Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~8 min read
Chapter 16: What Bjorn Says
The argument happened on a Sunday, in the forge, where Leif went in the depths of winter when he needed to think with his hands.
He had been doing metalwork since he was old enough to hold a hammer — his foster-father in the fjord settlement north of Bergen had been a smith, a man of deliberate and uncomplicated goodness who had looked at a ten-year-old with bad habits and decided the forge was better than whatever else the boy would do with the energy. He was not a master smith, not Gunnar’s equal, but he was competent, and the forge in winter was warm and loud and demanded a specific kind of attention that left no room for the other kind.
Bjorn appeared in the forge doorway and stood there until Leif looked up.
“She helped birth Astrid’s boy,” Bjorn said.
“I know.”
“Ingrid rates her.” He said it with the tone of someone reporting something that surprised him.
“Ingrid rates what she earns,” Leif said. “She earned it.”
“Yes.” Bjorn came inside. He sat on the bench along the wall, in the heat of the forge, which he did when he intended to stay until the thing was said.
Leif kept working.
“She’s part of the settlement,” Bjorn said.
“She lives here,” Leif said. “For now.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Bjorn crossed his arms. “She is part of it. Sigrid talks to her as a peer. The women come to her when they have a question she can answer. The dock-men stopped watching her sideways six weeks ago. She is part of the settlement.”
Leif set down the hammer. He looked at the piece he had been working, which was a hinge for the great hall’s secondary door, and was done to the extent he was going to make it tonight.
“Say what you came to say,” he said.
“She is going to leave in spring.” Bjorn held his gaze. “You know this. She is going home. You cannot keep her here, and you have not tried to. You are going to send her back to her father.”
“Yes.”
“But you have not sent her back yet. You have had two months to find a way to send her home before the sea closed. The Bergen route, the Orkney trader, the supply run to Britain. There were options. You did not take them.”
Leif was quiet.
“And now the sea is closed and she is here for winter and she is part of this place.” Bjorn looked at him steadily. “And you are going to have to send her away in spring, which is going to be a different problem than sending her away in autumn would have been.”
“I know.”
“Do you.” Bjorn leaned forward. “Because I have been watching you for three months, Leif. I have been watching you not-watch her across the great hall, and I have been watching you have conversations on the dock that go twice as long as any conversation needs to be, and I watched you correct the map with her in the great hall like the two of you were writing it together, and I watched your face at the solstice feast when she laughed.” He paused. “I have known you for fifteen years. You are not difficult to read when you are not being careful.”
Leif looked at the forge.
“Say it plainly,” he said.
“She is a chieftain’s daughter from Ireland who was taken from her home against her will and who is here because you made a decision on a dark path that was tactical and has become something else.” Bjorn said it with the directness of a friend rather than the tact of a subordinate. “She is going home in spring. And you have feelings you are not doing anything about, which means you are also not doing anything about the problem, which means you are going to sit here and let it get worse until the spring comes and takes her and then you are going to stand on the dock and watch her sail away and come back to an empty great hall that smells like her and that is it.”
The forge was very loud.
Leif said nothing for a long time.
“What would you have me do,” he said finally. It was not quite a question.
“I would have you decide.” Bjorn stood up. “Either send her home — the land route, it’s slow, it’s expensive, it’s possible, she goes home before winter locks in further — or keep her and tell her why and see what she says.” He paused. “Those are the two options. What you are currently doing is a third option which is not a decision and will end worse than either of the actual ones.”
“She wants to go home.”
“I know she does.” Bjorn looked at him. “I also know that she sits in the great hall at night and talks to you for hours and then goes back to the longhouse and does not look like a woman who is entirely certain about what she wants.”
Leif looked at the hinge on the worktable.
“She was taken from her home,” he said. “Against her will.”
“Yes.”
“Whatever she might — ” he stopped. “Whatever it looks like. Whatever I might — ” he stopped again. He was not a man who left sentences unfinished and he had left two in succession, which was its own statement. “She is here because I took her. Everything after that is coloured by that. I can’t — ” He looked at Bjorn. “I can’t make a claim on anything she offers when she is here because of what I did.”
Bjorn was quiet for a moment. “Does she seem to you like a woman who offers things under duress?”
Leif thought about the map. The conversations. *You have a good laugh.* The way she had looked at him at the solstice feast, held his gaze, chosen not to look away.
“No,” he said.
“No,” Bjorn agreed. “She does not.” He moved toward the door. “The problem is yours to resolve. I am only telling you what I see.” He stopped in the doorway. “I also see a woman who is building herself a life here in the spaces between planning to leave. That is not nothing. Decide what to do with it.”
He left.
Leif stood in the forge and listened to the fire and the hammer-sounds that were not his, that were Gunnar’s apprentice at the far end doing something with an iron bracket, and he thought about everything Bjorn had said with the careful precision he brought to things he needed to see accurately.
He thought about the land route. Slow, dangerous in winter, expensive. He could arrange it. It was possible.
He thought about her at the dock in the autumn watching the last ship south and what her face had been doing.
He thought about *stop wasting the winter.*
He thought about a woman who had been taken from her home against her will and who had turned that abduction into a language learned and a map corrected and a birth safely managed and the most honest conversations he had had with another person in years, possibly ever, because he had never before met someone who operated at the same register he did — not louder, not softer, just level, eye to eye, saying the true thing.
He thought about spring.
He thought: what you are not doing is not neutral. Inaction is also a choice and it has consequences like any other.
He picked up the hammer. He put it down.
He went to the great hall and he sat at his end of the table and he did not know, for the first time in a long time, what the right decision was.
He sat with that.
He thought: you have sat with harder things.
He thought: you have not. Not like this.
Outside the forge Bjorn walked back to his longhouse and thought about fifteen years of knowing a man and what it meant to watch him run his own calculations and trust that he would eventually arrive at the right answer.
He thought: arrive soon. The winter is not indefinite.
He thought: she is not indefinite.
He went home to his wife and said nothing about any of it, and across the settlement the great hall stood dark and cold under the midwinter stars, and inside it the fire had burned low but not out, and the hinge waited on the worktable, and the map was on the wall with its small charcoal corrections, and everything was still, and waiting, and deciding.
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