Arc 4: The Feast Hall
Chapter 4: Seventeen Friends, Six Fights, and One Catastrophic Blonde
They found the feast by accident.
This was consistent with how the Bubbly Viking Crew found most things.
They had been sailing along the Frankish coast — actual Frankia, correctly navigated, Jesper had been insufferably precise about it for three days — looking for a place to resupply, when they smelled it. Woodsmoke and roasting meat and something fermented and wonderful drifting out across the evening water from a settlement on the coast, a cluster of longhouses and docks and firelight that resolved, as they got closer, into something larger and more crowded than a standard settlement.
"What is that," Jens said.
"Smells like a feast," Sven said, with the reverence of a man who respected feasts.
"Whose feast."
"Does it matter," Milos said.
It did not, it turned out, matter. The settlement was a Frankish-Norse trading port, the kind that had grown up along the coast where Carolingian merchants and Norse traders and Frisian middlemen had decided that business was more interesting than conflict, and the feast was in honor of a successful trading season, which in this time and place meant that enough silver had moved and enough ships had come and gone without sinking that everyone collectively felt the gods had been favorable and this warranted acknowledgment through the consumption of enormous quantities of food and drink.
They docked. They were welcomed, because a feast of this kind welcomed anyone who arrived with silver and a reasonable disposition toward not starting trouble immediately. Jens paid the guest-silver. They were given places at the long tables. Food appeared.
The Bubbly Viking Crew, who had been at sea for a collective month and a half and had survived a cat island and a toddler island and England and had eaten dried fish more times than any of them wished to count, looked at the feast laid out before them.
"Oh," said Sven.
"Oh," said Sam, who didn't usually say oh about food but was making an exception.
"I will eat all of this," Milos announced, to no one and everyone.
"You will not," Tijjani said.
"Watch me."
"Milos—"
Milos had already started.
They sat. They ate. The fire was enormous and warm and the hall was full of noise — Norse and Frankish and the particular polyglot of a trade port where languages mixed until they became something new — and for the first time in weeks nobody needed to navigate or row or worry about what the next island was going to turn out to be.
It was, by any measure, a good night.
It was also, in the specific way of good nights, the night several things happened that would take significantly longer to resolve.
I. Sven and the Matter of Seventeen Friends
Sven made his first friend within four minutes of sitting down.
This was the man to his left, a broad Frankish trader named something that Sven couldn't quite catch but who had a laugh that filled a room and an immediate and genuine interest in where Sven had come from and what he'd seen. Sven told him. The man was fascinated. He called over two friends. They were also fascinated. They called over more people.
By the end of the first hour, Sven had a radius.
Not metaphorically. Literally: a radius of people around him, sitting closer than the bench technically accommodated, leaning in, listening, responding, laughing, telling their own stories in return. The radius expanded as the evening went on, drawing in people from further down the table who had heard that something interesting was happening over there.
Sven talked to all of them.
He asked them questions and he meant the questions, which people could always tell, the difference between a question asked to be polite and a question asked because you genuinely wanted to know, and Sven always wanted to know. He wanted to know where the Frankish trader's family was from and how long he'd been working this route and whether he liked it. He wanted to know about the old Norse woman two seats down who had a scar on her jaw and a voice like gravel and turned out to have a story about a storm in the North Sea that had the entire radius going quiet. He wanted to know about the young man across the table who was clearly at his first feast, nervous, too young for the company, and who Sven made sure had food and included in the conversation until the nervousness settled into something more like belonging.
Bjarni, under the table, collected scraps from seventeen separate people, because every friend Sven made immediately wanted to feed the dog.
By the middle of the feast Sven had accumulated:
Three trading contacts who had pressed him to come through their ports. Two men who had invited him to stay with their families if he was ever passing. One old woman who had taken his face in both her hands and said something in Frankish that he didn't understand but which Tijjani, passing by, translated as "you are a good boy" in a voice that suggested she meant it seriously. Seventeen people who, when asked later about the feast, would mention Sven first.
