Willibald

For much of his time on the page Willibald is an unkempt figure: pale, tangled blond hair, a full beard of the same shade, and grey eyes give him a wild, weathered look. That changes once he reaches Gainsborough, where he turns up shaved smooth and marked with a monk's tonsure. His usual dress is plain, a dark robe worn with simple shoes.

Faith consumes him. He roams in search of whatever insight or trial might finally make him a truly righteous soul, chasing what he calls "love." His meaning for the word, though, has little to do with fondness. He treats love as pure selflessness stripped of any preference, bias, or bodily pleasure toward a particular person or group, and he waves away every other reading of it as a corrupt lie.

His manner swings between loose and gentle, wrapped in a detachment so complete it can pass for indifference. Questions of God or morality set him off into sudden outbursts, and he pays no mind to whoever he unsettles in the process, usually needing a great deal of drink before he calms. Yet the ordinary troubles of the people around him barely stir him. Beatings, threats on his own life, even the slaughter of the innocent draw only a muted response, with genuine feeling surfacing only when he kneels to pray for the wronged at the cross. In time the suffering that the strong heap on the weak leads him to question whether God loves mankind at all.

Almost nothing is laid out about where Willibald comes from. It is known that he once dwelt at King Sweyn's palace but walked away from it, finding nothing among the king's holdings worth keeping in his hunt for "love," and threw in with Ragnar's circle instead. Most of his days pass drinking among Askeladd's men, breaking the routine only to talk with them now and then.

His single lasting mark on events is a conversation. Speaking his worldview aloud helped push Canute away from the meek boy he had been. He told the prince that Ragnar's devotion was no real love but a kind of favoritism, no purer than the man who bows before a king yet flogs his own slave, pointing out that Ragnar had allowed sixty-two innocents to die simply to keep Canute alive. Real love, he argued, only gives and never takes or asks anything back, like a deer's rotting body left as food for any creature that passes. The idea drove Canute toward the goal of building a paradise on earth, a turn Willibald regarded as a miracle taking shape in front of him.

He was last seen carousing with Askeladd's warriors, downing well past fifty-five rounds of drink and outlasting even the hardiest of the Vikings.