“And if I don't?”
I look at his twenty men. I look at him. The heat coming off my body has intensified and the air around me shimmers and his men can see it and they don't understand what they're looking at but they understand it’s not normal.
“Then I stop asking.”
Stennard holds my gaze for a long time. Then he steps back. One step. Another.
“This isn't over,” he says. “I'll come back with more men. Enough men.”
“Bring them.”
They leave. The column forms up and moves south down the path and I watch them until they disappear around the ridge. Eseld stands beside me and watches them go. Her hand finds mine. Her fingers are cold.
“He'll come back,” she says.
“Yes.”
“With more men. Enough to be a problem.”
“Yes.”
She’s quiet for a moment. I see her thinking. Her eyes on the terrain to the south, reading the approaches the way she reads everything.
“I can handle this,” she says. “The smoke compounds, the terrain. I know where the chokepoints are and where the footinggives and where to place the pots for maximum coverage. I can stop a bunch of men without killing any of them.”
I look down at her. Small. Fierce. Her hands already planning, her mind already running the calculations.
“Not alone,” I say.
She looks at me. Studies my face.
“Then who?”
The answer is heavy. It costs something I have not wanted to pay.
“The clan,” I say.
Hrothgard is an hour’s walk east. The clanhold. I have not been there since I walked in to tell them Vortek was dead. The silence that followed me out of that hall has not lifted until now.
The path is the same. The same rock formations on the ridge, the same turn where the trail drops between two outcrops and opens to a view of the valley below. Vortek and I walked this path a hundred times. To trade, to drink, to sit in the great hall and argue with the other hunters about tracks and weather and who had the better kill.
Eseld walks beside me. Her hand in mine.
I walk into the great hall with her.
The hall is full. Evening meal. Jötunn at long tables, firelight on a range of faces — blue and gray and pale — the noise of conversation and the smell of food and the sound of people. It hits me in the chest. I had forgotten how loud the living are.
Haldrek sits on the raised seat at the far end. Older than I remember. His white hair thinner, his face heavier. He sees me come through the door and for a moment something crosses his face. He smooths it before anyone else catches it. But I see.
I walk the length of the hall. Every Jötunn in the room turns to watch. The hermit. Walking through the great hall with a human woman’s hand in his.
Haldrek looks at me. Looks at Eseld. Back at me.
“You want us to fight for a human.”
“I want her to live.” I hear my voice echo in this hall, and it sounds wrong. Too rough. Too unused. “I can't do this alone.”
Silence. The fire crackles. A child at the far table stops eating to stare.
