Chapter 41
Forty-One
He cannot. He will not, I told myself as I wandered the halls, rocking Halvar and bouncing him, my arms straining, my blood heating as anger rose within me and then cooling as sadness swept through. The idea of Fell being gone.
My feet took me to a courtyard I had not visited much since I first arrived in Aalt. It was where Jorn did his star sighting, where he’d provided refuge for me my first shy moon in the north.
The air outside was too warm to feel truly fresh, and I stood, waiting for the breeze to stir around me as it often did so close to the sea.
It did not come. The taste of salt weighed heavy in the air.
The cloudless sky above seemed thick. I forced deep breath upon deep breath, but no ease came to me.
“Mira?”
I jumped—I was in a state—and this startled Halvar, so he cried. I shuffled him back and forth, trying to find the rhythm he so loved. It was Jorn who’d arrived, which shouldn’t have surprised me.
“Hello,” I said.
He tilted his head to the side, frowning in confusion. “You… would like a reading?”
I shook my head. And then I wiped at my face with my one free hand because my tears were coming and I didn’t want them to.
“You would like to sit?”
He pulled out a chair for me, and I took it as he set out a cup for me and poured tea into it. It seemed like he was avoiding my gaze, and I realized suddenly how often that happened.
“You have been avoiding me,” I said slowly, my mind straining a little with the idea.
“No,” Jorn said. “I have been paying very close attention to you. But I did not want Arik to notice, so I have been pretending to avoid you.”
“You are so utterly cryptic—”
He laughed. “No one says this word so much—”
“Why have you been hiding the attention you are paying me?” Though Halvar was quieted, his weight was making my arm sore. I shifted him, discovering a spot of quickly cooling drool on my shoulder.
Jorn shrugged, turning a casting stone that sat on the table around in his fingers.
“For someone like me, you are noticeable… You have great potential. In another situation, I would offer to take you as my apprentice. But in this life…” He sighed.
“It matters not. I think it has not helped. Arik sees you as… part of the myth of his life.”
My heart slowed. “And what do you see me as?”
He smiled, leaning back. “Part of the myth of his life.”
“What is he planning?” I said, suddenly aware that I might have all the answers to my and Fell’s questions sitting across from me, if only I knew the right way to ask.
“Obviously, I cannot tell you everything he tells me, but you are strong-sensed. You know he is thinking of movements. He has four potential plans. His enemies, the captains, the weather even—he will choose his course at the last moment, when he has as much knowledge as he can. He thinks this will protect his choice from being foretold by readers—he is not wrong about that. He will ask you to read for him again. He told me of your last attempt.” Jorn’s eyes locked onto mine kindly, but forcefully.
“It was flawless. Raw. I told him you were young and desperate to please and agreeable and that you could not read.”
“Why?”
“Would you not like a chance to avoid being chained to him as I am?”
I wanted to tell Jorn he wasn’t chained, but something in his expression kept me from softening his words.
“I can read anything,” Jorn said. “Stones, bones, rivers, smoke… but what speaks to me most is the stars. If you tell me as much as you can about the day you were born, I may be able to tell you something that will cheer you some.”
“It was in the spring when day and night are equal length,” I said. “The equinox.”
“Exactly?”
“Exactly.”
“How many years ago?”
I frowned. My birthdate had passed during the fog of newly born Halvar. Surely there had been some celebration of the equinox. I had missed it entirely… “Ten and ten and… two.”
Jorn set to work, spinning his bronze plates, lining things up very carefully, frowning with the kind of concentration that makes a person especially beautiful, the kind of focus that comes only when someone is doing what they most love.
And, as had been happening to me often since Halvar’s birth, I found myself able to see—just a glimpse—of the child’s face still buried in the man: Jorn as a boy playing, building sand fortresses perhaps.
I thought of Jorn’s mother. Her wishes for him.
Would she be pleased with what he had become?
I decided she wouldn’t be. While he was a master of his trade, calm when others were frenzied, living with plenty to eat and drink and smoke and study, he was a captive in a foreign land.
“Is your mother still living?” I said.
He continued to fiddle for a moment before looking up at me. “I cannot say for certain, but I think not.”
The wind twisted through the courtyard, tousling his hair, knocking his trinkets into one another as the weight of his words settled in my heart.
