Page 181 of The Sun He Buried

A child.

Pathetic.

The same face that showed pain twice had said both.

Baldr breathes beside me.

Chapter Eighteen

It worked.

The knife remains in my hand.

Solveih crosses the edge of the practice ground behind me. I keep my eyes on the target. Seven blades sit in the wood. The eighth lies on the fence beside the bottle, where she left it.

Her hurt moves toward the Hall.

Slowly.

She doesn’t run. She doesn’t fall. She won’t come apart where I can see it. She doesn’t have to. It’s already spilling into the bond, the whole way to the door, and she has no idea I feel it.

It worked.

She will return to my brother. She will get beneath his blankets and remember every story ever told about me. Baldr will hold her. By morning, she will understand that one hour in the snow was exactly that.

One hour.

One poor decision.

My fingers close around the knife.

The cut beside my thumb opens again. It seals before the blood reaches my wrist.

Behind me, the side door shuts.

I put the knife on the fence.

The bottle can stay with it.

Wind drives snow across the clearing and covers her tracks first. Mine last longer. I step through the broken line of them and enter the trees.

The forest takes the lantern within twenty paces.

Black pine closes around the path. Snow sits on the high branches in thick shelves. The trunks block the wind, then release it in narrow strikes.

Sound dies here.

The Hall disappears behind the first rise. The settlement goes next, one roof at a time. A smithy hammer reaches me through the storm, three blows and a pause, then nothing. The smith should’ve closed an hour ago. I’ll have Ketill ask why.

Tomorrow.

The hill begins beyond the last workshop. No rope marks this path. No lanterns hang from the trees. The people below have enough sense to stay where roofs exist.

Their Dróttin has never been burdened by the example he sets.

I climb.

The pines don’t yield a straight road. They never have.