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water, so he had leeway. He had hands and face beaten by weather, but his eyes were clear and there was at least a horn-spoon of intellect behind them, even if his nose was crooked from fights and his body a barrel which had been scoured by wind and wave.
    ‘Not Halk’s fault,’ he growled at Hoskuld. ‘Should have stayed in Dyfflin for long enough to fetch such supplies as spare leather, but you would sail. Should have stayed in Sand Vik longer than to pick up this poor dog of a steersman, but you sailed even faster from there.’
    ‘Enough!’ roared Hoskuld, his face turning white, then red. ‘This is not fixing matters.’
    He broke off, glanced at the thin line of land and wiped his mouth with the back of one hand.
    ‘This is the Frisian coast,’ he muttered darkly. ‘No place to be wallowing, dangled like a fat cod for sharks.’
    ‘Leather,’ Onund grunted.
    ‘None,’ Gorm replied, almost triumphant. ‘Some bast line, which will have to do.’
    ‘Aye, for you never stayed long enough in Dyfflin or Sand Vik,’ Crowbone noted and everyone heard how his voice had become steeled.
    ‘Save for picking up a steersman,’ he added, nodding towards Halk, who stared from Hoskuld to Crowbone and back, his mouth gawped like a coal-eater.
    Folk left off what they were doing then, for a chill had sluiced in like mist, centred on Crowbone and the lip-licking Hoskuld.
    Crowbone knew now where the steersman had his lilting Norse from. From Orkney, where Hoskuld had gone from Dyfflin and before that from Mann. Mann to Dyfflin to Orkney.
    ‘You know who this Svein Kolbeinsson is,’ Crowbone said, weaving the tale as he spoke and knowing the warp and weft were true by the look in Hoskuld’s eyes.
    ‘How many others have you told?’ Crowbone went on. Hoskuld spread his arms and tried to speak.
    ‘I …’ began Hoskuld.
    Crowbone drew the short-handled axe out of the belt-ring at his waist and Hoskuld’s crew shifted uneasily; one made a whimpering sound. Hoskuld seemed to tip sideways and sag a little, like an emptying waterskin. The crew and the Oathsworn watched, slipping subtly apart.
    ‘You know from Orm what I can do with this,’ Crowbone said, raising the axe, and Hoskuld blinked and nodded and then rubbed the middle of his forehead, as if it itched.
    ‘Only because you have friendship with Jarl Orm is it still on the outside of your skull,’ Crowbone went on, in a quiet and reasonable voice, so that those who heard it shivered.
    ‘Svein Kolbeinsson,’ Hoskuld gasped. ‘Konungslykill, they called him. I was younger than yourself by a few years when I met him, on my first trip to Jorvik with my father.’
    Crowbone stopped and frowned. Konungslykill – The King’s Key – was the name given to only one man, the one who carried King Eirik’s
blot
axe. Such sacrifice axes were all called Odin’s Daughter, but only one truly merited the name – Eirik’s axe, the black-shafted mark of the Yngling right to rule.
    Carried by a Chosen Man called the King’s Key, the pair of them represented Eirik’s power to open all chests and doors in his realm, by force if necessary. It gave Eirik his feared name, too – Bloodaxe. Crowbone blinked, the thoughts racing in him like waves breaking on rocks.
    ‘This ship it was,’ Hoskuld said wistfully. ‘The year before Eirik was thrown out of Jorvik and died in an ambush set by Osulf, who went on to rule all Northumbria.’
    What was that – twenty-five years ago and more? Crowbone looked at Hoskuld and while the gulls in his head screeched and whirled their messages and ideas, his face stayed grim and secret as a hidden skerry.
    ‘Svein Kolbeinsson was taken at the place where Eirik of Jorvik died, but after some time he escaped thralldom and fled to Mann. It seems he turned his back on Asgard since the gods turned their backs on him, so he became a monk of the Christ in the hills of Mann around Holmtun, in the north of the island. He died recently, but before