Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
"Here."
Matilda stopped walking and looked at where Ivar was pointing.
A flat stretch of ground set back from where his men were making camp, far enough that their sounds came to her muffled—the low voices, the scrape of equipment, the settled noise of men who had done this many times––close enough that she could see the shapes of them against the firelight.
"That's further than the others," she said.
"Aye."
"Why?"
He looked at her with those dark eyes that gave very little back. "Because I said so."
She opened her mouth. Closed it.
She was too tired to argue about tent placement and she suspected he knew that, so she took the bedroll Torvald held out to her and walked to the spot he'd indicated and didn't say another word about it.
The tent was small and practical and smelled of pine resin and damp canvas.
She got it upright on the third attempt, which she considered a reasonable result for someone who had never put up a tent in her life and wasn't planning to admit that.
When she turned around Ivar was crouched behind her, wordlessly repositioning two of the pegs she'd driven in at the wrong angle. She decided she hadn't seen it and ducked inside.
She could hear him settling outside.
She lay on her back on the bedroll and stared at the canvas above her and listened.
The camp had gone quiet quickly, the way it did with men who knew how to sleep fast and lightly, ready to wake the same way.
The fire crackled somewhere close.
Further out, the forest breathed in the dark. Branches shifting, leaves turning over, the small constant sounds of things that lived in it.
A branch shifted closer than the others.
She sat up.
It was nothing. She knew it was nothing.
She had enough experience with her own mind by now to know the difference between a sound that meant something and a sound her body had simply decided to treat as though it did.
Eight years of reading threats had made her very good at cataloguing and only moderately better at letting go. She lay back down. The fire crackled. An ember shifted. Somewhere in the dark, an owl made its opinion known and went silent.
Another sound. Smaller. Closer to the left.
She sat up again.
Outside, nothing changed.
The camp breathed in the slow even rhythm of sleeping men. She could see the shape of Ivar through the canvas. Still upright, still facing outward.
Something about that, the simple fact of him there, steadied her enough to lie back down a second time.
She lasted approximately six minutes.
The problem wasn't noise. The problem was the dark.
The specific quality of it inside the tent, the way it pressed in from every angle with a completeness the dark outside didn't quite manage.
Outside there was always something. A sliver of moon, the glow of the fire, the pale suggestion of sky above the trees.
Inside the tent there was nothing. Just black, thick and close and total, and her own breathing getting shallower than she wanted it to, and the familiar beginning of the thing she'd spent years learning to talk herself down from.
She moved closer to the entrance. Not outside, but closer to it.
She picked up her bedroll and repositioned it so her head was near the opening, near the tied-back flap, and the thin strip of firelight that came through the gap.
That was better. Marginally.
The black receded to something manageable and she lay on her side facing the opening and made herself breathe slowly and watched the strip of light and counted the way she'd taught herself to count.
One. Two. Three.
Outside, Ivar shifted.
She hadn't asked him to. She hadn't made a sound. But his position changed. She could see it in the shadow his shape threw against the canvas, angling slightly, moving without standing, so that he sat between her and the tree line more fully than before.
His back was no longer partly toward her. He was facing her direction now, or close enough to it, close enough that if anything came from the forest it would reach him first.
He hadn't looked inside and hadn't spoken. He'd simply adjusted, quietly, as though he'd noticed a draft and moved out of it, and gone still again.
She watched his shadow for a long moment.
Then she reached into the pocket of her cloak and found her candle.
The flint was in the satchel.
She found it by feel, struck it twice, and the wick caught, and the inside of the tent went from black to amber and she exhaled a breath she'd been half-holding since she'd lain down.
The small flame threw soft light against the canvas walls and made the space feel like something with edges again.
The smoke gathered almost immediately.
Canvas, she discovered, was not designed for candlelight.
Within a minute the air inside the tent had taken on a quality that stung her eyes and sat heavy at the back of her throat.
She was considering whether to endure it or extinguish the candle and endure the dark instead, which was not really a choice at all, when the tent flap moved.
Not opened. Just moved, the way it moved when someone touched it from outside.
"Aye," she said.
Ivar's hand came through the gap first, then the short blade he carried at his belt.
Without ceremony or comment he drew a clean slit in the upper canvas, perhaps four inches, and folded the cut edges back and tied them with a strip of leather he appeared to have brought for exactly this purpose.
Fresh air moved through immediately. The smoke thinned. The candle flame stopped guttering and burned straight and steady.
He hadn't come inside. His head was at the opening, enough to see what he was doing, no more.
