Erik knelt at the dock’s edge and pried up a plank gone soft with rot a promise three weeks late, buried under raids and councils and a settlement that kept sending men west to kill strangers.
His hands moved.
Chisel.
Hammer.
The rhythm was older than the scaffold, older than Minneapolis, older than the twenty-three years he’d lived before the tide pulled him under.
Wood and iron and the gap between what held and what didn’t.
It felt like the only honest thing left in the world.
The Saxon’s face replayed behind his eyes.
Brown hair.
Scar on the left cheek.
The confusion that came before the blood.
The way the body had fallen not dramatic, not clean, just the sudden absence of a man who’d been standing and then wasn’t.
Skaldic Memory held it all.
The wedding ring Erik’s eyes had missed but the Memory had caught anyway.
Gold band.
Worn smooth.
A wife somewhere in Northumbria who would never know what happened.
Erik set the chisel and swung.
The plank split clean.
He pulled the pieces free and reached for the timber he’d already cut to length.
The replacement fit.
He drove the first nail.
The sound was sharp and final.
It didn’t drown out the replay.
Footsteps behind him.
Slow.
Deliberate.
Not a warrior’s gait.
Erik didn’t look up.
“You are fixing the dock,” Athelstan said.
Erik drove the second nail.
“It needed fixing.”
The priest sat.
Not beside him the dock wouldn’t hold two men’s weight at the edge but close enough.
Cross-legged on the stones.
Hands folded in his lap.
The posture of a man who’d learned patience in a place where impatience got you killed.
Silence.
Erik reached for the third nail.
His hands were steady now.
They’d stopped shaking somewhere between the longhouse and the harbor, between the celebrating and the work.
Steadiness was a lie, but it was a useful one.
“You killed a man,” Athelstan said.
Erik’s hands paused.
The nail was halfway in.
He finished driving it before he answered.
“To save a friend.”
Athelstan nodded.
Once.
Slow.
“That is the only reason my God accepts.”
Erik set the hammer down.
Looked at the priest.
Athelstan’s face was calm.
Not the calm of a man at peace the calm of a man who’d been broken and put back together enough times that the shape of breaking was familiar.
“I don’t believe in your God,” Erik said.
“I know.”
Another silence.
This one longer.
A gull cried overhead.
The water lapped at the dock’s legs.
Somewhere behind them, the settlement was waking voices, the clang of a smith’s hammer, the loose-jointed noise of men who’d survived another fight and didn’t know what to do with the reprieve.
“Does it help?” Erik asked.
“Believing?”
Athelstan considered the question.
His eyes tracked to the horizon.
The place where the sea met the sky and neither could be told from the other.
“Sometimes,” he said.
“When I can remember what I believed before they taught me to be afraid of it.”
Erik picked up the chisel.
Moved to the next plank.
This one wasn’t rotted just loose.
He pried it up anyway. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Needed the motion.
Needed his hands to be doing something the Memory couldn’t replay.
“I prayed for you last night,” Athelstan said.
Erik’s hands stopped.
“To your God?”
“To anyone who might be listening.”
The honesty in it was unbearable.
Erik looked at the priest.
Athelstan met his eyes.
No judgment.
No expectation.
Just the quiet recognition of a man who’d carried something heavy and seen another man pick up a similar weight.
“Thank you,” Erik said.
The words felt wrong in his mouth.
Too small.
Too simple.
But Athelstan smiled brief, barely there and something in Erik’s chest loosened by a fraction.
The priest stood.
Brushed the dust from his robe.
“The dock will hold now,” he said.
“It’ll hold.”
Athelstan left.
Erik watched him go.
The priest’s shadow stretched long across the stones, and for a moment Erik saw a thread bright, fraying, connected to nothing and then the vision was gone and there was only a man walking back toward the settlement, carrying the flat loneliness of being the one who’d survived.
Erik worked until the sun was overhead.
Six planks replaced.
Four more to go.
His hands were blistered by the time he heard the second set of footsteps, heavier than the first.
A warrior’s gait.
Aldric sat beside him.
Passed him a skin of mead without a word.
Erik drank.
The liquid was warm and bitter and it settled in his stomach like a stone.
He passed it back.
They sat.
The silence between them was the same silence they’d shared in the shield wall.
The understanding that didn’t need words.
Erik had saved Aldric’s life.
Aldric had sat with him after and said the first one stays.
