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John's sketch of Sefawynn from the saddle stops the ride. She calls Ealstan back; he takes the page, looks at it, looks at her, and whispers that the likeness is uncanny. It is not, by John's standards, any kind of impressive — ballpoint on the margin of a guidebook — but to a culture whose visual art has run to interlace, knotwork, and stylised pottery for centuries, post-Renaissance perspective and shading is functionally magic. They stop at a hollow by the road for food and a short rest.

Ealstan asks if he can watch John draw, and John obliges with a portrait of him — quietly engaging his hand-stabiliser augments for a little extra polish. As Ealstan whispers that the skill is otherworldly, another piece of John's past returns: he was an art-school washout. Three years in, convinced he could never rival the other students, he had decided he was an imposter and quit. He somehow used the art afterward, in the academy, though that bridge is still missing. The recovered shame surprises him — he had thought of himself as a cop, full stop.

Sefawynn, meanwhile, has set a small ceramic dish on the ground with three berries on it and three leather straps beside it. She announces it is a test and walks off to wash up. Ealstan, who knows what she's doing, drops the topic. He unhooks his axe, fishes out a whetstone, and asks John whether the two men they're chasing can be killed by ordinary weapons. John gives him the working answer: their skin resists cuts and piercing, but a wielder willing to keep hitting can eventually overload the protection — and no, the eyes won't help. Ealstan asks about bows. John says guns are worse, the same problem with no chance to engage. He starts to outline biometric trigger-locks before Ealstan, considering and then visibly putting the thought away, apologises for contemplating *stealing a dweorgar weapon*.

The conversation drifts. Wellbury is one day off, Maelport another; an earldom that is only some five days' walk end to end, ruled by Earl Alwin over ten villages and two reeves. There is no king. *Bretwalda* is a Waelish thing, the Bear's institution; the Weswarans, by Ealstan's account, don't have one — though Alwin has lately begun to talk about becoming one. John, fishing further, gets Ealstan's sense of his own life: a thegn is an honour, the caretaker of land and lord. At forty-two he is feeling his strength go, with raiders pressing the coast, the Bear's beasts harrying the border, and an earl too distracted to defend the outer villages. The last raid took six of his people. Both his sons died in it. He believes he could have saved two of them if he had still been the man he was. The dead Oswald, John learns when he asks, was Ealstan's brother's son — and when John registers that as a close relation, Ealstan answers that *everyone* in the village is a close relation; his family has worked those lands since the crossing. John, who had been picturing a feudal lord losing a servant, has to recalibrate.

They circle the question of justice. Ealstan does not know the word *prison*. The guilty are killed; the innocent are freed; minor crimes earn a lashing; people are held in a pit only until judged. Locking a man away for years strikes him, kindly, as crueller than the killing. John has no clean answer.

Sefawynn comes back with wet hair and a fresh dress — she had, by *wash up*, meant a bath in the sea John can now hear under his augmented hearing — and holds up the leather straps, now neatly braided. The berries are gone. She declares the result a cofold: a landswight bound to an individual rather than a place. Since it performed the task she set it, his wyrd is for the moment good. She will keep watching.

Before John can ask what the ritual actually was, his augmented hearing catches three long low notes from the north. Horns. Ealstan asks to see; Sefawynn relents. Minutes later, the three of them are belly-down at a cliff edge above the surf, looking forty feet down at three Viking longships rowing parallel to the coast — and at Ealstan's face, gone white, telling them what those ships mean.