Hild

A long dark-green cloak and a homemade crossbow mark Hild wherever she travels. Her right eye is clouded and bloodshot, scarred when she fell from a cliff while fleeing a Viking raid as a child. She usually pins her blonde hair back with a green cloth so it never covers her ears while she tracks game, though she begins letting it hang loose once she makes peace with Thorfinn. Years in the wild have left her lean and powerfully built, with a hunter's hard-earned strength.

Hild first comes across as guarded and icy, keeping her distance from everyone and saving her coldest treatment for Thorfinn, whom she watches without ever lowering her guard. She has a dry, cutting tongue and needles people like Bug-Eyes and Einar with sly remarks. Beneath the frost, though, she is gentle enough that she cannot bring herself to kill even someone she loathes, and she softens completely around children, eventually teaching Karli and the other youngsters of Arnheid Village.

Her real gift is her mind. A single look at her mentor's crossbow was enough for her to grasp its inner workings and start drafting a lighter design a woman could handle, and she constantly dreams up devices no one around her had imagined. She is disgusted by the Jomsvikings' habit of seizing women for pleasure, and that outrage is what convinces her to work alongside Thorfinn in freeing the captives. Once she forgives him, she turns fiercely protective, guarding his fragile peace with the Lnu even to the point of being ready to kill Styrk, while still promising to hold back the instant Thorfinn asks her to.

Before the tale reaches her, Hild lives alone in the Norwegian wilds as a hunter, raised by an old huntsman after raiders wiped out her family. That solitude ends when Thorfinn and his companions pass through her territory in January 1019 on their way toward Greece. She helps them bring down a bear that had given them trouble, and while his wounds are being tended, Thorfinn introduces himself and the group shares the meat as a meal.

When Gudrid asks why she lives as she does, Hild recounts how eight years earlier a warrior band under Askeladd slaughtered her people, and how one young fighter, whom his comrades called Thorfinn, cut down her father. Thorfinn, visibly shaken, admits that he was that man. Hild gives thanks that the day has at last arrived and levels her crossbow at him, then chooses to travel with the crew instead, watching for any sign that he might return to killing. Years later, after helping the settlers raise Arnheid Village in Vinland, she finally sets her hatred aside and forgives him.