"How do you do that," Milos asked him, at one point, pausing in his eating.
"Do what."
"The—" Milos waved a hand at the radius. "That."
Sven looked at the people around him. "I just talk to them."
"I talk to people."
"You challenge them."
"That's talking."
"It's a different kind."
Milos looked at the radius. The radius looked comfortable. Warm. Like a place people wanted to be.
"Teach me," Milos said.
"You want to—"
"Not now. Later. When I'm not eating."
"Of course," Sven said.
Milos went back to eating.
Sven went back to his radius.
The young nervous man across the table had relaxed enough to start talking, and what came out when he talked was funny, genuinely funny, and Sven laughed the real laugh, not the polite one, and the young man's whole face changed.
This was what Sven did. He couldn't explain it. He just did it.
II. Milos and the Matter of Six Fights
Milos started the first fight by accident.
Specifically by winning an arm wrestle so enthusiastically that the man across from him decided this was a challenge to his reputation and responded physically. Milos responded to the response. The fight lasted thirty seconds and ended with the other man sitting on the floor looking surprised.
"Sorry," Milos said, and offered his hand, and the man took it, and they were friends after that, which was how Milos tended to make friends.
The second fight was on purpose. A man down the table was being unpleasant to a woman who clearly wanted him to stop being unpleasant, and Milos had observed this for approximately forty-five seconds before deciding that forty-five seconds was the maximum time he was willing to observe it. This fight lasted fifteen seconds and ended with the unpleasant man outside the hall, reevaluating his choices. The woman looked at Milos. Milos shrugged. She gave him a piece of bread, which he accepted.
The third and fourth fights were connected. A disagreement between two groups that Milos got involved in because one of the groups pushed someone in a direction they hadn't chosen to go, which Milos had opinions about. He resolved both simultaneously by the technique of being too unpredictable to fight effectively, which left both groups confused and, eventually, more interested in negotiating with each other than in continuing.
Tijjani, who had watched this, came over.
"You resolved a conflict," Tijjani said.
"I fought them," Milos said.
"You fought them until they agreed that fighting each other was more complicated than whatever they were disagreeing about."
Milos thought about this. "Is that strategy?"
"Unintentional strategy is still strategy."
"Huh."
"You might be smarter than you appear."
"Don't tell anyone," Milos said.
The fifth fight was straightforwardly fun, a mutual agreement between Milos and a large Norwegian who had been looking for a friendly test of capability all evening, and it was conducted with the cheerful mutual respect of two people who had correctly identified each other as equals and wanted to find out what that meant in practice. Milos won by a small margin. The Norwegian shook his hand with genuine enthusiasm and bought him a drink.
The sixth fight Milos lost.
He lost it to an old woman.
This requires context.
She was perhaps sixty, perhaps older, small and compact with grey hair plaited back and the stance of someone who had been doing something physical for decades and had stopped needing to think about it. She was sitting at the end of the table when Milos, in a moment of conversational bravado, made the claim — not meanly, just confidently — that he had not lost a fight in two years.
The old woman looked at him.
"Sit," she said.
She put her elbow on the table.
Milos looked at her arm. Looked at her face.
"Yes," she said.
He sat. He put his elbow down. She took his hand.
He discovered, in the next twenty seconds, that she was extraordinarily strong in the specific way of someone who had been doing something with their hands every single day for forty years, strong in the tendons and the angles, and that she also knew something about technique that Milos, whose technique was push very hard, didn't, and that the combination of these things was, for exactly the amount of time it took her to put his hand down, enough.
His hand hit the table.
Silence.
"Two years," she said pleasantly, and went back to her drink.
Milos stared at his hand. Stared at her. Stared at his hand again.
"Teach me that," he said.
"No," she said.
"Please."
"No."
"I'll pay you."