The debt was unpayable.
The bond was formed.
“Mine was sixteen,” Aldric said.
Erik looked at him.
“Saxon boy. Conscript. He had a knife and no idea how to use it.” Aldric stared at the water.
“I thought it would feel like victory. It felt like breaking something I couldn’t fix.”
Erik’s throat was dry.
“Yours will feel like that too,” Aldric continued.
“For a while. Then it won’t. And then you’ll miss when it did.”
The honesty cost him.
Erik saw it in the way Aldric’s knuckles whitened around the mead-skin, in the way his voice stayed level by force alone.
The first kill was a story Aldric had never told, and he was telling it now because Erik needed to hear it.
“How long?” Erik asked.
“Until it stops feeling like breaking?”
“Yes.”
Aldric shrugged.
“Depends. Some men, a week. Some men, never.” He looked at Erik.
“You? I’d say a month. Maybe two. You think too much.”
Erik almost smiled.
“That’s a problem?”
“In a shield wall? Yes.” Aldric grinned.
“Everywhere else? It keeps you breathing.”
He stood.
Clapped Erik on the shoulder the grip firm, the weight familiar.
“Ragnar’s calling another council. Tomorrow. He’ll want your pattern-reading.” Aldric’s grin faded.
“You going to be ready?”
Erik looked at the dock.
Half-fixed.
The work wasn’t done.
“I’ll be ready.”
Aldric nodded.
Left.
Erik sat alone.
The mead-skin was still warm in his hand.
He drank again.
The confusion.
The ring.
The wife who’d never know.
He set the skin down.
Picked up the chisel.
The next plank came free clean.
Dawn found him still working.
The settlement was quiet.
The watch had changed.
The fires had burned low.
Erik had four planks left and his hands were bleeding where the blisters had torn, but the work was almost done and the work was the only thing keeping the Memory from swallowing him whole.
Footsteps.
Lighter than Aldric’s.
Slower than Athelstan’s.
Oswin.
The thrall carried something wrapped in cloth.
He stopped at the dock’s edge.
Waited.
Erik looked up.
“Show me,” he said.
Oswin unwrapped the cloth.
Inside: a brace.
Wood and iron.
Angled supports.
The joints were rough not elegant, but strong.
The kind of thing that would hold weight without complaint.
“I built this,” Oswin said.
Erik stood.
Took the brace.
Turned it over in his hands.
The weight was right.
The angles were sound.
The design wasn’t his wasn’t the way Erik would have done it but it was good.
Functional.
Honest.
“For the thrall quarters,” Oswin continued.
“The beam was sagging. I remembered what you said. About load and distribution. About letting the wood carry what it wants to carry.”
Erik looked at him.
“You built this.”
“From what you taught me. Not from your hands. From mine.”
The pride in Oswin’s voice was the first clean thing Erik had heard since the axe fell.
He handed the brace back.
“It’ll hold,” Erik said.
Oswin’s face split into a grin.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
The thrall rewrapped the brace.
Held it like a man holding proof of something he’d doubted.
Then he left back toward the quarters, back toward the work, back toward the life that kept moving forward whether Erik was ready or not.
Erik sat.
The sun was rising.
The dock was almost finished.
His hands were bleeding and his body was tired and the Saxon’s face was still replaying behind his eyes, but somewhere in the middle of the grief and the work and the quiet, something had shifted.
He wasn’t alone.
Athelstan had sat with him.
Aldric had told him a story that cost something to tell.
Oswin had shown him proof that the work Erik did mattered that it created value beyond the moment, that it lived in other hands and became something new.
The first kill was permanent.
The Memory would hold it forever.
The Saxon’s face, the ring, the wife, the children all of it archived with perfect fidelity, grief that could not fade because the record could not fade.
But the carrying didn’t have to be solitary.
Erik picked up the hammer.
Drove the last nail.
The dock was finished.
He stood.
Looked at the water.
The tide was coming in.
The settlement was waking behind him.
Ragnar would call the council tomorrow and Erik would deliver his pattern-reading and the world would keep asking him to be useful, to be functional, to be the thing the gods had made him without asking first.
But today this moment, this breath he had fixed a dock and carried a kill and let three men sit beside him in the grief.
It wasn’t healing.
It was carrying.
He picked the hammer back up, turned it once in his blistered hand, and went to see what else in Kattegat needed fixing.