Chapter 3: Beyond the Edge of the Sea

In Iceland during 1002, the traveler Leif Ericson entertains Thorfinn, Ari, and the other village children with accounts of a lush country he found across the western ocean and named Vinland. He describes its warmth, its endless meadows and forests, and the native Skraelings who befriended his crew and gifted him the headdress and pipe reserved for true warriors. When Thors comes home, the storytelling winds down and Ari leads the children off to bed.

A skeptical boy scoffs that Leif is no real fighter, prompting Leif to argue that a man who struggles against the sea earns the title of warrior just as much as any swordsman. The next morning, while clearing snow from the roof, Ylva slips and tumbles into a drift, uncovering a nearly dead man with a broken chain hanging from his neck. Thors carries the frozen runaway inside to be warmed.

Down by the water, Leif shares darker memories with Thorfinn, including a stranding on the ice near Greenland that only he survived out of seven men. He also explains that their people fled to Iceland generations earlier to escape King Harald's conquest of Norway, a truth Thorfinn angrily rejects, certain his ancestors would never have run from a fight. The boy races home and finds Thors reviving the slave with chest compressions. The man wakes, confesses he escaped his master Halfdan and has nowhere left to go, just as word arrives that Halfdan's ship has reached the docks in search of him.

Leif recounts his discovery of Vinland and his friendship with the Skraelings who honored him with a warrior's headdress. Ylva stumbles off the roof and finds a dying runaway slave in the snow. Leif reveals that the family's ancestors abandoned Norway to escape King Harald, which infuriates Thorfinn. Thors revives the slave, who admits he fled Lord Halfdan, and Halfdan himself arrives by ship hunting his escaped property.

This installment opens Volume 1 and was adapted as Episode 1 of the anime. It was published on April 27, 2005. The chapter's epigraph, spoken by Leif Ericson, frames sailors as warriors who do battle with the ocean rather than with a blade.