Chapter 29
Twenty-Nine
My situation quickly revealed a side of King Arik few people saw. He was an obsessive man by nature. No one would deny that. But rarely was he obsessed with individual people. My wellbeing became his entire focus.
This was adorable for about three days, then it became irritating. Then it became highly problematic paranoia slowing almost all the work the court did in a given day.
Was my food fresh enough?
Ought I stretch to encourage the child to be tall?
Should this whole conversation happen outside, where the light of the sun could enter my eyes and brighten my womb?
Fell laughed at Arik’s eagerness. “The only thing the child needs is a calm mother, and if there are too many requirements of her, she will not be calm. So stop pestering her.”
Ivar was unable to laugh. His workload had tripled.
His eyes were always darting around, his mind anticipating requests from King Arik before they came.
As court healer, his tasks were two-fold.
First, he needed to appease the king, responding to all requests and answering endless questions about wombs and the way the spark of life became flesh.
Second, he was truly trying to ensure me and my child to be were healthy.
He had the sense to keep some of his concerns quiet, whispering to me about hawthorn tea when King Arik was distracted for a moment.
He claimed I had a scarred heart. He wanted me to speak to someone about my mother.
He wanted me to sit as he pulled past pains out of me through my temples.
Most of his suggestions were too superstitious or witchy for me to take seriously.
He begged me. “Please, Mira. If anything happens to this child, Arik’s rage against me will be as powerful as the sky itself. ”
I had two “soup sisters,” Gerd and Hrund, who would take turns guarding my cauldron in the kitchens.
One was always near, pestering me to have at least a small cup of broth while King Arik shouted at someone or other about playing a song that was too sad for me to hear, about not cleaning up spilled mead instantly because what if I slipped?
Fell’s role became beating people away from me, fighting with everyone to give me a moment’s peace.
Every time he succeeded, I loved him more.
I dreamt of gentle sea creatures who floated slowly toward me, curious about me.
I dreamt of bear cubs. I played the prettiest songs I knew for hours, setting the frame of my lyre against my stomach so I could feel the vibration of it with my skin.
Besides myself and Fell, the only person not thrilled or in a flurry of panicked service to King Arik was Jorn. Indeed, he seemed less interested in me than ever before. He seemed annoyed with everyone’s fussing. Standoffish even.
There was an afternoon King Arik asked if anything could be read about the child-to-be, and Jorn very nearly rolled his eyes. “I have told you, most will not be set until the birth.”
“Most! You said most! I will have what can be known now.”
I almost wasn’t listening to them. I was in a dreamy state, studying the flickering of a candle flame, the sweet smell of beeswax especially wonderful to me. I absentmindedly wove my fingers through the threads of the rug I lay on. I was so tired…
Jorn snorted and said, “The child will be trouble, like their father.”
“Now, Jorn, do not be dragging me into—” Fell started.
But Ivar and Hrund were already laughing.
Jorn continued. “The child will always have many strong people around them.”
“Obviously! The child will be a friend of the king. Of course, there were will be strong people around.”
“Yes Jorn, tell us more. The good stuff. The drama!” chimed Hrund.
“All children are important. This one is no exception. They are important for many reasons, but there is one act they will commit that will tie together loose skaels… the last piece in a great plan of the gods…”
Tie together, I thought, enjoying the phrase. Enjoying the idea that this child may have tied me and Fell together. Perhaps I would have been strong enough to leave him and go home. But now…
“I want stone in your answer! Not mist!”
Jorn sighed. “There is something that many people desire. Great, strong people. Mostly masculine people in the group I see. But somehow, this thing becomes lost. They look for years—or maybe they are already looking now. I cannot see that… but it will be this child who finds it. They will succeed where many powerful people have failed.”
I could tell by the fervour in King Arik’s voice that his eyes were shiny with enthusiasm. “Is it a treasure? Who are the seekers?”
Jorn shifted in his chair, the wood squeaking a little. “Some will call it a treasure, others a curse. I do not recognize the seekers, apart from one.”
I studied Jorn’s face, trying to discern what I heard in his voice. He looked uninterested.
The king smirked. “One of them is me?”
Jorn nodded.
Fell was grinning, but he hardened his voice. “Jorn, stop throwing wood on the fire! Look at him! He is almost rabid. No more talk of treasure.”
“Yes,” I said. “No more. You need only say, ‘This will be a quiet child. One who listens to their parents.’”
Jorn looked almost irritated that I’d spoken.
I narrowed my eyes, trying to understand his expression, but I couldn’t. I’d done nothing…
“Jorn is mood-filled as of late,” I said to Fell when we were alone in his chamber. In Islish, there was the word moody, which implied darker moods, but Norsern didn’t have a word for this, so I’d gotten creative.
Fell shrugged, pulling his tunic off over his head, his tattooed chest still a marvel to me. “Jorn is allowed to be mood-filled.”
“Yes, but it is annoying, no?” It wasn’t just Jorn who had me irritated.
Fell’s chamber was beginning to fill with gifts from King Arik’s courtiers, most of which we hadn’t yet explored or discussed.
The disorder was getting to me. I didn’t want so many loose things stacked against the walls.
I wanted the clean, dim space I’d found the night Fell and I were together for the first time.
But the wind chimes can stay, I thought. Fell had hung them before the open window, and the sound was perfect to my ears.
