Chapter 10: Night Wake

The vessel glides forward in the dark while a sleeping Thorfinn rests against Thors and a weary Ari keeps watch over the black water. Ari marvels that Leif can hold a true heading without a single star to guide him, and Thors cautions the boy against staring too long into a sea that swallows the careless. Pressing for a hero's tale, Ari confesses his wish to fell an enemy captain and prove himself a man, but Thors turns the talk toward Ylva, teasing that the girl favors strong suitors and that Ari plainly cares for her.

Rather than glory, Thors reaches back to his eldest daughter's birth during his Jomsviking years. In the memory he cradles the squalling infant clumsily, fretting that something must be wrong with so loud a child while the midwives beg him to mind her head. He presses Helga, spent from a hard labor, to give him a son as the Chief desires, then brushes off her plea to name the baby, claiming Norway calls him away. Only when she shouts his name in fury, the single time in fifteen years he ever saw her angry, does the weight of the moment reach him. Ari deflates at so tender a story, and Thors admits the name Ylva was his own mother's, the first that surfaced, and that fatherhood is when his fear of combat began.

Leif calls out that the Faroe Islands lie ahead, and a waking Thorfinn hopefully asks whether they have reached England, only to learn the archipelago sits between Iceland and Norway, a stop to refill water and barter for supplies. As the crews row into the inlet, Leif's drum falls silent; the settlement holds fewer houses than he recalls, and unease takes hold of him. Thors urges a retreat, distrusting both the mood of the place and the cramped ground. High on the surrounding cliffs, Askeladd's raiders notice their prey turning about and, judging the targets warier than expected, begin hurling rock and timber down onto the boats below.

Released on July 13, 2005, the twenty-page installment closes the early stretch of Volume 2, and its events feed into the third episode of the anime adaptation. The Japanese title reads Yoru no Kokai. Ari, Thors, Thorfinn and Leif anchor the present-day scenes, Helga and Ylva appear in flashback, and Askeladd's crew, among them Magni, sets the ambush in motion.