It did not take long to reach the grove, though the newcomers felt that they had been introduced to half the town along the way. The grove itself was still littered with casualties from the celebration, though some had begun to stir. Sunniva and Selinda were amongst them, the sisters checking on Bjorn. Trumpetter had wandered off earlier, and Kirsa still slept over by the ash tree, swaddled in her red cloak.

“We had cause for joy, last night, with the last of Decay’s touch purged,” Thor whispered to his guests. “But there are those who cannot handle their drink so well as I.”

“Is that him?” Aderyn asked, nodding towards Bjorn. The baresark was sitting on a sleeping mat under a tree, not the ash, but a young oak that had grown enough to provide shelter.

“Well, yes, but also no,” Thor said. “He was touched by Decay as he rescued Helka’s victims, and it was they who were cleansed. Sunniva and Selinda - the two changings his bandages - were her apprentices.”

“You have not driven them out?” Adrijan asked, perplexed.

“Why would I?” Thor asked, tone mild. “It was not they who betrayed their neighbours.”

Adrijan opened his mouth to respond, but Stanislav elbowed him, and he closed it, nodding.

In the moment the interaction had taken, Aderyn was already moving forward, approaching the apprentice healers and their patient. Several sets of bleary eyes watched her, but they also saw Thor, and that was enough for them to consider the matter handled, and they rolled back over in search of more sleep. Thor, Ingrid, and the two Ungols watched as she knelt without a word. The twins paused at her arrival, but when she said nothing they continued in their task, unwrapping the bandages around Bjorn’s chest. The man himself was focused on keeping himself upright where he sat, opening one eye only briefly to take in the newcomer.

The wounds first left by the chaos hounds and then infected by Rot were no easy thing to look at, still seared red by infection and lined with blisters of pus here and there, but they had still seen an improvement. No longer did they threaten to burst open at the slightest touch and let loose a flood of all sorts of foulness, and no longer did Bjorn struggle to breathe, though weakness remained. He had a recovery of months ahead of him.

Aderyn took up a small pot of white poultice that the sisters meant to apply, first sniffing at it, then touching her finger to it to dab it at her tongue. She made no comment, but set the pot back where she had found it. Sunniva had a handful of river moss, wrapped tightly with sinew, and she dabbed at Bjorn’s chest, carefully removing the black gunk that was the last of the previous application. The warrior bore it stoically, and when it was clear, Selinda began to paste the poultice over the blisters anew.

“You do not cover the entire wound?” Aderyn asked, voice quiet to fit the grove.

Selinda grimaced, but left it to her sister to answer. “We are trying to stretch the batch,” Sunniva said. “The next still needs three nights to settle.”

“Ah,” Aderyn said. She pulled back the hood of her cloak, revealing ruddy brown hair kept short. “I will show you a way to speed the process.”

The twins paused in their ministrations, both glancing to Thor. He gave them two supportive thumbs up, and they looked back to the newcomer.

“We would like that,” Sunniva said, hesitant but hopeful.

Thor beamed to see Aderyn making a good impression on the two young women. He had high hopes for her future as a teacher to them. “Ingrid,” he said to the woman still standing at his shoulder, pretending he hadn’t seen her exchanging mean looks with Adrijan for the past minutes. “Could you show our guests to the longhouse? They deser-” he broke off, eyes fixed on a new arrival in the grove.

Unsure, the three with him followed his gaze, but their confusion only grew when they saw what had caught his eye. To be sure, the eagle, golden and fierce, that had just perched on the bough of the ash tree was unusually large, but that was all, even if it was matching Thor’s stare for intensity.

His hand brushed against his pocket, considering the lunchable that had appeared within that morning. But no, he had promised the eagle a fish caught with his own hands, and that was what he would deliver.

“I will leave you to it,” Thor said, still not taking his eye off the bird. “I have business to conduct.”

