Chapter 98: Two Paradises

Canute presses Thorfinn on whether he truly has the strength to stop him, as Askeladd once did, and a soldier urges the young man to back down, admitting he has no wish to kill him. Einar mutters that this is simply how the world turns, the strong bending the weak to their will while words go nowhere. All the while the severed head of King Sweyn hisses at Canute, mocking his fresh crown and insisting a king herds sheep rather than keeps companions.

The apparition warns that Thorfinn is a dangerous stray, one restless animal that could stampede the whole flock over a cliff, and demands his death. Instead of striking, Thorfinn declares that if the king's mind is fixed, he will simply run. The statement stuns everyone present. He argues that Canute's authority both saves and crushes, that he has no standing to condemn it, and that flight to a land the crown cannot touch is his only real option.

Canute erupts into laughter, marveling that Thorfinn came weaponless and let himself be beaten bloody only to ask a favor, the most half-baked bargain he has ever faced. He wonders how so gallant a soul could be born among Vikings, then asks where such a refuge could possibly lie, since his own borders keep spreading. Thorfinn answers that he will run as far as the world permits and build a peaceful land by other means, a home for all who cannot survive in the realm Canute is raising.

Canute grasps that the plan means patching the holes his conquests leave behind, and Thorfinn presses him to labor honestly so those holes do not grow too vast to fill. Won over, the king withdraws entirely from Ketil's farm and scraps his scheme to confiscate estates, unwilling to pile more work onto Thorfinn. Sailing away, he tells Wulf that until now he had counted only him as a comrade, yet today he found two more who chase the same goal down a different road, a discovery he finds delightful. On shore, an armored Thorgil returns to find every royal ship already gone.

Under the Japanese title Futatsu no Rakudo, the chapter appeared in Volume 14 and was published on October 25, 2013 across twenty-eight pages. Its material was adapted into the forty-seventh episode of the anime. Sweyn features only as a vision.