“Oh, dear,” said Somerled. He stood quietly at a little distance, his face gravely composed. “He seemed quite a useful fellow, too. Still, I expect they’ll manage to sail this tub without him. And if these islands provide the lush grazing my brother praises so lavishly, no doubt there will be wild cattle there for the taking.”

“He was a friend of mine once,” Eyvind said, frowning. It unsettled him when Somerled spoke like this. It was as if he thought nothing in the world of very much account.

“You’re a strange creature, Eyvind,” said Somerled. “Death should be nothing to you. Don’t you deliver it a hundredfold as your daily business? What does it matter if this fellow got his chest split open? He was nobody. He was no different from the Jutes and Franks you take with your trusty axe when you’re out impressing Magnus on his raids.”

“It is different.” Eyvind was watching the crew as they began to drag the bull’s bloody carcass forward to the place where they could most easily lift it over the side of the knarr. “This was a friend. At heart, a good man. And it seemed to me that we—I—owed him something. Because of that business with Ragna.”

“Who?” asked Somerled blankly.

Eyvind looked at him, and looked away. “Forget it,” he said. There was a doubt in his mind, a terrible, dark doubt, that stretched not just over today’s shocking events but back into the distant past. His fingers touched the scar on his forearm, mark of an oath deep and binding, a promise of lifetime loyalty. He closed his eyes a moment, and sent up a silent prayer to Thor. Let this not be true. Let me be wrong about him. They cast the bull’s body into the water, but Freyr was not pleased. The wind changed; the rain began to descend in icy sheets, plastering the men’s clothing to their skin and scouring the deck clean of blood. Ulf’s intended course had been toward the setting sun, but it now became clear the god’s angry breath was driving both vessels away from their true path toward a region trackless and empty, where the dark waters held only the lurking terror of sea monsters and the sudden sharp grip of low-lying skerries. On the knarr, they manned the oars, but the current pulled so hard it threatened to rip the lengths of heavy pine from their hands, and the vessel plunged ahead on her own wild course. The passengers clung to ropes, to rails, to one another, to whatever they could find, shocked into a white-faced silence. Ahead of them in the gloom of driving rain and ocean spray, the dark form of the Golden Dragon was barely visible above the turmoil of surging water.