“Don’t presume to know me, Kaspar.” She walks away, her brogans ringing sharply off the stone. “We’re not children anymore.”

***

The men of Torgrimsvær become useless. Unable to fish, unable to provide, they loiter in doorways and doze under their empty stalls. They spend their days in the grog hall or guzzle from jars of homemade brews. Poisonous potato brandy or cognacs so potent they cause blindness. They carouse over the cobbles and fight in the streets. Grown men, stripped to the waist, fists up and squaring off. Those that do not fight wager on those that do. Coins trade hands, debts are forgiven one moment only to be doubled the next.

A brave few try to hunt in the woods of the mountains only to return empty-handed, for there is nothing worth hunting there. Some return sickly and green from having munched on the eldritch mushrooms and woodland toadstools. Nero the Eel Skinner trips over an exposed tree root and spears his groin with his own lance. Hrodbert, who was always a poor shot with his bow, fires an arrow into his cousin’s thigh.

Red-eyed and brazen with drink, the men sing sailor’s rhymes to the women in the streets. Wives and daughters hurry past with reddened faces or gritted teeth. The fishermen hallo and cajole my father to beg God to smite the sea witch dead. Torgu Blackteeth has the mad idea of burning the mermaid by pouring a barrel of pitch into the harbor and setting it on fire. Some try to talk him out of it, but he scolds their cowardice and drunkenly rolls the barrel out to the pier. His headless body is found the next morning, washed up like driftwood on the stony beach.

As the food dwindles and the barrels are scraped, the men grow worse. Frustrated and red-eyed, they direct their rage at their wives, their children. The fisher-women move about the streets with blackened eyes and bruised cheekbones. When they speak, they cover their mouths to hide missing teeth. The children become street urchins, avoiding home out of fear of provoking their father’s tempers.

I try not to think of what Agnet is enduring, but my traitorous thoughts always circle back to her. Lying on my cot at night, I devise elaborate schemes and trickeries to murder Gunther the Brave. I could pierce his heart with his own harpoon or strangle him with a guy rope. I could bludgeon his brains with an anchor or simply push his drunken hide into the sea and ring the dinner bell for the mermaid.

But I am a coward and, worse, a breaker of vows. I make no move to murder the brute and save Agnet. When I stand before the gates of paradise, the Almighty will cast my ragged soul into the pit for this, and this sin alone.