“It is understandable,” Fell said, flopping onto the bed.
“Is it? Everyone else has been pleasant enough—”
“You have been named Norsen, right in front of his face.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” I climbed onto the bed with him, so tired I couldn’t imagine our conversation going on for more than a few phrases.
“He is still soter. He has been in the Land of the Northernmost Star for years. You are now more free than he is. If he feels annoyed, it is his right.” Fell also sounded exhausted. His eyes were closed and his breath slow. How I loved the tide of his breathing.
We chatted a little more, saying half of what we meant in tiredness before Fell was deeply asleep.
I, however, couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking of Jorn.
Being vaneruigk had my emotions storming.
He feels trapped in his life, I decided.
It was a pain I knew well, one that stirred me.
In my inability to sleep, I grew thirsty (because my condition had me endlessly thirsty), and when I’d finished all the tea set beside the bed, I rose to seek more.
Fell woke instantly. “You need something?”
“No,” I whispered, realizing I was hungry as well as thirsty. “I will just have a little broth, I think.”
I pulled woollen socks on in the dark and wrapped myself in one of the many lovely blankets we’d been gifted, stepping into the hall and shutting the door behind me as quietly as I could. Gerd was curled up on a large cushion in an alcove in the hall.
“Are you hungry?” she stirred, her eyes barely open.
“Yes. But I feel like walking. I will fetch it myself.”
I made my way toward the kitchens, and I think I was being guided by more than my hunger, for when I arrived, not only was Hrund lounging near the simmering cauldron full of bones and gentle herbs, but Jorn was there with her, drinking tea.
“Ah,” I said softly, not even noticing how much like Fell I’d become.
“You are hungry?” Hrund said, smiling pleasantly at me.
I nodded, but she hadn’t waited for my response. She was already ladling out a slightly too big portion of broth into a squared cup. “You want salt as well?”
I nodded again, feeling shy in front of Jorn, wondering if he couldn’t sleep either. If that was why he was awake in the middle of the night. There was a plate with crumbs on it next to him.
“I do not mean to interrupt your conversation,” I said. “I will just take some tea as well and then be gone…” But there were three choices already made and cooled on the cutting table.
Linden, juniper, or honey… “Oh, also oat water…” Sweet, sweet oat-infused water. Why had no one on the Isle thought to let oats settle in water before? It was the most soothing, comfortable drink.
I poured one of everything, deciding I would drink one tea and then my broth, which would have cooled enough by then, and then my other teas. My throat ached for drink as if I hadn’t had anything in days.
Hrund laughed. “Jorn, you must help her carry it all.”
Jorn scrunched up his nose.
“Please,” Hrund giggled again. “I must guard the broth with my life.”
“I can manage—” I started, but it was obvious I couldn’t.
“I will come,” Jorn said. And he was up on his feet, collecting my many cups, tucking one between his wrist and his chest, taking a cup in each hand as well.
I took my broth and my beloved oat water, and we were out of the kitchens. The hall felt cold in comparison as the kitchen hearth had been roaring.
It was silent as we walked for many paces before feelings swelled within me. “It is good fortune maybe that I have found you this evening. I was unable to sleep. I have been thinking about you.”
The quiet continued.
“I am sorry you are still soter,” I said.
“Me too,” Jorn said.
The weight in his words, the woe…
Jorn turned not toward my and Fell’s chamber, but toward the area where he worked.
Before I could ask where he was going, he raised his brows. “You will want honey cakes as well, no?”
I hadn’t been thinking of them, but as soon as they were mentioned—
“Yes,” I said with far too much seriousness.
He chuckled and then grew somber quickly.
“You need not feel sorry for me. Do I wish I were free to return to my home country once more before death? Yes. But I knew when I left, as a younger man, I knew I was leaving for good. I will be fine with everything in a day or two more. I am quick to release frustrations.”
I wasn’t sure I believed him.
He set all my tea cups down on his table and pulled honey cakes out of the drawer in his workroom where he always kept treats.
Our eyes met, and I think he understood the depth of my feeling.
The corners of his mouth turned upward. “You are clever and, no one will ever tell you this again probably, but you are kind. You hide it, but I see it, clear as I see the moon on a cloudless night.”
I held steady. No one had ever called me kind.
He set the cakes on his table and sighed. He offered his hand to me in the way Islish grainkeepers offered their hands to one another when first meeting. I set my broth and oat water down and grasped his elbow, our forearms aligning.
He said, “I am Hehemdi.”
I frowned, unfamiliar with the word.
“It is from my first language. I have a Norsern name while I live here because people cannot say my name easily.”
It took me a quarter of an hour and many attempts, but I was finally able to pronounce Jorn’s real name. Heh-hem-dee. The middle was said in the back of the throat, almost like a cough.
We ate the cakes together, and I finished half of my collected drinks before returning to the chamber Fell and I shared.
He was awake and dressing despite the hour. “I was just coming to look for you,” he said. “You took so very long.”
His words, his stance, his gaze… everything about him warmed me. I set my drinks down on the small table beside the bed and slid my arms around his middle, breathing in the smell of him.
“Let us never part for too long,” I said. And then his lips were on mine, and the faint chill I’d gained from walking around in the palace with so many braziers out was dulled by the warmth of his hands.