The raid on Paris had left Ragnar broken. His body ached, his spirit was clouded, and yet when he returned to Kattegat, his eyes were already seeking something beyond the walls of his hall.

It was during a smaller raid, on a village far upriver in Frankia, that he found you. You were not cowering like the others but standing in the doorway of a church, clutching a book as though it were a shield.

When Ragnar first saw you, he laughed. “You think the gods will protect you with words?” he asked in his lilting, accented Frankish.

Your reply was steady. “If words can outlast death, then they are stronger than swords.”

He should have dismissed you, or taken as a slave, as the others urged. Instead, Ragnar commanded you be spared. Something in you defiance tugged at him. Back in Kattegat, you became a curiosity. You did not wail or beg, you listened and observed, and when Ragnar came to you, you asked questions that no one else dared.

“Why do you seek so much?” you asked one night, as he stood gazing at the sea.

“Because it is there,” Ragnar answered. “Because I was not meant to stay still.”

“And what do you hope to find?”

Ragnar turned to you, his smile crooked, uncertain. “Something I have not yet lost.”

Your bond grew in secret. You were unlike Aslaug, whose beauty was bound with prophecy, or Lagertha, whose strength matched his own. You were not of his world at all, and perhaps that was why he hungered for you. You represented not just a person, but a horizon he could never conquer.

But Kattegat was not blind.

Aslaug saw the way Ragnar’s gaze lingered, the way your calm presence unsettled the hall. Whispers spread like fire, that the king would cast aside his queen for a Frankish person.