Chapter 24
Twenty-Four
Jorn’s warning on Fell’s second evening back had left me a little unnerved, but what happened next in the hall gutted me entirely.
Catseye—the woman I’d thought was stealing from me when I was in my fever, the woman Fell had brought me to before anyone else while I was in delirium—came to the hall.
She was beautiful, as I’ve said, and she loudly reprimanded Fell for letting his fights as my Norser build up, earning laughter from several Norsern.
But then, she seemed quite done with her anger.
She sat with Fell nearly in her lap and shaved the sides of his head, which had grown out some since he’d left the palace. She untied the part of his hair that was long, combed it, washed it, and then braided it.
He leaned into her body in a way… I could have cried.
Instead, I went to bed early and listened to the wind outside my chamber window, the lapping of water against the palace, ice chunks scraping rhythmically against each other. There was something soothing in the slurp-rush of it. The constancy.
I must go home soon, I told myself. I will ask the king in the morning if now that I’ve read, I can go home. There were too many kinds of pains in the world. I’d been protected from so many of them back on the Isle. I decided I hated living in the north. I am not made for this kind of ache.
And then, just as I made peace with my thoughts and began to feel sleepy, I heard humming in the hall outside my door.
Surely not.
But I knew it was.
He knocked on my door, just once and softly, and I thought of not answering as a punishment.
For whom? Perhaps for him, perhaps for me.
I just knew that someone should pay something.
I ignored the thought and answered, owl-faced by choice, which I think is a more severe owl-face.
I didn’t even speak. I just stood there, waiting for him to explain himself.
He laughed, one short burst of joy. “I had been meaning to catch you before you went to sleep.”
Still, I said nothing.
He squirmed ever-so-slightly, and then the audacious man bit his lip, his eyes wandering while he thought, as if I wasn’t standing right in front of him, ready to be destroyed by such a sight.
My face burned and I became terrified he could sense my overwhelm so I averted my gaze. It was too late—the image was seared into my mind.
Why? I begged myself.
Why what? Why would something so small feel so significant? Why did he look as he looked? Why did I feel as I did in his presence? It was a form of torture I was entirely unfamiliar with.
He looked back at me, and I likely appeared ill, because I felt I was.
He grinned.
And then I realized that he’d said something, only I hadn’t been paying attention because… well, I was unbalanced by the entirety of my situation.
“No understand,” I said quickly.
“You do not understand my words or… why I would say them?”
“Uhh…” I was losing the ability to speak in his presence. “Say words… yours again, slowly.” I winced internally at how backwards my phrase had been.
“I will go to a place in the forest—there is a spring that might be medicine for me—for my shoulder, this makes sense, yes? Would you prefer to come with me or stay here? I thought you might miss land. I am only asking, not telling. I do not believe in ordering sotern one way or another.”
He was inviting me somewhere.
With him.
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes you will come, or yes you will stay?”
“Come,” I said.
Wrapped in furs, we walked the same way I’d walked with Jorn and Hallbjern, out the northern side of the palace where there was sea and cliffs.
The world was blue and laced in snow, but the land was revealing itself in small patches, promising the spring to come.
I studied Fell’s lazy, meandering steps.
Lightly, I thought. He does everything lightly. Laughs. Wanders. Appears. Disappears. Perhaps that evening he was walking even more gently as he ached from the fighting.
He veered from the beach just as it was getting dark enough that I became spooked.
I’d never spent much time outside fortified buildings, especially not in the evening.
I could see faces in the rocks we passed, faces in the trees.
I shivered and found myself keeping close pace with Fell, afraid to carry on, but also terrified of turning back alone.
“Playful stone there,” Fell said.
“Hmm?”
“That one.” He pointed. “It will move if you step on it.”
I avoided the stone as we made our way into the forest that clung to the cliffs—everything was alive with sound.
There were the waves behind us and the wind in the branches above us, the crunching of our steps in the snow—mine louder than his, which made no sense to me at the time.