"With what."
"...I have a friend with money."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she put her elbow back on the table.
"Again," she said.
He lost a second time, but slower, and she pointed at what she was doing at the critical moment, and Milos watched with the total focus he brought to things that genuinely interested him.
They spent an hour at the end of the table after that. She talking, demonstrating, him listening and trying. This was possibly the most focused Milos had been at anything that wasn't a battle.
Jens saw it from across the room and noted it with the private satisfaction of someone watching something unexpected turn out to be true.
III. Sam and Tijjani and the Matter of Not Noticing
It started because they sat next to each other.
This was not a deliberate choice. It was an accident of available seating — Sven had his radius, Milos had his fights, Jens had taken a seat at the center of the table where his size was appropriate, Jesper had been immediately identified by several people as someone beautiful and was receiving the attentions that came with this, Yuki was wherever Yuki went. Sam and Tijjani both arrived at the remaining adjacent seats on the bench at the same moment and sat without discussion.
They had been on the same ship for six weeks.
They had not, it turned out, actually talked.
Not properly. Not the way you talked when there was nowhere to go and no task to complete and food in front of you and noise around you that created, paradoxically, a private space. On the ship there was always something to do or some other dynamic happening or the specific proximity of small-quarters living that made real conversation somehow harder than it should be.
Here, Sam poured two cups and handed one to Tijjani without thinking about it, and Tijjani took it without thinking about it, and Sam said something about the Frankish wine being better than expected, and Tijjani agreed and added something about the trade route that supplied it, and Sam knew about the trade route because his family controlled part of it, and Tijjani knew about it from a different angle entirely, and this turned out to be the first thread of a very long unraveling.
They talked about trade routes. Then about Frisia, which they had both come from and had completely different experiences of. Then about the specific problem of being intelligent in a world that frequently didn't know what to do with intelligence — Sam as the son who was given everything and found it insufficient, Tijjani as the man who could read any room and had therefore spent years in rooms that weren't interesting enough. Then about what they were doing on this ship specifically, not the general answer but the real one, the thing underneath the stated reason.
"I wanted to find something I couldn't buy," Sam said.
"What was it."
"I don't know yet."
Tijjani looked at him. "That's honest."
"I'm drunk."
"You've had two cups."
"I'm emotionally drunk."
Tijjani made a sound that was almost a laugh. Sam noted that Tijjani almost never fully laughed — the sound would approach laughter and then stop just short, like something keeping its distance from its own amusement.
"What," Sam said.
"Nothing."
"Why don't you just laugh."
"I do."
"You do the thing where you nearly laugh and then stop."
Tijjani looked at him. "You noticed that."
"I notice things. I'm a merchant. Noticing is my profession."
"..."
"Why."
A pause. Tijjani turned the cup in his hands.
"Old habit," he said. "If you laugh fully, people know what's funny to you. That's information."
"And you don't give away information."
"I try not to."
"And yet," Sam said, "you just told me that."
Tijjani looked at him.
"You're drunk too," Sam said.
"I've also had two cups."
"Emotionally."
Something happened in Tijjani's expression. Something small and real. He looked away and then back.
"Perhaps," he said.
They talked for three more hours.
Nobody interrupted them. Not because the crew was being considerate — they simply kept not noticing that Sam and Tijjani were still there, still talking, the way you didn't notice that the fire was still burning because it had just always been burning and was part of the landscape now.
At one point Milos walked past and glanced at them and walked on without comment.
At another point Sven looked over from his radius, saw them, smiled privately, and returned to his conversation.
Jens noticed and then forgot because other things were happening.
Only Yuki stopped, for just a moment, walking past the bench at some point in the late evening. He looked at Sam and Tijjani, who were leaning toward each other over the table, deep in something that had no space in it for anyone else.
He nodded to himself.
Filed it.
Moved on.
IV. Yuki and the Matter of Being Beloved
Nobody could explain it.
