The body came out of the water just after dawn.
Erik was near the docks because Ragnar had sent him to check the supports on the fish-drying racks before winter settled in for good.
The work was simple.
The morning was grey and cold and wet, the kind of wet that came off the sea in layers and soaked through wool without announcing itself.
He heard the shout first.
Then the splash of oars.
Then voices, low and quick, the cadence of men hauling a body they’d hauled before.
A drowning wasn’t rare.
The sea took people.
Sometimes it gave them back.
Erik crossed the dock as the boat pulled alongside.
Two fishermen hauled the body over the gunwale a man, bloated and grey, net still tangled around his left ankle.
Water ran off him in streams.
His mouth was open.
His eyes were open too, filmed and staring at nothing.
Saxon.
Erik recognized the build, the hair.
One of the thralls from the raid two weeks back.
The man had been hauling nets yesterday.
Erik had seen him working, steady and silent complaint earned a blow, so he never complained.
The fishermen laid him on the dock.
One of them muttered in Norse and gestured toward the longhouse.
The other knelt and checked the net practical, not grieving.
Nets were expensive.
Bodies were not.
Erik’s gaze caught the dead man’s face.
The world lurched.
Cold.
Immediate.
Totalizing.
Water in his mouth, his nose, his throat, pressure crushing his chest from the outside and a different pressure building from the inside, lungs screaming for air that wasn’t there.
His foot caught the net, wrapped tight, holding him under he pulled, thrashed, the surface a hand’s breadth away and unreachable, light bending through water, his own hand pale and distant, the cold seeping in through skin and muscle and bone, stealing the thrash, stealing the panic, leaving only the cold and the dark and the particular burning moment when his body gave up and inhaled seawater instead of air.
Erik doubled over and vomited on the dock.
His hands hit wet wood.
His stomach emptied.
The world kept spinning, kept drowning him, kept filling his lungs with salt water he hadn’t swallowed.
He gasped, choked, vomited again nothing left but bile and the taste of the sea he hadn’t fallen into.
Somewhere above him, a voice.
Ragnar’s voice.
Asking a question Erik’s ears refused to parse.
Erik’s right eye was blind.
Not dark overlaid.
The drowned man’s face superimposed on the dock, on the water, on the grey sky, perfect and unfading.
His left eye saw the living world.
His right eye saw death.
A hand closed on his shoulder.
Warm, heavy, steadying the grip of someone used to holding men upright on a pitching deck.
Erik blinked.
Tried to stand and his knees buckled.
On the second attempt he stayed upright.
Ragnar was watching him.
Blue eyes holding one beat past necessary.
“Are you ill?”
Erik’s throat was raw.
“No.”
“You look ill.”
“I’m not.”
Ragnar’s hand stayed on his shoulder.
The grip was firm.
The message was unclear concern, or containment, or both.
“You saw him die.”
It wasn’t a question.
Erik met Ragnar’s eyes.
Grey skin and filmed pupils flashed across them the dead Saxon’s open mouth, the exact angle of the head when the neck stopped fighting.
Erik broke the gaze.
“I saw him dead,” Erik said.
True enough.
Not the whole truth.
Ragnar let go.
Stepped back.
Barked an order to the fishermen in Norse quick, dismissive.
They hauled the body toward the treeline, already discussing where to bury a thrall who had no value worth burning.
The dock emptied.
Gulls returned, bickering over fish scraps, indifferent to death.
Erik stood alone, salt wind raw against his wet face, and tried to breathe without tasting seawater.
The dead man’s face followed him.
Not memory.
Not imagination.
Overlay.
Every living face he passed wore the dead Saxon’s grey skin for half a heartbeat filmed eyes, slack jaw before snapping back to its own colours.
So Erik kept his gaze on surfaces that couldn’t stare back.
His own knuckles.
The wood grain of the railing.
His boots on wet planks, fish guts rotting in the gaps between slats.
He made it back to the longhouse.
Found the corner where he’d been sleeping.
Sat down and stared at the wall.
Lagertha passed him twice.
Both times she paused; both times she said nothing.
On her second pass, her eyes lingered narrow, assessing.
Erik kept his head down.
The dead face was still there.
Fainter now.
But there.
By midday he could look at people again without the overlay consuming them.
The dead face had receded to the edges a flicker in his peripheral vision, a shadow that moved when he turned his head.
He went back to work.
Fixed a hinge on the grain storage.
Replaced a cracked support beam in the goat pen.
Kept his hands moving and his eyes on wood and iron and rope.
No one asked him what had happened at the dock.
Floki found him at dusk.
Erik was sitting outside the longhouse, near the treeline, back against an oak that was older than Kattegat and would outlive everyone in it.
His hands were still.
The air smelled like snow coming.
Floki appeared without sound.
One moment empty air, the next a crouching shape three feet away, head tilted like a man reading scripture carved in a tongue no one else spoke.
“The raven was at the dock this morning,” Floki said.
Erik went still.
“I saw it,” Floki continued.
His voice was light, conversational, the tone of a man discussing the weather.
“Circling. Low. The kind of circle a carrion bird makes when it knows the meal is already dead.”
Erik said nothing.
Floki’s eyes were wide and unblinking.
“You saw something too.”
Not a question.
A statement waiting to be confirmed.
Erik turned his head.
Met Floki’s gaze.
For one guttering instant the dead Saxon’s grey skin slid across those wide eyes then dissolved.
Erik dropped his stare to the dirt.
“I saw a dead man,” Erik said.
“Everyone saw a dead man.”
“Then we saw the same thing.”
Floki smiled thin, satisfied, the expression of someone watching a theory prove itself in real time.
“No,” he said quietly.
“We didn’t.”
He stood.
Brushed dirt off his hands.
Walked three steps toward the longhouse, stopped, turned back.
“The raven sees what men don’t,” Floki said.
“The gods show it what needs seeing. And if a man sees what the raven sees…” He trailed off.
Let the silence finish the sentence.
Erik’s hands were shaking again.
Floki noticed.
His smile widened.
“You should sleep,” he said.
“Tomorrow the world will make more sense. Or less. The gods enjoy both.”
He left.
His footsteps made no sound on the frozen ground.
Erik sat in the dark, bark rough against his spine, and tried not to see the dead.
The overlay was fading.
By full dark it was gone entirely the drowned thrall’s face had retreated to wherever it came from, leaving only Erik’s memory of it.
But the memory was perfect.
Indelible.
Every detail locked in place with a clarity that ordinary recollection never held, sharp as a blade kept too long on the whetstone.
Erik knew his body had done this without asking permission, and the knowing sat bone-deep that he would carry this death forever.
The cold.
The net.
The moment the lungs gave up.
He closed his eyes.
Sleep didn’t come.
Somewhere overhead, a raven called once.
Erik kept his eyes closed.
He already knew it was there.