The eagle flared its wings, beating its way into the air, and with a thought Stormbreaker was in hand and he was following. The morning was on the verge of being left behind, the townspeople well and truly going about their business for the day, save for those who had celebrated most vigorously the night before. From the sky, Thor could see the ongoing work of readying the century old tree trunks to be placed around the town as walls, and even a hunting party departing to the nearby forest, but only for a moment, for their destination was not far. Man and eagle set down a short way upriver, both observing the currents.

“You may have disdained the last fish I offered,” Thor said, “but I will find one to satisfy you!”

The eagle gave a doubtful cry, settling itself down on a log of driftwood that had somehow come to rest on the riverbank.

Challenged, Thor shed his tunic and strode into the cold water, not stopping until he was waist deep. He caught flashes of silver scales and dark shapes as they were disturbed by his entry, and he settled in to wait.

His first catch did not take long. A long, slender fish, almost eel-like, came to investigate his toes, and when it thought to take a bite, he let it, pinning its jaw to the riverbed. In a flash he had it up and out of the water, forced to stretch out his arms as he held it by gill and tail.

“Well?” he asked the eagle. “What say you?”

The eagle gave a dismissive clack of her beak and looked away.

Thor narrowed his eyes. He would not be found wanting. The long fish was whipped around and thrown at the bank where Stormbreaker hovered, the axe parting head from body. The fish fell to the stones with a thump, where it lay twitching. Even if the eagle did not care for it, it could still feed another. He returned his focus to the river.

Twice more Thor seized a hungry fish, each bigger than the last, but twice more the eagle turned up her nose at the offering. He was beginning to suspect that it would take more than a simple river denizen to satisfy her. Even the three fish together on the bank were of little interest, though it at least confirmed in Thor’s mind that she was something beyond a typical eagle. Even a familiar would have at least sampled the bounty on offer, but here was a bird that had finally tired of his offerings and was beating its way back into the sky with a final dissatisfied shriek.

Standing in the river, Thor narrowed his gaze as she disappeared from sight, hands on his hips. Even if no simple fish would satisfy her, he would not be deterred, nor would he accept defeat. It was hardly even about making recompense any longer, the original insult nearly forgotten.

A fist clenched in determination. He would find a fish that the bird found acceptable, on his name as an Odinson. He swore it.

X

When Thor left the river behind to return to town, he did so with an armful of fish, their heads left to feed the pack of dogs that had been drawn by the scent of their blood. The heads could have been used for stews, but the hounds had waited so patiently and left his catch alone so obediently that he had not the heart to deny them. He had meant to deliver them to the longhouse, but he had been intercepted by another pack, this one made of youngsters on the cusp of adulthood and the odd younger sibling. They would see to the scaling and the gutting, they said, if only they might lay a hand on his axe, and it was with a solemn clasping of hands with the boy who led them that the deal was struck. The mob raced away, hooting and hollering the instant they were out of sight, and Thor turned back to the river with a smile. He had blood and scales to clean himself of.

Even on the tail end of winter, to bathe in the river was a folly even for strong men, but Thor was no mere man. He shed his clothing and leapt from one of the newly built docks, the longship it was built to service gone downstream to fish, scrubbing himself with ice water and river sand. He found it refreshing, and he lingered a while, watching the elders and fighters on the far bank mark out where the new walls would be placed, once the trees that Thor had felled were trimmed to readiness and trenches dug for them. He was watched in turn, however, by a group of young ladies whose business of gathering water for washing seemed to be delayed by knocked over buckets and a break for gossip.

Fair Aslaug was amongst them, and when he rose from the river to retrieve his clothes with water streaming from his form, she caught his eye, amusement glimmering as she looked between one of her companions and his bare form. The young woman was staring at him with a gaze that reminded him of the dogs that had so recently coveted his catch, and he could not help but huff a laugh in turn. When he had dressed, the group found their work quickly concluded, and they went on their way.

