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John follows a tipsy Wealdsig and his hearthmen out the manor's front door into the torchlit courtyard. The scene at the wall is bad. Ealstan stands axe out in front of Sefawynn and Wyrm, a knot of soldiers pressing him back; archers are setting up across the yard. There is no sign of Thokk. John pleads with the reeve to call them off. Wealdsig cheerfully orders an arrow loosed instead — *let's see how they fight, coward* — and an arrow goes clean through Ealstan's gut, then two more behind it.

Something in John tears at the sight. Ealstan had believed in him: the only person in any dimension to take *Runian* at face value. The man bleeding on the dirt does not know who John actually is — but he looks across the courtyard and meets his eyes and smiles. John drops the staff and runs and tackles the nearest soldier. Above him, fist drawn back to swing, he freezes again — the same paralysis that took him in front of the Hordamen — and through it comes one last memory, the one he has been working hardest not to look at.

The title bout against Quinn in the EFL had been a dive Ulric ordered. To make the fall look honest, Ulric had also ordered John's chest and skull platings compromised first — without telling him — so when Quinn put him on the mat there was nothing to keep his ribs together. The years since have been spent trying to unlock those platings while their owner laughs at him over the password. John has carried that humiliation like luggage. He is, he decides, done carrying it.

He gets up. An axe swings; he turns his forearm steel-grey and blocks it, then puts the soldier ten feet through the air with one full-augment punch. Six years of EFL training, bladed-weapons variant, takes over. He shatters one sword on his other fist, breaks a man's hand, breaks a third man's arm; the rest of the soldiers retreat shouting that the outlander is one of *them*. But across the yard the archers are nocked. He thunders at them to put their weapons down. They look to Wealdsig for orders. The reeve, who is enjoying every second of this, calls back that *Ulric* said the outlander was a coward.

John tries to bring his other platings online; the password screen mocks him. The brief sureness drains out. He looks at Ealstan gasping bloody on the ground and his arms come down. He slumps and offers himself — *take me, let my friends go*. Wealdsig looks at the body and tells him Ealstan is already dead. And then a voice he has heard once before — burned across the Hordaman sail — speaks in his ear: *is this the best you can do? I thought you were worth the trouble.*

He looks at the wounds again. He is useless; his medical nanites are not. He yanks the arrows out, deactivates the plating on his palm, opens a cut with Ealstan's own knife, presses bloody palm to bloody gut, and triggers the system's emergency person-to-person transfer. About ninety percent of his nanite supply migrates through the contact — sutures, scrubs, rebuilds tissue — at the cost of forty-eight hours of dropped immunities on his side. Ealstan groans without anaesthetic as cells weave themselves out of dissolving nanites; the wounds scab over; he sits up and pokes at the holes in his shirt where his guts had been.

Wealdsig is staring slack-jawed. *You can heal?* John, on instinct, lies that he heals where his fellow outlanders kill. To prove it, he offers to mend a cut — and Wealdsig eagerly slices his own palm. John transfers what he can, taking his reserve down to the five-percent floor the system refuses to cross. The reeve flexes his hand and finds something he was not expecting: the fingers of the hand he once nailed to a tree for Woden bend again. The nanites are quietly fixing the old wound along with the new.

Wealdsig's face changes. He had seen Ulric's thunder-and-lightning trick; he had watched men blown apart at the boss's whim. His people are not impressed by killing — they get killed at home. They are impressed by *living*. John asks how many sons he has lost. Seven, the reeve whispers. All seven of my boys. Ealstan climbs to his feet and says he is shockingly fit. Wealdsig says, mildly, that he is lonely.

Sefawynn approaches John then and abases herself in the dirt — *forgive me, Great One* — the very reaction the handbook told him to provoke, and the one he wants least in the world from her. He doesn't know how to answer. Wealdsig does the political math out loud: if I let you go, the other outlanders will kill me. John offers a deal — let us go and I will go kill them, and you have the man who can keep your people alive as your ally. Wealdsig takes it. The condition is one good punch to the face, hard enough to bruise, so the reeve has a story for Ulric and Quinn when they return. John has been wanting to do exactly that all night, and obliges. He shepherds his companions toward the front gates. *They told me you were harmless*, Wealdsig calls after him. *Do they know what you can actually do?* No, says John, and keeps walking.

The chapter ends Part Two.