Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
"The burn's faster than it looks."
Matilda didn't answer him.
She could see that perfectly well herself. The water moving quick and dark over the stones, catching the early light in ways that made the current look almost decorative when it wasn't.
She picked her way to the edge and crouched and cupped water over her face and didn't think about how cold it was.
Around her, Ivar's men were doing the same, spread along the bank, quiet and efficient in the grey morning light.
Nobody spoke much.
The camp had come down faster than it had gone up and the horses were already loaded. She'd woken, mortifyingly, to find that she had in fact slept, deeply enough that Torvald had had to say her name twice outside the tent before she'd heard him.
She hadn't looked at Ivar when she came out.
She looked at him now, briefly, sideways.
He was upstream a little, washing his face with the brisk unselfconsciousness of someone who had done this in a hundred burns on a hundred mornings and found nothing remarkable about any of them.
His hair was pushed back. His cloak was off, folded over a rock. The cold didn't appear to be troubling him.
She looked away.
She reached further out over the water for a cleaner current, shifted her weight forward onto the next stone, and the stone moved.
It happened very fast.
The stone tilted, her foot went sideways, her balance went with it. She had one clear thought, not this, not in front of all of them, and then a hand closed around her forearm.
Firm. Immediate. Not grabbing, just there. Solid and certain.
Taking her weight before she'd finished losing it and holding until she found the stone again with her foot and her balance came back and her heart was hammering so hard she could feel it in her back teeth.
“I’ve got ye.” He said as he let her go.
Clean and immediate, the moment she was steady, his hand simply wasn't there anymore.
No lingering. No are ye all right said in that voice people used when they wanted to watch her face while she answered. Just the contact and then the absence of it, and he was already looking back at the water.
She straightened.
Her pulse was doing something she needed it to stop doing.
She was very aware of the exact shape of where his hand had been, the grip of it, the warmth, and she was also aware that she had not frozen. Not even the beginning of it.
Her body had simply registered. Caught, steady, safe and moved on, and she didn't know what to do with that so she cupped more water over her face and let the cold of it do something useful.
"Told ye it was fast," he said.
"Ye told me it looked fast," she said. "There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"Aye. One is an observation. The other is a warnin'. If ye meant it as a warnin' ye should've said so."
He looked at her then, and the ghost of something crossed his face, that almost-expression she was developing an unwilling familiarity with.
"I'll bear that in mind," he said.
She wrung the water from her cuffs and did not smile.
It was hours later when the storm came from nowhere.
One moment the sky was the flat grey it had been all morning, low and still and unanimated. The next, the wind picked up with a purpose that made the horses toss their heads and Torvald say something short and Norse that she suspected wasn't a blessing.
"There," Ivar said, already moving, and she looked where he was looking and saw the rock overhang set into the hillside above the path, a shallow shelf of granite jutting out over a space just wide enough to be useful.
"Move," he said, to her and to his men both, and they moved.
The rain hit before they reached it. Not building up to itself, just arriving, heavy and immediate and horizontal.
By the time she ducked under the overhang she was already soaked across the shoulders and the wind was doing something very determined to her hair.
Ivar's men spread along the base of the hill on either side, pulling hoods up, settling into it with the resignation of people who had learned that weather had opinions and there was no point in having a conversation about it.
The overhang fit two people.
She became aware of how close Ivar was beside her. Which was not a choice either of them had made so much as a simple consequence of the space available, and the rain that was making the alternative very clear.
She pressed back against the rock face.
He stood at the edge of the shelter, close enough that the rain coming off the overhang was landing on his shoulder rather than on her, which she suspected was also not an accident.
A hard gust came sideways and pushed her into him before she could brace against it.
She caught herself with a hand against his arm and straightened, but the wind had its own ideas and the space had its limits. There was simply nowhere to go that wasn't into the rock or into him.
She stopped trying to go anywhere.
He reached up to steady her, before unclasping his cloak.
"Ye dinnae have tae she started.
