Floki

Floki stands apart from the shaggy Vikings around him. He keeps his light hair cropped to a moderate length and shapes his beard into a clean rectangle, which lends his face a squared-off cast, and he has no eyebrows to speak of. A long scar carves down the right side of his features and reaches to his lip. He wears the standard garb of his Jomsviking company; a helmet marks his earliest scenes, though later panels drop it.

The Baltic fighting leaves a permanent mark of its own. By its end an enraged Thorfinn has severed three of Floki's fingers.

The single warm thread in Floki's character is his devotion to his grandson, Baldr. Everything else is calculation. He is a cold, relentlessly ambitious plotter set on installing Baldr as chieftain of the Jomsvikings, a role the boy himself wants no part of.

Beneath the ambition sits a mean, grudge-keeping streak. He arranged the death of Thors because he could not bear feeling looked down upon by the man, and he later marked Thors's son Thorfinn for the same reason, his wounded pride sharpened by the threat Thorfinn posed to his grandson's claim on power.

Long before his schemes bore fruit, Floki served in the Jomsvikings beside both Thorkell and Thors during the years Thors still counted himself among them, and the two commanders knew him well. That closeness bred no affection. Floki nursed a lasting resentment toward Thors, convinced the celebrated warrior always regarded him with contempt. When Thors deserted, Floki seized on an old death sentence as his cover and contracted Askeladd to hunt him down, though the true motive was personal spite rather than any point of law.

Floki climbed to prominence not with the blade but through cunning and political maneuvering. He ranked among the principal Viking commanders serving Sweyn during the assault on England and carried that standing into Canute's reign. His masters, Sigvaldi and Sweyn among them, entrusted him with delicate errands, sending him to coax Thors back into the fold and to press Thorkell into abandoning the English cause, work that betrayed a real gift for negotiation. His record in a fight was another matter entirely. The rare times he drew steel laid bare how little of a warrior he was: Askeladd overwhelmed him with ease after cutting down Sweyn, and Thorfinn disarmed and maimed him in a single moment during the Baltic war.

That maiming came once Thorfinn learned who had ordered his father's death. Consumed by fury, the young man took three of Floki's fingers and shattered his sword, yet stopped short of killing him. In the wreckage of the Jomsvikings' dissolution, Floki and young Baldr were cast out of Jomsborg, his grand designs left in ruins.