Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
"Ye're shakin'."
"I'm cold," Matilda said.
Claricia looked at her in the glass with one raised eyebrow and said nothing, which was more effective than saying something.
"Aye," she said. "That's one word fer it."
"It's the correct word," Matilda insisted, though the tremor in her hands had nothing to do with the drafty stones of Mull. She looked at her reflection, at the green wool, and the silver pins, and felt like a stranger in her own skin.
Her mind kept drifting to the ceremony, to the inevitable moment when Ivar would have to touch her as his wife. Her body, usually a fortress of iron-willed composure, was remembering things she had spent eight years trying to forget.
The weight of a man's grip. The feeling of a cage closing. She was terrified that when Ivar reached for her, she would not see the man who lit candles, but the shadows of the man who had come before."
"Matilda."
"I'm fine."
Claricia set down the comb.
"Ye're allowed tae be frightened," she said. "I was terrified. Ada was terrified. Isolda was terrified too."
"Aye," Isolda said, from the window seat, where she was feeding Astrid a piece of bread while Ada slept on the bed behind her.
"I'm nae frightened," Matilda said. "I just," She stopped. Looked at herself in the glass.
The dress was green, the same green as yesterday, because it was the best one Sigrid had found.
Her hair was up properly. Claricia's doing.
She looked, she thought, like a woman about to be married.
She was about to be married.
Me God, I cannae believe this.
"How long did it take?" she said. "Before it felt real. Before it felt like yer life and nae someone else's."
Claricia was quiet for a moment. "A week, maybe. Maybe less." She paused. "It helped that Erik was," She stopped. "Well. Erik was Erik. Which was terrible and then wasnae."
"Magnus was worse," Ada said, without opening her eyes.
"Ye're supposed tae be asleep," Isolda said.
"I was asleep. I heard terrible and woke up." Ada turned over. "Magnus was considerably worse than terrible in the beginnin'. And then he somehow became the most important man in me life."
Matilda looked at them. Claricia with Thor's handprint still on her sleeve. Isolda with someone else's baby in her lap. Ada flat on the bed, participating with her eyes closed.
She looked back at the glass.
"Can I ask ye something," she said.
"Aye," Claricia said.
Matilda kept her eyes on her own reflection.
"The kiss," she said. "At the ceremony. Is it…?"
Her hands were flat on her knees and she looked at them. "I've had a man's hands on me before. Not the way ye think. But it went far enough that me body remembers it whether I ask it tae or nae."
She said it plainly, the way she'd learned to say difficult things. No softness around the edges. "I freeze sometimes. When I'm nae expecting it. And I dinnae want tae freeze in front of the entire clan."
The room was quiet.
"Daes he ken?" Claricia said.
"Enough." She paused. "He's been careful since the beginning. He waited before he touched me on the horse. He," she stopped, " notices things."
"Then tell him," Claricia said. "Before. So he kens what tae watch fer."
"And if ye freeze," Isolda said, from the window, "he'll stop. Ragnar would've stopped. Any of them would've stopped."
"I ken that," Matilda said. Then, quieter: "I think I ken that."
She looked back at the glass. Her reflection looked back at her. Green dress, silver pins, hands in her lap.
"The thing is," she said, and then stopped, because the thing was harder to say than the rest of it.
She tried again. "The thing is I dinnae think I only feel afraid.
" Her ears had gone warm. "When I think about it.
About him. I think there's something else in there as well and I," she pressed her lips together.
"I've never felt that before. The something else. And I dinnae ken what tae dae with it."
Claricia looked at her in the glass for a long moment. Then she picked up the comb.
"Ye dinnae have tae dae anything with it," she said. "Just let it be there."
Matilda looked at them. Thor's handprint. The sleeping baby. Ada's closed eyes.
"Ye stayed," she said quietly. "All of ye."
"Aye," Claricia said simply. "We stayed."
From below, the bell rang once.
"Right," Sigrid said, from the doorway. "It's time."
"And the kiss," Claricia said, already moving toward the door. "Dinnae think about it beforehand. It'll only make ye worse."
"I wasnae thinking about it," Matilda said.
"Ye are now," Isolda said pleasantly, and followed her out.
