Halfdan

Halfdan has a lean face and narrowed eyes, and he keeps his hair long and unbound, generally swept back with a few loose strands drifting over his brow. Around 1002 he wore a thin mustache and goatee over smooth, unlined skin. By 1018 that hair had turned entirely white, his facial hair had filled out, and the hollowness of his cheeks had grown far more severe. A fur-lined cape is his usual garb, and his signature chain runs partway around his neck with the remaining length wound about his right arm.

A grim reputation for viciousness and cruelty follows Halfdan wherever he goes. He preaches that chains, whether real iron or the figurative bonds of law, exist to improve a man. As a slaveholder he once meant to make a public example of a runaway who fled to Thorfinn's village, planning to torture the man before his fellow slaves. Even his own followers fear him, since he will not hesitate to bring the chain down on one who dares mock the authority of the law.

Age has only sharpened his methods. He now lends money to struggling or desperate farmers, then seizes their land the moment they cannot repay, effectively reducing them to servants in all but name. What truly drives him is the pleasure of purchasing another man's pride and then stripping it away, an exercise he savors as raw power. His outlook on women is deeply patriarchal, treating them mainly as bearers of children and instruments for sealing marriage alliances, yet he still permits his wife Asrid her blunt tongue and rarely bothers to argue back.

His mastery of the chain is what earns Halfdan both his weapon and his name. He can flick it out to knock a foe's blade aside or loop it around an enemy's head, leaving the victim wholly at his mercy, and he chooses whether to wrench it back for a savage head or facial wound or unwind it leaving no mark at all. Age has not dulled the skill, and because so few fighters ever face a chain, defending against it remains genuinely difficult. One episode of his ruthlessness comes in 1002, when a slave of his ran off and took shelter in Thorfinn's village. Suspecting exactly where the man had gone, Halfdan sailed in aboard a longship still bearing its carved dragon's head and stepped onto the pier, brushing aside Leif Ericson's protests.