Chapter 8
EIRIK
Ican't stop thinking about her mouth. This isn't a productive state of mind for a packless alpha who should be focused on the Drakfell scouts on the northwestern ridge, the uncle who wants him dead, and the borrowed fortress whose tolerance of his presence has quietly outgrown the medical excuse that got him through the gates.
But I've never been good at should, and the memory of Signe's mouth is louder than strategy.
It's been days since she put her mouth on me in the infirmary, and we haven't talked about it. We haven't talked about much of anything, but last night she said 'I'll see you tomorrow' in the voice she uses for wound care and discharge notes, and when I asked her why, she couldn't answer.
She didn't need to. The answer was in the way her scent pushed through the suppressant hard enough that I could taste the omega beneath the alpine bloodroot.
My wolf paces inside me like an animal in a space too small for what he's carrying. I need air. I need fire. I need the forge.
Leif is already at the anvil when I arrive, drawing out a piece of flat stock with the steady, unhurried rhythm of a wolf who treats iron the way Signe treats injuries: with the kind of attention that doesn't tolerate interruption.
The forge chamber sits at the base of the western tower, the ceiling blackened from years of smoke, the walls carrying a patina of soot and mineral deposits that give the stone a dark, oiled sheen.
Tools hang from iron hooks along the walls, each one positioned where the hand expects to find it without looking.
Leif doesn't look up when I walk in. He nods toward the second anvil, where a half-finished bracket sits cooling on the face, and the nod is the only invitation I'm going to get.
I pick up the bracket. I find the tongs. The coal bed is running hot enough that the heat pushes back against my face when I lean in to seat the metal, and the push is the first honest sensation I've had since leaving the infirmary.
The forge strips everything down. The corridor politics, the scent management, the careful calibration of how much space I'm allowed to occupy in a pack that isn't mine.
None of it survives the fire. There's the metal, the hammer, the anvil, and the question of whether the next blow lands where I intended.
The simplicity is a mercy I didn't earn.
I work the bracket for a while before the silence gets too heavy. Leif's rhythm on the other anvil is steady, his strikes landing with the clean accuracy of someone who has done this particular task so many times that the motion lives in his shoulders instead of his head.
He isn't going to ask. That's the arrangement we've built over the days I've been spending here. He provides the fire and the work. I provide the noise. The exchange suits us both.
"She's in my head," I say, and the confession comes out between hammer strikes, timed to the impact so the words hit the air with the ring of steel behind them. "Every corridor. Every meal. Every time I close my eyes. I can't get clear of her, and the not getting clear is getting worse."
Leif's hammer doesn't change rhythm. He draws the flat stock another inch, flips it, draws again.
"She put her mouth on me," I say, because the forge is the only place in this fortress where the truth doesn't echo.
"In the infirmary. She decided to cross a line she'd drawn, and she did it with the precision she brings to sutures.
I've been replaying it ever since. Every time my mind should be on Balric's scouts, it goes back to her. "
The bracket glows. I pull it from the fire and set it on the anvil, and the first strike sends a spray of scale across the stone floor.
Leif sets down his hammer. He picks up the tongs, turns his piece on the anvil, and examines the edge with the focused attention of a wolf deciding whether the metal has earned one more heat or needs to cool.
"Your bracket's crooked," he says.
I look down. The bracket is crooked.
"Your strikes are landing off-center because you're not watching the face," he says. "You're watching the fire, and the fire doesn't care where your hammer falls." He picks up his own hammer and goes back to work. "Watch the face."
It isn't advice about the bracket. I hear what's buried in the words the way I hear what's buried in Signe's healer voice: the real conversation running where the language can't reach.
I straighten the bracket. I watch the face.
The forge sound fills the chamber, two hammers working separate rhythms that occasionally sync and occasionally clash, and the clash is as useful as the sync because it tells me where my timing has drifted.
Leif doesn't say anything else. He doesn't need to.
The forge said it for him: stop watching the fire. Watch where the hammer lands.
