Anne

Anne is a girl in her teens whose auburn hair falls just past her shoulders, and strong feeling brings a flush to her cheeks. Around the village she layers a dark, patterned sleeveless dress over a white long-sleeved tunic, adding an apron, and when she heads outdoors, a short hooded mantle. For trips to the market she trades this for a plainer medium-toned tunic and apron.

Raised in a Christian home, Anne holds her religion close and often speaks to God, silently or aloud, as she moves through her day. That devotion collides with a lapse of her own: taken with a ring she saw at a market stall, she gave in and stole it, and even after warnings about damnation and a coming reckoning shake her, she cannot bring herself to be rid of the band.

Anne's trouble begins at the market, where a ring on a merchant's table so captivates her that she slips it away and hides it inside a hollow tree near her house. In December 1013 she is turning the ring on her finger, wondering how to live a blameless life, when her mother calls her indoors to help lay out the evening meal. Grace is said, her younger brother questions the point of prayer, and their father speaks of hell and a day of judgment; unsettled, and hearing that the day is meant to come in twenty years, she excuses herself and slips outside.

She returns to admire the ring, tells herself she will not let the rest of her family reach heaven without her, and tries to throw it away, but her hand will not obey. In that moment she sees Bjorn and a party of Vikings closing on her home and hears Father Willibald shouting a warning. From a distance she watches Askeladd's men herd the villagers together and slaughter them all. Numb, she wanders away across the countryside for an unknown stretch until exhaustion drops her alone in a field. She wakes to three strangers, one of them tugging at the ring, and once she tells them raiders have seized her village, the local lord sends out a first force, while Thorkell, catching the same news, sets off in pursuit himself.