Chapter Text
The ropes are digging into Thorfinn’s skinny wrists and it hurts, as usual. By all rights he should be used to the pain of chafing and rope burn by now, but somehow the skin on the insides of his wrists just won't toughen.
Thorfinn keeps quiet, keeps his head down, eats and washes when told and doesn't fight when the line he’s tied to is tugged by the person in front of him and the person in front of them by the slaver at the head. He doesn’t complain and keeps his back straight and head low when he and the other thrall are lined up for buyers. The market is bustling, and the early afternoon sun makes his rough tunic uncomfortable and itchy around his shoulders and back. Thorfinn frowns and tries not to squirm too much. He hears one of the other slavers talk to a customer over the rest of the crowd in snippets.
“You’re looking for… … right?”
“That's right. He’s the son of an old friend, y’see, and I’m really desperate to bring him back home--”
“Well you came to the right place then! We’ve got several young men fitting that description for you to choose from right over here--”
“No, I said I wasn’t- fine. Let's look then. Stay close Nuta, can’t have us losing you in this crowd too.”
The new voice (an old man?), and the slaver approached the line, the soles of their boots making crunching sounds on the packed down dirt and pebbles in the market street. Thorfinn sighed and rolled his head back a little to look impassively up at the sky. All he could hope for at this point was that he’d fetch a somewhat good price by a somewhat kind man, and that was if he was bought at all. Most free men who had had a brief interest in him as merchandise were either quickly drawn away by some other poor soul, or somehow found something new wrong with him that the previous potential buyer hadn’t seen before. So far the most complaints about his appearance he’d gotten were for his eyes, which were - to be fair - very big and very round. He couldn't help that, his father had been the exact same, and his mother, and his many siblings. At least he liked to think that was the case, as he didn't remember any of their faces. He let his head roll back down with another smaller sigh.
“Yknow now that I think about it, I think we do have a Thorfinn in this haul.” said the slaver, seemingly having been saving that tidbit for last.
Hang on, a Thorfinn?
“Thor- ?! Yes, yes, please, let me see him! Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place!” the old man again, sounding distressed.
A Thorfinn?
His breath was picking up without his permission, but he did his best to reign himself in. He probably didn’t have to worry too much about looking presentable if he was being looked for, but he couldn’t help that urge. He was being looked for? Him? Who the hell could it be? His parents and siblings were most likely years dead. Could this man be a distant relative? He was being looked for?
All at once he saw three pairs of boots in front of him; the too-familiar ones of the slaver, the new ones belonging to the man, and a third smaller pair. That must be Nuta. Another relative? A cousin? An auntie?
Thorfinn finally chanced a look up at the man’s face and was met with--
Shock, pain, and disappointment on the old man’s wrinkled face. Thorfinn felt that warm ray of hope shrivel up and get tucked back away deep in his chest.
“I told you he was short.” The man’s voice was clipped. Thorfinn heard him sigh roughly. The person named Nuta stayed quiet, probably also very disappointed about his height. The slaver shrugged dramatically, throwing his hands in the air.
“Hey now, you asked about a blond, brown-eyed Thorfinn, and I told you we had a blond, brown-eyed Thorfinn! Not like I can make ‘im any shorter for you without lopping off something.”
The old man scrubbed a rough-looking hand down his face and turned back towards Thorfinn. The wrong Thorfinn. There was a horrible bout of silence, and then another more gentle sigh.
“Lemme look at you then, lad” said the old man, not unkindly, just tired.
The pure shock he felt at not immediately being left was really the only thing that made him look back up, right into the old man’s face. What he saw instead of more disappointment could be described as just a quiet sadness. He knew what that felt like, that heavy, grey feeling that you just have to live with. Over the man’s shoulder, he saw the vague shape of the other person standing close behind him. He chanced a look and- oh.