Yuki did nothing, specifically, to become beloved. He did not seek people out. He did not perform charm. He spoke limited Norse and no Frankish and apparently some words of a language that one old trader identified with great excitement as bearing resemblance to things he'd heard from Arab merchants who'd heard them from traders further east, and the two of them had a conversation of about twelve words and enormous mutual satisfaction.
He just moved through the feast in his quiet way and things happened around him.
He sat near a group of men arguing about something and the argument resolved. He walked past a woman who was crying quietly at the edge of the hall for reasons that were unclear and stopped and sat nearby and didn't speak, just sat, and the crying slowed and she looked at him and he met her eyes and she seemed, somehow, seen in a way that helped. He found the best food on the table with unerring accuracy and directed people toward it through the simple method of eating it where they could see him and looking genuinely pleased. He shared everything.
By the middle of the evening there was a loose orbit around Yuki that he had not organized and did not seem to notice. People kept ending up near him. Not talking to him, necessarily. Just near.
"What is he doing," Jens asked Sven, at one point.
Sven watched Yuki. "Being," Sven said.
"Being what."
"Just being. Some people—" Sven thought about it. "Some people make space for other people without meaning to. You know? The room gets bigger when they're in it."
Jens watched Yuki hand a piece of bread to a child who had wandered in from somewhere. The child ate it and sat down next to Yuki and Yuki let the child sit there and the child fell asleep against his arm.
"Does he know they're all—"
"Yes," Sven said.
"And he doesn't—"
"He doesn't mind."
Jens stood there for a moment.
"Do you do that too," he said. "The room thing."
Sven looked surprised. "I just talk to people."
"People are different around you."
"I'm very large. They adjust."
"Sven."
"What?"
"That's not why."
Sven opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at his seventeen friends, spread across the radius, still there, still there, the evening half over and still there.
"I just talk to them," he said again, quietly. But something in his face moved.
Jens clapped him on the shoulder, more gently than usual.
"Yes," Jens said. "You do."
He left Sven to his radius and went to find a drink and accidentally found Jesper instead, which was not what he needed.
V. Jens and the Matter of the Catastrophic Blonde
The problem was the firelight.
That was what Jens told himself later. The firelight was doing something specific to the color of Jesper's hair, turning it from gold to amber to something that was very warm, and Jesper was laughing at something someone across the table had said, a real laugh, not the performance of a laugh, the kind that reached his eyes and stayed there a moment after his mouth had stopped, and Jens was walking past with a drink in his hand and made the catastrophic error of looking.
He looked too long.
This was the problem. If he had looked for the normal amount of time — the glance, the register, the look away — it would have been fine. But he looked for longer than that, the way you looked at something before you knew you were looking at it, the way attention moved before the decision to pay attention arrived, and Jesper in the firelight was—
Jens stopped walking.
Not dramatically. Not visibly, except to anyone watching him, which included Tijjani, who was looking up from his conversation at exactly the wrong moment, and Yuki, who noticed everything, and Sven, who had eyes in all directions while talking because that was how he maintained the radius.
Jesper was — he was warm. Jens couldn't find another word. He spent most of his time performing a certain kind of cold elegance, the careful composure of someone who had learned that being beautiful and untouchable was safer than being beautiful and available, and Jens had gotten used to that, had calibrated to it, had built his irritation around the edges of it.
But right now, drunk on two cups of better wine than anyone had expected and surrounded by people who didn't know his history or his title or the expectations that came with being the prince of anything, Jesper was just — warm. Easy. His shoulders were down. His hands moved when he talked. He was telling a story about something and the people around him were leaning in and he was making them lean in without trying, the way he did everything he was actually good at, effortlessly and infuriatingly and—
He looked up.
Caught Jens looking.
The moment lasted exactly one second. Maybe less. Jens's face did the thing faces did when caught — the micro-adjustment, the reorientation, the attempt to make the looking look like something else — and he looked away and walked on and drank approximately half his cup in one go.
