Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Matilda had found it four days ago, tucked behind the east wing, behind a door that looked like it led to a storeroom.
Herbs along the south wall, mostly dead now in the autumn cold, their stems brown and rattling faintly in the breeze.
A stone bench that caught the afternoon light at an angle that made it warm.
Nobody went there. The silence was the kind that asked nothing of a person, and she had needed that more than she'd known.
Sigrid had found her the following day and sat down without being asked, which was very Sigrid. They'd been going there together since.
They walked the circuit slowly, hands clasped behind their backs, their boots quiet on the gravel path. The sky above the garden walls was pale blue and cold, the kind of blue that looked warm from indoors and wasn't.
Matilda looked at the path.
She'd been turning the question over since she'd woken that morning, trying to find a way to say it that didn't make her sound like what she was, a woman who had run out of time.
"Can I ask ye something?"
"Aye," Sigrid said, without breaking stride.
Matilda's fingers found the fabric of her cloak and held.
"The marital bed." She kept her voice even.
The words felt sharp in her throat, like something she'd been carrying at an awkward angle for too long.
"Is it as frightening as it sounds?" She stopped.
Started again. "I've heard things. From women who werenae kind about it.
And from women who were kind, but I couldnae tell if they were being honest or just…
saying things." She pressed her lips together. "I dinnae ken what tae expect."
Sigrid was quiet for a moment, not commenting on the fact that Matilda had just admitted their marriage wasn’t consummated, for which Matilda was grateful. They reached the end of the path and turned. The dead herb stems fluttered softly against the wall.
"There are women who'll tell ye it is unpleasant and that's all there is tae it," Sigrid said finally. "And women who'll tell ye it's wonderful from the first moment and always will be." She paused. "Both of those women are leavin' something out."
Matilda looked at her sideways. Her pulse was going faster than the conversation warranted.
"The first time depends almost entirely on the man," Sigrid said, plainly, with no softness put around it to make it easier to hear.
Matilda had always appreciated that about her.
"If he's selfish, or careless, or in a hurry — aye, it'll hurt fer a moment, and ye'll wonder what the fuss is about.
But if he pays attention…" A pause. "If he goes slowly.
If he's more interested in what ye're feelin' than in what he's feelin', or at least equally interested," she looked at Matilda steadily, "it's different. "
"And ye think Ivar will pay attention?"
Sigrid considered this in the way she considered things she already knew the answer to.
"I've worked fer the laird fer six years," she said.
"I've watched him notice things nobody else notices and act on them without being asked and without making a performance of it.
" Her jaw set slightly, the way it did when she was stating something she'd stake her name on.
"He told me tae fill a chamber with candles and nae explain why.
" She glanced at Matilda. "What dae ye think? "
Matilda looked at the dead stems along the south wall. The brown stalks, the pale sky, the small, enclosed space that held warmth the rest of the island had already given up on.
She thought about the tent, and the slit in the canvas, and a shadow that hadn't moved all night.
She thought about a thumb moving once against her jaw in a warm kitchen, and the question that had come with it, low and direct.
"I think he'll pay attention," she said.
"Aye." Sigrid nodded once, the way she acknowledged things that had been decided. "I think so too."
They walked another circuit in silence. The stone bench sat in its strip of pale sun, and Matilda stopped at it and sat, and tilted her face up toward the light. It was thin and cold, and she closed her eyes and let it sit there, the orange warmth of it behind her eyelids, and breathed.
"The two weeks," she said. "They're nearly up."
"I ken," Sigrid said, and sat beside her.
Matilda’s hands were loose in her lap, which was not the way her hands usually were when she thought about this.
"I'm nae afraid." She opened her eyes and looked at the pale sky.
"That's what's strange. I keep waitin' fer it tae come back, the fear, the way it always comes back, and it—" She stopped.
"Isnae coming," Sigrid said.
"Aye." She lowered her chin and looked at her hands. "I dinnae ken what tae dae with that."
Sigrid was quiet for a moment. A gust came through the garden and moved the dead stems and passed. "Ye dinnae have tae dae anything with it," she said. "Ye just have tae let it be what it is."
