Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
She woke before him.
The chamber was a hollow of grey stillness, the air smelling of cooling wax and the faint, sweet scent of peat. The fire had burned down to a bed of glowing embers.
Ivar lay on his back beside her, one arm loose and heavy at his side, breathing in a slow, even rhythm.
The tension he carried in his broad shoulders, the rigid armor he wore even in sleep, had eased somewhat.
Not entirely, she suspected that entirely was a setting he simply did not possess.
But his face had a quality she hadn't seen in it before.
Not soft, exactly. Unguarded.
She looked at him for a moment longer than she intended to, watching the steady, deep rise of his chest.
Then, she slipped out from under the heavy covers. The floor was bone-chilling, the stone biting at her soles, but she dressed quietly in the grey light and left him to the rest he’d earned.
The corridor was a cold, empty vault, the keep not yet fully awake. She could hear the distant, hollow sounds of the kitchen fires being built and the first of the household moving through the lower passages like ghosts. She followed the scent of woodsmoke down the back stairs.
She had been thinking about the oatcakes since the second day in Oswin’s room.
She was aware it was a strange, mundane thing to fixate on while a man’s life hung by a thread, but her mind had needed a place to be that wasn't the wound, the fever, or the suffocating helplessness of watching him bleed.
It had settled, with a stubborn insistence, on the fact that she did not know how to make oatcakes, and that Ivar ate them every morning without comment.
She wanted to make them for him. She understood this was not a rational response to four days of terror, but she intended to do it anyway.
The kitchen was a warm cavern, low-ceilinged and heavy with the scent of yesterday’s bread and the fresh char of the morning fire.
Three of the kitchen women were already at the long table.
Beira at the far end, her forearms dusted white as she kneaded dough, and two younger lasses sorting dried herbs near the window.
All three of them looked up, their eyes widening when she walked in.
"Lady Matilda." Beira’s voice went careful, the tone used when Matilda departed from the expected pattern of a laird’s wife.
"Ladies, I will be happy tae make the oatcakes this morn," Matilda said, her voice level. "I just need tae ken where everythin’ is."
A heavy pause hung in the air.
"I can show ye how."
"I ken how." She didn't, not truly, but she had watched Beira’s hands move twice, and she had the general shape of it in her mind. "I just need to ken where the supplies are kept."
Beira studied her for a moment with the look of a woman deciding whether to argue and concluding that the energy required wasn't worth the result. She pointed at the shelf. The oats. The salt. The flat iron pan already sitting on the hearthstone, and the wooden press on the peg above it.
"The griddle needs tae be properly heated before—"
"Aye. Thank ye, Beira. I’ve watched ye before, and I think I’ve got the general idea. If ye dinnae mind, I’d like tae give it a try meself."
Beira returned to her kneading while she found the oats and measured them into the bowl, or attempted to, using the wooden cup Beira had pointed at. She poured what was decisively too much and decided to commit to it.
Salt. Water.
She mixed it with her bare hands, the gritty texture cold against her skin, working it until it came together into something that held its shape when she pressed it.
The first problem was the thickness.
She pressed the first round onto the hearthstone, and it was clearly too thick, a clumsy, heavy thing. She pressed it down more firmly with the heel of her hand, but it spread unevenly at the edges and held a stubborn ridge in the center that she didn't think was meant to be there.
She put it on the iron pan anyway and sat back on her heels to wait.
"The griddle’s nae heated," one of the younger lasses started.
"I ken," Matilda said.
Because she had just realized the griddle was not hot enough, and there was nothing to be done about it now except wait for the heat to build.
She waited. The cake sat on the pan in its imperfect shape and did nothing for some time, and then it began to cook.
She forgot to watch it because she was already pressing the second round, trying to get the thickness right, and by the time she remembered the first one, the edges had gone a color that was decisively past golden.
She took it off and looked at it.
The edges were black and the center was pale in a way that suggested it had not cooked through, which she understood was the worst possible outcome.
