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I found my braid with my hand and wound it around my knuckles, watching them. As if it all hadn’t happened. The raid. The battle in Aurvanger that took his leg. The blood feud that burned in their hearts for me and my people. There was no room for it in that moment. There was only a beginning. And its light hid everything else. It was so beautiful that it hurt, touching every wound uncovered inside of me.
“Elska ykkarr,” he said, and the warmth of the words wound around me. I love you.
“You don’t owe me anything.” I could hear the Riki down the path starting to move. “You saved my life. More than once. We’re even.” He glanced down at the ground and I waited for the words building behind his lips. “We’ll never be even.”
I fell asleep to the sound of his breathing, his back rising and falling against me, like the sound of seawater kissing the fjord.
Wondering about the thread that seemed to be tied between Fiske and me, slowly tightening.
Fiske moved out from under the trees ahead of me and the white moonlight spilled down on him as he slid off the horse. I tried not to stare at the way his form looked against the frigid night.
“I would do it again,” he said. “All of it.”
It was terrifying—that feeling—like there was something tying me to him. Because if one of us fell into the darkness, the other would too.
I feel like…” I caught the sob in my chest and swallowed it, suddenly embarrassed. He leaned in closer to me. “Like what?” My eyes ran over his face. The scruff on his jaw. The dark lashes around his blue eyes. “Like I’m a flame about to burn out.”
I wept. A dark, sacred cry rising up out of me. He held me together, keeping the pieces from falling down around us. And I cried until I couldn’t feel. I cried until I couldn’t think. The moon rose up over my broken home and I broke with it.
He smiled at the corner of his mouth. “Because you have fire in your blood.”
I wondered if we could be warriors fighting alongside each other. If it would make us weaker or stronger.
He’d always trusted me completely. But I could feel that faith wavering, threatening to give way to suspicion.
He was right. I wasn’t ready to hear him say it. I wasn’t even ready to let myself think it. I didn’t have the room in my thoughts for trying to figure out what it meant and all that it would bring. Because we could all be dead in the next few days.
The Aska were hiding. A strong and fierce people, now reduced to the shadows.
He chose to trust me. I wondered if it would be the last time.
My father had his arms wound around Iri like ropes, hunched over and weeping into his shoulder, his body wracked with sobs. The sound of it filled the house and spilled out into the village. And Iri was the same, his face broken into pieces as my father held onto him.
My father was a proud man and I’d wondered which would have a stronger hold on him—his Aska blood or his love for Iri.
He’d left his family and come with me down the mountain as his people reeled in the aftermath of a raid. He’d taken me home. Helped me find my father. Now it was my turn to make a choice. To choose him the way he’d chosen me.
“I don’t belong to you.” I repeated the words I said to him the night he pulled the stitches from my arm. This time, to lift the weight that pressed down onto him and silence whatever words were whispering in his mind. And because a small part of me still wanted them to be true. “Yes, you do.” He pulled the hair back out of my face so he could look at me. “Like I belong to you.”
And when he kissed me again, the seconds slowed. They stretched out and made more time. I felt his body against mine, unraveling everything else that was between us, and my soul unwound, threading itself to his. And I let it. I gave myself to him. Because I was already his.
I didn’t forgive her because I didn’t need to. I understood Mýra. I knew that fear of everything being ripped away and the last of what you love being threatened. We were warriors. And she was willing to fight for me the way I was willing to fight for her. Nothing would ever change that.
It made me tremble, thinking of his hands on me. Remembering the way his mouth tasted on mine. I couldn’t undo the tether between us. And I didn’t want to.
“If you go back to Hylli, I want to come with you.” I twisted the corner of the blanket in my hands. “What about your family?” “I’ll go where you go.” This time, the words were unyielding.
I reached for him and he came down onto his knees in front of me, between my legs, and he let out a long breath as he leaned into me. I held his weight, holding him tightly. “I didn’t want to ask you,” I said in a cracked whisper. He set his head onto my shoulder. “You didn’t have to ask me.”
Fiske lived in lockstep with his heart. He did what he believed in.
A smile pulled wide at my lips, threatening tears. It was a taufr, the talismans the Riki used to protect the ones they loved. Fiske must have slipped it into my vest with the idol. The stone was smooth and black, the words etched into its surface. Ala sál. Soul bearer.
I reminded myself of who I was—an Aska warrior who’d lost everything. A girl with fire in her blood. I told her to keep running.
“Eelyn!” I heard his voice and everything stopped. The water. The fighting. The wind. I looked to the beach, trying to find him,
came up out of the water and I could see his face. Fiske. The square line of his jaw widened as he shouted, looking into my face. I couldn’t hear him. And then the water rushed up out of me, the salt burning in my chest and throat. He pulled me to him, and the sound came back. The water, the village, the warriors.
It was still finding a home within me, replacing what had once held only hate for the Riki. And now my heart belonged to them. In so many ways.
And that was the way of it. Things belonging where they didn’t. Like two night skies on a frozen lake. One looking down from above and one looking up from the deep.
Love finding where the title comes from. 😍
could still see a young Eelyn standing on the beach turned into the wind, a sword in one hand and an axe in the other. I hadn’t lost her. I hadn’t buried her. I’d only let her change into something new. I’d envied Iri my whole life for his open heart, and now mine had been pried open too. I was the same. But I was different.
