The Sea of Trolls

Jack and the Bard return to the Bard’s house and spend hours using magic to create a thick, wet fog. This is the closest Jack has ever felt to the life force, and its “wonder and beauty” move him to tears (67). Casting the powerful spell drains the Bard and his apprentice, and Jack lights a fire and spoon-feeds his mentor after darkness falls on the coast.

The next morning, Jack and the Bard conjure more fog, and the boy worries what will become of the village if it never dissipates. The Bard suspects Frith of causing this fear, and he gives the boy a protective golden pendant stamped with a tree. After Jack puts on the pendant, it becomes invisible.

That night, the Bard has a fever. Jack tries to give him back the rune of protection, but the old man explains, “Once given, can’t be returned. Anyhow, wanted you to have it” (73). Jack prepares food and medicine for the Bard before falling into an exhausted sleep.

In the middle of the night, a fierce wind rips apart the house’s thatched roof, and a terrifying rider on a many-legged horse leaps inside. Jack faints. When he awakens the next morning, he’s relieved to see that the Nightmare is gone, and the Bard is alive. When the elderly man awakens, Jack realizes that he has lost his reason. The boy must tend to him as if he were an infant. A crow missing a claw on its left foot flies into the house, eats some of Jack’s food, and listens as the boy voices his worries.

Jack decides that his mentor would be safer with the other villagers. On their way through the village, Jack is alarmed to discover that his family has returned home despite the ongoing threat of the raiders because Lucy complained about the conditions in the woods. When Jack mentions that the Bard created the fog, Giles voices his strong opposition to magic: “Hellfire awaits those who transgress the laws of God” (85). Jack’s mother assures him that the Bard may return to his usual self with time and care, and the boy realizes that she has magic of her own that she uses to speak to animals and heal people.

Jack slips out of his house when his parents aren’t looking, walks to the Roman road, and cloaks the path in fog. Lucy follows him and grows frightened. Soon after he finds his sister in the mist, a group of berserkers stomps past, and the children huddle together in the bracken by the side of the road. Jack urges Lucy to be silent, but she reveals her location because she thinks the warriors are the knights Giles said would come for their lost princess one day. Jack remains with his sister as a young warrior aims a knife at her neck, and he is knocked unconscious by an enormous blond man.

Jack awakens on the raiders’ ship. There is no land in sight, and the boy considers hurling himself overboard because he believes that Lucy is dead and that he’s failed the Bard. The rune of protection’s power helps Jack regain his will to live. He declares that he’s going to kill Thorgil, the young warrior he believes murdered his sister, but he discovers that Lucy is alive and onboard the vessel. Thorgil attacks Jack, but Olaf, the blond man, is the raiders’ leader, and he intervenes.

The berserkers land on a beach where two other ships full of raiders are waiting and show off their spoils of war, including their captives. Jack meets a monk and a woman whose daughter was murdered. The monk preaches that humans are inherently corrupt, but Jack defends the grieving mother’s belief that her daughter’s soul was pure. A fight breaks out between Thorgil and another young warrior, and Jack is startled to learn that Thorgil is a girl. The monk is familiar with the Northmen’s language and culture, and he explains that the young shield maiden is trying to impress Olaf.

The warriors spend several days gathering plunder and then sail north. Jack is appalled by Thorgil’s crude and cruel behavior, especially the way that she pinches Lucy because the shield maiden’s “greatest joy was to cause pain” (104). He’s also anxious about the fondness developing between Lucy and Olaf. During a storm, Olaf murders the woman whose child was killed and throws her body overboard. As he struggles to bail the boat out, Jack mentally recites a prayer the Bard taught him for the dead woman.

After a desperate battle with the sea, the ship reaches land. Exhausted and shivering, Jack and Lucy cling to one another on the beach. Lucy bursts into tears when Jack tells her that the berserkers are human traffickers, not knights. She clings to the hope that she’ll go to Heaven if she dies. Jack realizes that his sister, like their father, relies on her imagination to survive life’s miseries, so he encourages her belief that she is a princess. As he lulls her to sleep, Jack marvels at the strength that looking after Lucy gives him.

The ship sails northward to a town with a market where enslaved people are sold, and the members of Olaf’s band enjoy a merry reunion with their fellow warriors. The captives are bathed and fed hearty food, and Jack feels like “a pig being fattened with apples” (113). By the end of the market day, Jack, Lucy, and the monk are among the few remaining unsold captives. Picts, a secretive Celtic group of skilled iron workers who adorn their bodies with blue paint, express interest in the children. The Pictish leader offers Thorgil a magnificent sword in exchange for Lucy, but Olaf persuades her to keep the child. When Olaf prepares to sell Jack, the boy pleads his case in the Northmen’s language and sings pieces of the stories the Bard taught him. Impressed, Olaf brings Jack back to his camp.