I pick up a jar of dried fish from the table and go back to the shelves.
Thyran is sitting by the fire. He watched the whole thing. He doesn't ask what it said.
I don't tell him. It doesn't matter. Whatever the army wants, whatever they're offering or threatening or demanding, it belongs to a woman who doesn't exist anymore. The woman who lit fuses and filed reports and followed orders. She walked into the snow and she didn't come back.
The woman who came back plants turnips.
Evening.
The fire is low. I'm sitting beside him on the platform with my back against his side and the book open in my lap. The Jötunn history. I'm three chapters further than I was last week. The old dialect is getting easier. I can read every other word now without sounding it out.
“What’s this one?” I point to a word on the page.
He leans over my shoulder, close enough that I feel the heat of him against the back of my neck. “Hrothvän.Hearthstone. The stone closest to the fire that holds the heat longest.”
“There’s a word just for that?”
“There’s a word for everything to do with heat and cold. Thirty words for different kinds of ice. Twelve for different ways a fire burns.”
“How many for warm?”
“Depends on what’s warm.” His arm settles around me. “The word for warm stone is different from warm fur is different from warm skin.”
“What’s the word for warm skin?”
“Kälthuveð.”
“That haskälthuin it. Cold one.”
“Yes. The warmth of something that should be cold. Something that surprises you by being warm when you expected ice.”
I look up at him. He’s looking at the fire. But the corner of his mouth is doing something.
“You named me after a word for unexpected warmth.”
“I named you after what you are.”
I close the book. I turn and put my hands on his chest and push him back against the furs and his hands find my hips and the book slides off the platform and neither of us goes to pick it up.
The comb is on the table. I braided my hair an hour ago and set it there the way I set it there every night. It stays where I put it. Nobody moves it. Nobody needs to.
It’s mine.
EPILOGUE: THYRAN
She is singing.
Not well. Not in tune. Not any song I recognize. She’s in the storage alcove and she’s sorting the dried herbs — again — and she’s singing under her breath, a low tuneless thing that wanders from note to note without committing to any of them. She doesn't know she’s doing it. Or she does and she’s stopped caring.
Either way. It fills the hall.
I'm at the table, sharpening a blade that doesn't need sharpening. I sharpened it yesterday. But the work keeps my hands busy and my hands being busy means I'm not crossing the hall to the storage alcove and pressing her against the shelves and making her stop singing by finding something better for her mouth to do.
She'd probably let me. That’s the problem. She'd let me and then the herbs wouldn't get sorted, and she'd blame me for it later and I'd let her because listening to her blame me for things is one of the better sounds in my life.
The hall is warm. It’s always warm now. Outside, spring is coming. Reluctant. Stubborn. Thawing one inch at a time, as if the land has to be persuaded. I used to sit in my chair and freeze.
Now the chair is closer to the fire and the fire is mostly for light because the heat comes from me and from her and from whatever happens between us when we're in the same room.
