Chapter 35 #3
He laughed. “You cannot make me dislike her. Look! She gave me mushrooms—” Fell pulled from his tunic pocket dried mushrooms. They had red caps and little white spots. “I did not even ask for them. She said I will have a glorious evening one night soon, and this must be part of it.”
“Rowan says those are bad for you.”
“Ah, Rowan knows everything in the world, does he? Should we let Arik know someone has beat him to it?”
I huffed.
He grinned. “She is not as pretty as you are.”
Whether or not it should have, this did make me feel better.
And the tea, when it began to take effect, made me feel even better than that.
We found some of Fell’s friends, and laughing was easy, and the heaviness in my stomach did feel lighter, like the tea was carrying the weight of my womb for me, making it easier for my muscles and skin and hips to stretch.
I lay on the grass, my head in Fell’s lap as he played with my hair, someone’s donated furs over my stomach, the breeze keeping my face cool while the rest of me was warmed.
Rowan was given many a free drink when people found out he was new to Aalt, and though he was resistant to the offerings, he sipped enough to relax.
From where I lay, I studied the release of his performative misery as conversations took place around us, and I remembered my own struggles upon arriving. How rigid I must have looked.
How different I am, I realized, nuzzling my head further into Fell. How different Rowan will be.
Fara had been chatting somewhere else around the fire, but she came upon us then, right as I had that thought, and sat cross-legged beside me. Fell was speaking to someone on his other side.
“I am sorry I spoke of healers before,” she said.
It took me several moments to remember she might mean leeches.
She said, “You have a relationship with these animals.” It wasn’t a question.
“I felt this, too,” Fell said. “You became ice for a moment.”
I hadn’t known he was listening.
I decided to become ice again, but it didn’t work.
Perhaps from the tea she’d made… I cannot say.
I nodded, and a tear slid down my cheek, and I knew somehow that it had been waiting there my whole life to come out and be seen coming out.
And just like the weight of my womb was easy, my memory was easy. I couldn’t avoid recollecting.
“When I was a girl, I dreamt my sister fell from a horse and broke her arm. I woke up crying… My mother came to me, and I told her. Even though it was against the law to dream, she did not admonish me. She held me and told me it was only a dream. She was not this kind of mother. But that time she was. The next day, my sister fell from her horse and broke her arm…”
I could remember the look of Elfrith as she held her arm gingerly against her chest, trying not to cry, but mostly failing.
“My mother took me to the orderlies to have the evil sucked out of me. They held me down and covered me in leeches. The creatures had to go on my tongue too because I had spoken the evil.”
Fell stilled entirely beneath me, looking down at me from above, his face splashed in pink from the firelight. Unreadable to me, which was most unusual.
“Yorunn witnesses all that happens inside homes,” Fara said.
Fell nodded. “Yorunn witnesses all that happens inside homes.”
I smiled sleepily. “I do not know what that means.”
“Yorunn is fire and hearth and ash,” Fara said. “Goddess and witness to the home. I am happy to have met you. If you come to me again, I will make more tea for you.”
“I will take that under consideration,” I said.
She laughed, high-pitched and nasally. “I like the words you choose.”
Fell’s stillness dissolved, and his hands again roamed through my hair.
I drifted.
When Dania had gone home for the night, and I’d napped and woken refreshed to find everyone apart from me and Rowan and Fara deliriously drunk, I wrapped myself in whoever’s fur I’d ended up with and took a seat beside Rowan on a log rolled next to a roaring pyre.
Fell and his friends were building something out of kindling, but in their state, they kept knocking pieces down that were meant to stay up, losing themselves in a fit of giggles as they did.
The sky was rich with stars, and I felt clear and certain.
“I’m not going to tell anyone back home,” I said to Rowan. “Anything you do here. Anything you see or say or become.”
He looked at me then, and I could sense I’d scraped him with my words. I had found his fear and named it, killed it, and buried it all in a single moment. This too was sorcery, though few would think of it as such.
He opened his mouth and then closed it. Opened it again and halted once more.
I could remember the first night I felt freed in the north, like having wings beating steadily inside my chest, wings stretching out as something inside me soared. I imagined those same wings inside his chest. Flapping slowly and then coasting. Easy.
My insides thrummed like there were two teeny drumsticks within.
Miraculous.
I took a breath and straightened my back.
“To prove how serious I am, I will tell you a secret. You can hold it hostage, knowing that if I were to tell on you, you could tell on me. Knowing you can tell me a secret in return, and I won’t repeat it because it cannot be more than what I have to share. ”
His jaw tightened.
“I’m to have a child,” I said, raising my chin the smallest amount. “A Norsern one. It kicks me even now, and I’m happy its legs are strong.”
Rowan studied me—his moss-coloured eyes hardening and then softening.
Hardening. Melting. He swallowed, the bob in his throat moving up and then down.
I felt it break—whatever from back home held us into our strict thoughts and postures—it snapped in him.
He told me one secret, of which I’m sure he had many.
“Once, when I was a boy, I dreamt of you, Gentlewoman.”
We held each other’s gaze for a moment longer before he looked away.
The air felt awkward because so much had been shared.
“I have professed an oath to your brother,” Rowan said, keeping his gaze on the pyre. “I keep thinking it is so strange to have ended up here same as you. I keep thinking my oath now means I must protect you here. That perhaps this is what the gods wanted, why they allowed me to be taken captive.”
“Now Rowan, you sound like a Norsern talking about skael,” I said.
He huffed softly, not quite a laugh, but the closest I had seen from him yet.
“And if you truly wanted to protect me, you would go speak to Fara as she keeps looking over here, and it makes me uncomfortable. It’s you she wants to see, not me.”
He did smile then. “And what would I say to her? Stye-ein, stye-ein?”
I laughed. His pronunciation was perfect. “Where did you learn this?”
“It is what my captor says. I don’t know what it means.”
“It means steady,” I said.
Finally, he laughed. “So enough for a full conversation then.”
I put on a false stern face. “Go.”
Rowan took a long drink from his goblet and stood. “As you command, Gentlewoman.”
This, I thought as I watched him approach Fara, as she scurried to make space for him next to her, setting her hand on his shoulder in a way no woman on the Isle would ever have done. To command a strong person and have them obey. This is what power feels like.