Canute

When Canute first appears he has long blond hair, wide blue eyes, full lips, and delicate features so soft that people keep mistaking him for a girl well into his late teens. His beauty even sets some of his men wondering whether their goddess Freyja had been reborn in him. Kingship reshapes the look. He crops the hair into a short bob and lets a little growth gather on his chin, and beneath his left eye sits a scar Thorfinn left there. By his later years he wears his hair shorter still, keeps a goatee, and is rarely seen without a cape and a circlet.

The prince starts out meek and fearful, forever tucked behind Ragnar, but Thorfinn's relentless taunting slowly goads him into standing on his own. A darker turn follows once he learns his own father has quietly marked him for death; craving revenge, he grows commanding and hard. The killing of Ragnar, the guardian Askeladd removed precisely because the old man's shelter was stunting the prince, seals the transformation. Thorkell later remarks that Canute's gaze had taken on the same uncanny quality he once saw in his comrade Thors, the look of a man who had become a true warrior.

From there Canute turns shrewd and manipulative, willing to sweep aside anyone blocking his vision of a Viking paradise on earth. He poisons his own brother to claim Denmark, engineers a pretext to strip Ketil of his lands and swell his profits, and orders innocents slaughtered to secure that ground. In private he begins to unravel, haunted by visions of his dead father and even holding conversations with the apparition. For all his loathing of weapons as a youth, he takes up the sword in adulthood and becomes a capable, tactical fighter, sharp enough to parry a sudden strike from Thorgil and a steady hand at archery. Backed by his North Sea empire and its vast fleet, he grows into a power few dare cross, though the real menace lies in the poison and the quiet assassinations that clear his path.

Canute enters the world on 12 July 996 as the younger son of Sweyn, the Danish king who had also seized broad swaths of England and Wales. His older brother is Harald and his sister Estrid, yet it is Ragnar, not his father, who raises him; the retainer treated the boy like his own child and screened him from the intrigues of the court. Brought up a devout Christian, the young prince clings hard to his faith.

His story proper begins in 1013, with Sweyn's armies stalled at London after Thorkell defected to the English side. The king marches off to conquer the rest of the country and leaves Canute nominally in charge of the London front, waving off Ragnar's protest that a seventeen-year-old is too green for such a command. The defense collapses and Canute is taken prisoner by Thorkell. Askeladd, scenting the ransom a captured heir would fetch, springs a plan that pulls the prince free amid a blaze set by his band, and Thorfinn is the one who drags Canute, Ragnar, and the priest Willibald out of the fire. Askeladd kneels and swears service, then asks the prince to lift his helmet; the face revealed is so girlish that the whole party is stunned.

The march that follows carries Canute through Wales, where his silence and paralysis in front of hostile envoys expose how unready he is to rule. Thorfinn's needling finally cracks the shell and the prince begins to speak. The pivot comes when Askeladd, under orders from Sweyn, kills Ragnar; before dying the old guardian wrings a promise that Askeladd will look after the prince and reveals that the king wants his own son dead to head off a succession split. Ragnar's death shatters and then remakes Canute. Through long talks with Willibald about the nature of love, he concludes that true, unconditional love belongs only to the dead and to nature, never to living men, and he resolves to rebel against a God who demands a love he has stripped from human hearts. He declares it his duty as a future king to wage the kind of battles that carry real meaning.

Years later, in the Slave Arc, a colder Canute walks the ruined roads of Mercia, English heads staked along the way on his own orders. Having crowned himself king of England and moved to depose the returned Ethelred II, he owns the devastation without flinching, yet checks his men when they turn to looting and rape, ordering the offenders executed and displayed as a warning. When Thorkell rages that halting the war is impossible for a king, Canute answers that a road to the throne must run through blood.