The midday sun was almost warm as he sat down at the end of the dock, taking the moment for himself. There was more lumber to be felled, and work to be done, but for the moment no one was imperilled and no dark foe bore down upon them. He could take a moment, to sit, to think.

A moment he had, but before the sun could do more than shift slightly across the sky, there came the tread of boots on the dockwood. A glance back showed him Wolfric approaching, brow furrowed in thought.

Thor shifted to one side, a silent invitation to sit, and his follower did so. For a time, they were silent, simply watching the current drift slowly by. Then-

“I spoke with Harad,” Wolfric said. “He spoke of my father.”

Thor nodded, but did not speak. He remembered Harad’s condition for telling them of Leifnir’s lair.

“Did I ever tell how I lost my eye?” Wolfric said, apparently changing the subject.

“You have not.”

“An Aesling woman put an arrow through my shield, and my arm,” he said. “Had they not slowed it, I would have been slain.”

“This was not in the attack on your home,” Thor said. He remembered Wolfric as he had first met him, cold and wounded and fleeing from raiders with only Elsa at his side, though the wounds had not been fresh.

“No,” Wolfric said. “We were the raiders. My uncle led us, and we had sailed west. We meant to take what was theirs for our own, to ease the winter.”

“Do you feel ill, that you would visit upon others what was visited upon you?” Thor asked. There was no judgement in his voice.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Wolfric seemed to hear it all the same. “No! No.” He shook his head. “There is raiding, and there is raiding. In one, you take their grain, their animals, maybe a thrall to help with work, but in the other you take…everything. Even before you, it was not for me.” He fell silent, staring past his feet at the water.

Thor gave him time.

“I think it was for my uncle, and I know it was for my father,” he said, finding the words. “I never knew my mother, and I do not know what tribe she was from. The twins, their mother was Baerson and acted as a mother to me. I heard tell she was a willing bride, which means mine was not.”

“Not an easy truth to hear.”

Wolfric gave a bitter snort. “No.”

“What happened to him?” Thor asked.

“Harad.”

It was not difficult to imagine the old warrior happening to someone.

Wolfric sighed, running a hand over his scalp. It would need shaving again soon if he meant to keep it bare, though the stubble on his cheeks was thicker. “He came to our village one day while I was helping our hunters. He challenged my father, killed him, then left. It was not until I was older that I started to understand why.”

“You still grew up under that shadow,” Thor noted.

“Aye,” Wolfric said, “and Uncle never gave up on revenge. That’s what the raid he took me on was supposed to be the start of, gathering strength and becoming for him what he was for my father.”

“But you were wounded, and sent home.”

Wolfric nodded. “He hoped that Helka might save arm, if not my eye, and that I could rejoin him. She did, but then the Aeslings fell upon us.”

“And I fell upon them.”

A smile crossed his face, but then he shuddered. “I would have lost them both.”

“You did not,” Thor said.

“But I nearly did. Had I not lost my eye, had I not been there only to return months later to find the town razed…” he said, expression darkening.

“You did not,” Thor repeated, more firmly this time. “And you need not torment yourself with thoughts on how you might have reacted. You are the Wolfric that is, not the Wolfric that may have been.”

He swallowed. “Aye, Lord Thor.”

A thought occurred. “Where is your uncle now?” Thor asked.

“I do not know,” Wolfric said, a frown crossing his face. “The plan should have seen him return by now, but unless the plan changed…” he trailed off.

Thor would not spend worry on a man like this seemed to be, even if he was Wolfric’s uncle. “An easy thing to happen,” he said. “You are settled with Harad, then?”

“I am,” Wolfric said, and it was clear that the last lingering remnants of a childhood fear had been lifted from him that day. “We spoke. He told me- Helka- well. I understand him better, now.”

“Then that is well,” Thor said. “The girls?”

Wolfric rolled his eyes. “Running around and acting out Kirsa’s deeds with Trumpetter like they didn’t just worry me into the grave and back,” he said. “If their hair was not turning to gold, I would think the ordeal had changed them none at all.” A hand went to his neck, tugging on something that Thor had yet to notice.

