“Thank goodness you’re still here!” said Blood-Axe. “This man overheard you threatening to leave town!”

“Arrest me if you will, Blood-Axe, it won’t make any difference,” said Jón. “You’ll never get another ray of my sunlight!”

“Why should I arrest you?” said Blood-Axe. “I just want to talk. Not that you’re an easy man to talk to—I had to bribe your guards just to let me through the gate!”

“Well? What do you want?” said Jón.

“After you stormed out of the meeting, we had a change of heart,” said Blood-Axe. “It was wrong of us to ask you to shoulder all the burden, Jón Jónsson, and we’re ready to compromise.”

“What? You mean . . . you’re not making me your prisoner?”

“Are you feeling all right, friend? Where are you getting these outlandish ideas?”

In a flush of panic, Jón excused himself and ran out of the house to search for Tyr. All that night and the next day, he looked everywhere—every inch of the town, behind every rock in the lava field, even in the distant highlands—but the strange man was nowhere to be found. Jón realized he’d been had. Tyr had lied to him, and now both his fortune and the boxes that had helped him make it were gone.

Jón knew he could never show his face in Egilsstaðir again. He snuck away in the dead of night, disgraced and humiliated, with only his horse and the gold he had stuffed in his pockets. He rode and rode, crossing the whole frozen country, until he arrived in the valley where he’d grown up.

No one recognized him. He told them his name was Einar Eriksson. Using the gold he had left, he bought back the house his parents had built, and there he stayed for the rest of his days, earning his living as a shoemaker. He never again used his talent.

The town Jón Jónsson left behind was forever changed. Two days after he left, the last rays of sun over Egilsstaðir petered out, and the whole populace, rich and poor alike, were cast into darkness. They had not even the light of the moon to help them see, and when they eventually ran out of torches and candles and firewood, they had no way of seeing at all, and wandered the streets calling “Hey! Watch out!” and feeling blindly with their hands. No one could tell poor from rich any longer, and the townspeople were forced to band together in order to survive. Everyone in jail was pardoned. When they slept, the whole town crammed into the town hall so that their combined warmth kept them from freezing. Weeks later, when the sun appeared above the horizon at last, the people of Egilsstaðir had forgiven one another and agreed never to speak of Jón Jónsson or his cursed sunlight ever again.

That summer a crew of workers were clearing a road through the lava field when they happened upon three strange, black boxes hidden beneath a boulder. Curious, they opened them, and the heat that poured forth melted the men into puddles and spilled so much light into the sky that the sun did not set in the north of Iceland for the rest of June and much of July—nor the next summer, nor the next, and so it remains to this day. So it was Jón Jónsson, you see, who took the winter’s sun and gave it to the summer.