Chapter 27
Twenty-Seven
Weeks passed. Beautiful, secret weeks of smiles and songs and my heart thrumming in my chest as I felt so happy I could cry. But then everything changed as everything is prone to doing…
It was early morning, but rather than meeting in King Arik’s study as usual, we were in one of the smaller halls.
The floor was entirely covered by maps, which the king was in the process of organizing.
He had several Norsern with him, moving parchment and linen around on the floor, comparing the smallest differences in the drawings, trying to discern which maps were the most correct.
He was having a grand map commissioned and wanted it as accurate as possible.
I was sitting on the floor in the corner, practicing with the stones as the king had requested. He had another set of questions for me but wanted me more practised before asking them. After that reading, he said we could discuss my return home. How I dreaded that conversation.
Unseen! was the song the stones were singing. Something unseen!
Yes, but what? I thought back at them in a surly tone.
They offered nothing beyond the energy of teasing.
Unseen! Surprise! Unseen!
King Arik must have sensed my confusion because he walked closer to me and looked at the cluster of stones on the floor. “I can fetch Jorn if you would like, Gentlewoman.”
“I want to figure it out, but…” I sighed. “Surprise. An unseen surprise. That is all they say.”
The king crouched, his eyes still on the stones. “Do they say who is not seeing? Who will be surprised?”
Tehehe. Surrrrprise!
I huffed. “No. That too is a surprise.”
“Hmm.” King Arik went back to his organizing for several moments, but he quickly stopped attending to the mess of maps and stood looking out the window with his arms crossed.
Four times this happened: the king paused for a long, quiet ponder and then returned to his maps.
Finally, he frowned, stood up straight, looked directly at me and said, “Gentlewoman, have you been ill?”
“No.” But then I thought more about his question. I hadn’t been not ill. Fell left me in all sorts of states just by being near me or far from me. Truly, no distance left me free from the tizzy of him existing and me knowing about it.
The longer I held the king’s gaze, the colder my blood went in my veins. His expression was too enlivened. His eyes glowed like coals.
“When was the last time you went to the bleeding hall?”
My breath stopped. I hadn’t gone in recent memory. Not since Fell…
I felt my eyes widen, my mouth open slightly.
King Arik’s glare burned into my bones. “Gentlewoman… please tell me you went after the last shy moon.”
I hadn’t. My mind was slow, like mud at the bottom of a river. “I…”
“Gentlewoman.” His resounding voice cut through my daze. “Tell me there is no chance…”
I shook my head, one small jerk.
The king turned to Hallbjern and spoke in Norsern. “Fetch Ivar.”
Ivar came quickly. His hair was damp—he must have been bathing before he’d been summoned.
He listened to my middle with some kind of healer’s horn.
That was when those gathered began to figure out what King Arik was contemplating, what I was attempting to contemplate but also desperately trying to avoid thinking about.
“I did think her tits were bigger,” Eydis said. When the king glared at her, she said, “What? I did. You must have noticed?”
Ivar felt the sides of my face and neck, gently. “You have strong dreams?”
“Yes.”
“And wanting to eat very specifically?”
“Yes.”
He shrugged. “Vanurigk.”
I didn’t know the word, but also, I did.
King Arik’s eyes blazed with the fury of a thousand braziers. “WHAT?”
“Vanurigk.”
“No.” The king ran his hands over his face. “Fuck!”
“Vaen-oorh-ick?” I said. Literally translated, the word meant opening a door.
“Baby,” said Ivar. “Inside.”
Fuck.
“Gentlewoman, please let this be a jest.”
“I…”
“FUCK!” Arik kicked at his maps and several pages swirled away from his boot, skidding across the floor.
“What am I… how do you think the Islish are going to react if I return you to them pregnant? ‘Yes, hello, here is your missing child I was going to offer you in exchange for trade agreements, by the way, she is fucking pregnant!’” He picked up a chest and threw it half across the room.
“Your order, Gentlewoman! The grainkeepers at the Hard-Won Kepen! Just imagine for a moment how any of them… This is a fucking disaster!” Apart from Ivar, the Norsern in the hall had moved away from the king, giving him space for his anger.
“Uh, less yelling,” Ivar said, raising his hand hesitantly. “Do not yell at vanurigk.”
“I will yell whenever and to whomever I want!”
Ivar took a step forward, but I was only half paying attention because my whole world was swallowed by panic. What was I going to do? And how could I be surprised? The stones near my knees giggled. Surprise!
I felt like my spine wanted to burst out of my body.
