Page 73 of The Sun He Buried

The yard contains four stable hands who’ve unloaded royal parties without killing one since before either of us took our current offices. It’ll survive.

Ketill knows this. His amusement’s been pressing at the inside of my mask since the outer watch signaled Baldr’s party on the lower road.

He turns the ledger around and points to the bottom figure. “North reserve.”

I add the column in my head. “Correct.”

“I’m relieved. It’d be awkward to replace you this late in the day.”

“You’d need to find someone willing to tolerate you.”

“That does narrow the field.”

Wheels grind beyond the inner gate.

Ketill looks at me.

I read the same line again.

“The yard,” he says.

“What about it?”

“Needs supervision.”

I rise because throwing him through the window would damage the latch.

Baldr rides in beside the first carriage. Snow streaks his coat and the shoulders of his horse. He swings down before the wheels stop, hands the reins to a waiting boy, and goes straight to the carriage door.

He’s had three days beside her. I had every part of what he stirred in her—the ease, the comfort, that soft settling she keeps for him.

There’s been worse.

The carriage door opens.

Purple appears first. A heavy cloak, too large at the shoulders, followed by one small gloved hand gripping Baldr’s. Solveih steps into the snow beneath my window.

For years, she has been nine years old in my memory.

That child is gone.

What steps down instead is small enough that Baldr bends to hear her, and soft, and round-faced in a way that’ll have strangers calling her a girl for years yet. All that pale hair, half of it shaken loose and stuck to her cheeks in the cold. Pink at the nose, and not minding. The feeling’s had no face. Now it has one, and it’s going to be a great deal harder to bury.

She says something that makes Baldr laugh. I get none of it through the glass—only her, the way I always get her.

Her worry reaches me first—tight until she acts, then doubling back to wonder whether she was rude. So does the easy comfort my brother fills her with.

Comfort. I’ll be generous and call it comfort. The bond’s never spared me the rest.

None of it tells me what to do with the sight of her.

Then a white head pushes through the front of her cloak.

Ketill comes to the window. “Is that—”

The nearest guard steps forward to take a trunk from the driver.

White fur shoots across the space between them.