Of the few possessions Hrífa owned which could fill up a bed-bag or a small sleigh, fewer still would be of great use on a long seaward voyage. The first he plucked from the walls and the small piles of refuse was the spear, whose strength he tested against his knee, and by jabbing into scaly tree-flesh; and although it held up, he felt the give in it, and knew that it would not survive very many slams of a shield boss or strokes of an honed sword. He set it aside, resolving to buy a new pole in the village before they embarked, if such a pole existed. It would make a decent knife even if the shaft snapped.

Then he sifted through the debris. His old helmet, converted into a chamberpot by hammering the peaked scalp down into a flat bottom, was too far rusted and stained, and besides, it reeked terribly. Even the lowly [i]seiðmann[/i] carried about him some semblance of Nordic dignity, albeit one rather distorted to the eyes of more assimilated onlookers. His armor, then, was paltry, for even his wrist bracers were boiled leather, not splinted with iron strips nor sewn in with mail; and he was much too poor for a mail shirt, as were most the villagers, though he could imagine the tribe's few warriors were lending out their weapons and armor to their friends. After all, the long winter struck the entire island, and every village upon it, so they needn't fear war and conflict with the locals, who also wished to conserve their supplies and their strength, turtling themselves up til they ate the very last of their stores.

Could he then persuade someone to part with their mail and helmet, that he might not look so fragile on the battlefield? Of course these "battles" were against helpless coastal villages and Christian monasteries, but armor was armor, and whether it was a proper sword or a desperate slave's reaping hook, Hrífa wanted something hard and protective between the blade and his viscera. Stealing was out of the question, even if he already had been indicted of it two dozen times that day around town; they wouldn't wait til they reached shore to toss him overboard. The witch preferred to wait til they landed before he would slip away into the night, to begin a new life in the Franks' lands or the Visigoths'.

He supposed, then, that he would have to rely on the gods after all. Playing by the brave, noble warrior's rules had been a nice thought to humor, but Hrífa could see he was ill-equipped to see it through. He glanced over to his bag of rune sticks, and decided on a whim to give them a throw. Reading the results in the bones, which landed face up or down, and overlapped in certain patterns, according to the will of those great beings in Valhalla and elsewhere, Hrífa translated their meaning, and the results astonished him.