It was not entirely ruined, because entirely ruined could be thrown out, but ruined in the way that required a decision about whether to serve it anyway and hope.
She set it aside and started the second round.
The second batch went better in the sense that she watched it like a hawk this time and did not let the edges go black.
They went a deep, committed brown instead. The centers were thinner, but one cracked down the middle when she turned it, and the other stuck slightly to the pan and lost a jagged piece of its edge.
She arranged them on the wooden board and looked at them critically.
They looked like something a person had made who had been told about oatcakes in a distant story rather than taught to make them.
They are edible. Probably.
She had tried two batches and the second was better than the first. That would have to be sufficient, for she could hear the keep waking up around her and she did not want him to come down and find her in a state of active failure.
She put the least damaged three on the front of the board and angled the cracked one toward the back.
"Those are braw," said one of the younger lasses, in a tone of voice that indicated she was a kind person and a terrible liar.
"I think that they’re kind of terrible, especially compared to Beira’s," Matilda said and laughed. "But thank ye, lass."
Matilda set the last of the oatcakes on the board, looking at them critically. She could already feel the weight of her own expectations on them, especially with Ivar's usual love for the things.
A small sigh escaped her as she rearranged them, trying to hide the worst ones at the back. Maybe he'd only notice the ones that were slightly… better.
She stepped back, arms crossed, trying to come up with a plan of action to hide the results of her experiment, but before she could decide, she heard footsteps in the corridor.
Her stomach dropped. Ivar was coming. And there was no way to make the oatcakes magically improve in the following two seconds.
In a moment of sheer impulse, she grabbed the worst one, the one with the burnt edges, and moved it to the far side of the table.
And there he was, stepping into the doorway.
He had dressed. His hair was not fully ordered, giving him a rakish, unsettled look.
The wound pulled at his movement. She could see it in the slight brace of his right side, but he was upright and his eyes were clear, and the grey residue of the last four days was finally gone from his face.
"Ye’re up early," she said quickly, a little too brightly.
She immediately hoped it didn’t sound like she was trying to cover something up. Ivar’s eyes scanned the room before landing on the table, then on her.
He raised an eyebrow and looked at the oatcakes with the kind of grave seriousness he usually reserved for battle strategy. Matilda’s heart gave a little leap, but she kept her expression as neutral as she could manage.
"So are ye."
"I've nae had a blade in me side."
"That ye've mentioned." He went into the kitchen, his gait unhurried, and stopped on the other side of the table. He looked at the board again with an expression that was doing a great deal of work to stay neutral. "Did ye make those?"
"I did."
"Yerself?"
"That's what I said."
"Aye. I see we’re having a breakfast of champions," he said, his voice even, but there was that slight twitch at the corner of his mouth.
"Aye," she said, her smile faltering just a bit. "Nae the usual, but they’ll fill ye up."
He picked up the one at the front of the board, the best of the lot, and turned it in his hand.
One edge was the color of a winter night. The crack down the second one was not, it turned out, hidden by its position. He examined it with the careful, grave attention of a man asked to assess a tactical map.
"I pressed them too thick," she said, her chin lifting. "The first batch. The second batch is better."
"Which is the second batch?"
"The ones that are only brown."
He looked at the board, appearing to do a small calculation. "Which one is this?" He held up the one in his hand.
She considered the question. "That one is transitional," she said.
Something moved in the harsh line of his face. He bit into it.
She watched him chew. He chewed for considerably longer than a well-made oatcake would have required. His expression remained thoughtful throughout.
"Well?" she said.
"They're…" He stopped, searching for the word. "They've got character."
"They're burned."
"The edges have texture." He took another bite with the commitment of a man who had made a decision and intended to honor it. "The center is…"
"Raw."
"Substantial." He finished it.
He put his hand out and picked up the second one, the cracked one, and bit into that as well, and she stared at him.
"Ye dinnae have to eat that."
