The land had been rising a little the last part of the way. Where it met the sea it dropped in a steep bluff down to a strip of cobbles. An oak tree stood on the height, gnarled and twisted by untold human lifetimes of wind. Its boughs reached like arms, its bare twigs like fingers, athwart the stars.

Here the Sound opened out into the Kattegat. Scania was no more than a darkness in the east. Otherwise the eye found only sea. It murmured to the land, moonlight shattered where small waves broke, but beyond went the long, easy breathing of the deeps, as mighty in their sleep as ever in their wrath, and the light ran over them like a fire as &old as the air.

Hadding dismounted. He tethered his horse to a bush. It whuffed and drooped its head. Hadding rumpled the rough mane. “You’ve done your work,” he said. “Take your ease.”

Untying the bundle behind the saddle, he spread it on the ground. The moonlight showed bread, cheese, smoked meat; other gear for the road; and a rope, which no one had seen him put in. He uncoiled an end of it, ran fingers over the noose there, and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I have my skill yet.”

Hanging it over his shoulder, he walked to the brink of the bluff. For a while he watched the sea that was his. Stars came out of it eastward and sank into it westward, as do ships faring by.

Then, “Here I make my last offering,” he said aloud, “for my honor, my blood, and my folk. Wherever I am bound, know, know well, you yonder, he who comes was a king.”

He turned and strode to the oak tree. There he unslung his sword, drew it, dropped sheath and belt, and drove the blade upright into the earth. Moonlight sheened On iron.

He tossed off his cloak and bared his feet. Reaching, he caught hold of the lowest branch and began to climb.

Aloft and aloft he went. So had he climbed when he was a boy, laughterful, afar in wilderness and all unaware of any strangeness in his life. As he rose, he saw ever more widely across the waters he had sailed, toward lands where he had warred, won, lost, and gone back to win anew. Scania became a moon-misty ridge. Beyond it, northwesterly, lay Ragnhild’s Norway. Ever had she yearned for its mountains. South and west reached Denmark, low in the arms of the sea. Overhead were the stars.

The tree was not big. Too long had the sea winds grieved it. The topmost limbs would not bear his weight. But he had risen far enough. With a boy’s nimbleness, he walked out until his footing bent beneath him. With a sailor’s deftness he hitched his rope to the branch above. The noose he laid around his neck. A while more he stood looking at the moonlit sea.