But when I followed the trail back, it had started with me.
I was the one who watched Iri get cut down in battle. I left him. And I was the one who followed him into the forest the night they captured me.
It began with me. I’d made a choice.
Like Fiske had made a choice when he saved Iri’s life.
The hinges on the door creaked and I went for my knife.
Fiske stood at its opening. He pushed the door closed behind him and the moonlight was cut out, leaving only the light of the torch on the wall. My hands clenched tighter around the sage, the scent still fragrant in my lungs. He looked at me and the hardness that always hid his face fell away. I could see him again. The way I had at the river. The way I had in Hylli. The open, tender part of him that was reaching out. It moved across the floor of the cellar and touched me. It lit the inside of me on fire.
Tears stung behind my eyes and I tried to blink them back, but I wanted to see him. I wanted to feel him. And as if he could hear me think it, he crossed the space between us slowly. The toes of his boots almost touched mine as he took the bundles of sage from my arms and he reached up, leaning over me to hang them from the line.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
But he didn’t answer. He looked down at me before his hands lifted, finding my face, and he stepped closer. His fingers wound into my hair until I tipped my head back and I sucked in a breath.
“I’m sorry.” His voice was deep.
I searched his face. “For what?”
He dropped his head down, his lips hovering over mine. “For everything.”
His fingers curled tighter into my braids and he kissed me. He dove down deep inside of me, filling me up with the warmth the winter had stolen away. Melting the frosted, frozen pieces.
His hands were hot on my skin, trailing down my neck, over my collarbones to slide around my waist and pull me up, into him. I lifted up onto my toes, trying to get closer. Trying to wade through the thick, murky stream of thoughts in my head. To flush them out. He pushed the top of my tunic open and when his lips moved to the top of my shoulder, I groaned. Because it hurt. More than the arrow wound. More than the day I lost Iri. This was a different kind of pain.
His hands slid from around me, hovering over the scar encircling my neck that was still healing from the collar. He leaned away from me and the hardness carved its way back onto his face.
I took hold of his armor vest, pulling him back to me. But the guard was going back up over him, one thought at a time. “I don’t belong to you.” I repeated the words I said to him the night he pulled the stitches from my arm. This time, to lift the weight that pressed down onto him and silence whatever words were whispering in his mind.
And because a small part of me still wanted them to be true.
“Yes, you do.” He pulled the hair back out of my face so he could look at me. “Like I belong to you.”
I couldn’t feel the tears falling anymore. I couldn’t feel anything except for the parts of me that were touching him. I reached up to the clasps of his armor vest, keeping my eyes on his. I pulled them free, working it loose until I could fit my hands up under his tunic and press my palms against his skin. I slid my fingers over his ribs and he shook against me, his breaths coming harder.
I pushed the uncertainty and doubt down to the very deepest part of me. I buried them there, along with the beliefs and traditions that had made up who I was. I pulled the tunic up over Fiske’s head and dropped it on the ground with the armor vest and touched the scars perforating his skin in raised, chaotic lines. The deep blue stains of the bruises on his side. The shape of him. He wiped the tears from my face, spreading his thumbs over my cheeks, and I smiled.
He unbuckled my vest and I lifted my arms so that he could pull it off with my tunic. And when he kissed me again, the seconds slowed. They stretched out and made more time. I felt his body against mine, unraveling everything else that was between us, and my soul unwound, threading itself to his.
And I let it. I gave myself to him. Because I was already his.
FORTY-FOUR
Iri held Inge in his arms, looking over her shoulder at me. He didn’t need to ask because I knew what he was thinking. We’d see Runa safely to Aurvanger while he went with my father to the Aska.
He let her go, and he didn’t reach for me. He didn’t have to say it. That he was sorry. And I was too. I let my father hold me, saying good-bye as Myra stood back against the house, talking to Fiske. He towered over her, but she stood squarely, meeting his gaze with a fierce look in her eye that I recognized. That was Myra. Small but ferocious. I’d seen her take down men twice his size. She could have killed him that night on the way to Fela just as he could have killed her.
She walked to me with her eyes down, her thumbs hooked into her belt. I reached up to grasp her right shoulder and she did the same.
“I’m sorry,” she said, reaching up to touch the bruise on my face where she’d hit me.
I didn’t forgive her because I didn’t need to. I understood Myra. I knew that fear of everything being ripped away and the last of what you love being threatened. We were warriors. And she was willing to fight for me the way I was willing to fight for her. Nothing would ever change that.
It wasn’t until they were scaling down the snowy ridge that I knew what I’d done. I’d spent every waking moment trying to get back to them and now I was sending them off without me. If there was a last chance, this was it. But my feet stayed planted where they were.
“Two days.” Fiske tried to calm the unease he could see coming to life in me.
“What did she say to you?” I asked, watching Myra disappear over the hill.
“That she would kill me if anything happens to you.” He laughed. “I believe her.”
A soon as they were out of sight, we got to work. I listened to Fiske and Inge talk. About plans. Supplies. Traveling to Aurvanger. I ignored the feeling of my heart being pulled down the mountain and let the sound of his voice brush up against me and touch that place in the center of me that was still soft. It made me tremble, thinking of his hands on me. Remembering the way his mouth tasted on mine. I couldn’t undo the tether between us. And I didn’t want to.
We prepared everything Inge and Runa needed to treat the wounded. We checked weapons, riggings on the horses, we filled saddlebags and wrapped bread. When we were packed, we went to Runa’s and helped her family. Her mother was going to fight for the first time in twenty years. She pulled her scabbard from a dust-covered trunk in the shadows of their house and I sat outside, mending the hole in her armor vest. I watched the others load up their horses, feeling truly invisible among them for the first time. As if they’d forgotten me.
We headed down the mountain the next morning in one long line, trailing the path, and I walked beside Inge’s horse with Halvard. Fiske looked back to keep his eye on us from where he rode ahead with Vidr and Freydis. Inge looked at them from the corner of her eye. I’d noticed her doing it after the attack, when Vidr and the Tala seemed to keep noticing Fiske. How they kept singling him out. I didn’t like it either. And I didn’t like what it may mean in battle.