Snorri led us to a dreadful dive, a low-roofed subterranean tavern thick with the stink of wet bodies, spilled ale, and woodsmoke.

“It’s a touch warmer and slightly less damp than outside, I’ll grant you.” I elbowed my way through the crowd at the bar. Local men, dark-haired, swarthy, variously missing teeth or sporting knife scars, packed around small tables towards the back in a haze of pipe smoke.

“At least the ale will be cheap.” Snorri slapped what might be our only copper on the beer-puddled counter.

“Qu’est-ce que vous voulez boire?” the barkeep asked, still wiping someone’s spit from the tankard he intended to serve in.

“Kesquer-what?” I leaned in over the counter, natural caution erased by six days of rain and the foul mood that torrent had exposed. “Two ales. The best you have!”

The man favoured me with the blankest of stares. I drew breath to repeat myself rather more loudly.

“Deux biéres s’il vous plaît et que vous vendez repas?” Snorri answered, sliding his coin forwards.

“What the hell?” I blinked at him, talking over the barkeep’s reply. “How—I mean—”

“I wasn’t raised speaking the Tongue, you know?” Snorri shook his head as if I were an idiot and took the first full tankard. “When you’ve had to learn one new language you develop an interest in others.”

I took the tankard from him and eyed the beer with suspicion. It looked foreign. The floating suds made an island that put me in mind of some alien place where they’d never heard of Red March and cut princes no slack. That put a bad taste in my mouth before I’d even sipped it.

“We of the North are great traders, you know?” Snorri continued, though what sign I’d given that I might be interested I could not imagine. “Far more comes in through our ports on Norse cargo ships than in the holds of longboats returning from raids. Many a Norseman knows three, four, even five languages. Why, I myself—”

I turned away and took my foul-tasting beer off towards the tables, leaving Snorri to negotiate the food in whatever mangled tongue was required.

Finding a space proved problematic. The first burly peasant I approached refused to move despite my obvious station, instead hunkering over his huge bowl of what looked to be shit soup, but smelled infinitely worse, and ignoring me. He muttered something like “murdtet” as I moved off. The rest of the ill-mannered louts kept to their seats, and in the end I had to squeeze into place beside a nearly spherical woman drinking gin from a clay cup. The soup man then proceeded to give me the evil eye whilst toying with his wicked-looking knife—an implement generally not required for the consumption of soup—until Snorri came up with his beer and two plates of steaming offal.

“Budge up,” he ordered, and the whole row of locals edged along, my neighbour wobbling like gelatine as she undulated to the left, leaving sufficient room for the new addition.