“Who is the father?” Arik’s voice cut through the chaos of my inner realizations again.
“I…” The king’s face was too full of fury. I was afraid to tell him, afraid of what he might do.
“Gentlewoman!”
I shook my head. “You mustn’t hurt him.”
“I mustn’t? Gentlewoman, tell me this moment.”
“Please,” I said, the sound of tears threatening to break in my voice. “It’s not his fault.”
“I will break one person’s finger for every hour you delay telling me. You will have to watch and listen to their pain—”
I was breathing too quickly. If I go home now, I’ll die.
They’ll kill me. I felt dizzy and couldn’t blink enough, and the idea of people’s fingers breaking to protect Fell was awful, but seeing King Arik’s face…
it wasn’t safe to tell him the truth. “Have mercy,” I said, tears burning the back of my eyes.
Ivar kept himself between me and the king which was a kindness no one present appreciated in the moment, but I did sometime later when I thought back on it.
Fortunately, no fingers were broken, because Jorn arrived with Dania at his side. The two had come when they’d heard the yelling. Her boys were running circles around the pair of them, making a kind of shrill noise that felt like it was scratching my brain.
“What has happened?” Jorn said upon entering, his eyes darting from tense person to tense person.
“The soten is opening a door,” one of the Norsern backed against the wall said.
Dania’s hands shot to her mouth, her eyes bright with shock.
Jorn’s gaze settled on me, bewildered.
“She will not say who fathered it,” Ivar said. He looked back at me, “Which is allowed. You need not say.”
“She bloody well does!” King Arik said. “And if I must force your fucking mouth to stop working Ivar, I will do it!”
“You will be happy I stayed you later,” Ivar said, though his expression didn’t seem like he entirely believed his words.
“You will not be,” King Arik said, his voice quieting but growing all the scarier for it. His eyes turned on Jorn. “And you will need to explain how you missed this.”
“Stop all this!” Dania came forward to stand between Ivar and the king. “Fell is the father. Obviously.”
I hated her for days for that. I hadn’t told her of what conspired between Fell and I, but she must have figured it.
“Fell?” King Arik turned to look at me.
I was as still as rock at the bottom of the sea.
“Fetch him,” King Arik said.
Fell arrived lightly—the same way he did everything—with a smile on his face. “I told you I don’t remember the shape of the mountain on Kierre. I was too busy with the fight—” He stopped when he saw King Arik’s purple face. The bulging veins. “Ah, I expect I have done something—”
King Arik pointed at me. “Did you turn this woman vanurigk?”
“Uhh…” Fell looked at me then, his brows raised in the most adorable fashion. “Did I?” The sweetness of his tone brought tears to my eyes, and I had the urge to laugh the way Norsern did when many things in a row had gone wrong, but they still had their friends close by so it didn’t matter.
I didn’t answer, but I think that was enough of a response.
“Ah!” He laughed, and even though the hall contained a fuming king and many uneasy Norsern, Fell came to me, bending his neck so he could set his forehead against mine.
He wrapped his arms around me—not around my waist as he usually did, but above my shoulders.
His arms shielded our faces from those onlooking, and I did let a tear escape then, relieved by the false privacy.
“Please do not hate me,” I whispered.
He smiled. “I could not.”
And then he looked at me, or rather, into me. I knew he was trying to understand how I felt, but I couldn’t feel anything other than the relief of not having everyone able to see my face.
“From the head of a ship to the tail, where are you?”
This was a common way of asking how a person was faring.
“I am afraid.” Another tear dripped down the side of my nose, tickling my face. It was a rare thing to admit fear in the north.
“Do you want to keep the door open? Or do you want to close it?”
“I… it is already open, is it not?”
“There is tea that can close it. I mean, it does not always work. My mother took it, yet I am here. But mostly it works.”
I shook my head. “What happens to… it if it does work?”
He shrugged. “It goes back to the top of the mountain, waits for another door.”
“No,” I said, knowing instantly, in my gut—with full certainty—that I didn’t want the tea. “No,” I said again, even more firmly.
“Very well.” Fell smiled so tenderly that it broke my heart a little. “You will play mother. I will do as you tell me.” He laughed and, for a moment, that made all fair.
He kissed me, and that made all more than fair.
Fell pulled his head away from me and turned to the king. Keeping one arm around me, he pointed the other at Arik. “You are going to throw us a party.”
“Oh, I am, am I?”
Fell grinned that dangerous grin of his. “Yes. And you will use the good wine, the drylands wine.”