Episode 43: The Battle of Ketil's Farm

With the royal fleet bearing down on the coast, Ketil musters roughly three hundred and fifty laborers, though Fox reckons barely a hundred can actually swing a weapon. Snake explains that debt, not loyalty, drew the men here, and that their pride as Norsemen now traps them in a war none of them truly chose. Thorfinn refuses to flee while Arnheid clings to life, so Leif agrees to hold his ship a single extra day rather than sail off without the young man he spent years searching for.

At the shoreline, Canute's crews loose volleys from their decks and scatter Badger's ambush before the king even sets foot on land. A royal envoy delivers the terms: ten years of exile instead of the executioner, with a reply owed by daybreak. Ketil's rage curdles into arrogance once Thorgil tallies the invaders at only a hundred, and he vows to grant anything to whoever claims the king's head. Scouting ahead, Snake and Fox spot elite thegns and, far more alarming, a company of Jomsvikings that no peasant militia could ever hope to withstand.

When the two forces finally meet, Snake begs Ketil to reconsider, but the order to loose arrows comes anyway. As steel begins to fall, Thorfinn hurries the cart bearing Arnheid away from the carnage, while she drifts through a vision of riding home beside Gardar and their children.

Snake confesses the truth behind his host's reputation: the fearsome Iron Fist he once trained under years ago is not this Ketil at all, merely a mild landowner borrowing a borrowed name. Having lived freely on the farm, Snake decides it is time to repay that shelter and marches off to the front, telling his followers they are free to flee; they choose to stand with him instead.

Thorgil coldly lays out his strategy to Olmar, admitting the ragtag army is bait meant only to fix the king's attention while he hunts for a killing opening. The Jomsvikings soon carve through the peasant lines, and Canute commits his thegns to seize Ketil alive. Olmar crawls from the water weeping, unable to fight, as his brother surfaces silently behind the unguarded king.

Airing on May 16, 2023, this MAPPA-produced installment is the forty-third overall and the nineteenth of the Slave arc season. It adapts material from the ninetieth chapter region of the manga, roughly chapters 89 through 91. Takafumi Ishida handled episode direction with Shigeyuki Miya on storyboard, and it sits between Episode 42 and Episode 44.