I don't ask. I don’t push. I stand beside him and wait.
He leads me down the slope to the cairn. It’s larger than I expected. The stones are big, each one heavy enough that it would have taken his full strength to carry and place them. He built this alone. Stacked each stone by hand, in the cold, on a day when the weight of what he'd lost was still fresh enough to break him.
He puts one hand on the top stone. His fingers spread across the rough surface. His head drops.
I take his other hand. Hold it. Stand beside him in the wind.
He doesn't speak. Neither do I. The silence here is different from the silence of the hall. A place he comes to and doesn't talk because there’s nothing left to say and the not-saying is the point. The weight is carried. The stones hold it.
We stand there for a long time. The wind pushes against us and he doesn't move and I don't move and the hand on the stones stays where it is. His breathing is steady. His temperature is steady. He is not breaking apart. He is just standing with his brother and holding his wife’s hand and letting both things be true at the same time.
He lifts his hand from the stone. Squeezes mine.
We walk on.
The hall appears on the third morning. Stone and timber against the pale sky, smoke rising from the chimney. The smoke stops me. Someone has been tending the fire.
Thyran sees it too. His grip on my hand shifts. He scans the ridgeline, the approaches, the ground around the door.
He pushes the door open.
“Thyran.” A voice from inside. Female. Low, with an edge to it that sounds like a blade being tested. “About time. Your book selection is terrible.”
She’s sitting in his chair. Tall, pale-skinned with a blue undertone, white hair pulled back in a braid that falls past her shoulders. Older than Thyran. Sharper in the face, the linesaround her eyes cut deep. She has the look of a woman who has outlived people she loved and made the grief into something useful. Her eyes are bright and quick and they track from him to me to our joined hands and back to me in under a second.
She stands up and moves with the ease of someone who has been in this hall before. Many times. The fire, the chair, the book on the armrest — she knows where everything is. Or where everythingusedto be, before I rearranged it.
“Eira,” Thyran says. His voice is careful. “This is Eseld.”
“I know who she is. Everyone in the territory knows who she is. The human who registered for the bride market and the hermit who followed her there.” She looks at me. Openly. “You're smaller than I expected.”
“I prefer 'wife,' actually.”
Her eyebrows rise.
“I'm Eseld. The wife. The situation everyone seems concerned about. Are you staying for dinner, or just here to stare?”
She stares at me for three full seconds. Then she laughs. Real. Surprised. A sharp sound that fills the hall the way Thyran’s voice fills it, resonant and large.
“She has teeth.” Eira looks at Thyran. Something shifts in her expression. Something that was guarded becomes open. “I didn't expect teeth.”
“Stay for dinner,” Thyran says.
She nods as if the invitation was a given.
I put together a stew from what’s left in the stores while the two of them talk. Listening, I fill in the shape of her. She’s his aunt. From the way she talks, she’s the one who kept trying after Vortek died. She mentions food sent and returned. Runners turned away at the door. Years of reaching for someone who refused to be reached.
She loved Vortek. Not the way Thyran did. I can hear it in the way she says his name. The slight catch. The warmth she can't quite keep out of her voice. She loved him, he died, and then she watched his brother disappear into this hall. She couldn't save either of them.
Eira eats three helpings of the stew. She eats without pretension, with the appetite of someone who walked a long way to get here and doesn't waste food.
“So.” She tears a piece of bread in half and uses it to wipe the bowl. “The market. I've heard the gossip. I want to hear the truth. Did he really trade Vortek’s trophies?”
Thyran nods. Once.
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
