Chapter 83: Atonement

Returning through the rain, Snake and Fox discover the four guards left to watch Gardar all dead, his cut ropes and a discarded knife beside them. Fat still clinging to a blade tip, only partly washed away by the rain, tells Snake that Gardar was stabbed deeply on top of his earlier wounds. Reasoning that no horse was taken and the man cannot have gone far, Snake orders his people to spread out and kill Gardar the moment they find him.

At dawn in their barn, Thorfinn and Einar admit neither slept well. Einar grieves for Arnheid, who lost her family and her freedom in a single day through no fault of her own, saying it is always the innocent who suffer most. The words cut Thorfinn, who confesses he has done nothing but kill and inflict suffering, though he quickly withdraws the remark, feeling he has no right to claim hurt. Grateful that Einar never told Arnheid of his warrior past, Thorfinn admits he dreads a kind woman like her learning the truth, and wonders aloud how he once slaughtered so many without a second thought.

Einar asks whether Thorfinn truly believes war and slavery could be undone. Thorfinn ties the two together, since the defeated are usually enslaved, yet notes that Norsemen prize killing and plunder as sources of pride, raising their sons to raid as they always have. To reject that, he says, is to be branded a coward and cast out by kin and neighbors. He accepts the label, preferring exile to carrying the dead, and describes the spirits that haunt his nightmares, demanding to know why he killed the fathers, brothers, and sons of others when he knew the agony of losing his own father. He feels he is already at his limit and cannot bear even one more.

Thorfinn explains he did not feel this torment until he became a slave, and doubts most warriors sense it while they still fight. Throwing down his sword is not enough to atone, he says; he must grow as much wheat as he plundered and raise as many homes as he burned. He longs for even a single place where no one needs a weapon, where he could build a grave so the dead might rest. When Einar counters that any such haven would be easy prey for Vikings, and that peace sometimes demands the sword, Thorfinn insists that fighting to live in peace only traps people in the same cycle of violence.

Einar dismisses the vision as impossible, since nowhere is free of bloodshed, then muses about a land so far away that even Vikings could not reach it. The idea stirs a memory in Thorfinn of Hordaland, who once wondered aloud whether such a place existed across the sea, and of a sailor named Leif who told him stories of it in childhood. Einar grows excited, but Thorfinn cautions that its exact location is unknown, that it lies terribly far off, and that building anything there would require gathering many other outcasts like themselves. Still, Einar is glad to finally have something worth hoping for. Just then Fox and other guards ride up to search the barn, and Thorfinn realizes Gardar must have escaped, while Einar's thoughts fly at once to Arnheid.

Snake finds his four guards dead and Gardar escaped, and orders him killed on sight. Thorfinn confesses to Einar the guilt and nightmares left by those he has killed and his resolve to atone through building rather than destroying. He recalls Hordaland's words and Leif's childhood stories of a distant land beyond war and slavery. The guests begin searching the barn, and the pair realize Gardar is loose.

Released June 25, 2012 in Volume 12, this thirty-two-page chapter adapts into Episode 39 and the opening pages of Episode 40. It is a cornerstone of Thorfinn's redemption arc, articulating both the guilt driving him and the first stirrings of his dream to reach Vinland, the peaceful land beyond the reach of war.