It was familiar. “Is that -?” he asked, gaze making it clear what he meant.

“Ah,” Wolfric said, rubbing the back of his head. “My carving hand is not so steady; I rarely had the patience for Uncle’s lessons. It was meant to be your axe.”

Stormbreaker’s head was easy enough to make out, but the haft was much too short, as if it had been carved too thinly and broken off part way. Sinew string connected it to the leather thong around his neck, worn much the same as the one Ingrid had.

Thor could not help but laugh. “That is fitting. Let me tell you about my hammer, the weapon I bore before Stormbreaker. Let me tell you of Mjolnir.”

Weightier topics were left behind for the moment as Thor told his first follower in this land of the weapon that he had first made his name with, of the highs and lows he had been through with it. When the tales were told, each went on their way, and both were the lighter for it.

X

Later, Thor found himself sitting in his grove. It had mostly emptied, those who had spent the night long departed, but he was not quite alone. He rested against Trumpetter, the mammoth resting after a full day of playing with the children, and he had a bucket of warped and damaged nails before him. In the shade of his ash tree, he was straightening and checking each nail by hand, saving some poor apprentice the trouble. Trumpetter was not his only company; a short way away two old warriors were having a quiet conversation, and though they might have thought he was out of earshot, he could not help but overhear.

“-your skald brother, with the pretty black locks and that dagger he nearly cut my spine with.” Bjorn was leaning against the tree his sleeping mat sat under, sipping slowly at a waterskin.

“Neuner,” Harad said, nostalgic smile on his face. “The trouble he got us into. He was a true brother.” The big man was sat in the dirt, legs stretched out before himself as he reached for his toes.

“Was?” Bjorn asked.

“He died, in the south. The wanderlust never left him, even after I finally settled down.”

Bjorn considered him. “Even after you gave it up, the Axeman was never told to be one to forgive.”

“He did not fall to treachery, or in battle,” Harad said. He paused, reconsidering, and gave a rumbling hum, releasing his toes. “Well, he would have said it was a battle. His heart gave out as he found, ah, victory.”

Bjorn could not help but snort. “A fitting end, for the tales I have heard of his.”

“Half of those were exaggerated,” Harad said, grumbling.

“Only half?”

Harad grumbled some more.

“I wonder if I might guess which are which,” Bjorn said, amusement in his voice even as he was forced to speak slower to keep his breath. “Mournful Pass. Exaggerated?”

“Aye,” Harad said. “There were three hundred of us, and only two thousand Kul under three lords. Two of them hated each other more than us.”

“Erengrad,” Bjorn said next.

“Ugh,” Harad said, disgusted.

“Not exaggerated?” Bjorn said, as gleeful as a man in his position could be.

Harad muttered darkly to himself. “I do not wish to talk about it.”

“Even the Ice Witch?”

“I do not wish to talk about it,” Harad said again, louder.

Bjorn hid a smile by fiddling with his long moustache. “Bordeleaux.”

“Ugh,” Harad said, again disgusted.

This time, Bjorn’s brows shot up. “Don’t tell me-”

“No, no,” Harad said. “It was exaggerated. It is just -” he pulled a face. “Fucking Bretonnians.”

Bjorn matched him. “Fucking Bretonnians.”

“We only dallied there because Neuner was smitten with one of their holy women,” Harad said, complaining in a way that Thor had never heard of him before. “It should have been a single stop on the way to Estalia, but that teat-blinded fool had to pursue her, hoping she would lift her skirts.”

“Did she?”

Harad grumbled extensively, giving voice to a long nursed grudge that had lasted past death and seemingly answering the question. “From Bordeleaux to Massif Orcal we followed her and her knight, and then on to Parravon. All those leagues he spent penning foolish poems, and she spent sighing after her knight.”

Bjorn, who had been holding back a smile at the grumbling, frowned in confusion. “Then -?”

