Though he gave her a queer, sidelong glance, hurriedly Hrífa searched elsewhere for his answer, away in the distant clouds. If he was honest, he was searching for birds again. "Once my head has been cut, I probably won't much mind what happens to my body," he confessed in a hushed whisper, as though Hralding was on the other side of the ship, at the aft, steering the rudder, the witch saw no cause to disrupt his lessons. "If I do, I'd like to see it eaten."

"By animals," he added clumsily, as if that was in doubt. But why not? Every tree-nut he ever ground to flour may have belonged to a mouse, who fancied the gaunt intruder rather like a towering thief likewise! Then all his life he had breathed air which belonged to terns and gulls, and gulped water which was the house of many fish. He was remorseless and really rather selfish in his taking of those things which his physiology demanded—unapologetic—but this came too with the stipulation of debt. Some day he hoped to return to the earth what he had borrowed, and rotting in a tomb, this was not possible; hanging from a king's gate, he was out of reach for all things but the ravens. He did not fancy that fate fair and just to the other critters who held him in their debt, the others he owed a pound of his flesh.

What he loved about this place he called [i]nature[/i], and all its inhabitants, was that it obeyed its own laws, and these laws cared not for the whimsies of men, as men were encapsulated within these laws, and they too obeyed this code, even when they thought they rebelled against nature by erecting walls and hiding behind them, building keeps high into the sky to escape the floods, and pits deep in the earth to avoid the winds. Men's laws were just different. Hrífa obeyed them (most times) despite disagreeing with them; he knew well why [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haakon_Sigurdsson][color=ffffff]Håkon[/color][/url] deserved death at the hands of [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tormod_Kark][color=ffffff]Þormóðr Karkr[/color][/url], and why the slave in turn was deemed a traitor: the dishonor of his treachery outweighed the heroics of his vigilantism. But who was a man to declare who "deserved" what? Who owned that infallible right to deliver his fellows to the afterlife?

The world claimed its dues without fretting for these highfalutin abstracts, often enough. Supposedly wicked men lived and supposedly good ones fell  like birch limbs to wicked axes. But eventually all men paid the same debt, and the witch, while not anticipating his day with any enthusiasm, also did not fear the time when his caught up with him. He would pay it gladly.