Matilda sat with that. The garden was entirely still, and the pale sun was on the bench, and it was warm.
She thought Sigrid might be right.
The coastal patrol had taken longer than expected.
Ivar came back with the cold of the sound in his shoulders and his eyes raw from the wind and two hours of calculations still turning over in the back of his mind that he hadn't managed to put down yet.
He'd walked the north path himself, checking the sight lines, the coves where a vessel could sit dark and quiet and watch the keep.
He did it every third day. The day he stopped doing it himself was the day he'd decided someone else's eyes were good enough, and that wasn't a day he had reached yet.
He was tired. Not the clean tired of a hard fight or a long crossing. The kind that settled behind the eyes and came from too many hours of thinking without resolution.
Torvald had the bath brought up without being asked.
The chamber smelled of steam and woodsmoke, the fire built high, and he got into the tub and closed his eyes and let the heat work on his shoulders and did not think about anything for as long as that was possible, which was not very long.
He was somewhere between awake and not, the day finally beginning to lift off him, when the door opened.
He turned his head.
Matilda stood in the doorway.
The firelight was behind him and the steam was between them and she was flushed from it, her eyes bright, her hair beginning to escape its pins in the damp warmth of the room.
She took him in. All of him, the water, the bare line of his shoulders, the situation, and he watched her do it. Watched her not leave.
That was the thing. She had every reason to back out and close the door quietly and they would never have spoken of it. Instead, she stepped fully inside and pulled the door shut behind her, and the small decisive sound of the latch dropping was the loudest thing in the room.
He kept his arms along the edges of the tub and said nothing. He was not going to make this easier for her. Not because he didn't want to, he did, considerably, but because she hadn't gone there to be managed.
She'd stayed on her own, and that mattered, so he wasn't going to take it from her by filling the space before she'd decided what to put in it.
She crossed to the window. Her shoulders were high. Her hands found each other behind her back, the clasp she used when she was thinking.
He gave her the moment.
"Ye can turn around," he said. His voice came out lower than he'd intended, roughened by the steam and the hour.
"I'm lookin' at the yard."
"The yard isnae interestin' at this hour."
"I find it very interestin'." A beat, and then, without turning: "How long have ye been back?"
The question surprised him slightly. Not the content of it, the steadiness of it. She was making conversation. Deliberately, carefully, the way a person made conversation when they needed another thirty seconds to finish deciding something.
"An hour," he said. "Maybe more."
"Did ye find anythin'?"
"Nay."
She was quiet for a moment. Her reflection was barely visible in the dark glass of the window, the suggestion of her face turned slightly toward the yard below.
"Good," she said. And then she turned around.
Her face was pink from the steam. Her eyes were dark and very steady, and she was looking at him directly. He felt it like a hand pressed flat to his chest.
He kept his hands where they were, loose on the edges of the tub.
She didn't fidget. Didn't reach for an excuse or a deflection.
The room was quiet, the fire the only sound.
"Come here," he said and she approached him slowly, her eyes doing all the speaking.
"The first night," he said. "I told ye that ye could touch me if ye wanted tae."
Her mouth moved. A small, careful breath.
"Aye." Very quiet. Her eyes dropped to his chest, then came back up to his.
"That offer isnae time-limited," he said, and held her gaze, and waited.
She looked at his face. Then at the scar along his ribs, catching the firelight.
He watched her reach out.
Her hand moved through the steam slowly, deliberately, and he stayed completely still while she traced the scar with one finger—light, unhurried, following the length of it the way you followed something you wanted to understand.
He felt every part of it. The specific careful weight of her touch moved through him like heat, and he gripped the edges of the tub and kept his hands exactly where they were and breathed through his nose and said nothing.
"Daes it still hurt?" she said. Her voice was quiet, not soft but careful.
"Nay." He watched her finger follow the line of it. "It's been a long time."
"How long?"
"Fifteen years."
She looked up at him briefly, then back at the scar. "Ye were merely a lad."
His brother had called it a lesson. The training guards had called it a badge. They’d expected him to carry his battle scars as part of his armor.