He found a seat on the far side of the fire.
He sat in it.
He did not look at Jesper.
He thought very firmly about Frankia and future raids and whether they needed to resupply rope and all the other things that were his job to think about, none of which were Jesper.
Jesper, across the fire, had also looked away. Had looked back at the person telling him something. Had laughed at the right moment.
His hand, under the table, had gone still.
He was thinking about the way Jens had looked at him, which had been — different. Not the assessing look of someone sizing up a fighter, not the irritated look that was Jens's dominant register where Jesper was concerned. Something else. Something that Jesper, who had a very good read on what looks meant because he'd spent years learning to track them for survival, recognized with a feeling like cold water.
He picked up his cup.
He drank more than he'd been drinking.
This was the beginning of the evening's second problem.
VI. The Escalation
Jesper's relationship with wine was functional until it wasn't, which was true of most people, but Jesper crossed the threshold faster than expected because he had not been eating enough for the quantity he was consuming, having been distracted through the dinner portion of the feast by the conversation around him and the general business of performing ease and not thinking about Jens.
Jens, who was not looking at him.
Except when he thought Jesper wasn't looking.
And Jesper was always looking, he had just stopped making it obvious, and this meant he kept catching Jens in the act, and every time he caught Jens the feeling came back, the cold water feeling, and he responded to the cold water feeling by drinking more wine, which was not a strategy.
He was aware it was not a strategy.
He was doing it anyway.
By the third hour he had crossed from pleasantly relaxed into genuinely unguarded, and by the fourth hour he had arrived at Jesper Karlsson, which was the version of him that existed before the composure was installed, before the exile and the ship and the years of learning to be untouchable, before he had understood that being untouchable was the safest thing to be.
He was funny. He was warm. He put his arm around someone he'd been talking to and made them feel like the most interesting person in the room. He laughed at his own stories before he finished them. He danced, briefly, with a Frankish woman who asked him to, and he was good at it, unselfconsciously good, not performing grace but just having it.
Jens, who was not watching, watched all of this.
He watched Jesper dance with the specific expression of a man losing an argument with himself.
"Jens," said a voice beside him.
He looked. Tijjani, appearing from somewhere, sitting on the bench next to him with the expression of someone who had come for a specific purpose.
"No," Jens said.
"I haven't said anything."
"Whatever you're about to say. No."
"I was going to ask if you wanted more wine."
"...yes," Jens said.
Tijjani refilled his cup. They sat in silence for a moment, watching the feast.
"He's—" Jens started.
"Yes," Tijjani said.
"I wasn't going to—"
"You were about to say something about Jesper. I'm saving us both the journey."
Jens was quiet.
"You know," Tijjani said, in the tone of someone being careful, "there's no law."
"I know."
"Among our people—"
"I know, Tijjani."
"Then the obstacle is—"
"I don't know what it is," Jens said. "That's the obstacle. I don't know what any of it is."
Tijjani looked at him. "You don't know him yet," he said. "Not really. What you know is the surface. The performance."
"I know."
"But—" Tijjani paused, considering. "I think the person under the performance is—"
"Don't."
"Jens—"
"Don't tell me what he is. I'll find out myself or I won't." Jens looked at his cup. "Don't tell me."
Tijjani looked at him for a long moment.
"Okay," he said.
They sat in companionable silence.
"He's annoying," Jens said.
"Extremely."
"He put my axe in a tree."
"Yes."
"He refuses to navigate properly."
"His navigation has gotten us to most of the right places."
"Eventually."
"Yes. Eventually."
"He keeps calling me Dane."
"You are a Dane."
"That's not—" Jens stopped.
"I know," Tijjani said.
Across the room, Jesper sat back down at the table and reached for his cup, missed it, reached again, found it, and drank with the careful deliberateness of someone who had realized somewhat belatedly that they should stop and had therefore decided to finish this cup first and stop after that.
