Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 20: Three Drafts
He wrote the trade proposal in March.
Not the letter — that had gone in autumn, the framing letter, the opening of the conversation. This was the detailed proposal: the specific terms of the trade agreement, the access and the silver and the protection of the monastery routes, the reciprocal obligations, the schedule of exchange. This was the document that would be put before Ciarán Ó’Briain and his council and debated and amended and eventually, Leif hoped, signed.
He wrote it three times.
The first draft was correct in all the technical details and wrong in the thing he could not name for two days and then named: it was written from the position of a man who expected to be negotiating with a chieftain he had wronged, and that expectation showed in the terms — too generous, too accommodating, the document of a man paying a debt. That was not the agreement he wanted and it was not the agreement that would last, because agreements built on guilt were agreements that shifted with the guilt.
He wrote the second draft.
The second draft was better — balanced, genuinely mutual, the terms of two parties who saw the same opportunity from different angles and were meeting in the middle. But when he read it back he found that there was a gap in it, a section on the role of the trade mediator — the person who would carry negotiations between settlements, who understood both sides — that he had left deliberately vague, and the vagueness was a specific kind.
He had left it vague because filling it in required naming her.
She had said she wanted to come back. She had said it on the dock in February with the careful precision she brought to things she meant, and she had said she did not know if want would become action, and he had heard both parts of that. The proposal could not be built around a decision she hadn’t made yet. But a proposal without that section was a proposal with a hole in it, and a proposal with a hole in it was not something he wanted to send to a chieftain who would read it carefully.
He wrote the third draft.
The third draft had the mediator section filled in generically — *a representative of the Ó’Briain family, with established knowledge of Norse trade practice and settlement procedures* — which was accurate and specific without naming her and which left the door open in both directions.
He read it back.
He thought about what he was hoping for.
He had been trying not to think about this with the deliberate effort of someone who had decided that the thinking was not useful. She had said: come and ask me when I am home. He had said: I will. Both of those things were true and he was going to honour them and that required, for the present, not trying to calculate outcomes he could not calculate.
He was not succeeding at not calculating.
He wrote what he knew. He had known her for six months — the length of a winter, which was longer than it sounded when the days were short and the hall was the world. He had known her in the way you knew someone when the situation stripped away every layer of social performance and left only the thing underneath, and the thing underneath was extraordinary and he was not using that word loosely.
He thought about the herbs. She had given him a list, eventually — twenty-three plants found in the settlement’s stores or the surrounding hillsides, with their Irish names and their properties and the cases in which they were useful, written in the precise, slightly formal Latin she used for things she considered important. He had read it three times and then given it to Gunnar and watched Gunnar read it and then look at the longhouse where she slept with the expression of a man revising an assessment.
He thought about the map. The corrected map, still on the wall, with its small charcoal marks. He looked at it every morning. He was not certain what the looking meant but he had stopped trying to make it mean nothing.
He thought about the palisade and stopped, because thinking about the palisade was not compatible with writing proposals.
He sealed the third draft.
He put it on the table to be ready for the first ship south when the sea opened in April.
He sat in the great hall with the sealed proposal in front of him and the fire going and the settlement at its late-winter rhythms outside, and he thought about April.
April. The sea. Her on a ship heading south, standing at the stern the way she had stood at the prow when they arrived, watching until there was nothing to watch.
He thought about her father’s hall. About her walking back into it. He had been building a picture of it from everything she had told him — the great hall, her father’s maps, the coast in the west with its particular light that was soft in a way the Norse light was not. He had been building it because knowing what you were sending someone back to was better than not knowing. He had not examined whether this was a strategic instinct or something else.
He looked at the sealed proposal.
He was not, he recognised, certain what answer he was hoping for.
He was certain what answer he was hoping for. He was not certain he was permitted to hope for it.
She was going home in five weeks. She was going to stand on her father’s coast with the sea between them and the full weight of what had happened and what it had cost and what it had built, and she was going to ask herself the question, and she was going to answer it, and whatever she answered was what he was going to live with.
He had meant it on the palisade: *if the answer is no, the trade agreement stands, and that is enough.*
He had also meant: *I don’t believe that. But I would mean it.*
Both were true. Both were him.
He went to find Bjorn and told him the proposal was ready and to begin preparations for the spring voyage.
Bjorn looked at him. “She’ll be on the ship.”
“Yes.”
“You’re sailing her home.”
“She goes with the Ó’Briain escort from the Orkneys,” Leif said. “We’ll meet them at the island crossing. Her father arranged it through the monks — she knows.” He paused. “I’ll sail as far as the Orkneys.”
Bjorn looked at him for a moment. “And then?”
“And then I wait.”
Bjorn was quiet. “How long?”
Leif thought about the sealed proposal on the table. About a woman who had said *I want to come back* and also *I don’t know*.
“As long as it takes,” he said.
Bjorn said nothing.
He went back to his preparations. Leif went back to the great hall and sat with the sealed proposal and the map and the fire, and outside the winter was beginning, barely, at the very edges of its reach, to shift.
March. Five weeks.
He thought: whatever answer she gives, it is hers.
He thought: I would still give the same answer.
He thought about the stars and the same Polaris and the sea that was not the obstacle they had thought it was, and he thought: ask me again when you are home.
He thought: I will ask.
I will ask.
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