The days blur together after the patrol’s visit. Two weeks become three, and I stop thinking about leaving.
The routine has a weight to it. A gravity that pulls me in and holds me there. I wake at dawn to find tea already steaming on the table, the fire freshly stoked. Thyran somewhere in the hall pretending he hasn't been watching me sleep.
I drink the bitter brew while my body remembers how to move. Spend the morning finding new chaos to organize, new messes to fix, new ways to make myself useful in a space that has never needed me.
Eat whatever he has hunted or caught or preserved. The man cannot cook. But he knows how to keep meat fresh and bread from molding, and after three weeks I've stopped being surprised by the sheer volume of food that appears.
He feeds me more than I'm used to. The sharp angles of my collarbones are softening, the constant gnawing in my stomach has gone quiet. He noticed I wasn't eating enough and adjusted without saying a word.
Work until the light fades. Sleep in furs that carry his scent, woodsmoke layered over something cooler underneath.
It is seductive, this routine. A trap I walk into willingly, and I know it, and I can't seem to care.
I am finding things in the hall. Useful things. Things that make the soldier in me sit up and pay attention.
A vein of sulfite in the passages behind the main chamber, yellow and sharp-smelling. Charcoal in abundance from the fire pit. Saltite in the bat guano that crusts the upper rafters, the kind that can be refined and mixed and turned into something destructive.
I build a proper cache. Behind the grain stores, out of sight, organized the way I organize everything. Thyran watches me do it without comment.
My coat has been hanging by the door since he dried it the first week. I go through the pockets the way I go through everything. Methodical. A broken buckle. A strip of wire. And at the bottom of the inside pocket, a leather fold with coins. Three months' military pay I never spent. I was walking to die. I didn't plan on needing money.
I put them back. I don't need money here either.
I find knives, too. Old ones, rusted, blades tossed aside and forgotten. I clean them with oil and sharpen them on the whetstone he left beside my tea. I hide them around the hall in places I can reach quickly. One under the furs. One behind the grain sacks. One near the door, wedged into a crack where I can grab it on my way out.
The first time I test an edge, drawing it across my thumb to check the bite, I look up and find him watching from his chair. He doesn't say anything. But the next morning, a small bottle of blade oil sits next to the whetstone.
He is arming me. Helping me prepare for whatever is coming.
I find the rest of his oils in the back of the storage alcove that afternoon. Rendered fat, mostly. Some plain, some steeped withherbs. He uses them for everything. Leather conditioning, blade care, waterproofing seams.
One jar is finer than the rest. Smooth, the fat rendered down until it’s almost liquid. A sprig of comfrey floats in it, the leaves still green. I've watched him rub the same stuff into boot leather to soften it. Stretch it.
For a moment the image of his thick fingers working the hide until it gave under his hands flashes before me. I put the bottle back on the shelf. My face is hot and the reason has nothing to do with the fire.
He brings me other things too. Things that have nothing to do with weapons or survival.
A new blanket appears on my sleeping furs one morning. Thicker and softer than the others, dyed a deep blue. I didn't ask for it. I didn't mention being cold. But he noticed, and found a solution without being asked.
New boots come next. Fur-lined, warm, sized for human feet though still slightly too big. My old ones were failing. The leather cracked on the walk in through the Wastes, and the soles pulled away from the uppers. Every step on the stone floors let the cold through. I stuff the toes of the new ones with rags and wear them anyway, and the difference is immediate.
Then a book. Massive, Jötunn-sized, with pages I have to turn using both hands. A history of the Wastes, written in a dialect so old I have to sound out every third word. I read it by firelight at night, and he watches me read with an expression I can't decipher.
“The light’s better by the fire,” he says when he gives it to me. He walks away before I can respond.
Three weeks in, I come back from the storage alcove and find something else on my table. Not a blanket or a tool or a book. A small white bloom with petals thin as paper and veins of paleblue running through them. Encased in a thin layer of ice, frozen solid, perfectly preserved, carefully placed in a dish of snow.
I pick it up and turn it over in my hands. The ice doesn't melt against my skin.
I find him outside, chopping wood. The axe is the size of my entire body. He swings it one-handed, splitting logs with single blows that echo across the snow.
Steam rises from his shoulders and his bare arms. He’s not wearing his coat. Just a sleeveless tunic that leaves his gray skin exposed to the cold, the fabric damp and clinging to his chest.
I stop in the doorway.
I have seen plenty of men. Soldiers, officers, lovers I took and left behind when the orders came. None of them made me forget why I'd come outside.
He swings the axe. I watch the muscles in his back shift under his skin. Eight feet, every movement controlled despite the force behind it.
