The obsidian box had brought him only bad luck. Not only had it gotten him banned from Egilsstaðir, but ever since he’d started carrying it with him, he hadn’t been able to find more than a day’s work anywhere. Jón considered throwing it into the sea or leaving it under a rock for some other fool to find, but he couldn’t quite make himself do it. Just a few more days, Jón thought to himself. If I haven’t found a use for it by then, I’ll get rid of it.

Three days later, Jón was on the road between Húsavík and Akureyri when he met a fellow traveler.

“What news?” the man asked, as was the custom.

“The whale’s turd is heavier than the puffin’s,” said Jón, which was an old Icelandic way of saying nothing much. “What news have you?”

“The farmers of Egilsstaðir are in dire straits,” the man said. “It’s the height of growing season, but their volcano’s been acting up, spewing ash everywhere. The sun’s been blocked for weeks. It’s a real problem!”

“Is that so!” said Jón. “How interesting . . . I mean, how terrible!”

He bade the man good-bye and spurred his horse toward Egilsstaðir as fast as it would gallop. Approaching the town, he saw dark clouds of ash clogging the sky, shading the land in a dusky, early evening dimness at noon. The crops had begun to wilt in the fields.

When Jón arrived, the farmers were holding an emergency meeting in the town hall. “What are we to do?” one of them was saying. “If this ash doesn’t clear soon we could lose our whole crop!”

“Perhaps I could be of help,” Jón said, and they all turned to see him standing at the door, the obsidian box in his hand. The farmers remembered what he had done—how his sunlight had lit up the night for a whole week—and they tripped over one another to give him their money.

Jón rode around town on his horse, distributing sunlight to each ailing farm—enough to bathe the fields of paying customers in sunlight, but no more. Their crops were revived to health within a few days, despite the ash that continued to blanket the sky.

Then Jón ran out of sun, and he had make another trip into the highlands to harvest more. He was gone several days. By the time he returned, the light he’d sold the farmers had petered out, and they were growing anxious.

“We were worried that something had happened to you!” one of them said. “If you hadn’t come back, I don’t know what we would’ve done.”

“Never fear!” Jón replied. “I’m back, and I’ve got the best sunlight money can buy.”

He sold nearly all of it within a day. His pockets were bulging with money, and before long the farmer’s fields were bursting with healthy potatoes, leeks, and cabbages. Demand was so high that he had to raise his prices. The farmers grumbled about this a little bit, but they seemed to understand; it was business. Then Jón had an idea, and he went to look for Tyr in the lava field where he’d first appeared. He found the strange man dozing behind a mossy boulder and woke him.