Chapter 2: Somewhere Not Here

Askeladd's raiders sail into the settlement ruled by Lord Gorm on the Jutland Peninsula, arriving to spend the cold season as they seem to do every year. The locals turn out cheerfully for the returning crew and their plundered wealth, and a few of the village boys daydream about filling the gaps left by dead men, imagining that a spot in the band would let them roam foreign shores and win renown.

Inside Gorm's hall, Askeladd tosses looted jewelry to a cluster of girls before Gorm steers him toward the price of housing and feeding the crew through winter. Askeladd, who calls the older man his uncle, waves the cost aside, boasting of ample silver. When Gorm's slave is slow to fetch drink, Askeladd remarks on her unusual name, and Gorm explains he paid dearly for a woman descended from a ruined noble house, grousing that she makes a poor servant. Askeladd counters that her failings come from clumsy handling, since anyone can be worked upon with the right approach. Spotting the young Thorfinn nearby, he asks Gorm to preside over a duel set for before the evening meal.

The crowd gathers as Gorm lays out the terms: any weapons allowed, the bout ending in withdrawal, collapse, or death, its cause being the boy's vow to avenge his slain father. Thorfinn opens with blistering speed, shaving hairs from Askeladd's scalp, but the older warrior slips every strike and forces the boy to spring back so his short blades will not shatter under a parry. Bjorn notes aloud how composed and dangerous the youth has grown at close range. After Thorfinn briefly disarms his opponent, Askeladd mangles the name of his father on purpose, feigning that he cannot recall the man he killed. The taunt works, and a furious Thorfinn insists his father Thors would never have died had he not been held hostage. Askeladd charges the memory back, calls Thors a fool who traded his life for his son's, then catches the enraged boy barehanded and hurls him down, telling him he still has much to learn before ordering Bjorn to reset the dislocated shoulder.

That evening the crew feasts while Thorfinn keeps a lonely watch on the vessel that once belonged to his father, refusing to celebrate. A boy asks Askeladd why he tolerates such a menace, and Askeladd answers that the youth is too proud to strike from the shadows and will settle for nothing but an honest victory. Watching Gorm flog the slave for spilling a tray, Askeladd privately laughs at a man enslaved to gold beating a woman bought with it, blind to his own bondage. Asleep on the ship, Thorfinn dreams of Thors, shrinks to a weeping six year old, and hears his father admit he cannot talk him out of vengeance. He wakes with his blade at the throat of the slave, who has come with food, and she wonders whether he is bound like her. He declares himself a free warrior by choice, and she muses about whether some peaceful land lies beyond the sea, untouched by war and slavery. Her words carry Thorfinn back roughly a decade to a hearth in Iceland, where a traveler in a native headdress spoke of sailing past Markland to a lush country he had settled and named.

Askeladd's crew reaches Gorm's village to overwinter, establishing the band's yearly rhythm and its uneasy alliance with the feudal lord. Thorfinn's grudge duel plays out and ends in defeat when Askeladd provokes him past reason, proving the boy's raw skill is undone by his temper.

The slave woman's longing for a place free of war and thralldom triggers the chapter's closing recollection, in which the traveler Leif Ericson tells the Icelandic children of the fertile land across the ocean he called Vinland. This memory plants the series' central promise of a homeland beyond the reach of violence.

The installment carries the Japanese title ここではないどこか (Kokode Wanai Doko ka) and ran on April 20, 2005 across forty two pages, sitting between the first and third chapters of the opening volume.

Its content was split across the television adaptation, supplying the final pages of the first episode and nearly all of the eighth. The chapter also delivers the first spoken account of Vinland, framed through Leif's description of ripe fruit and open plains.