Page 267 of The Sun He Buried

“You did,” I say.

Baldr waits. My apology gets as far as my throat.

“Eirik.”

His voice is warm. I look at him.

“I know.”

He knows I’m sorry.

He stands and sets Snowpetal in Solveih’s lap.

His hand closes around my shoulder on the way past.

The grip is brief and hard. Then he goes to find his wagons.

The room’s quiet again.

I take the mask off the washstand.

“Does that hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Every time?”

“Every time.”

She doesn’t tell me not to.

The silver finds the scars it made and seals back into them. Blood first, then the heat, then Myrkviðr drops out of my chest until it’s only a room full of people again—the cook, the healer, the men in the yard, all of it at a distance I can carry.

Solveih watches every part of it and stays where she is.

By dawn, the eastern road’s open.

Ketill finds me at the lower gate with three reports, eight recovered bars, and the name of every dead man from the weigh house. Varrik’s name sits at the top.

One rider is missing.

“He left before the fighting,” Ketill says. “East road, then south beyond the old marker. The watch found the horse’s tracks.”

“Where do they end?”

“They don’t.”

Somewhere beyond my border, a man’s explaining that Varrik failed, the bars are back in Myrkviðr, and the Sanguir their grandfathers tried to erase is alive.

He will also explain Solveih.

What she is to me.

Where to put the next blade.

“Find the people Varrik answered to,” I say.

Ketill folds the reports beneath one arm. “And then?”