“Not a sailor, then?” Arne Dead-Eye, watching me from a bench, his oar locked before him, a pipe in his hand.

“Vikings smoke?” It just looked wrong, as if his beard might catch light.

“This one does. You don’t get handed a book of rules, you know.”

“I suppose not.” I wiped my mouth and hung there on the boat’s side. The quins were doing complicated things with sail and rope. Tuttugu watched the waves from the prow and Snorri held the tiller at the stern. After a while I felt strong enough to lurch over and collapse on the bench beside Arne. Thankfully the wind carried his smoke the other way or we would have had a chance to see whether any of last week’s meals might reappear if I tried really hard.

“What other rules in this handbook that you don’t get have you broken?” I needed distraction from the heave and swell. We appeared to be weathering some kind of storm, despite the clearing skies and moderate winds.

“Well.” Arne puffed on his pipe. “I’m not really one for the mead-hall and the singing of all those songs. I’d rather be out on the ice doing a spot of fishing.”

“You’d think a man of your talents would want to be stalking prey that he could bring down with a shot rather than hook out of the water through a small hole in the ice.” I’d placed a fair measure of my hope for survival in Arne Dead-Eye. The great thing about a man who is deadly with a bow is that not much gets close enough to trouble him. Those are the sort of men I like to stand next to in a battle if events conspire to keep me from galloping off into the distance. “Hell! Where’s my damn horse?”

“Bits of it are probably all over the lower slopes of Den Hagen.” Arne mimed chewing. “Stew, sausages, horse-bacon, roast horse, tongue soup, liver with onions, fried horse, mwah. All good.”

“What? I—” My stomach had the last word of that sentence. A long word full of vowels and spoken mostly over the side at the rolling sea.

“Snorri took her up to the stockyard this morning and sold her,” Arne called at my back. “Got more for the saddle than the mare.”

“Hell.” I wiped more drool from my chin before the wind had a chance to decorate the rest of me with it. Back on the bench I rested a moment, head in hands. It seemed we were coming full circle. This nightmare had started with me being bundled into a boat full of Viking, and now here we were again. A bigger boat, more water, more Vikings, and the same number of horses.

“Dead-Eye, heh?” I hoped to cheer myself with the idea that Arne might keep me safe. “How’d you earn that title?”