Page 63 of Iron Beneath the Snow

Mara shifted slightly, studying her now.

“To what?” she asked.

“To see only what was considered worthy of it.”

Mara’s attention returned to the stag, now reduced to clean sections laid out with care.

“And this?”

Eira watched as a hunter separated tendon from muscle with deliberate, practiced motion.

“This isn’t sanctified,” she said slowly. “But it matters just the same.”

Mara regarded her for a moment longer, something quieter entering her expression.

“Then you’re not looking for comfort,” she said. “You’re looking for truth.”

Eira did not answer immediately.

The words reached deeper than she expected—not as correction, but as something that aligned with what she had already begun to see.

By the time the last of the meat was carried inside, dusk had fallen over the courtyard, folding the space into firelight and shadow. The hall filled gradually—children first, drawn by warmth and smell, then elders, then the hunters themselves, shedding the last of cold from their shoulders as they entered.

The scent of roasting meat and woodsmoke thickened the air, grounding everything in something immediate and real.

Eira rinsed her hands once more before stepping inside. For the first time since crossing Ironfang’s threshold, she did not feel like an intrusion forced into a structure that had no place for her. She was still observed—still assessed—but no longer misplaced.

The long tables filled without announcement. Food was divided evenly, passed from hand to hand without ceremony. No seat held prominence. No portion was marked as sacred.

She found herself beside Soren without intending to. The proximity felt incidental—or, at least, it was allowed to appear that way.

He did not look at her at first.

“You were given a place without being told where to stand,” he said.

It was not a question.

Eira followed his gaze briefly—the way people moved around her without hesitation now, the absence of that subtle distance she had felt on her first night.

“No one decided it for me,” she said.

“That is how it works here.”

She studied the hall again—not the movement this time, but the pattern beneath it.

“And if I had chosen poorly?”

“Then the work would have corrected you,” he said, finally turning his head slightly toward her. “It tends to.”

Around them, the hall grew louder—laughter breaking from one table, low conversations threading through another, the steady crackle of fire deepening as more wood was fed into it.

“This,” she said after a moment, her gaze drifting across the distribution of food, “would not hold in Frostvein.”

“No,” he agreed.

“Too much depends on who is seen,” she continued. “Who is named. Who is acknowledged.”

Here, none of that was visible.