I'm walking the perimeter of the hall, checking the foundation stones the way I do after every thaw cycle. Looking for frost heave, for cracks, for places where the freeze and melt have worked the mortar loose. Standard assessment. Habit.
The snow along the south wall has pulled back further than it should have. A strip of bare ground, maybe two feet wide, running the length of the wall. Dark earth. Damp. I crouch and press my hand flat against it.
Warm.
Not just thawed. Warm. The heat radiating up through the soil from the stone foundation, from the walls, from the hall itself. From him. Weeks of his body heating the stone and the stone holding it and the heat bleeding down through the foundation into the ground below. The frost line has been pushed back. The soil underneath is soft.
I dig my fingers in. The earth gives. Rich, dark, unfrozen. I pull up a handful and smell it. Mineral and loam and something organic underneath. Alive.
I look at the hall. I look at the ground. I do the math.
The warm zone extends about three feet from the foundation on the south side, maybe two on the east where the wind draws more heat off the wall. The west is sheltered by the rock face and holds temperature better. I pace it off, marking the edges with stones. By the time I'm done I've mapped a strip of usable ground that wraps around three sides of the hall.
Thyran comes outside and finds me on my hands and knees in the dirt.
“What are you doing?”
“The ground is warm.”
“I know. It’s always warm near the hall.”
“No. It’s warm enough to grow things.”
He looks at me. Looks at the ground. Looks at the strip of bare earth along the south wall.
“Turnips,” I say. “Greens. Maybe kale, if I can find seed. Anything that tolerates cold nights and short seasons. The soil temperature here is high enough for root vegetables. Your heat is doing it. You've been warming the ground all winter without knowing.”
He crouches beside me. Puts his hand on the earth next to mine. His hand sinks the frost line another inch just by being there.
“I heated the ground,” he says.
“You heated the ground.”
He looks at his hand in the dirt. Looks at me. Something crosses his face — not surprise, not wonder. Something quieter. The expression of a man who has spent years believing the fire inside him was a flaw, a wrongness, something that made him different from his people in ways that hurt. And now a woman is on her knees in the mud telling him his heat can make things grow.
“I'll need tools,” I say. “A spade. Something to break up the hardpan underneath. And seed — Eira can bring it from thehold, or from the trading posts. Root vegetables for the first season. We test the soil, see what takes, expand from there.”
“You're planning a garden.”
“I'm planning a garden.”
He stands up. Looks at the hall. Looks at the Wastes stretching in every direction, white and cold and empty. Looks back at the strip of warm earth at his feet.
“I'll make you a spade,” he says, and goes back inside.
I stay in the dirt. My hands are filthy and my knees are wet and I'm crouching in a strip of warm ground at the base of a hall in the middle of nowhere, planning where the rows will go.
I'm not reading exits. I'm not counting the structural capacity of the walls or the load-bearing tolerances of the foundation. I'm thinking about what kind of soil vegetables need and whether the east side gets enough light and how deep the warm zone goes and whether I can extend it by banking earth against the foundation.
I'm building something.
A runner arrives in the late afternoon. From the southern settlements, a Jötunn who trades with the human outposts along the border. He carries a leather pouch with a letter inside. Army seal, red wax, stamped with an insignia I don't recognize.
I take the letter. I look at the seal. I open it, read the first line.
I walk to the fire.
The paper curls and blackens and the wax seal melts and drips and the fire takes the whole thing in seconds. I watch it burn. My face is calm. My hands are steady.
