Chapter 3 #3
"It will be if my uncle's scouts find this cottage before the storm lifts.
" He says it without heat or pressure, the cold arithmetic of a man who has been calculating odds since he crossed the council hall over his father's body.
"If they come, I need to know whether to fight or move.
I can't do either without the information. "
I hold his gaze. Then I begin stirring the broth, because stirring gives my hands something to do that isn't cataloging the way he looks when the charm drops and the animal underneath takes its place.
The firelight catches the pages on my worktable, and he follows the motion. His eyes move from the door to the table and stop on the open spread of my grandmother's birth registry. The pages are old, the ink faded to a soft brown. The margin notes are written in a hand I know better than my own.
Between the pages, held flat by the book's spine, a pressed flower sits in the crease of the binding. Petals thin as parchment, a pale color that I've never been able to match to any specimen in my reference materials.
My grandmother noted the plant alongside a dosage variation she'd been experimenting with. She described the soil it grew in, the altitude, the direction of the slope. She described everything except where to find it, and I've never been able to identify the specimen from her notes alone.
"That flower," Eirik says.
I go very still.
"The pressed one, between those pages." His voice has changed again. Not the warmth, not the threat assessment, but recognition. The quality of a man looking at a familiar thing in an unexpected place. "I know that plant. It grows above the snowline in Drakfell territory."
My hands, which have been steady through sutures and wound irrigation and the private act of doubling my suppressant, pause on the handle of the wooden spoon.
He knows the plant. He knows where it grows. The gap in my grandmother's records, the one I've never been able to close because the plant came from a territory I've never visited, is sitting on my table wrapped in bandages.
The question he hasn't asked is there in his face, open and direct: why does a Northern Pack healer have a Drakfell mountain flower pressed between pages that are older than both of us?
It's too sharp for someone who was unconscious and bleeding last night, and it tells me everything I need to know about how dangerous he'll be when he's healthy.
I remove the broth from the fire and pour it into a clay cup. I carry the cup to him and set it in front of his hands. "Drink this. The protein will support your healing factor, and the root vegetables will replenish the mineral deficit from the blood loss."
He takes the cup. His fingers close around mine for a fraction of a second before I pull free, and the contact is brief enough to be accidental and deliberate enough to register as a statement.
Alpha-proximity response: elevated skin conductivity, accelerated pulse at the wrist, warmth spreading from the point of contact along the median nerve. Standard physiological cascade. I categorize it, dismiss it, and move on.
"Signe," he says. My name in his mouth sounds like the first word of a question he's going to spend a long time finishing.
"That flower. Those pages. Why does a wolf who seems very much at home, alone, in a secluded cottage above the tree line have a dead plant from my territory pressed into a book that looks like it hasn't left this table in years? "
I meet his gaze, and for one measured breath, I consider the truth. The truth is a door I've kept locked since girlhood, and opening it for a wounded stranger whose uncle is hunting him through the mountains would be the most profoundly stupid clinical decision I've ever made.
"Drink your broth," I tell him. "And then sleep. Your body needs rest more than it needs answers."
He drinks. He doesn't sleep. His gaze stays on the pressed flower, and the questions behind his eyes are already outpacing the answers I'm willing to give.
The blizzard howls. The fire pops and settles. Somewhere in the mountains beyond my walls, wolves are hunting the man on my table, and he's looking at my grandmother's handwriting with the recognition of someone who has walked the territory those notes describe.
The broth sits in his hands.
My hands are steady around the pestle as I resume grinding, the rhythm measured, constant, the only heartbeat I've allowed this space for years.
Tonight, the grinding doesn't quite fill the room. His breathing occupies the spaces between the strikes, and the cottage, which has been mine alone for so long, holds a second rhythm that my own adjusts to accommodate without my permission.
I grind harder. The pestle obeys. The compound obeys.
My hands are steady. The steadiness is what I have.
Outside, the wind changes. The blizzard's pitch drops by a quarter tone, and I know what that means because I've weathered enough storms in this cottage to read them the way I read wound drainage. The storm is weakening. By morning, the passes will begin to clear.
He heard it too. I don't need to look. I can feel the change in his breathing from across the room.