“She was forty-four when I was born, and I am forty-three now so…” His hands were back at his work. “Look here, this is a map of the stars on the day you were born. Look at these two—they are meeting up and conspiring. This is very mischievous. It is quite similar to Arik’s birth, actually.”
Jorn told me many things about the stars that afternoon, speaking about each of them as if they were people with characteristics and relationships, and while I was listening, I was also overwhelmed by the boyishness I saw in him.
In the same way Hald ran to Dania to tell her about the insect he’d found, Jorn was thrilled to be telling me about the stars.
And Jorn’s mother was so far away he didn’t even know if she was dead, so perhaps no one had sat and listened to him like this in a long time.
When I returned to our rooms, feeling bittersweet and ready to make amends, Fell wasn’t there.
It was late-afternoon, but that didn’t mean much to me given how random my sleep was.
Despite my exhaustion, I stayed awake, waiting for his return, as long as I could, growing angrier with him for being elsewhere with each hour that passed.
Finally, just as I had given up and found sleep, he entered—but not as he usually did.
Fell was light in all his behaviours, as I’ve said, but that day he was heavy. His boots made sound as he kicked them off. His steps. Even how he closed the door.
He slumped down on the bench nearest the door, his weight all wrong in his limbs.
“Are you drunk?” I said.
“No.”
The longer I looked, the more I could see that was the truth. He was starkly sober, his ice-blue eyes crisp and clear in the dimness. He rested his head against the wall behind him, looking as beautiful as always, but also dreadfully exhausted.
“What has happened?” I said.
“Well… you are getting your wish.”
“What?”
“We will not be parting when Arik sets off for Byernen to meet with the captains.”
I felt relief despite Fell’s obvious misery.
“He has forbidden you from rowing again?”
“No. He has forbidden you from staying behind.”
“What?” I eased out of the blankets, doing my best to leave Halvar undisturbed, feeling the rush of evening cold as I made my way to Fell, settling onto his lap. His face felt hot in my hands.
“Halvar, too. Arik says he will not leave either of you. You are to set out with us in nine days for Byernen and to wherever we go after. He will not tell me where—maybe he has not decided. But these are raiding ships… they will be attacking something or defending something—”
“That is crazy.”
“I have been fighting with him all evening about it. Halbjern finally forced me out to give us each time to calm.”
“You stay with Halvar. I will talk to him.” And I was up, marching toward the king’s quarters, the absurdity of his demand almost comical to me.
Obviously, I couldn’t take a baby on a raid.
It was mad. I did not heed Halbjern’s attempt to stay me, nor give Arik time to address me.
I simply entered Arik’s workroom, closed the door behind me to exclude Halbjern, and said, very calmly but very loudly, “I cannot bring a baby on a raid.”
King Arik smiled. “Who said anything about raiding?”
I sighed. “You are sending the raiding ships somewhere to do something. It will be dangerous, or you would not send raiders. You would send someone else.”
His eyes were alight. “Someone is pithy this evening.”
“You love Halvar,” I said. “I know you do. You would not put him at risk like this.”
“Would he not be safer among the fiercest of my warriors?”
“No,” I said, switching to Islish without thinking. “Not if they’re doing something wild or dangerous, which they almost certainly will be—”
“Here, Gentlewoman, sit. Calm—”
“No. You have taught me to say no to you. Remember? No. No. No. One hundred times no.”
He sighed, a flicker of frustration showing on his face.
“Gentlewoman. Let me explain my thinking. You can be of service to me in Byernen. I have many decisions to make quickly once I get there. The truth is that energy is given to the young. What used to race through Jorn’s veins now meanders slowly.
I need a young reader’s perspective. The impatience of youth is a form of magic.
But beyond that, it has come to my attention—here I will find it for you…
” He turned and began flipping through a stack of parchment.
“I have come to learn there is a chance… ah, yes, here it is…” He pulled a sheet of parchment out of his stack and turned it so that I might see it.
I came closer, leaning over his work table to see as he tapped the page.
“Yes. Here. See?”
My heart stopped.
“There may be an attack in my absence.”
It was my letter. The one I’d written to Dayne.
How long had he had it? How long had he been pretending not to know that I’d sent it? However much I didn’t want to see his face, I knew I needed to. My eyes shifted up to meet his, and my skin grew as cold as ice immediately.