Oath

Thorfinn opens his eyes on rolling green pasture with a lamb bouncing over him, half convinced his whole bloody life was a nightmare. In truth he lies unconscious in the dirt while Einar keeps swinging at the retainers until their nerve breaks and they withdraw, promising harsh consequences. Inside the dream, Thors smells blood on his son and asks who the knife has killed. The vision shifts to the boy Thorfinn stabbing young Einar after wiping out his kin, and Thors gently insists that no one has enemies and no one is fair game to harm before the corpses of the dead pull them both down.

Thorfinn catches an edge above a lake of blood where laughing dead warriors brawl forever. Perched on a pillar, Askeladd greets him and explains this pit is where fighters are discarded, a place without victory where everyone but you is a foe. He notes that Thorfinn once belonged here but slipped free once he emptied himself, and he is back only because rage made him strike a man again. Askeladd urges him to listen to the dead clinging to his body, all of them his own victims. Weeping, Thorfinn stops fighting them, admits he cannot recall their faces, and apologizes. Askeladd cuts down the phantom archers and orders him to climb while carrying the slain, calling it his personal battle toward becoming a true warrior. Thorfinn wakes with his arms reaching upward, checks on the collapsed Einar, and resolves through tears to never wound another person, wanting instead to be reborn and atone. Meanwhile Ketil spares both slaves punishment, producing a coat button Pater found and rewriting the incident as a boar attack, and Pater reveals he too was once a slave.

Thorfinn experiences an extended dream sequence in which Thors and Askeladd both weigh in on the life he has led. Askeladd, appearing in the afterworld vision, delivers the charge to climb out while shouldering the burden of every person he has killed. Waking, Thorfinn makes a firm oath to Einar that he will never harm anyone again and will seek atonement. Ketil intervenes on the slaves' side, fabricating a wild boar story from the button linked to the retainer Trygve to spare Einar and Thorfinn any penalty.

Airing March 7, 2023, this is the thirty-third episode overall and the ninth of the second season under MAPPA. It adapts chapters 70 and 71 together with an original scene. Tadahito Matsubayashi directed, with Atsushi Kobayashi providing storyboards. The title marks Thorfinn's central turning point, the pledge that reorients the rest of his journey away from killing.