Chapter 17: England, 1008

The chapter opens in East Anglia during 1008, where a bloodied Thorfinn sprints through a black forest with an arrow lodged in one arm, cutting down the hounds and men on his trail. By dawn he has collapsed over a branch in a river, where a village woman and her small daughter find him while washing clothes.

The pair carry him home and dress his wound. Waking to a dog on the bed, the boy stays guarded, yet hunger wins out and he devours the meal set before him. The mother guesses he is barely ten, and though she recognizes he is Danish and cannot follow her speech, she insists that Christian mercy forbids leaving a hurt child to die. Her daughter bristles, reminding her that the Danes are the enemy her own father marched off to fight.

When a rider arrives hunting a Viking infiltrator who has slain two thegns and bears an arrow wound, the woman calmly claims the boy is her son John and sends the soldier off. Thorfinn, who had begun drawing his blade in secret, grasps that she has shielded him. Unable to repay the kindness, he lights a brand at the hearth that night, warns her in halting English to flee, and races to the shore. There he sets a shack ablaze as a beacon for Askeladd's waiting fleet, then cuts through the soldiers who rush the flames, killing the very rider who had questioned the family. The mother watches in tears as he begs the uncomprehending villagers to run for the trees.

Askeladd's crew lands before anyone can escape. Praising the boy for a job well done, the captain orders a swift plunder ahead of the arriving garrison. Sick at heart, Thorfinn forces his face blank and wades into the slaughter.

A washerwoman and her daughter discover the injured Thorfinn adrift in the river and bring him into their home. The mother lies to a searching soldier, passing the boy off as her late son to keep him safe. In return, Thorfinn ignites the signal fire that summons Askeladd, kills the pursuing rider, and pleads with the terrified villagers to escape. The raiders come ashore, and the boy buries his guilt behind a hollow, indifferent mask before joining the attack.

A prologue frames the episode within the long Viking assault on England, a conflict stretching back to the early ninth century and driven by hunger for the island's rich, broad farmland; the fighting grew far crueler after 1003, in the wake of King Ethelred's slaughter of Danish settlers. A closing note jumps ahead to 1013, when King Sweyn of Denmark drove Ethelred into exile in France near the peak of the Viking age. The chapter opens Volume 3, ran in the February 2006 issue on December 25, 2005, and was adapted as part of Episode 6.