POV: john-west
Summary
John walks onto the Hordaman beach with Sefawynn and Ealstan in tow as though he expects them to bow — which gets the Hordamen, who customarily expect screaming, off-balance enough that no-one swings yet. He spouts gibberish in his best mystical-language register — *Alakazam BIOS discography Philadelphia* — and Sefawynn, cringing, "translates" the demand: the great aelv requires to know their intentions for his lands. A runner is sent for the three ship captains.
The captains arrive — the lead one in a chainmail shirt and red trousers, the other two flanking. Sefawynn's coaching is bearing out: John's clean-shaven face, modern build, unarmed posture, and the way he stands all add up to *not a man we recognise*. The lead captain, with an *álfr?* in thickly accented English, tests him. John answers with more nonsense. He hits the rhythm of an aelv prince getting bored with mortals: tell your men to turn around; you have my permission to leave. The captain, smiling, doesn't move. He has met aelvs, he says; *you are no álfr.*
John shifts. He pulls one of the portraits from inside his cloak and offers it: he has taken the captain's soul. The skald — *Careful, lord, he has a strange wyrd; a landswight follows him by its own choice* — flinches back when she sees the drawing. The lesser two captains and their skalds confer, decide the risk is real, accept their portraits as captive souls in return for leaving, and march their men back to their ships. The lead captain — the one who has actually met aelvs and isn't sure — stays.
He has been south, he says. He has seen men in those countries make drawings on parchment to tell stories. Up close, the picture looks like madder root, not blood. A man who can do this is valuable. As a slave. John feels his hand slipping on the bluff. He activates his skin-camouflage layer and lets his arms run a slow, deliberate crimson up from the elbows. He layers a reverb over a vocal mod set to the captain's own voice and speaks at him: *do not test my patience.* The captain scrambles back. Even Sefawynn, who knew about the colour trick, looks surprised. John names himself — *Runian Von-Internet of Cascadia, aelv prince and keeper of souls* — and claims the captain and every one of his soldiers. The captain has to bend; if his men flee, his raid is finished.
*Fine, álfr*, the captain says. John presses his luck and demands the captive being held in the third boat. The captain refuses to give him up, but agrees not to fight: come take him, then, if you must. *But you will leave my image in his place.* John recognises the test for what it is. The Weswarans believe aelvs cannot cross water; he is being dared.
He goes anyway. He climbs the gangplank, pauses on the deck of an actual Viking ship and lets himself be impressed for a heartbeat — *historians would have killed to stand here* — then makes a small show of being affected by the water and forces a laugh he doesn't feel. The captive turns out to be a man with olive skin, a curly black beard, and white robes — emphatically not local, the first non-Weswaran John has seen here. He starts toward him. The captain swings the axe.
John's body, instead of countering, *cringes*. Some buried memory of shouting and concussive light flares behind his eyes. Shame floods him. He raises his hands not as a fighter but as a frightened art student, and his back hits the mast as the captain's swing tracks toward his head. The axe head separates from its handle in mid-air, vanishes over the side, and the handle misses him by inches. John, the captain, and Ealstan all stare. The captain recovers first and reaches for a sword. He has been convinced now — too convinced. He shouts that the Dökkálfar will pay well for an aelv prince's corpse, and stepping onto water has weakened John past the point that mortal blades cannot reach him.
Sefawynn, improvising, shouts in alarm — *flee, master, before they bind you with boasts* — which slots the captain into a new plan: capture rather than kill. He gestures his skald forward, and she steps up to deliver the binding in tight alliterative verse. *Word-weaver I am, on waves wandering, the dread one's daughter, daunter of the dead*. John flinches as if struck. *Struck-straight, strength strays.* He sags against the mast. *Victorious vision I vow through this verse.* He grits his teeth and then stands up, stretches, and asks her, *is that your best, skald?* On the third stanza he flicks the verse aside with one hand and reasserts his title; she stumbles back.
Ealstan, meanwhile, has been fighting three Hordamen close-in. He leaves one bleeding against the gunwale and forces the others back. John, Sefawynn, and Ealstan converge near the captive; the captain and his soldiers gather forward. John asks Sefawynn if she still has the ink. She does, but holds it away from him — *don't write, you will draw Woden's anger.* *Would you rather be dead?* *Yes.* He takes it anyway and waves her and Ealstan and the captive toward the side. He smashes the bowl onto the deck and smears the ink into one of the runes he saw on Stenford's stone — the one shaped like an F. The Hordamen recoil from the shape as if from a rabid animal.
He stands. *You will leave, and you will not return to these lands.*
Thunder cracks from a clear sky and the rune ignites — the ink itself catches fire on the deck. John stares. The handle of the captain's axe. The vanishing offerings at the roadside. The everything. His ability to disbelieve in this dimension is, as of right now, gone. The Hordaman captain, equally stunned, vows to leave — and adds, with a hardening face, that they will not return until they have strength enough to defeat John, *for the gods will stand by us after what you have done here*. John has no answer. He runs for the gunwale, hauls himself over with his hand augments, and jumps into water he very much hopes is not too deep.