She watched him check the tied edges, check the angle of the slit, check the position of the candle on the flat stone she'd found to set it on, satisfying himself that it was stable and wouldn't tip.
He did all of it without being asked.
He looked at her then, properly, and she looked back at him, and the candlelight was between them, small and steady.
"Better?" he said.
"Aye." She paused. "Thank ye."
He didn't dismiss it or wave it off the way people did when they wanted to make a kindness feel smaller than it was. He just nodded once, like it was noted, and stayed where he was at the opening.
"Why cannae ye stay in the dark?" he said.
She'd expected something careful. The kind of question wrapped in softness, pre-apologizing for itself, already bracing for her to be upset by it.
He just asked it the way he asked everything, straight and direct, like he wanted the information and saw no reason to dress the asking of it up in anything.
She considered not answering.
She had deflections ready. Light ones, the kind that closed a subject without appearing to, that she'd been using for years with people who asked variations of this question with their eyes even when they weren't asking it with their mouths.
She looked at his face in the gap of the tent opening. At the dark eyes watching her, patient and entirely without the careful softness she'd spent years dreading.
"I hate the darkness," she said. "I always have. It's worse in small spaces."
"Aye." He waited. Not pushing. Just leaving room.
She pulled her knees up slightly.
"And yer men." She chose the next words with care, the way she always did when she was saying something true out loud for the first time to someone she didn't know yet. "I dinnae ken them. Any of them. And I dinnae feel," she paused, "easy around men I dinnae ken. Particularly at night."
She held his gaze. "I'm nae sayin' this tae cause trouble or tae make demands. I'm sayin' it because ye cut a hole in yer tent fer me and ye deserve tae ken why."
She said it the way she'd learned to say difficult things. Flat and plain, no apology around it, no softness offered as a buffer.
She watched his face for the recalibration. The moment people decided she was something fragile that needed managing differently than they'd been managing it before.
She'd watched it happen so many times she could predict it now, the small shift behind the eyes, the adjustment in tone, everything going a little more careful.
He looked at her for a long moment.
"The slit will keep the smoke down," he said. "Keep the candle away from the canvas on the right side, it's closer than it looks." He glanced at the tied-back flap. "I'll leave this open an inch. Ye'll have the firelight."
That was all.
She stared at him. "Ye're nae going tae ask."
"Ask what?"
"Why." She held his gaze. "Why I dinnae feel easy. Why the dark. Everyone asks why."
"Ye told me what I need tae ken," he said. "The why is yers."
She looked at the candles.
"Most people dinnae dae that," she said.
"Dae what?"
"Leave it alone." She paused. "They think if they ask enough questions, they can fix it. Or they think knowin' the shape of it makes them better at handlin' me." She said the last two words the way they tasted, which was not good. "Ye just left it."
"Aye." The line of his mouth moved. It was not a smile, but near enough that her stomach registered it before she could stop it.
"I'm nae tryin' tae handle ye, Matilda MacInnes. I dinnae think it'd go well fer either of us."
She looked at him. And there it was again, completely unwanted and entirely inconvenient, the almost-smile she was already finding it difficult not to answer.
"Nay," she said. "It wouldnae."
"Try tae sleep," he said. "We move at first light."
"I dinnae sleep well at night."
"I can see." He said it simply. "Try anyway."
He pulled back from the opening and she heard him settle again outside. The soft shift of him repositioning, and when she looked at his shadow through the canvas he was between her and the tree line, upright and still, facing outward into the dark.
She lay on her side facing the candle.
It burned small and steady, the ventilation slit doing its work, the firelight from outside coming through the open inch of the flap and projecting a thin stripe of gold across the canvas floor.
A sound from the trees. Small and gone before she'd finished identifying it.
She looked at his shadow.
Still there. Still… still.
She made herself breathe slowly.
The candle burned. The camp slept. The fire crackled its way toward embers, and the forest settled into the deep quiet that came in the hours before dawn.
She realized, at some point, that his shadow hadn't moved. Not once. He hadn't slept.
She didn't know how she knew, she just did. The particular quality of someone who was awake or sleeping. He was awake.
He was still sitting between her and the tree line. Still watching the dark.
She thought about saying something, but she didn't.
She watched the candle burn down another inch and let the night do what it was going to do and told herself she would think about all of it later.
Later.
The way he'd said the why is yers and meant it.
Nae now.
Now she just watched the small steady flame and let him watch the dark. She tried not to think about the fact that for the first time in longer than she could clearly remember, the night did not feel like survival.
And somewhere in the hour before dawn, without meaning to, she slept.