They all stared at the strange man, uncertain what to do, what to say. Who was this? What did he want? Who was his son? They glanced at each other uncertainly, the silence punctuated by the crash of thunder.

  “Well?” the man demanded, looking around at them. “Where are you, Skíei?”

  The others turned to stare at Skíei. He barely noticed. He was too busy staring at the strange man. His father? What?

  “There you are, boy!” The man surged forward, onto the deck of the ship, jostling them all once again. “Skíei! Come give your father a hug!”

  Skíei didn’t move. “I’m sorry, but who are you?” he asked.

  “Tórr,” Svanbj?rn supplied. “Am I correct?”

  “You are correct,” Tórr boomed. “Now, come here, Skíei! Let me get a look at you!”

  Skíei still did not move but looked to Svanbj?rn and Yrsa. “Did you know?”

  “No,” said Yrsa.

  “I did not,” confirmed Svanbj?rn. “But Tórr is no trickster, and you have the look of him.”

  Skíei, unsure whether to be relieved or disappointed. “Well. That is alright then.” He walked over to Tórr.

  Tórr looked him up and down. “Skinny,” he pronounced. “You’re built like your grandfather.”

  “The Allfather?” Skíei asked uncertainly.

  Tórr threw his head back and laughed. “óeinn?” he asked, still chucking. “No, but your grandfather Evander.” At Skíei’s blank look, he added, “Magdalena’s father.”

  “My mother’s father…”

  “Yes, he was…? He is…?” he trailed of and turned to Ajax. “Is your father still alive?”

  Ajax glared at Tórr, which the god did not seem to notice. “He was when last I saw him fifteen years ago.”

  “Is, then,” Tórr said decisively. “Your grandfather is slightly built.”

  Skíei was now staring at Ajax. “You’re my uncle? When were you going to tell me?” he demanded hotly.

  “I wasn’t!” Ajax bit back. “If I had known my sister had whored herself to a Norse god, I would never have looked in on you at all!”

  “Whore?!” Tórr demanded. “Magdalena did not whore herself to me!”

  “Then what do you call it? Ajax demanded. “For my father did not consent for you to marry her, and there certainly was not a wedding!”

  Tórr reddened. “Never mind what it is called. I don’t expect someone like you to understand what happens between a god and his devotee. And I am not here to talk to you. I am here to talk to my son.”

  “Who is stopping you?” Ajax waved a hand. “Talk to the boy if you want to.”

  Tórr growled but turned back to Skíei.

  “Am I really,” Skíei asked, “your son?”

  “Of course!”

  Skíei carefully considered this and the implications brought by it. If Tórr was his father, that meant… “I’m a demi-god?” he hazarded.

  Tórr nodded. “Indeed! The first in several centuries, in fact!”

  He blinked rapidly, trying and failing to fully understand. “I… do I have special powers or something?

  Tórr thought about this. “Yes and no,” he said slowly. “You are more like your mortal mother than like me, I am afraid. While in many ways you are different from most mortal men, you are still mortal. You are no stronger... but perhaps you are wiser.” He paused. “Or rather, you will be. You are young for wisdom yet.”

  “What good is there to being a demi-god then?” Skíei asked impatiently.

  “All the good!” Tórr ran a hand over his beard. “A demi-god like you guides the paths of men. What you choose to do in life, who and what you believe in, it guides the way of entire generations of men!”

  He stared at Tórr. “What?

  “It is true!” He pointed to Brother Pawe?. “His sacrificed god… that was the last demi-god born. Still that one shapes the futures of men.”

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  Skíei shook his head. “And if I choose to… to do nothing? To believe nothing? What then?”

  Tórr’s smile faded. “Then you abandon this world to chaos and death for generations, Skíei. You cannot know the harm you would do.”

  “Maybe no.” Skíei looked up at the rain. “But that’s a lot to put on the shoulders of someone everyone on this ship still calls ‘boy’, do you not think?”

  There was an ugly silence as everyone on the ship took in his words and the implications of them.

  “I have never called you ‘boy’,” Tanis said quietly.

  “You have barely spoken to me.”

  “My point stands.” She shrugged. “Do not destroy the entire world because you are angry with us, Skíei.”

  He relented a little. She was right, whether he wanted to admit it or not. “I do not know what I will do yet,” he admitted. “I am only seventeen. This is… a weight on my shoulders I do not want and did not expect.”

  Tórr clapped a hand on Skíei’s shoulder, staggering him slightly. “Well, my son, you need not decide tonight, so long as you decide.” He leveled Skíei with a keen glare. “You will decide, will you not? Son?”

  Skíei didn’t answer for a long moment, thinking. Finally, he picked Tórr’s hand up off his shoulder and dropped it. “Do not call me ‘son’,” he said quietly, his voice barely audible above the storm.

  “What?” Tórr demanded.

  “Do not call me ‘son’,” he said again, louder. “A true father would have come long before I turned seventeen. A true father would have taught me to hunt and fish and fight. A true father would have told me all of this years ago!” He paused and added quietly, “A true father would not have left my mother to abandonment and death.”

