Page 238 of The Sun He Buried

They haul me off the road into the trees. My boots cut two broken lines through the snow until it turns rough with roots, and the cold works in under the cloak and finds every wet place the snow left on me.

I think about Asta, waking to a made bed and no note, scared out of her mind and furious, and both of those are mine. I think about Baldr down at his wagons, waiting on a woman who’s already gone. I think about Eirik, who got all of it down the bond and is somewhere behind his silver right now, knowing something’s wrong and not knowing what.

The thread stays tight. I can’t see him. But the far end’s moving now—I can feel that much. Coming.

Somewhere behind me, Snowpetal is bleeding her way uphill in the dark, running for the one person who can find me.

I hold on.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Something moves through the bond and stops.

A hard jolt, low under my ribs. There, then gone—pain, and then a flat nothing where the pain was.

She fell.

She’s forever going down—stairs, thresholds, flat open ground with nothing on it to trip a child—and it always reaches me the same way: a bright crack of pain, a curse I feel her swallow, and then her getting up and carrying on like the floor started it.

I wait for the rest of it. The getting-up. The swallowed curse, the flash of temper at the floor.

It doesn’t come.

I set my seal to the next page. Then the one under it. I keep half an ear on the bond for her the whole time, and she doesn’t come back onto it.

Long enough that I put the seal down and go to find her anyway—to prove the quiet’s her sulking somewhere warm, and nothing else.

The guest wing’s already awake—chests down the passage, half the household hauling the other half toward the yard. Nobody meets my eye, which is the natural order of things and a mercy this particular morning.

Her door’s open. The bed’s made. The room’s empty.

So she’s up, then, and off somewhere being cheerful at someone. I turn to go, and I don’t look too hard at why my chest hasn’t loosened.

I find Asta in the west gallery.

Not alone. Ketill has her backed into the window bay, kissing her like the household isn’t twenty feet away, her fist knotted in his collar, and for the first time in six hundred years my mine overseer isn’t watching the door.

I’ll enjoy that later.

Then Asta sees me past his shoulder.

She’s off him and across the gallery before Ketill’s finished turning around. Her braid’s half-undone, her eyes are red, and the fury coming off her has nothing to do with the man she just had by the collar.

Her hand cracks across the side of my face.

The mask takes most of it. Her hand comes away the worse for it. She doesn’t so much as shake it out.

“That’s for last night.”

So she knows.

She would. Solveih came down from my rooms with a torn dress and my blood dried under one nail, and Asta’s built a conviction on less. I could tell her the woman she’s ready to gut me over chose it—all of it, both hands—but it wouldn’t cool her a degree, and it isn’t mine to hand out.

“Ketill,” I say, without looking away from her. “Your judgment’s as sound as ever.”

“Eirik.” He’s come up behind her, unhurried, reading my face.

Asta pulls in a breath to start on me again.