Vinland Saga Book 9

He shouts this up a snow-covered mountainside at someone he cannot see, and the staging matters more than the wording. Hild has been hunting him; the summary at the front of Book Nine calls her the hunter whose father Thorfinn killed, and who claims the right over his life and death. So the confession goes out at the volume of a challenge, and the next panel turns it: he will not die, he cannot afford to die on this day. Those two statements pull against each other only if atonement means submitting to her judgment. He is claiming the right to choose the form of his own repayment, which is exactly what a victim's family might resent. Three pages later he is thinking about her prints in the snow and the long reload time of a crossbow, planning to close in during it. The chapter makes the apology sincere and tactical at once, and does not apologize for that.

Hild is easy to read as the obstacle Thorfinn's redemption has to get past. On this page she has the better argument. The pleas have come from the people around him: three pages earlier a woman holding a crying baby says that Karli does not want her to kill him, and a crewmate shouts that killing Thorfinn won't make her family come back, which is true and beside the point. Her point is about precedent. If declaring a change of heart were enough to escape a past, the people with the most to escape would declare it first. That is a theory of justice, not bloodlust, and Thorfinn reached a version of it himself on Ketil's farm when he said that swearing off killing does not atone for the harm already done. She has a crossbow trained on a man lying face down in the snow and still frames the question as one about the world rather than her own grief. The tragedy of the scene is not that she is wrong. It is that her standard and his are nearly the same, and she has no reason yet to believe he holds it.

Six words, and they change the grammar of her anger. Up to this point in the chapter, the question on the table has been whether he lives. A question about how he intends to atone assumes that he will, and asks for an answer she can judge. The page before builds the turn: she looks to the two figures standing beside her in the haze and asks whether they are telling her to forgive this man, a request she plainly cannot meet. She cannot forgive, so she asks for a plan instead, which is narrower than mercy and more durable. Two pages later she calls his answer preposterous, says it will not bring her family back to life, and asks whether he thinks it will atone for their loss. Then she says "Try it." Forgiveness is not granted anywhere in these pages. What is granted is probation, with Hild as the officer, and that is a more honest settlement than a reconciliation would have been.

The figures she asks are drawn in a gray haze, two men standing with her in the snow, and the question is put to them rather than to Thorfinn, who lies behind a crewmate further down the slope. Earlier in the book, in chapter 119, a remembered voice she calls Father tells her to forgive her fellow man and says he knows she can do it. Her reply then is a run of questions: forgive whom, him, herself, those murderers? The same memory pages decide that she cannot forgive the killers and cannot forgive herself for being hunted. So this is not her first refusal. It is the old argument resumed, with the man who killed her father lying a few paces away. "Sins" is the telling word. It belongs to a moral vocabulary in which forgiveness is at least possible, and she is fighting inside it instead of rejecting it. On the next page she asks Thorfinn how he intends to atone.