"I've had worse."
"Ye have nae."
"Winter campaign, the year I was twenty-three." He chewed thoughtfully. "We ran out of proper rations off the coast of Tiree and Torvald made something out of barley and sea water that I believe removed a layer of me stomach linin'."
"That's nae a recommendation. That's a medical incident."
The corner of his mouth moved. "These are better than that."
"That is the lowest possible bar."
"Aye, but ye cleared it." He set the second cake down and looked at her across the table. The kitchen women had gone entirely quiet. "Why are ye in me kitchen making oatcakes at dawn?"
She met his eyes. "Ye like them."
He went still like he usually did when something surprised him and he was deciding what to do with the surprise. She watched the gears turn behind those dark eyes.
"I'll give the rest tae Torvald," she said, her voice jumping a register because the quiet had weight in it that she wasn't sure she was ready to carry. "As punishment."
"Torvald's stomach is less discriminatin' than mine."
"Ye just told me yer stomach survived a medical incident off Tiree."
"Torvald's survived worse. He ate a seabird raw once. On a dare."
"That's revoltin'."
"He won the dare."
She laughed.
It came out before she could organize it into something more composed. A real, bright laugh that filled the warm kitchen air and made the last of the tightness in her chest come loose.
Ivar was watching her with an expression she didn't have a name for yet.
She picked up the small wooden cup she'd used for measuring, which still had a dusting of flour in it, and flicked it across the table at him.
The flour settled across the front of his dark tunic and the line of his jaw in a small, white cloud. The kitchen went deathly quiet.
Ivar looked down at himself. He looked up at her. He looked at the flour on his tunic.
"That," he said, "was a tactical error."
"Was it?"
"Aye."
He moved around the end of the table without hurry, which was somehow worse than if he'd moved quickly, because it gave her time to decide whether to retreat.
She stood her ground. Then he was in front of her, close enough that she could feel the heat radiating from him. His hand came up and brushed the flour from her cheek in a single, slow pass that started at her cheekbone and ended somewhere near the line of her jaw and stayed there.
His thumb was still. His eyes were locked on hers. All the kitchen sounds, the crackle of the fire, the distant movement of the household, the quiet industry of the women who had become deeply fascinated by the stone wall, all of it receded to the edge of the world.
"I was frightened, Ivar."
She said it plainly, because it was true and he had told her things in the firelight the previous night that had cost him considerably more. She owed him the same plainness in return.
His hand was still at her jaw. She felt his thumb move once, slow and deliberate, the same way it had moved across her wrist in Oswin’s room.
"Matilda," he said.
"Dinnae tell me there was naethin' tae be frightened of."
"I wasnae going tae." He said it simply, his voice dropping into that rough, private register. "I was going tae say thank ye."
She looked at him.
He pulled her closer, unhurried, giving her the same careful space he always gave her, and kissed her.
It was in the warm kitchen, with flour on his tunic and the smell of burned oatcakes in the air and the three kitchen women finding the wall extremely interesting, and she didn't particularly care.
She smoothed the front of his tunic and let her hand rest there for a moment, feeling the steady rise and fall of his breathing, the warmth of him under the wool, the wound that was healing on his right side that she would check again before the afternoon.
"Come and eat somethin' that isnae those," she said.
"I ate two of those."
"Out of solidarity, nae enjoyment. Come and eat."
He looked down at her hand on his chest. He covered it with his own, brief and deliberate, and let it go.
"Aye," he said. "Lead the way."
She did.
Behind them, she heard Beira say something to the younger women in a low, private voice and heard one of them suppress a sound that was clearly a laugh.
She walked through the kitchen door with Ivar at her shoulder, into the corridor, toward breakfast, toward the day, toward whatever Henry and the Council and the grey water of the sound intended to bring next.
The keep smelled of burned oats and woodsmoke and the warmth of a home that had, without her entirely planning for it, become hers.
She found she didn't mind at all.