“We gave over the Warboss skull, the city lord paid us, and then the woman offers that bucket head a reward in turn, anything of hers that she had to give.”

Bjorn chuckled. “He didn’t.”

“He could have mounted her then and there in full view of their court, but he asks for a corner of her scarf, as a favour to remember her by,” Harad said, shaking his head.

Bjorn put a hand on his chest against the pain, even as he chuckled further.

“He rode off from the city before the day was out, and she rode Neuner through the bed that night.”

Bjorn’s shoulders were shaking. “There were times I would regret not killing him before he stabbed me,” he said, “but now I am glad I did not, if only for that story.”

Harad smiled. “You are the reason he spent the rest of his life killing the berserkers first, you know.”

“A high compliment,” Bjorn said. “He is still the only one to land a blow on my back.”

Thor continued to listen as he worked, enjoying the talk of the two old warriors as they compared adventures and scars, boasting especially of the marks given to them by the other. To hear each tell it, the one they had received was the more impressive blow, and Thor was gladdened to see that their paths had carried them forward in such a way that they could sit and talk in peace. When he finished his bucket of nails, they were still talking quietly, and he left them to it, the afternoon sun filtering through the trees that were growing ever closer to forming a canopy in truth. Trumpetter snorted and rolled over, still dozing, and Thor found himself humming an old tune as he left the grove behind.

X

The day wore on, men and women racing the daylight to finish this or that task. Thor was not one of them; he had fallen afoul of old Wioleta, of the Aeslings who had taken his hand and fled Skraevold. When she had seen him doing ‘petty labours unfit for a warrior, let alone a god’, she had harried him from the storehouse, haranguing him and her layabout grandchildren in the same breath. Surrendering under such fierce assaults, he had wandered off to the longhouse in search of mead, and found not just that, but entertainment as well.

“...dressed and drawn in sky-fire, the reward for their trust. No brittle battle-slave could touch them, for no cause did they have, none to match the defence of hearth-warmth. The priestess spoke with the voice of her god, and all who had not the ears to hear suffered its fury…”

At the end of the hall, standing atop the table’s end, Stephan held sway over a group of spellbound youths, apparently done with their chores for the day. Their reward was to be used as a test audience for the tale that the skald had called ‘The False Healer’, and by the gleam in their eyes and the stillness of their frames they found it to be more than worth it.

They were not the only ones present. Not halfway up the tables, two elders sat, close enough to hear but far enough not to intrude. The older of the two cocked his head at a particular turn of phrase.

“Did Kirsa truly shout a daemon to death?” he asked.

“I think it was the lightning that went along with it,” Helena answered. Most of her attention was on the tale, or rather the teller, grey brows furrowed in thought as she stared at his back.

“It would do that,” Thor said. He could not help but be proud - Kirsa had come a long way since she had been a fearful captive of raiders.

Helena gave a hmm, but it was distracted.

“Something on your mind?” Thor asked, draining his tankard.

She took a moment to respond. “The skald,” she said. “What do you know of him?”

Now it was Thor’s turn to level a considering eye, but this time at Helena. “He is of Nordland, a bard.” He gestured at the show, proof of his words. “We rescued him from Skraevold, though he was not taken from Nordland like the others, but in Norsca.”

“What cause did he have to venture north?” Helena asked.

“To see the land of his father,” Thor said. “A courageous undertaking, if one that has not gone as he might have hoped.”

The old shieldmaiden’s eyes grew sharp at this, and they returned to the young man. “Did he say anything of this father?”

Thor thought back to his few conversations with the man. “He implied that he was a skald, and a man of…daring conquests.”

This seemed to settle something for her, and she nodded, a faint smile crossing her face.

“You know him,” Thor observed.

“We might,” Helena said. She tapped a finger on a silver band she wore around one wrist.

“Neuner,” Thor said, a reasoned stab in the dark.

“How - did you divine it?” Helena asked.

