The land beyond Kattegat lay damp with the melt of spring, rich earth breathing steam beneath a pale sky. The fjord shimmered in the distance, the call of gulls threading through the air, but here on the slope of Ragnar’s farmland, the world was quieter. It smelled of wet soil, crushed grass, and the faint tang of smoke drifting from nearby huts.

Ragnar crouched low, long limbs folded easily, his hands buried deep in the black earth. The dirt clung beneath his fingernails, streaked against the lines of his palms. He had wielded axe and sword across kingdoms, spilled blood on English soil, and worn crowns on his head—but here he was only a farmer again, the way he had begun.

Beside him, you knelt in your copper-colored skirts, your coiled black hair falling in heavy ropes over your shoulders, loose strands sticking to your cheeks in the damp air. Your hands moved methodically, scooping neat furrows in the soil for seedlings, pressing the earth down with careful pressure. You hummed, not a Viking song but some strange Spanish melody he did not know, full of lilts and turns that caught the air like birds darting between trees.

He glanced at you often, pale eyes narrowing in thought, not because you were foreign—though you were that—but because you were unfathomable. Olive skin against the northern cold, plump and strong, your body made for earth, for life, not the harsh edges of war. You had come to him through trade, a daughter gifted like fine wine or rare silk, but no alliance could have explained the strange tether you had laid across his mind.

You dug too deep in one spot, soil crumbling in a small collapse. Ragnar chuckled low in his throat, the sound more amused than mocking. “You mean to bury it, not kill it,” he said, though not harshly. He rarely was, not with you. His voice held that wolfish curl of humor he carried even in war.

You glanced at him, lips parting as if to answer, but instead you shrugged and pressed the soil flat again, green eyes serene as always. You waited—your way of waiting through every storm, every silence, every long calculation no one else saw. Then, with a sudden flash of mischief, you jabbed a clump of earth toward him, smearing it against his wrist.

He grinned, wide, reckless, boyish for a heartbeat, sea-glass eyes catching the light. “Ah, so the Spanish bride fights with dirt now.”

You laughed, bursting into a song half-formed, half-jest, your voice carrying strange words he did not know. Ragnar leaned back on his heels, studying you the way he studied maps, the way he studied kings, as though some great mystery of the world had been bound in your plump hands and wandering tunes.

The seedlings lay between you both—sage, thyme, wild fennel—little scraps of green ready to be coaxed into life. You pressed one gently into its furrow, patting the soil down, lips still moving with the remnants of song. Ragnar mimicked you, though his hands were rougher, used to tearing rather than tending. Still, there was reverence in the way he touched the earth, as though planting were no less a conquest than sailing westward.

He thought then of the sagas that would be told of him—raider, king, conqueror. Yet none of them would speak of this: of broad shoulders bent low to the earth, of silence broken only by your humming, of seedlings planted in the damp soil of Kattegat’s spring. None of them would know how you smelled of wildflowers even in the mud, how violet clung to you like a secret, how you could smear dirt on his skin and somehow he let you.

The wind picked up, carrying the salt of the sea and the promise of summer. Ragnar’s eyes lingered on you, on your green gaze steady as earth itself, on the strange contradiction you had become in his life—foreign yet rooted, soft yet immovable, his obsession in every season.

And so he pressed another seedling into the soil, his hands steady, his mind unquiet. A farmer, a king, a conqueror—yes. But beside you in the damp fields of Kattegat, Ragnar was something else entirely. Something no saga would dare to name.