This was a mistake, I thought. To be alone in the dark with him in such a closed space…
it felt as though something intimate were happening—something very against prescription.
I should not have left the gold. Already we’d been gone too long.
“Her name is Mira. She is soten. It is a winding story, but I think she is quite good at keeping secrets.”
It took me several moments to realize Fell was speaking to an evergreen tree. I froze, unwilling to believe he was mad, but finding it difficult to reason otherwise.
Fell turned to me, his teeth white in the darkness. “She is Halthorr; she guards the spring. She would have you not tell anyone about it.”
“I will not tell,” I said, entirely unsure if he was jesting or not.
“You must touch her, so she can sense how truthful you are.”
I couldn’t keep myself from smiling at the foolishness of it—a tree with a name and intentions was ridiculous to me at the time.
I now know better. I came closer to the tree (which also meant moving close enough to Fell that I could feel his warmth) and then I set my fingers on Halthorr.
Her needles rustled above me, and I felt…
it can only be explained as realness, a sense that my life and where I stood were real things.
“She likes you, I think,” Fell said.
I like her, I thought. I’d never been aware of what the Norsern called felger, before—a commune with a spirit.
Of course, I had experienced it several times in this tale alone, only I’d been unaware of it.
I felt Halthorr—her persona and her disinterest in us—but the moment I let go, I reconsidered all I’d just sensed as fanciful.
I felt self-conscious because Fell had been watching me, and his watching was a feral thing.
His eyes were so pale I could make them out in the darkness.
My insides seemed to be tying themselves into knots, part of me desperate for him to look away, another part drowning in his attention.
“I am sorry for your injury,” I said. “Even if I have an owl-face, and it does not show.”
He grinned. “No bloodstain.” He meant no lasting harm done. But he was wrong. Each moment of our little walk added to my inner aching, solidifying my suffering, causing endless permanent damage to me. I should not be doing this, I thought again.
I was correct, but also terribly incorrect.
The spring he’d been seeking was a grand thing, more of a pool really.
The moon and stars glinted on the surface from gaps in the trees, and the water made the sweetest bubbling sound.
I understood what he’d meant about keeping it a secret.
It was a private place—potent—it would be ruined by too many visitors.
Fell reached over his head and tugged at his tunic.
I looked down for modesty’s sake, but I saw the bundle of cloth land on a stone, and that alone was intimate enough to muddle my mind.
He stepped out of his boots, and I saw his trousers also discarded.
Nakedness is nothing in the north, which I had already come to understand, but that didn’t mean I felt it was nothing when it happened around me.
I heard the swish of water as he waded into the pool and kept my eyes down, on the cloth that had so recently been touching his skin.
I am a terrible creature, I thought.
“Come,” Fell said.
I shook my head, my eyes still on his tunic.
“I will be too cold.” That wasn’t just a careful avoidance of the topic of his nakedness—or his casual implication that I too should strip and skip into the pool—it was also a genuine response.
It was the end of winter, and the air was so fresh, my nose and ears and fingers stung; I imagined a spring would be frigid.
“It is warm.”
I didn’t believe him for a single moment. I’d been among the Norsern for five moons; they always claimed it was warm when it wasn’t. All week, they’d been joyfully ranting about how spring had arrived, and how warm it was, despite it still being colder than the dead of Islish winter.
“Come, feel.”
I looked up out of habit—I tended to look at people who were speaking to me. All but his head was beneath the water, and though I could make out pale streaks where his torso and limbs were beneath the surface, I felt him covered enough that I could look without too much trouble.
I shook my head. “Norsern are always telling me it is warm. This is warm, that is warm, in my language there is a third thing…” Mira, stop speaking, I begged myself. “Not this or that, but third, and you do not have this word, but if you did, Norsern would say it is warm, too. But no… not for me.”
He grinned. “You do not trust. I understand. You are from the Land of Mud and Mist. I have known others from there. It will be warm for you. I choke on it.”
“Choke?”
“Ha. It means… I swear it is the truth; I will choke on the words before I take them back.”