Ylva

Ylva wears her thick, wavy hair pinned up, with a fringe left loose to frame her face. Her features are lively and quick to show what she feels, and she carries herself with the sturdy air of a woman used to hard living.

She is stubborn and strong-willed to the core, a young woman who bends to no one and says exactly what is on her mind.

Ylva came into the world at Jomsborg around 987, arriving just before Thors set out for the Battle of Hjörungavágr. The delivery was a hard one for Helga, and Thors, let down that the child was not a son, handled his daughter carelessly at first. He nearly left for Norway without even naming her, but Helga refused to allow it, showing an anger Thors would never see in her again. Reaching for the first name that came to him, he gave the girl his own mother's, and from that point his whole attitude toward war shifted sharply.

Some months after the Jomsvikings mourned Thors as fallen in the battle, he came back to Jomsborg to slip away with Helga and the baby. Thorkell, drinking up on the roof, spotted them leaving and moved to block their escape, forcing Thors to knock him out cold. Ylva slept soundly through the entire flight.

She was raised on Iceland afterward, and being the eldest she carried much of the labor while her frail mother could do little; her brother Thorfinn arrived nine years her junior. Once Thors was dead and Thorfinn failed to return home after vanishing aboard a warship, Ylva became the family's chief provider. She earned a reputation around the village as a wild, defiant sort, taking on the fishing, the whaling, and every task usually left to the women, throwing herself into work so hard after losing two of her kin that Helga had to teach her to rein herself in. Years later, when Leif ran into Thorfinn at Gainsborough, he tried to coax the young man home by telling him Ylva had married and now had children of her own. On the day Thorfinn finally came back, she at first would not accept that the stranger was her brother, and once she knew him she rounded on him, wounded and furious, for having left her and their mother to fend for themselves.