"He's drunk," Jens said.
"Quite drunk, yes."
"Someone should—"
"Yes," Tijjani said.
"I'm going to—"
"I know," Tijjani said, and did not smile, because he was giving Jens the dignity of this, which Jens appreciated even if he wouldn't have said so.
Jens stood up. Crossed the hall. Arrived at the table where Jesper was carefully explaining something to a candle.
"Jesper," Jens said.
Jesper looked up. His eyes took a moment to find Jens and then found him and stayed.
"Dane," Jesper said.
"Time to sleep."
"I'm having a conversation."
"With the candle."
"It's a good listener."
"Jesper."
Jesper looked at him. The composure was completely gone — not replaced by anything dramatic, just gone, like a door left open, the room behind it ordinary and real. He looked at Jens with the direct attention of someone who had temporarily run out of the energy required for management.
"You looked at me," Jesper said.
"What."
"Earlier. Across the fire." He said it simply, not accusing. Just noting. "You looked."
Jens was very still.
"And then you stopped," Jesper said. "You always stop."
"I—"
"It's fine," Jesper said, and it sounded like it wasn't entirely fine, not in a painful way, just in the way of a true thing that hadn't fully settled yet. "I'm just saying. You look and then you stop."
"Jesper—"
"I'm very tired," Jesper said. "I think I would like to sleep."
"Yes," Jens said. "I'll—"
But Jesper was already listing sideways with the specific momentum of a man who has decided the bench is no longer structurally necessary, and Jens caught him, because of course he did, and ended up with Jesper's weight against his side and his arm around Jesper's back, and Jesper apparently decided this arrangement was acceptable because he simply redistributed and let Jens take it.
"You're very large," Jesper said, into Jens's shoulder.
"I know."
"It's annoying."
"You've mentioned."
"I mean that it's—" Jesper paused. "Annoying."
"Right."
"In a—"
"Jesper.
"What."
"Sleep."
Jesper slept. Almost immediately. The trust in it was involuntary — the way people trusted things when they were past the ability to choose, and Jesper's head dropped onto Jens's shoulder and stayed and he was just gone, present and gone at once.
Jens sat with him for a moment.
He thought about what Jesper had said. You look and then you stop.
He thought about looking. About stopping.
He picked Jesper up — properly, fully, because there was nowhere to lay him down where he'd be comfortable and he was not leaving him on the bench — and Jesper was lighter than expected, which shouldn't have surprised him, Jesper was not a large man, but it surprised him anyway and he adjusted his hold and carried him out of the feast hall toward the sleeping quarters they'd been given.
Jesper didn't wake.
His head was against Jens's chest and his breathing was even and he was, in sleep, very young-looking, the sharpness and the composure both gone, just a person who had been tired for a long time and had finally stopped.
"Jens."
He looked up. Sven, in the doorway of the hall, with the gentle eyes of a man who was seeing something clearly.
"Room's to the left," Sven said. "Third door."
"Thank you."
"He'll be fine in the morning."
"I know."
Sven stepped aside. Jens carried Jesper down the corridor and found the third door and managed it without putting him down and laid him on the sleeping platform and covered him with his cloak because there was no blanket immediately available and stood there for a moment in the dark.
Jesper didn't move.
Jens looked at his own hand. At the shape of Jesper in the dark.
He went back to the feast.
He told himself the cold in his hands was from the corridor. He was not convincing.
At the table he had left, Tijjani was waiting with two cups and the expression of someone who had not been watching but had been informed by Sven and was therefore fully briefed.
"Don't," Jens said.
"I wasn't going to say anything," Tijjani said.
"Good."
"I was just going to note—"
"Tijjani."
"—that the room's to the left. Third door."
"I found it."
"Good."
They drank.
