Chapter Twenty-One
Snowpetal cleared at least three tables at the feast without trying.
I’ve decided that’s my fault.
Not the clearing—she’s good at that, and the men had it coming for singing over the trout verse.
The tail.
The tail is my fault. She was born with a war-club on the end of her, spikes and all, and I keep walking her through a crowded hall and looking surprised when the cups flee.
So. Wool.
The hook Asta packed, because Asta packs everything. A ball of white—thick and soft, warm just to hold—about to become a hat for a weapon.
Snowpetal watches from a safe distance. She already knows this is about her.
“It is,” I tell her.
She puts her head down.
Smart.
The storm’s had everyone under one roof for days now, so I’ve taken the bench by the small hearth and the good light with it.
I crochet the way I do everything with my hands—confidently, and slightly wrong.
The first round comes out an oval. I pull it back.
The second is rounder. By the fourth I’ve got a white puff the size of a large apple, two pricked places on my thumb, and a Sanguir leaning against my knee to supervise the thing being built for her against her will.
“Hold still.”
She doesn’t hold still.
Getting it onto the tail is its own war. The club is heavier than she is patient. I catch it mid-swing, work the puff over the spikes one at a time, and cinch the wool at the base while she cranes around to bite whichever hand is nearest. The last spike goes through. I knot it and let go.
Snowpetal whips the tail up to inspect the insult.
Where a war-club used to be, there’s now a snowball.
She freezes.
She looks at it. She looks at me. She looks at it.
“You’re welcome.”
She swings it once, experimentally, into the bench leg. A soft, offended whump. The bench survives.
Her ears go flat. She hits the leg again, harder, gets the same fat nothing, and I watch a small white predator learn she’s been declawed at one end and made adorable at the other.
“You’ll thank me at the next feast.”
She turns her back on me and sits on my foot.
Baldr finds us like that—me bleeding gently from the thumb, Snowpetal sulking on my boot with a pom-pom where her weapon should be. He’s got the easy warmth we get after an argument, the one that means we’re fine now and won’t be discussing why.
“There she is.” He crouches and ruffles the fur between Snowpetal’s horns, not once looking at the tail. “You made her something.”
“I made the room something. She’s incidental.”
“It’s sweet.” He’s already standing, already halfway to whatever he came in for. On his way past he reaches down and gives the puffball a fond little pat—the same tail the whole hall backed away from—and doesn’t feel the bone under the wool. “Very you.”
Then he’s gone. I pick the wool back up.
Snowpetal abandons me an hour later.
I don’t notice until the room goes quiet the way it does when she’s found the one person she likes better than her own dinner. I look up.
Eirik stands in the doorway out of the storm, snow melting off his shoulders, and Snowpetal is already crossing the floor to him with her ridiculous new tail in the air.
He looks down at her. His eyes go to the puffball and stay.
“You’ve dressed a weapon.”
“Improved her manners.”
He crouches. Snowpetal steps onto his boot, and he lifts the tail on one gloved finger and looks under the wool—checking the spikes are still under it. Satisfied, he settles it back down.
“It’s a mace, Solveih. You’ve put a bonnet on a mace.”
“She looks lovely.”
“She does.” Snowpetal climbs his arm. “Right up until she takes the hand that pets her.”
“People can be afraid of her and still hold her. Both are allowed.”
He looks at me over the head of the one small creature built to hunt his kind, who’s decided instead to climb his arm.
“A dangerous philosophy,” he says.
He doesn’t put her down.
The tally session starts after the midday meal.
The first strip of blue sky appears while Ketill is explaining why eight bars of vein-silver can’t walk.
I miss the beginning.
The sun has found the high windows.
Real sun.
It cuts through the grey above the pines and lays one bright square across the long table, right over the eastern tally that’s ruined everybody’s week.
Ketill stops talking.
So does everyone else.
The shutters have rattled for so many days that the quiet takes a moment to reach me. Wind still moves around the Hall, but the hard part is gone. Snow falls beyond the glass in slow, thin pieces instead of trying to come through it.
A mine clerk near the window stands.
“The ridge,” he says.
He crosses the room and presses both hands to the sill.
People rise from the benches. A woman near the hearth laughs. Somebody opens one shutter, and cold air pushes through with a smell of pine instead of white nothing.
Ketill looks toward the line of dark trees.
“Watch will have the upper road by morning,” he says. “Lower road a day after, unless the drifts buried the markers.”
Baldr’s hand settles against my back.
“We can travel soon.”
My stomach drops.
That’s not the correct response.
Soon means Sólvik. My room beside his. Salt beyond the windows. Asta complaining about wet sand in the hems of my dresses. The little west dining room and the corner pieces of every honey cake.