"Yer teeth are about to start," he said, which was an outrageous exaggeration and also, she suspected, approximately true.
He pulled off his cloak, then stepped in behind her and settled it over her shoulders.
For a moment, his hands lingered at her collar, adjusting the fold where it sat against her throat. In the process, his knuckles brushed the side of her neck. Barely, but still, she felt it.
Then he stepped back.
The wool was warm with the deeper heat of something worn for hours against a man's body. It carried the rain, the cold air, and something unmistakably him beneath it. She drew it closed at the front with fingers that were entirely steady and refused to think about that at all.
"Thank ye," she said.
He said nothing. His eyes were on the rain.
The storm roared off the overhang and turned the path below into a running stream. It hammered the shoulders of his men until they were shapes in grey, hunkered and thoroughly soaked.
"Dae they ever complain?" she said, noting how patiently they tolerated the storm.
"About what?"
"The weather. Standin’ in it. Any of it."
He glanced at her.
"Erikson complains. Constantly. The others have learned to tune him out."
"Which one is Erikson?"
"The redhead."
She turned in the direction he was pointing. The redhead was currently wringing out his sleeve, his mouth pulled down at the corners, eyes on the sky.
"He looks miserable."
"He's fine," he stated drily. "He makes that face in good weather too."
A laugh pulled at her before she could stop it. Small, but real.
Beside her, she saw a ghost of a smile appear, and it was somehow more distracting for the restraint of it.
The rain hammered down harder. Wind curled beneath the shelter and shoved at them both, nudging the last inch from between them until her shoulder brushed his arm.
She should move. She did not.
Neither did he.
The contact was slight, almost nothing, but the heat there was immediate and out of all proportion to how little of him was actually touching her.
She tried to keep her eyes averted, but they continued to return to him.
Rain had darkened the strands of hair at his temple.
A thin line of water ran from his jaw to his throat and disappeared beneath his collar.
He made no move to wipe it away. He stood still, looking out into the storm with that same quiet attention he gave everything, as if even weather deserved to be studied before it was judged.
"Daes it bother ye?"
"What?"
"The rain," she raised her voice to be heard above the storm.
He considered that with more seriousness than the question deserved. "Nay."
She kept her eyes fixed on him. "Naething bothers ye, daes it?"
He turned his head slightly to look at her. There was some amusement just behind it.
"One or two things," he said.
"Such as?"
He looked back at the rain. "I'll let ye ken."
She stared at the side of his face.
Her shoulder was against his arm, and the wind was still howling. She couldn't tell anymore if she was warm because of the cloak or something else entirely.
She looked back at the storm.
Neither of them moved.
Then it passed the way it had arrived, all at once.
His men stirred and shook themselves.
One of them, a sour-faced man she'd noticed earlier because he was impossible not to notice, looked at his wet clothes with deep displeasure.
"I've been drier fallin' into the sea," he said.
"Ye would ken, as ye have fallen intae the sea," another said. "Twice."
"Aye, and both times I was drier than this."
A third man looked up at the sky with the expression of someone who had a grievance they intended to file formally. "
"We couldnae have found the overhang ten minutes earlier," he said.
"We found it when we found it," Torvald said, from further along the rock face, wringing out his hood with the resignation of a man who had made peace with weather a long time ago.
"Aye well." The man looked down at his boots, which were soaked through and through. "Tell that tae me feet."
She stepped forward first, out from under the overhang, and the cold air hit her face. She breathed it in, trying to ignore that her heart was beating fast.
She snuggled deeper into his cloak.
The sea somehow seemed bigger than she remembered.
She had seen it years ago from a hillside so far inland it had looked calm. Back then, it had been a grey strip laid flat between sky and land, distant enough to seem like something God had placed there for decoration.
Her nurse had stood beside her that day, wrapping a shawl tighter around both of them to keep out some of the wind, and when Matilda had asked what lay beyond it, the woman had said, Men go there tae disappear.
At the time, Matilda had thought that sounded romantic. Now it seemed a far more practical warning.