Children of the Wolf

I am descended from Vikings. My paternal lineage runs all the way back to Erik the Red, the first European to stumble upon the shores of North America. Even for a Viking, he was brutal and hotheaded. His clan exiled him from Norwegian soil for murdering too many of his kinsmen, so he gathered up a raiding party, sailed across the Atlantic, landed in a frozen wasteland, named it Greenland for some reason, and made war on the people he found there.

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He was born Erik Thorvaldsson. The title “Red” came from his flame-colored hair, explosive temper, and penchant for bloodshed. You can draw a straight line down the family tree from him to Ulf Thorvaldsson, my father.

Perhaps all children see their parents as larger than life, but Pappa really was. Standing seven feet tall, he had a chest like a boulder and wore his hair and beard long, usually in intricate braids. He looked like a creature from the Old World, a hero or villain from the tales of the Vikings. He looked like what he was.

We lived on the outskirts of a small Iowa town, Pappa, Finn, and me. It was the end of the twentieth century, though I didn’t know it then. My brother and I grew up placeless and timeless, cut off from the outside world. Our neighbors were prairie and pines. Our days consisted of archery and epic poetry. No school. No other children. No extended family. No authority but Pappa. Modern civilization was a strange fantasy that existed in books, on the other side of the TV screen, and, theoretically, beyond our fences. In that faraway realm, people spoke the wrong language, followed the wrong calendar, and prayed to the wrong gods. Finn and I lived almost entirely off the grid in a reality our father built for us. At the time, it seemed like the only reality.

Pappa had grown up in Uppsala, and he only ever spoke Swedish with Finn and me. He did know some English, enough to get by at the grocery store or the pharmacy, but he found it a lesser language. Nasal and chirpy. He did, however, permit Finn and me to speak English with each other and study it on our own. We were technically Americans, after all. According to the Iowa State Board of Education, my brother and I were being homeschooled, but Pappa scoffed at book learning. He brought us up in the way of our ancestors, whose children did not waste time solving equations or parsing sentences. They learned what mattered by watching their elders: how to fight, how to live, and how to die. There were no toys in our house; Pappa could not see the point of stuffed animals or building blocks. He taught us to handle knives, chop wood, hunt, cook, and endure pain.

Viking men were warriors, and Finn’s education proceeded accordingly. He studied the wall of mounted weapons in Pappa’s bedroom—swords and knives of every shape and size, all kept razor-sharp and ready for battle. Our father had no art, no photographs, only a lovingly arranged armory. In the Viking tradition, each weapon was given its own name: Wolf’s Tooth, Serpent of Blood, Torch of Blood. Finn learned the use and properties of them all. He sharpened the blades with a whetstone and leather strop. He and Pappa sparred with battle-axes and swords—wooden ones for now. Finn would graduate to real weapons when Pappa decided he was ready.

My lessons were different. Pappa was softer with me—a girl child and the baby of the family. In an ideal world, my mother would have been the one to guide me, but she was dead. The care and upkeep of the house were the purview of Viking women, which was not an inferior calling, Pappa always said. Men fought and pillaged, and women maintained the home, and both things were honorable and worthy. My education consisted of carpentry, gardening, baking, fixing the plumbing, and stitching up wounds in fabric and flesh.

Pappa did give me one blade, a slender six-inch knife named Vargbett: Wolf’s Bite. He showed me how to wield it without endangering my own fingers and, afterward, how to sheathe it safely. He advised me to keep it on my person during the rare times we left our land. Just in case.

Every night, my father would bound up the stairs with a book in hand—sometimes the Eddas (the stories of the gods) and sometimes the sagas (the tales of Viking warriors). Usually the former. My brother and I shared a room, and Pappa would fold his enormous body between our beds and read aloud for hours. In his booming baritone, he brought every part to life: frost giants and dwarfs, Valkyries and soothsayers.

I remember it all so vividly. Twenty years have passed since that time, but sometimes the wild crucible of my youth seems more real to me than this adult life. I remember the smell of pickled herring and lingonberry jam. I remember splinting my brother’s broken wrist under my father’s watchful eye. (No doctors—not ever.) I remember the beehives in the field, nine of them, perfuming the air with the tang of honey. Our house was surrounded by several hundred acres of prairie and forest, which felt like an infinite universe to me as a girl. Finn and I named the trees, swam in the pond, and spun stories about the rocky hill where trolls surely lived. We were a Viking clan of three.

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From Children of the Wolf. Used with permission of the publisher, Ballantine Books. Copyright © 2026 by Abby Geni.