Page 210 of The Sun He Buried

She puts her head down.

Smart.

The storm’s had everyone under one roof for days now, so I’ve taken the bench by the small hearth and the good light with it. I crochet the way I do everything with my hands—confidently, and slightly wrong. The first round comes out an oval. I pull it back. The second is rounder. By the fourth I’ve got a white puff the size of a large apple, two pricked places on my thumb, and a Sanguir leaning against my knee to supervise the thing being built for her against her will.

“Hold still.”

She doesn’t hold still.

Getting it onto the tail is its own war. The club is heavier than she is patient. I catch it mid-swing, work the puff over the spikes one at a time, and cinch the wool at the base while she cranes around to bite whichever hand is nearest. The last spike goes through. I knot it and let go.

Snowpetal whips the tail up to inspect the insult.

Where a war-club used to be, there’s now a snowball.

She freezes.

She looks at it. She looks at me. She looks at it.

“You’re welcome.”

She swings it once, experimentally, into the bench leg. A soft, offended whump. The bench survives.

Her ears go flat. She hits the leg again, harder, gets the same fat nothing, and I watch a small white predator learn she’s been declawed at one end and made adorable at the other.

“You’ll thank me at the next feast.”

She turns her back on me and sits on my foot.

Baldr finds us like that—me bleeding gently from the thumb, Snowpetal sulking on my boot with a pom-pom where her weapon should be. He’s got the easy warmth we get after an argument, the one that means we’re fine now and won’t be discussing why.

“There she is.” He crouches and ruffles the fur between Snowpetal’s horns, not once looking at the tail. “You made her something.”

“I made the room something. She’s incidental.”

“It’s sweet.” He’s already standing, already halfway to whatever he came in for. On his way past he reaches down and gives the puffball a fond little pat—the same tail the whole hall backed away from—and doesn’t feel the bone under the wool. “Very you.”

Then he’s gone. I pick the wool back up.

Snowpetal abandons me an hour later.

I don’t notice until the room goes quiet the way it does when she’s found the one person she likes better than her own dinner. I look up.

Eirik stands in the doorway out of the storm, snow melting off his shoulders, and Snowpetal is already crossing the floor to him with her ridiculous new tail in the air.

He looks down at her. His eyes go to the puffball and stay.

“You’ve dressed a weapon.”

“Improved her manners.”

He crouches. Snowpetal steps onto his boot, and he lifts the tail on one gloved finger and looks under the wool—checking the spikes are still under it. Satisfied, he settles it back down.

“It’s a mace, Solveih. You’ve put a bonnet on a mace.”

“She looks lovely.”

“She does.” Snowpetal climbs his arm. “Right up until she takes the hand that pets her.”