She comes out of the storage alcove with a jar in each hand and a smear of dried rosemary on her cheek.
“The dill is mixed in with the sage again.”
“It was like that when I found it.”
“It was like that because you don't label things.”
“I know what everything is by smell.”
“You know what everything is by smell because you've been eating the same seven things for fifteen years. We have more than seven things now. We need labels.”
She puts the jars on the table. Goes back for more. The singing resumes.
I pick up the rosemary jar. It has a label on it. In her handwriting, small and precise. She’s labeled everything in the storage alcove.
The jar of comfrey oil has a label in Jötunn. I pick it up and read it. She got two of the letters backwards. I don't correct her.
Tarn comes by in the afternoon.
He walks up the path from the east with a brace of hares over his shoulder and a look on his face that says he’s going to sit at my table and keep me company and not apologize for either. He’s been doing this once a week since the battle. He doesn't announce himself. He just appears in the doorway, ducks his head, and comes in.
He’s shorter than me by half a foot. Broader. The scar across his cheek catches the light when he sits near the fire. He sets the hares on the table and looks at me.
“Tracks on the north ridge.”
“What kind?”
“Mountain cat. Young one. Heading east.”
“It'll be in the valley by nightfall.”
“Want to go after it?”
I look at him. He looks at me. This is how it goes. He brings information and I decide whether to act on it and somewhere in the transaction we are becoming something that neither of us talks about.
Friends is not the right word. Jötunn don't use that word the way humans do. But there’s a thing where two people share space and trade information and eat at the same table and the silence between them is comfortable instead of empty.
“Tomorrow,” I say. “Early.”
He nods, then reaches into his pack and pulls out a folded bundle. Dark fabric, heavy, the color of autumn honey. Fur at the collar and cuffs. He puts it beside the hare without comment.
I asked him to find it three weeks ago. Something soft. Something beautiful. Something that isn’t what a soldier would wear.
He takes one of the hares. Leaves the other.
At the door he stops.
“She’s got plants in the ground.”
“I know.”
“South wall. I saw them when I came up the path. Green things. In the Wastes.”
“Chard. Potatoes. She says the ground is warm enough.”
He looks at me. At the hall. At the warm air coming through the doorway.
“Your heat?”
