The smoke had barely cleared when he found them.

A small thing, hunched in the wreckage of a charred home, their face streaked with ash and dried tears. Not crying any more. Not calling for anyone. Just sitting there, still and watchful, with that look Ragnar had seen on warriors who knew their end had already come.

Only this was no warrior. Just a child.

He had stepped over bodies to reach them. The village had been raided before his longship even touched the shore, nothing left but soot and bones and silence. He hadn’t expected to find anyone alive.

They didn’t flinch when he crouched down, just stared at him with wide, dirt-smeared eyes.

“Are you hurt ?” he asked.

They shook their head.

“Where is your family ?”

They looked down at their hands. “Gone.”

He didn’t ask how. It was written in the blackened walls and the caved-in roof.

He should’ve walked away. This child was nothing to him. Another orphan of war. The gods were full of cruel jokes like that. But instead, he reached out.

They stared at his hand, then slowly placed their own inside it. So small.

Just like Gyda’s was, when she was little. Smaller, maybe.

He’d lost Gyda not a full year past, and some days he still expected her to run down the hall and tug at his tunic. But there was only silence now in the longhouse. And dreams that woke him in the night with her name on his lips.

Why did I find them ? he wondered, as he lifted the child into his arms. They did not protest. They just clung to him like they already knew they wouldn’t be left behind.

The gods were always watching, always meddling. He’d cursed them often enough. But this—this didn’t feel like one of their curses.

This felt like Gyda.

She would have wanted him to find them. To love again. She would have said, “Father, this one is lost. Take them home.”

So he did.

He didn’t explain it fully to Lagertha, not yet. He only brought the child back to Kattegat, washed them in the stream with gentle hands, found furs good enough for them, and taught them to carve wood with hands that had once carved playthings for his daughter.

He watched them eat in silence, cautious but not afraid.

He watched them sleep curled against his side on cold nights.

He didn’t name the ache in his chest that grew softer each day the child stayed close.

But he did think, Perhaps the dead do speak.

Perhaps Gyda had not left him completely.

Perhaps she had sent this child to him like a message from another world, a quiet whisper in the ruins : Here is someone to love. As you loved me.

And Ragnar, with all his grief and all his questions, found a small, aching peace in that.

He held them tighter the next night, and did not dream of empty halls.