  Tórr recoiled as though he had been struck. “You cannot mean to say—”

  “I can mean to say whatever I like to a strange god, my father by birth or no,” Skíei said clearly. “I know who my family is, and you have never been a part of that. You do not get to come into my life this late demanding things I am not willing to give you.”

  “Skíei—” Tórr started.

  “No.”

  “But Magda—”

  Skíei surged forward, shoving ineffectually at Tórr. “Don’t you dare invoke my mother’s name! In fact, go away! I have no father!” He turned away from Tórr and stalked over to the other end of the ship.

  Yrsa followed after him, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Skíei…” she said quietly. “This is your father… And Tórr does not come to Midgard often. Are you sure you want to leave it there?”

  He shrugged. “A god can surely make time for his son if he so chooses,” he said loudly. “If he wants to call me son, I need more than this.”

  She sighed. “I understand, Skíei, but… well…”

  He shook his head. “Yrsa, I already have a family. I was raised by them.”

  She smiled faintly. “You’re a good boy, Skíei. Will you see him off, at least?”

  He sighed. “If I must.”

  “You must.”

  They walked back to Tórr together. Tórr looked wary but took Skíei’s arm when it was offered to him. The god regarded his son seriously. Skíei looked up at his father and found Yrsa was right. He didn’t want to leave it there.

  “I will think on what you say,” he said, trying to make peace.

  Tórr nodded, accepting this small gesture. “I will think also upon what you have said. Perhaps you are right. I am hardly the wisest of the gods.” He stepped back, then, and said, “You may all want to step back a moment."

  They crowded to the back of the ship. Tórr raised his hammer to the sky and, with a flash of lightning, was gone. The ship heaved for a moment, knocking them all off their feet again. They picked themselves up carefully, and Skíei found them all staring at him.

  “Were we going to get the tarp or start bailing instead?” he asked irritably.

  Lin and Tanis hurried to get the tarp. Yrsa, Svanbj?rn, and Brother Pawe? continued to stare at him. Ajax stared for only a moment longer before going to help Lin and Tanis.

  “When were you going to tell me Ajax is my uncle?” Skíei asked pointedly. “I could not help but notice none of you seemed surprised by that piece of information.”

  “I told you to tell him,” Brother Pawe? said to Svanbj?rn before turning back to Skíei. “I only found out the other day, when I asked Ajax.”

  “Magdalena, your mother, and Ajax were my charges while I worked for the merchant. For Evander,” Yrsa admitted. “I was… occupied with caring for Ajax when Magda became pregnant. Evander blamed me, and he abandoned Magda in Visby. Of course, I went with her.”

  “And I stayed with my sister,” Svanbj?rn added. “I had also worked for Evander. I built the cottage for the three of us, and for you.”

  “Ajax was barely thirteen when it happened.” Yrsa continued. “He wanted to stay with Magdalena, but Evander dragged him back onto the ship and to Greece again.”

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Brother Pawe? said. “I was only beginning my journey from Rome to Visby when all of this happened. I have never met Evander.”

  “But you knew?” Skíei confirmed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  The old monk shrugged. “Svanbj?rn was right. It was for Ajax to tell, not for us. He is your kin. It was for him to tell you in his own time.”

  “And now,” Ajax cut in, “it is time for him to tell you to move, stop talking, and give us a hand with the tarp.”

  They rushed to lend a hand, unfolding the tarp and tying it down under the crushing downpour. Ajax checked Skíei’s ties, swiftly undid them, and retied them. They stood up through the remaining night in the freezing rain, shivering and stamping to keep warm. Finally, the rain slackened and, eventually, stopped altogether.

  They blinked up at the stars, dim in the rising light of dawn, and sighed. They undid the tarp and hung up as much of their bedding as they could manage to try and get it all dry. Ajax gave the order for the sail to be unfurled, and soon they were moving through the water swiftly. As Skíei was preparing the noonday meal, he heard the words he’d been hoping to hear for days:

  “Land! I see land!” Tanis called, pointing ahead of them.

  “Are we here?!” Skíei demanded, rushing over to Ajax and the map.

  “I don’t know boy,” Ajax growled grumpily. “The map isn’t even showing the land yet. Patience.”

  Skíei shifted impatiently, watching the map with rapt attention. Slowly, creeping, a coastline appeared on the parchment. Ajax frowned at the creeping shoreline and leaned in closer to the map. He traces the jagged coast with a finger.

  “I know this…” he muttered, then hurried over to a chest. He rummaged in it for a moment. He came up with another piece of parchment. He looked at it, looked at the map, frowned again, and then nodded. “We’re not there yet.”

  "How do you know?” Skíei asked. Ajax slapped down the other parchment. It was another map, this one presumably non-magical. On it, where Ajax was pointing, was the same shoreline surrounding a river. The Wis?a. Skíei looked back at the magical map and saw the line was pointing directly at the river.