Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~8 min read
Chapter 11: The Most Interesting Conversation
He began speaking with her properly on a Tuesday, which was not a day she had assigned particular significance to, and which became significant afterward only because she kept returning to it when she was trying to identify when things had shifted.
He found her at the dock, which was where she often was in the mornings. She had developed a habit of walking the settlement’s perimeter before the work of the day began — she told herself it was reconnaissance, and it was, but it had also become the thing that settled her mind in the way that walking had always settled her mind, back in Ireland, back when the perimeter she was walking was her father’s land and she had known every stone of it.
He appeared beside her without announcement. This was a habit of his — not sneaking, he was not a man who sneaked, but he moved quietly and with purpose and did not consider it necessary to make noise when he arrived, which she had eventually stopped finding startling and started filing as simply how he was.
“Your father’s alliances,” he said, in Norse. “The southern ones. What do they gain from the Irish coastal trade that they couldn’t get from the English coast instead?”
She looked at him. “Good morning to you too.”
Something moved in his face. Not quite the laugh — more the shadow it left behind, the shape of where a smile would be if he had decided to produce one. “Good morning,” he said. “Now. The alliances.”
She looked at the fjord. She thought about what to give him and what to keep, the calculation she ran every time, and then she thought about the letter and what she had written in it and how she had written it: the full argument, the real one, because a partial argument would not make her father listen and she needed her father to listen.
She was going to have to decide at some point whether she trusted this man’s stated intentions enough to act as though she did. She had been making that decision in increments for a month.
“The southern clans want access to the monastery routes,” she said. “They’re not interested in trade for its own sake — they want the manuscripts, the learning, the connections to Rome that the monks carry. The Irish coast is the gateway to all of that.” She paused. “The English coast is closer to France but further from the holy places of Ireland, which is what the southern clans care about. My father’s alliances hold because my father has kept the monastery access open and kept it safe.”
He was listening in the way he listened — fully, without the divided attention of someone formulating a response while the speaker was still talking. She had noticed this about him: he heard the thing before he considered the thing.
“The raid hit the fishing fleet,” he said. “Not the monasteries.”
“You knew better than to hit the monasteries,” she said. “If you had hit the monasteries you would not be negotiating with my father. You would be dealing with every clan on the western coast simultaneously.”
“Yes.” He paused. “Is that what your letter said?”
“My letter said that the Norsemen who understand what the Irish coast is built on are the Norsemen worth speaking to.” She looked at him. “It is also the truth.”
He held her gaze. “I notice you make no distinction between what is true and what is useful.”
“I find them easier to work with together.” She turned back to the fjord. “What do you want from the trade routes specifically? Not the general version. The specific one.”
He was quiet for a moment — the pause of someone deciding how much to give. She recognised it because it was the same pause she had been making.
“Silver,” he said. “My people are good raiders and good traders. Raiding has diminishing returns — you take, the people you took from become enemies, you have to defend against enemies, the cost of defense eats the silver you raided. Trading is cleaner. The western routes give us access to silver that comes up from the south and east through Ireland — Arabic silver, Byzantine, some of it older than the current trade. Your coast is a collection point.” He paused. “I need the collection point more than I need the coast itself.”
She turned to look at him. He was watching the fjord.
“That’s more than you needed to tell me,” she said.
“You told me about the manuscripts.”
“I told you something I knew you’d find out eventually.”
“So did I,” he said simply.
She looked at him and she thought: this is the most honest conversation I have had with someone outside my family in years. She thought it with the slight, specific panic of someone who recognised the size of what they were saying and was not ready for it.
She thought: be careful.
She said: “My father’s name for the Arabic silver is the eastern fire. He has a saying — a settlement without the eastern fire is a settlement making do.”
“What does he call Norse silver?”
“He calls it raided and bloodied and we don’t want it in our houses.” She said it plainly, watching for the reaction.
He absorbed it. No defensiveness, no offense — he turned it over the way he turned everything over, as information.
“Accurate,” he said, after a moment.
She stared at him. “You’re agreeing with him.”
“The raid was a message, not a raid,” he said. “I know the difference. He knows the difference. The question is whether we can build a framework where the messages stop being necessary.” He paused. “That is what your section of the letter argues.”
“Yes.”
“You wrote it as though you meant it.”
She held his gaze. “I did mean it.”
The silence between them was different from earlier silences — not the silence of two people negotiating territory but the silence of two people who had said several true things in quick succession and were sitting with the particular weight of it.
She looked at the fjord and thought about her father’s hall and the silence there that she knew, that had its own weight and texture after twenty-one years. She thought about how long it would take the letter to reach him and how he would read it and what his face would look like when he got to her section.
She thought about a man standing at the prow of a ship in the dark, all the way from Ireland, watching the sea.
She thought: stop.
She said: “The silver from the Byzantine routes comes through two main points on the Irish coast. My father controls one of them. Seán Ó’Murchú controls the other.” She paused. “He will be more resistant than my father. His history with Norse ships is worse.”
Leif looked at her. “Why are you telling me this?”
She thought about it. The true answer was somewhere in the vicinity of *because it feels like wasting a good mind not to*, which was not a useful answer. The strategic answer was *because a better trade agreement protects Ireland better.* Both were true. She offered the strategic one.
“Because a better agreement serves my people,” she said. “That is the only reason I am involved in any of this.”
He looked at her for a moment. “Yes,” he said. Not arguing, not agreeing — just acknowledging that she had said something he heard.
She went back to the weaving hall. She spent the rest of the morning with the loom and the Norse going on around her and Sigrid’s occasional flat assessments of her thread tension, and she thought about Byzantine silver and the monastery routes and the conversation she had just had, which had been, she was reluctant to admit even to herself, the most interesting conversation she had had in months.
She had been intellectually alone for a long time.
She had not known how much she’d noticed until she stopped noticing.
She thought: be careful of this. Be careful of this specifically.
She thought: I know. I know.
She wove, and the day went on, and she was very careful.
She was not careful enough. She was already too far in to be careful enough, and she did not yet know it.
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