Chapter 4: Unbreakable Chains

Halfdan and roughly thirty of his men march into the village after landing without leave, and Leif tries to ease the tension between visitors and locals. A villager arrives to summon Thors to the harbor for help, but Thors is busy tending the runaway slave, who has stopped breathing. Spotting the stranger, the villager grows suspicious, and Ylva claims the man is a distant relative who traveled far and fell ill in the recent cold.

At the harbor Halfdan coldly lectures the crowd that chains are the only fitting neckwear for people and the only thing that can raise them into something better. He announces that a young Slavic slave severed his chains and fled during the previous night's blizzard, and asks if anyone knows anything. Ari accuses him of using the tale as a pretext to reopen an old grudge, and a villager explains to Leif that repeated disputes over grazing land had left people injured on both sides until the matter was resolved at the last thing, the Viking assembly. When one of Halfdan's men recognizes Ari as the man who took most of his left arm with a scythe, the two draw swords, but Halfdan halts the fight by whipping the blade from his own man's grip with his chain, then lashing it across the man's face, declaring he will not abide insults to the law, the chain that binds savages into men.

The dying slave slips into a peaceful hallucination of a warm field, speaking of the mother and sister he was torn from when they were sold away. Thors tries to steady him and tells him of Vinland, a place far to the west across the sea, warm and fertile, beyond the reach of slavery and war, and asks whether he will live there with them. Halfdan enters to reclaim his property, and a frightened Ylva insists Thors was only nursing the man back to health and will return him. Thors instead offers to buy the slave, raising his bid from three ewes to four, and finally to eight ewes all under three years old, which Halfdan accepts. Asked where he intends to take a man he believes has truly broken his chains, Thors says nothing, and Halfdan takes the silence as answer enough.

Beneath the northern lights, Thors and his family give the slave a proper burial, laying a burial stone as Helga and Ylva carry it in. When Thorfinn asks whether the weeping Ylva is sad, she clarifies that she mourns eight sheep spent on a slave who died within the day, bemoaning Thors's oddness. Thorfinn asks whether their ancestors truly fled east to Iceland to escape, as Leif told him, and Thors confirms it. When the boy asks where those who now wish to flee Iceland can go, Thors only rests a silent hand on his son's head.

Halfdan lands without permission and hunts his escaped Slavic slave through the village. He whips his own man to punish an insult to the law. Thors comforts the dying runaway with a description of Vinland. Thors buys the slave's freedom for eight ewes, but the man dies. Thors and his family bury him, and Thorfinn asks his father where those who want to escape Iceland can go.

A Volume 1 chapter adapted within Episode 1, this installment carries the Japanese title Tokare Enu Kusari. It introduces the vision of Vinland as a refuge free of slavery and war, the ideal that gives the series its name and drives Thorfinn's later journey. Halfdan's chain imagery frames a central theme, the bondage that Thors quietly rejects in favor of a distant, unreachable freedom.