“I needed no vision for this,” Thor said, not quite laughing, “merely the luck to overhear a conversation between your husband and Bjorn, and the wits to put the pieces together.”

“The Blue Wind is known to grant them,” Helena remarked, glancing at him. Her tone suggested nothing.

“I would not know,” Thor said. “The magical traditions of this realm are new to me.” Stephan’s words caught his attention once more, and he pretended not to see the doubt that still lingered in Helena’s eyes.

“- and drank of strength born of his ichor. The false-healer shared false-gifts from false-kindness, but even his Rot could not stand up to the hallowing sky-fire. Purged were the wolf-sisters, and purged was Vinteerholm, as bold Thunderer proved mightier than feeble Decay!” Stephan declaimed, raising a fist as if he held an axe to strike.

Helena gave a huff, approving and derisive all at once. “He has the same foolishness.”

“Oh?”

“Few skalds dare to speak so of the gods,” Helena said. “Those that do tend to suffer ironic fates.”

“Tyrants will always have thin skin,” Thor said, before smirking as a memory flitted past his mind’s eye. “Do you know, my brother used to write mocking verses for petty warlords? Mother had taught him a sending spell, and we would make a game of scrying for their reaction to the insults.” His amusement turned bittersweet as he remembered the nights they would all drink and offer up suggestions for Loki to craft into something true to be sent off, and of how only he now remained.

“A mischief maker, was he?” Helena asked.

“He was. Aye, he was…” he trailed off, getting lost in his memories.

The tale was soon concluded, and the audience properly appreciative. Stephan gave a bow as they beat hands against thighs or drummed on the stone floor, and the sound stirred Thor from his trance to rap his own tankard against the table. The youths did not linger long after Stephan stepped down from his stage, fleeing out the hall doors to find their next bit of fun, and Thor watched as the bard let out a breath, before knocking back a drink of his own. Beside him, Helena rose from her seat, setting her shoulders. He watched as she approached the bard, and saw as his face started at polite, then became guarded, before it was taken over by surprise, finally setting at hopeful. The two left the hall behind, and unless Thor missed his guess, they made for Harad. He silently wished them luck; to find anew a connection to a dead companion was not something to be taken for granted. He took up his empty tankard, and went looking for another keg of mead.

X

With the healing of the twins and the purging of the pall that had hung over the town, Vinteerholm seemed to let out a breath. Harad and Helena departed early one morning, and they took Stephan with them, if only just to visit the closest thing that could be called to a home of his father. There were those that were sad to see him go and surprised for it, unused to thinking well of outsiders, but whether one called him a bard or a skald, a skilled teller or tales was not someone to be thrown away, and his tales had been popular indeed. There was at least the consolation that he would return, in time.

They were not the only departures. Leifnir had demanded Thor’s presence in the grove one evening to reveal that she had cast her working on the blessed ash tree, and that petty illnesses would thenceforth be a thing of the past. That she had done so in the presence of Aderyn was perhaps an error, and the mighty dragon was subjected to such a questioning that when she finally took to the skies it seemed less the sudden and grand departure she had intended and more a hasty escape from the healer’s attention. Thor liked to think that her tail had whipped out in acknowledgement to his shouted invitations to return as she willed, but only time would tell.

Things began to settle down. The amazing became mundane. Few could forget that they hosted a god, but he was appreciated for the way his efforts saw the new walls race around the town, not for his ability to summon storms that could cast down mountains. The holy ash tree’s healing light became something to look forward to each day, not a bewildering miracle. The juvenile mammoth was not a prize they struggled to feed, but something to be stepped around when he snoozed in the grove. The children disagreed - he was instead a mountain to climb, and the most exciting thing in the town. Weeks passed, then a month. Routine set in. Lingering sicknesses were banished, wounds that had never healed right finally did. Spring was just around the corner.

Then, on a morning that some would almost call warm for the season, three half dead Baersonlings staggered up to the north gate, half blind and delirious, bloodied and bruised.