Later — much later, after the feast had thinned and the fire had burned down and the noise had softened to the particular quiet of people who were still present but running on ember-energy — Milos came and sat with them, eating something he'd acquired from somewhere. He looked at both of them with the clear-eyed assessment of someone who was less oblivious than he appeared.
"So," Milos said.
"Don't," said Jens.
"I was going to say: good feast."
"Oh."
"Good feast?"
"Yes," Jens said. "Good feast."
"I lost to an old woman."
"I know."
"She was very strong."
"Yes."
"I'm going to find her tomorrow and ask again."
"She said no."
"I'll offer more."
"Milos—"
"Sam has money."
"Don't use Sam's money."
"He won't mind."
"He will absolutely mind."
"I'll explain it's for my development."
"He'll mind more."
Milos considered this. "I'll do it while he's asleep."
Jens put his face in his hands.
"This is," Tijjani said quietly, beside him, "what we signed up for."
"I didn't sign anything," Jens said.
"Metaphorically."
"I just bought a ship."
"And look what the ship came with."
Jens looked up at the dying fire. He thought about Milos losing to an old woman and immediately wanting to go back. He thought about Sam and Tijjani talking all night and neither of them noticing. He thought about Sven and his seventeen friends and the child who'd fallen asleep against Yuki and Jesper in the garden of small ancient people looking lighter after he talked.
He thought about the weight of Jesper carried down a corridor.
"It's a good ship," Jens said.
"Yes," Tijjani agreed.
"Terrible crew."
"Absolutely terrible."
"But a good ship."
"The best ship," Tijjani said, and this time he did laugh, finally, fully, the laugh that had been stopping short all evening, and it was a good laugh, it turned out, warm and real, and Jens heard it and thought: there, that's the one.
Milos looked between them.
"What's funny," Milos said.
"Nothing," Tijjani said.
"You laughed."
"I did."
"What at."
"Us," Tijjani said. "I'm laughing at us."
Milos thought about this and then laughed too, because us was funny when you thought about it, genuinely funny, this specific collection of people in this specific place for reasons that didn't hold up under examination.
The three of them sat by the dying fire and laughed about themselves for a while.
Outside, the sea moved against the dock.
The night was very quiet.
VII. The Morning After, and What Was Said
They gathered by the Bubbly in the morning, one by one.
Milos first, because Milos woke early and was already on the dock when the sun came up, eating bread and looking at the water with a thoughtful expression that was new and that nobody commented on because commenting on new expressions in Milos felt like it might scare them away.
Sven second, Bjarni with him, both looking rested in the way of people who had slept well because their consciences were clear.
Sam third, slightly slower, but intact, carrying the wax tablet because he had things to record and the morning was for recording.
Tijjani fourth, with two cups of something hot that he'd acquired from somewhere, one of which he gave to Sam without comment, and Sam took it without comment, and they stood near each other at the dock.
Jens fifth. Looked at the ship. Looked at the sea. Looked at the state of the rope situation, which he'd been meaning to assess.
Yuki sixth, already there before anyone noticed him arrive, which was standard.
Jesper last, walking down the dock in the late morning sun, looking — fine. Intact. Hair slightly less perfect than usual, which for Jesper was still considerably better than most people's best efforts. He had, evidently, assessed his state and decided it was acceptable and proceeded accordingly.
He walked to the ship. Stepped on board. Felt the movement of it under his feet.
He looked at Jens.
Jens looked at him.
There was the question, in the air between them, of what had been said by the candle. What Jesper remembered and what he remembered accurately and what Jens was going to do about any of it.
"Good morning," Jesper said.
"Morning," Jens said.
A pause.
"Thank you," Jesper said. Quiet. Just that.
"Don't," Jens said.
"I'm just—"
"I know. Don't."
Jesper looked at him for a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, and moved to his place at the prow, and the moment closed behind him like water.
Not gone. Filed. Put somewhere that could be returned to.
