“Thank you,” I say, and he pauses in his work without turning. “For not letting me die.”
Silence. The snap and hiss of the fire.
“Go to sleep, Eseld.”
I climb back onto the platform and burrow into the furs. They’re warm and soft, and they smell like woodsmoke and that sharp, cool scent I’m starting to recognize.
When I wake before dawn, the fire has been freshly stoked. A different blanket lies over me, thicker than the ones I fell asleep under, and a new cup of tea sits steaming on the table within arm’s reach.
He’s across the hall in his chair. Eyes closed.
But somehow I don’t think he’s slept at all.
THYRAN
Ten days since I pulled her from the snow, and I cannot stop watching her hands.
They are small. Impossibly small. Scarred across the knuckles, calloused on the palms. Working hands. Hands that have known labor and violence and survived both. They move through my hall rearranging everything, picking things up, putting them down, turning the chaos of my solitary existence into something that makes sense.
She is organizing my storage area. Again.
I settle into my chair and track every movement. The way she frowns at a jar before moving it to a different shelf. The small sound she makes when she finds something that offends her, somewhere between a sigh and a growl. The way her shirt rides up when she stretches for a shelf, a strip of pale skin and the sharp curve of her hip.
I look at the fire. Force myself.
I can still hear her. She doesn’t narrate what she’s doing. She just makes sounds. A grunt of disapproval when she opens a container and doesn’t like what she finds. A sharp exhale through her nose when she discovers a leak in the ceiling has dripped onto a bag of salt. She moves it to a dry shelf, quick andsure, the way someone moves who has managed supplies under conditions much worse than mine.
She has been doing this for days. Quietly, methodically, reorganizing seven years of accumulated disorder. I did not ask her to. I did not tell her where anything was. She opened every container, examined every shelf, assessed the whole storage the way she assesses everything: structurally. What’s sound. What isn’t. What goes where for the system to hold.
And then she fixed it.
She reaches for a jar on a high shelf. Stretches up on her toes. Her fingers brush the bottom without getting a grip. She tries again, straining.
I am on my feet before I make the decision to move.
I stand directly behind her. Her warmth reaching me through the air between us. If I lean forward my chest will brush her back. My arm extends past her head. The jar is in my hand.
My whole body goes tight. She’s right there. I can smell her. Warm. Alive. Blood rushes loud in my ears.
She leans back. A fraction of an inch. Her shoulders brush my stomach.
Heat roars through me. Sudden. Violent. I feel my temperature spike, feel sweat break along my spine. If I don’t move I am going to do something I cannot take back.
I step back so fast I nearly go over my own feet.
“Here.” I thrust the jar toward her. Not meeting her eyes.
“Thanks.” She takes it. Her fingers brush my palm.
Brief. Her fingertips against my palm, and then gone. But it burns through me. My whole arm tingling. I force myself to turn away, to walk back to my chair, to put the length of the hall between us.
I sit down. Grip the armrests. The wood groans.
She goes back to organizing. I go back to watching. It is all I seem to do anymore. Watch her move through my space, fillingup the silence with her presence, making the empty hall feel like something other than a grave.
I know her rhythms now. She sleeps seven hours most nights but wakes at least twice, jerking upright, hands clenched, breathing ragged. Nightmares. She takes her tea with no sweetener but lets it cool before she drinks it. She hums when she’s focused on a task, low and tuneless. She stops the moment she notices she’s doing it.
She reads rooms. Not the way most people do, reading the faces within. She reads the walls. The ceiling joints. The places where stone meets stone. I’ve watched her scan my hall with narrowed eyes, pausing at the ceiling cracks, the worn lintel over the storage alcove, the place where the north wall meets the foundation. She’s reading the bones of this building. Calculating what holds and what would give. The precision of it is unsettling. I’ve never seen anyone look at a room like that. Like they’re deciding whether to trust it.