Home.
I should be asking how many wagons can make the ridge. I should be smiling.
Instead, I look across the table.
Eirik’s already looking at me.
He breaks eye contact first. His gloved hand moves one tally into the square of sunlight.
“The first wagon goes when the watch clears the markers,” he says.
Baldr’s palm presses harder against my back.
“How generous.”
Ketill looks at him.
Then Eirik.
His blue eyes have been doing this for days.
The brothers have spent the time since I woke in Eirik’s bed pretending they aren’t at war.
They’re terrible at it.
Ketill watches both of them and moves cups, maps, workers, and once an entire bench out of the path before anything can become worse.
It always becomes worse.
“The road made the decision,” Eirik says. “You may argue with it on the way down.”
Baldr leans back.
His arm comes around my waist and takes me with him.
I catch the table before my hip knocks it.
“Careful.”
His voice is warm against my hair.
Eirik’s pen stops.
Only for one breath.
Then he marks the tally.
Baldr bends and kisses the top of my head.
Every person at the table sees.
That’s the point.
I know it before Baldr’s mouth leaves my hair.
My face goes hot anyway.
His affection used to arrive when he wanted to touch me. A hand beneath the table. A kiss outside my door. His thumb moving over my fingers while I told a story he’d already heard.
Now it arrives when Eirik looks up.
Baldr’s arm tightens when the purple eye finds it.
I’m sitting in his lap without having moved there myself.
No.
Not his lap. The bench. Very close beside him.
This distinction helps nobody.
I put one hand on Baldr’s wrist.
He turns his palm and catches my fingers.
His smile reaches me easily.
It doesn’t reach the other side of the table.
There, it becomes a weapon.
Eirik glances down at our hands.
The purple eye goes flat.
He asks the clerk about the western scale.
I’ve learned to watch him.
That’s also a problem.
The small crease beside his pale-green eye when Snowpetal climbs him. His shoulder pulling when he says the cruel thing and wishes he’d didn’t. The way his fingers close when I thank him. The second his breathing stops before he hides behind the silver again.
He gives none of those away now.
Still.
Too still.
Asta sits on my other side with packing lists spread in front of her. She’s read the same line six times.
Her eyes move from Baldr’s hand to my face.
I look at the list.
One winter cloak.
Two wool dresses.
Six pairs of stockings.
That’s too many stockings.
I’ve said this before. The argument no longer interests her.
Ketill taps the map.
“If the upper road holds, the lead wagon can take half the guards. The second waits for the lower path.”
“Three wagons,” I say.
Everyone looks at me.
This subject has numbers. Numbers don’t kiss anyone in front of their brother.
I point to the marks on the map. “One by the ridge. One on the lower road when it opens. The last stays until both arrivals are counted.”
Eirik follows my finger.
“The lower scale was buried.”
“Then use the mine scale before it leaves and the pass scale when it reaches the eastern gate.”
“That leaves the road unmeasured.”
“The road’s the part we’re testing.”
Ketill’s brows lift.
Eirik looks at me.
Really looks.
The Hall, the map, Baldr’s hand, and the open sky all wait outside that gaze.
“Change the seals on the lower wagon,” I say. “Not the color. The shape. If the tally is wrong again, we’ll know whether the seal changed with it.”
“We,” Baldr says.
One word.
His hand leaves mine.
I turn.
Baldr’s looking at the map.
“Sólvik will receive the wagons,” he continues. “My clerk can send the counts back.”
“That’s what I meant.”
“You said we.”
“There are several people at this table.”
“And only one of them keeps forgetting where she lives.”
The bright square from the window reaches the edge of his sleeve.
Nobody moves.
Baldr’s face changes before I can answer.
He heard it too.
“That came out wrong.”
My hand flattens on the map. “It came out very clearly.”
“Sól.”
“I know where I live.”
Do I?
No.
I take my hand from the map.
Across the table, Eirik moves.
Not far. His weight comes forward, one hand going flat to the wood—the front half of standing, before the standing.
Ketill’s hand is already on his arm.
Two fingers. That’s all it takes.
Eirik doesn’t look at him. Doesn’t look away from Baldr either.
He hasn’t moved like that all week. Not once.
Then it’s gone. He’s still again, and when he speaks, it’s to the map.
“Her seal change solves the weak point.”
Baldr turns toward him. “I didn’t ask.”
“No. You rarely do.”
Ketill closes both eyes.
Asta puts down her list.
Baldr’s knee shifts beneath the table. “You’ve discovered questions this week?”
“They save time when the person in front of me knows the answer.”
“A recent habit, then.”