I work until my shoulders ache and the bracket is finished. The worst of the restlessness has burned off with the scale.
The anger at Balric is still there, banked beneath the grief, but the forge has filed the edges into something I can carry without cutting myself.
Before I leave, Leif speaks without looking up from the piece he's quenching. "She doesn't let wolves sit on her worktable. You know that."
"I know."
"And you're going to sit on it anyway." The water hisses around the cooling metal. Leif lifts the piece, examines it, sets it on the rack. "That's what I'm saying."
The day passes the way fortress days pass: in increments of usefulness. I walk the western perimeter with Gunnar in the afternoon, not because he asks but because he doesn't tell me not to, and the distinction is becoming the language of our arrangement.
He points out the drainage gap on the lower approach. I point out that the gap creates a choke point, and any attacker with half a brain would use it to pin a patrol against the slope with no room to maneuver.
He looks at me the way Leif looks at a piece of metal that's performing above its grade.
"You've run border assessments before," he says. It isn't a question.
"Since I could keep up with my father's stride."
He nods. The nod carries the practical weight of Leif's, and the accumulation of wolves who communicate in gestures rather than speeches is becoming one of the things I like about this fortress.
I find Signe's infirmary door ajar after midnight. The corridor is empty, the fortress gone quiet except for the night patrol's boot-falls in the distance and the mineral ticking of stone cooling after the day's fire.
Candlelight spills through the doorway in a thin strip, and the light carries her scent: the botanical sharpness of whatever she's been grinding layered over a deeper note that hits me like a fist to the sternum.
The closed room has concentrated it. Hours of her in a sealed space, and the suppressant can't keep up with the accumulation.
Everything in me drops low and locks on, every instinct narrowing to the doorway and what's in the room with the single-minded focus of an animal that has found what it's been tracking.
I lean against the doorframe and let the scent settle into my lungs before I speak. It's a bad idea. The kind of bad idea I specialize in.
She's at her worktable with the leather satchel open and the old ledger spread flat under the candle.
The pages are the ones I saw at the cottage, the faded ink and the notations in a hand that isn't hers, but the configuration is different.
She's arranged other pages around the ledger, loose sheets covered in her own handwriting, notes and lists and what looks like a map drawn from description rather than observation.
The layout is a cross-reference. I recognize the pattern from my father's war table: information from one source laid against information from another, looking for the overlap that turns speculation into knowledge.
I step inside. I sit on her worktable, close enough that the candlelight catches the pages beneath my hand and her scent catches everything else.
The concentration of her in this room is doing things to my blood pressure that have no place in a midnight study session, and my wolf doesn't care about the pages or the research or the centuries-old handwriting.
He cares about the pulse I can see in her throat and the fact that the omega bleeding through her compound is louder in here than it's ever been.
She looks up, and the expression on her face carries the particular irritation of a wolf whose workspace has been invaded by the one who invaded it yesterday and will invade it tomorrow.
"Eirik."
"Signe."
"Get off my worktable."
"No." I pick up the nearest loose page and examine it. "What are you cross-referencing?"
"Get off my worktable and I'll tell you."
"Tell me and I'll think about it."
The irritation holds for another breath, and then her jaw unclenches: not the mask dropping, not the professional distance collapsing, but the woman behind it deciding that the information is worth the cost of the wolf sitting on her furniture.
Her attention goes back to the ledger. I look at what she's been building.
The ledger is open to a page I haven't seen before. The tight, precise script I remember from the cottage, with a notation that makes me go still.
Root structure consistent with alpine specimens documented in prior entry. V. confirms seasonal availability. Second harvest attempted, unsuccessful. Altitude insufficient. V. advises higher approach via the northeastern pass above the glacier field.
"V.," I say.
She doesn't look up. "The initial appears throughout the older entries. My grandmother had a contact in the Drakfell mountains who provided specimens and location data. She never recorded the full name."
My throat tightens. The room contracts. "Valdi," I say, and my voice sounds wrong in my own ears, stripped down to something that the forge couldn't reach. "V. is my father."