My trips to Norway were the turning points of my life. The first trip I was on my way up and my last trip was my doing in. I should have sided with Earl Inge, Skuli’s brother. He was the first Regent to Hakon, until illness took him and Skuli took his place; he could … Continue reading Chapter 109 – Recollections

“Don’t go there,” the voice said. I knew that voice yet I couldn’t place a face to the person that owned it. “Who said that?” I knew they were coming. Even though I could not decipher the secret message in the runes, just holding the slip of parchment in my hands sent the warning through … Continue reading Chapter 108 – The Warning

He made me calm. I knew I was dreaming. I knew that I had fallen asleep on the pallet in my garret. Warm still from my Snorralaug. I could not stop my thoughts returning to Hallveig. Not her final days, when she suffered so, but to the times when we first met on the road. … Continue reading Chapter 107 – The Calm

I knew this voice. It was him. He touched my face, his fingers slid through my skin as if absorbed like bread into broth. A dream I thought. Strange in its texture; a sensation of real yet not real, like that place between wakening and dream where you exist in another reality, where the life … Continue reading Chapter 106 – The Reader

July ‘Do not go placidly into death,’ her words rang in my thoughts, though she herself was gone. I loved her the first time I saw her, even though she had rushed me like an angry wildcat, fierce, and ready to claw me in revenge for my misdeeds to her husband. Yet she came around. … Continue reading Chapter 105 – 1241 CE