Oh…
The most beautiful face in the whole of the human world stared back at him, eyes the colour of the day’s sky and long hair like gold thread tucked under a white kerchief. Nuta. He suddenly felt very shy. He and Nuta maintained just a few seconds more worth of eye contact before those blue eyes turned to the ground, almost demure. The high afternoon sun caught in Nuta's pale lashes, making them look bronzy. The long line of Nuta's nose was elegant and charming, and complimented the shape of her face.
“Do you know how to sail, son?” asked the old man, forcing Thorfinn’s attention away from the Freya-incarnate. His mouth snapped back closed (he hadn’t even noticed it had dropped open), before he had to open it up again to give an answer.
“No, sir.” Slaves who didn’t know how to sail weren’t allowed to learn.
“Do you know how to tie knots?”
Now that was something he knew. It’d been something he had been able to quietly study the slavers doing around the ships and as they tied him and the rest of the thralls together. He hadn’t gotten to practice using his own hands much, but his eyes were good and his mind was sharp.
“Yessir!”
Something about his expression must have done something good, because the old man gave him a wide and lopsided smile behind his bushy whiskers.
“That's a good start then, you can learn the rest.” Thorfinn held his breath as the old man turned back to the slaver.
“Alright… how much is he? I’m freeing him, but don’t think you can fool me with an inflated price!”
The slaver attempted to now very amicably chat to the old man now that money was involved, but Thorfinn’s mind was too fuzzy and bright for whatever it was that was being discussed. He vaguely felt the ropes around his wrists being cut, and the slaver’s hard hand on his arm to tug him away from the line. Free? He was free? Why?
Another hand, much kinder, landed on his shoulder and patted him. He was steered down the street then, but the hand on him never tugged or pushed or anything. This hand was just a guide.
“My name’s Leif, son of Erik. Let's get you sitting down, you look ready to collapse. My boat’s just down round this way.”
The old man, Leif, guided him in the same nice way down the street to the docks, to a little merchant's boat that he was helped into and sat safely on a wooden bench jutting out from the side. He heard Leif ask Nuta for something and then heard feet thud along the deck and then back over. A drinking horn filled with water was passed to him and he took it with both hands shaking. He drowned the water nearly in one long swig.
“Woah now, you can have more if you want, but you should go slow if you’re that thirsty.” Said Leif as he sat down across from Thorfinn. Nuta was hovering behind him again, almost nervously. Flighty like a bird and still too pretty to look at. Leif kept talking, probably to help bring Thorfinn back down.
“You can do or go wherever you want now, but if you’d like, you can stay and I can take you under my wing of sorts,” Leif smiled at him again, “I used to sail all over exploring the world, you see, but these days I’m just a merchant. If you stay, you’ll have meals, a place to sleep, and good work to keep you busy. I’ll teach you what I know about trade and sailing too.”
Some string in Thorfinn’s body was finally released then, and he sagged forward, head nearly between his knees and still clutching onto the drinking horn like it was the hand of the Christian Jesus himself. It was smooth and shined to a polish between his palms, without metal inlays, but of good craftsmanship and well cared for all the same.
Staying sounded nice.
“You look like you’ve been through a lot, son,” Leif continued, voice now more sober, “I can’t say I know what you’ve been through. I’ve never been a slave. But I’ve been in dire straits more times than you could count on both hands, and I know what it's like to see safety and then have it ripped away in the same breath.”
Thorfinn held his breath, fearing that whatever was building in his chest would burst out of him in an offensive noise that would make Leif take it all back, send him back.
“I won’t do that to you. I’m not that kind of man, never have been.”
Leif braced him up with another warm hand on his shoulder as Thorfinn finally cried, years of pain spilling out of him enough to fill the drinking horn back up tenfold.
.
.
.
It took almost a fortnight until Thorfinn felt secure enough to really start relaxing. The two free men -- the two other men, he had to remind himself -- certainly gave him enough tasks and chores to keep him busy, and it felt good using his hands and body to distract himself from his anxious thoughts.
