Sinric inches a little closer and gently opens his arms to embrace Athelstan. Or to offer the embrace, should Athelstan want it.

"One day," he says softly, "I shall meet the man that Ragnar was. The man he was before you. And what I expect to see in his eyes is a wildness and fierce curiosity for that world. That wildness you have tempered with wisdom but his fierce curiously flames into blaze still. And I have fanned those flames."

"Talk to him again when he is calm and you will hear the words of the man he is, not the man he was."