They sat on the ship in the morning. All of them. The dock around them was quiet, the feast's aftermath. Someone was cleaning the hall. The smell of last night's fire was still in the air. Bjarni investigated a rope and then gave up.
"We should leave today," Jens said.
"Yes," said Sven.
"We sail for Frisia."
Silence.
"Frisia is home," Sam said. "For some of us."
"Trading port. We sell what we took from England. Resupply. Then decide what comes next."
"And from Frisia?"
"And from Frisia—" Jens stopped. Thought about it. "I don't know yet."
He looked at his crew.
Sam and Tijjani, side by side without appearing to notice. Milos with the bread and the new thoughtful expression. Sven already watching the horizon with the calm of a man ready to go. Yuki, who was always ready, who had probably been ready since before any of them were awake.
Jesper at the prow. Looking at the sea. The light on his hair was amber again, different from the firelight, morning-amber, and Jens looked at it and this time didn't look away, because Jesper wasn't watching, and because Jens had decided, sometime in the corridor the night before, that stopping was getting him nowhere and perhaps he would at least let himself look.
"Tomorrow," Jens said. "We leave tomorrow. Tonight: one more night's sleep. In real beds."
General agreement. Real beds were still a novelty worth honoring.
"And tomorrow," Jesper said, from the prow, not turning around, "we sail for Frisia."
"Yes."
A pause.
"Do you actually know where Frisia is?"
Silence.
The specific silence of seven people simultaneously realizing that they had made plans to go to a place and had not confirmed that anyone on the ship knew with precision where that place was.
"...south," Jens said.
"South and west," Sam said.
"I know the coast," Tijjani said. "Generally."
"Generally," Sam said.
"I've been there."
"From which direction."
"...from land."
"Which helps us not at all."
"I can navigate to it," Jesper said.
Everyone looked at the back of his head.
"Probably," Jesper said.
"JESPER—"
"I'm more confident than last time—"
"That's still not—"
"I've been recalibrating consistently—"
"WE ENDED UP ON A CAT ISLAND—"
"And we're still alive," Jesper said, "which suggests my navigation is adequate."
"ADEQUATE—"
"The cats were friendly—"
"THEY STOLE SAM'S SILVER—"
"They gave it back—"
"JESPER."
"What."
"Can you navigate to Frisia."
A long, considered, deeply unconvincing pause.
"...yes," Jesper said.
"With confidence."
"With my current level of confidence, yes."
"What is your current level."
"Higher than it was at the cat island."
"That means nothing."
"It means something. It means improvement. Growth. A positive trajectory—"
Jens turned to the rest of the crew with the expression of a man building patience from raw materials.
"This is our navigator," Jens said.
"Yes," said the crew.
"We're fine," Jens said.
"Probably," said the crew.
"We might end up somewhere else."
"Again," said Sam.
"Again," Jens agreed.
From the prow, Jesper said: "The sea is large and full of interesting places. This is a feature, not a flaw."
"When we end up on another impossible island," Sam said, "I'm going to remind you you said that."
"Please do. I'll still be right."
Milos finished his bread. Looked at the horizon. Looked at the crew.
"Good," he said, simply.
Everyone looked at him.
"I mean—" He gestured, broadly, at all of them. "This. It's good."
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Because it was, and they all knew it, and saying so felt like it might break something, the specific fragility of things that were real and new and hadn't yet become the kind of solid that could be named without risk.
So nobody named it.
They just sat on the ship in the morning light, all seven of them, on the water, at the edge of everything that was going to happen next.
Bjarni barked at a seagull.
The seagull left.
The crew remained.
"Tomorrow," Jens said.
"Tomorrow," they said.
And below deck, in the dark among the rope coils, three small cats curled in a pile and purred, and waited, and were not going anywhere.
END OF THE PROLOGUE SAGA
The Bubbly Viking Crew sails on. The world is beginning to learn their names. They are heading for Frisia. Probably.