The Great Hall had been decorated.
Not lavishly. This wasn't that kind of wedding, there hadn't been time and Ivar wasn't that kind of man. But the trestles had been cleared to the sides, the floor swept clean, the fire built high enough to throw warmth across the full width of the room.
Greenery had been cut and laid along the windowsills, dark pine and late autumn berries.
The clan was assembled along the walls, the full household and a good portion of the village besides, standing in the way people stood when they'd come to see something that mattered.
The visiting lairds were at the front.
Erik with his arms crossed and Claricia went beside him with Thor. Magnus and Ada's with Astrid in the wrap against her chest, her hand in his. Ragnar and Isolda close enough that their shoulders were touching.
The King's men stood to one side, Henry with his cataloguing eyes and his three silent companions.
Ivar was at the center of it.
She saw him before he saw her.
He was standing with his back to the door, speaking quietly with Torvald, and she had a moment to look at him without being looked at in return.
He'd dressed up for it. Dark tunic, the raven clasp at his shoulder, his hair pushed back. He was, objectively and inconveniently, the most striking man she'd ever seen and she was furious about that too.
Then he turned.
He looked at her the way he looked at everything, directly and without performance, taking accurate information. It caused whatever had been making her feel unsettled all morning to finally calm down.
She walked across the hall.
He didn't move toward her. He waited, which she understood was its own kind of courtesy, and when she reached him, he turned to face the front and she stood beside him and they both looked at the old man with the grey beard who was apparently officiating, and it began.
The vows were short and plain, which she was grateful for.
She spoke hers clearly, each word deliberate, because if she was doing this she was doing it properly.
She was not going to let her voice waver in front of a hall full of people who were watching her closely enough to notice. She felt the clan around her, the weight of their attention, the particular quality of a room full of people trying not to make a sound.
Ivar spoke his vows in the same voice he used for everything, even, certain, leaving no room for misunderstanding.
The old man said the words that made it binding.
Then Ivar turned to her.
She'd known it was coming. She'd thought about it. Briefly and then firmly stopped thinking about it, and she'd decided it would be formal and brief and she would manage it the same way she managed everything, by being still and letting it pass.
He put his hand against her jaw, carefully, with the deliberateness she'd come to recognize as entirely characteristic of him. Nothing accidental, nothing unconsidered, and kissed her.
It was meant to be formal.
It wasn't brief.
Not dramatically, not in a way the hall would remark on. Just a beat longer than it needed to be, and then another, and his hand was warm against her face and she had not frozen.
She did not freeze, her body did nothing except be entirely present in that specific moment, and when he pulled back his eyes opened and found hers immediately and something passed between them that she didn't have a word for yet.
She was going to need a word for it.
The hall exhaled around them. A collective release of held breath, and someone began to clap and the rest followed and Claricia made a sound that was probably audible on the mainland, and Matilda faced forward and breathed carefully and told herself she was perfectly composed.
She was not perfectly composed.
But she was standing upright and her hands were still and she thought, all things considered, that counted.
The feast that followed was loud and warm and went on longer than she'd expected.
Marta had been ready for it.
The tables were full, the ale was moving, and the people who had been holding themselves carefully all day were only now letting go of it.
The lairds were at the top table, their wives beside them. Thor had escaped twice and been retrieved both times by Erik, who scooped him up without breaking his conversation. Ivar sat beside her.
Not across from her, the way he'd sat at supper the night before. Beside her, his shoulder an inch from hers, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him when the draught came through the far door.
He didn't make a production of it. He just sat there and ate, answered when people spoke to him, and refilled her cup once without being asked.
She was aware of his hand on the table. The way it rested there, close to hers, not touching.
She did not look at it.
Claricia leaned across at one point and said something low that made Isolda press her lips together hard and made Ada look at the ceiling. Matilda caught enough of it to feel the heat climb her neck and looked very deliberately at her plate.
"What did she say?" Ivar said, low, beside her ear.
"Naething," Matilda said.
"Aye, clearly."
She picked up her cup. The corner of his mouth moved, and she looked away before she could answer it.
The candles burned lower.
The hall thinned gradually, men drifting toward the door in ones and twos, the noise dropping to something comfortable.