“Don’t you feel even a little bit sorry for them?” Jón asked Blood-Axe one day.

“Not at all,” he replied. “If the dark-dwellers don’t like how we do things here, they’re free to leave town.”

And indeed, some of them did, but there were many who could not, and they grew more and more desperate as the freeze hardened and their appeals were ignored. Eventually, desperation soured into anger. The dark-dwellers, as the farmers who lived on the sunny side of town had taken to calling them, threw hard looks at Jón as they passed him in the street. He didn’t feel safe walking through Egilsstaðir alone, and in addition to the guards he employed to watch over his money, he hired several more to follow him wherever he went. The additional security was expensive, so to compensate he raised the price of light, and an even larger swath of town was thrown into darkness. Blood-Axe bought the sun they could no longer afford and used it to light his many stables and even the bottom of his well.

“Why on earth do you need light inside your well?” Jón asked him.

“So I can see how much water I have without going to the trouble of lowering the bucket,” Blood-Axe said.

That night an old woman on the dark side of town froze to death in her bed.

The demonstrations grew larger. The crowds got angrier. A man was overheard plotting to burn down the elders’ town hall, and was hanged.

An emergency meeting was called between the farmers’ union, the elders, and Jón Jónsson.

“We can’t go on like this,” said Bjarni Bjarnason. “Something has to be done.”

“Jón Jónsson will have to lower the price of his sunlight, that’s what,” said Blood-Axe. “It’s the only thing that will mollify the dark-dwellers.”

“That isn’t fair!” Jón protested. “No, the town is going to have to subsidize more light for those who can’t afford it. Then they’ll stop demonstrating and threatening me, and I won’t have to employ so many bodyguards, and I’ll be able to drop the price.”

“Why should we give all that light away for free?” said one of the farmers. “What have the dark-dwellers done to deserve our charity, other than threaten to burn down the town hall?”

“I say we kick them all out,” suggested Blood-Axe.

Bjarni shook his head. “If you turn them out of their homes, they might come back seeking revenge.”

“Put them in prison, then,” said the fishmonger. “All of them.”

“Too expensive,” said an elder.

“Kick them out and build a wall around the town,” said Blood-Axe.

“That would be like putting ourselves in prison,” said the fishmonger. “Why don’t we just kill them instead? Save us all a lot of money and trouble.”

“Don’t be absurd!” said Blood-Axe. “Who would we sell our vegetables to?”

After much discussion it was decided that, whether he liked it or not, Jón would have to lower his prices until things in Egilsstaðir calmed down.