned man spoke.
His voice carried.
“My village starves. Ragnar’s stores were full. I took what my family needed. Nothing more.”
Ragnar’s face stayed flat.
“My stores are for my people. Your village has its own earl.”
“Our earl is dead. We have no one.”
“Then bend the knee. Ask. Don’t steal.”
The thief said nothing.
The platform creaked.
Ragnar nodded once.
The executioner moved.
Erik tried to look away.
His vision locked.
Yggdrasil held him where he stood.
Light split the sky.
Not slowly.
All at once.
Yggdrasil’s limbs blazed above the gallows like roots growing upside-down, translucent and golden and impossibly vast, and the smell of green sap hit him not from the oak scaffold but from somewhere older, somewhere that tasted of bark and cold water.
Threads pulsed along every limb.
Hundreds.
Thousands.
A web connecting the thief to every life he’d touched, every person who knew his name, every fate his existence had altered.
The trapdoor dropped.
The thief’s neck snapped.
The sound carried.
Final.
Clean.
And Erik saw it.
A thread severed.
A bright line going dark.
Not fading cut.
All that light snuffed in a single heartbeat, and the grief-threads lit up in answer.
A woman in a distant village clutched her chest.
Gasped.
Fell to her knees in the doorway of a house that smelled of barley-flour and hearth-smoke.
She had no reason for the pain would have none until a traveler brought the news days later.
But her thread flared white-hot, and Erik felt it along Yggdrasil’s limbs like a hand crushing his ribs.
A child six, maybe seven stopped playing mid-step.
Turned east, bare feet in cold mud, mouth still tasting the honeycomb his father had promised to bring home.
Toward Kattegat.
His future dimmed.
Not gone.
Narrower.
A life that would now grow without a father.
An old woman weaving at a loom dropped her shuttle.
Her thread began to fray slow, unraveling from the edges like wool pulled too thin.
She would be dead within the year.
Grief would kill her, and Erik could see it written in that dimming gold the way a sailor reads a storm in the color of the sea.
Tears came without permission.
Erik let them fall.
Stood rooted.
The weight of what Yggdrasil showed him pressed into his chest, his throat, his skull.
Every death he’d witnessed at Lindisfarne had been immediate present bodies he could see and name and bury.
This was different.
This was propagation.
One death rippling outward along a thousand golden limbs, touching lives Erik would never meet, in villages he would never see.
The thief’s body swung.
The crowd was silent.
Erik could not look away.
Yggdrasil held him fast, its threads pulsing.
Somewhere east the woman was still on her knees.
The child had started crying.
At her loom the old woman sat motionless, shuttle forgotten in her lap.
Someone was watching him.
Erik felt it the specific weight of attention from someone who wasn’t just looking but seeing, the way you feel a blade held close to skin before it touches.
He turned his head.
Slowly.
A woman stood at the edge of the crowd.
Twenty, maybe.
Travel-stained cloak.
Blonde hair braided tight.
She wasn’t watching the gallows.
She was watching Erik.
Her gaze tracked his.
Followed the angle of his stare upward toward the sky above the swinging body, where nothing hung but grey cloud.
She saw none of it.
Erik could tell.
But she understood that he saw something she could not.
Her face stayed still.
Curious.
Clinical.
A scholar who’d found a puzzle worth solving.
Erik turned back to the gallows.
Yggdrasil’s canopy was fading not gone, but dimming, gold bleeding into grey.
Below it the thief’s body had stopped swinging, and the executioner was already cutting him down.
Lagertha’s gaze swept the crowd.
Stopped on Erik.
On the tear-tracks.
Something in her stilled a small motion, barely visible, the kind of tell she almost never gave.
She never glanced at the blonde woman.
Had no need to.
Erik knew she’d already seen the connection and folded it into the tally she kept on him.
The crowd began to disperse.
Quiet.
Somber.
Justice had been served.
The day moved on.
Erik stood where he was.
Feet nailed to the mud.
Yggdrasil’s canopy lingered faint now, barely visible, but present the way a scar is present under a sleeve.
He understood, suddenly and completely, that this was permanent.
Every death from now on would carry this weight: the dying person’s connections made visible, the grief of strangers forced into his perception like salt ground into an open wound.
The scaffold had crushed his spine in twelve seconds.
This would crush something else not bone but whatever part of a person holds the boundary between self and other, the membrane that lets you watch a stranger die and walk away whole.
Slower.
He forced his feet to move.
One step.
Another.
Away from the gallows.
Toward the longhouse.
Hands shaking.
The blonde woman fell into step beside him.
Not close.
Three paces to his left.
Silent.
Eyes forward.
Walking the same path as if by accident.
Erik’s throat tightened.
He had no name for her.
No way to gauge the danger.
But she’d seen him staring at the sky above a hanging man with tears on his face, and she had not looked away.
They walked in silence.
Past the boat-shed.
Past the granary.
The longhouse ahead.
She spoke without preamble.
“The branches are bright today.”
Erik stopped walking.
The woman stopped too.
Turned to face him.
Calm.
Certain.
Waiting.
Erik said nothing.
No language existed for what he’d seen would not exist for a thousand years, and even then it would fall short, clinical where the reality was molten.
But his silence was the confirmation she needed.
He could see it in her eyes.
The shift from curiosity to certainty.
She nodded once.
Small.
Deliberate.
Then turned and walked toward the longhouse without another word.
Erik stood in the mud.
Alone.
Gold still flickered at the edges of his vision like heat-shimmer off summer stone.
The thief’s severed thread was gone fully dark.
But the grief-threads burned on.
The woman on her knees.
The child crying.
The old woman at the loom, shuttle in her lap, eyes seeing nothing.
He looked up.
Grey clouds.
No gold.
No threads.
Only the promise of rain and the ordinary indifference of a northern sky.
But when he closed his eyes, the light was still there.
Permanent.
Indelible.
A map of every connection the dead man had left behind, burning itself into Erik’s memory with the same cold clarity that had seared thirty-seven deaths at Lindisfarne into his bones.
He opened his eyes.
Walked toward the longhouse.
One foot in front of the other.
Behind him, the gallows stood empty.
The rope swayed in the wind.
And somewhere to the east, a woman who didn’t yet know she was a widow sat waiting for a husband who would never come home.
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