Rowing was hard and left his arms sore enough to feel deadened, but food and drink helped. He forgot how much food could help. The slavers never left him or the other slaves starving, they couldn’t sell sickly-looking goods after all, but unless they were preparing for market they were carefully fed just enough to get by, never to build or keep strength lest someone tries to bolt. And there had been bolters, himself included once upon a time, when he was younger and thought of himself as agile and sneaky. Yes, it felt good to be productive and be praised for good work and to eat food every day, even though the food was mostly cured stuff for sea travel. It was still good food, and all the better because he was eating as a free man.
Nuta though - or Canute, as he heard called across the boat and in conversation - Canute was something else.
‘She’ was a ‘he’, for one, which was at once a shock and not as much of a shock as he thought it’d be at the same time. He’d heard of argr, men who didnt dress or behave so much as men ‘should’, but he’d never actually met one. It was awkward between them in the first place, but the process of which Thorfinn had found out about Canute’s argr status made things… more awkward.
It happened just a couple days after he was freed, when Thorfinn had finally plucked up the courage enough to ask Leif if he had offended his daughter.
“Since she’s so, um. So skittish and quiet n’ all.” He’d ended on a mumble, fidgeting with a bit of scrap rope during a moment of downtime. There’d been a nice wind that day, blowing right into their sails and keeping them at a good clip, and everything important had been tied up or down, so there wasn't much else to do until the wind changed. He and Leif were back at the stern, it being Leif’s turn at the rudder. Canute was huddled at the bow, being talked to by one of the other free men, but either not feeling the conversation or just fully not paying attention. He'd been carefully appraising the quality of a swath of patterned fabric in his lap, nodding along to whatever the free man was talking about, and looking over the sea in between. Thorfinn noticed that Canute commonly had a faraway gaze, staring off across the waves at something no one but he could see. It was honestly near unnerving to see such big, pale eyes stare so hard into nothing. Nearly, if not for the fact that the eyes were so terribly nice to look at.
There’d been a beat of silence as Leif had blinked twice and then burst into distressingly loud, amused laughter, immediately catching the attention of everyone else in the little knarr.
“Oh? Oh no, son, I don’t have children, much less a daughter. And if I did, she sure as hell wouldn’t be on my boat!” he grinned, easy and good naturedly, “Canute there is a man. Maybe less so of a man than others, if you pay attention to the likes of warmongering fools, but a young man still!”
Thorfinn felt himself flush to the roots of his hair. His new clothes felt incredibly itchy as he realized that all eyes on the boat were on him. He dared to look over his shoulder, and across the deck he met that terribly pretty, terribly piecing cornflower-blue stare of Canute, an incredulous look on his face with one fair brow raised at him. His hands, still very occupied with inspecting the fabric for imperfections, hung in the air, still like he was expecting something. Oh, how Thorfinn had wished to jump off the side of the boat and have his life be over with that day, especially since after that incident Canute appeared to purposefully avoid talking to him at all. He didn’t speak a lot in general, not even particularly to Leif, but the wary wide-eyed stares Thorfinn got here and there through blond hair and over pointy shoulders just solidified his theory. And people called him Full Eyes.
But because he could never pass up the opportunity to poke at something he shouldn’t, Thorfinn asked Leif about Canute again when they docked at a seaside town the next day.
“The boy I’ve been looking for entrusted me with Canute’s safety, and somewhere along the way I just grew too fond of him I suppose. Besides, he makes a mean stew, doesn’t he!”
Leif had grinned again and twirled at his bristly moustache, but something in his gaze appeared off, a little far away like Canute’s got sometimes. Then Thorfinn remembered the reason he was here in the first place. Right, that was probably him, then- The Other One. He spoke again before he could stop himself.
“That's... the boy you’ve been looking for, right? In the slave markets?”
“Ah, yes,” Leif said, distracted now with sorting out the smaller goods they’d be hawking that day, “Yes, Thorfinn. He’s the son of a very dear old friend of mine.”
And the way he said the name, the syllables his but very much not belonging to him… he’d almost forgotten that he was the wrong Thorfinn.