Erik's recovery is slow but steady, measured in small victories that accumulate like coins in a miser's purse.
The first time he sits up unaided. The first full meal he keeps down. The first weak laugh at one of Leif's ridiculous stories, the sound cracked and precious as ancient glass.
Each milestone loosens the iron band around my chest by another fraction, though I do not think I will breathe freely again until he is running through the training yard, copper hair blazing in the sun.
The ordeal transforms the household in ways I did not anticipate.
Bjorn's hostility toward his fathers softens by degrees, though he would deny it if confronted.
I watch him watching them—noting Ragnar's cold fury when he questioned servants about the poisoning, the way the king's composure cracked for the first time in anyone's memory.
Noting Leif spending hours at Erik's bedside, telling increasingly absurd tales of adventures that may or may not have happened, his voice gentle in a way his reputation would never suggest.
"They came every day," Bjorn tells me one evening, his tone carefully neutral. "Even when Erik could not hear them. Even when the healers said there was nothing more to be done."
"Does that change how you see them?"
He considers the question with his father's deliberation. "It changes what I know of them. Whether it changes how I see them..." He shrugs, a gesture too old for his years. "That remains to be determined."
He still calls them "my lord" rather than father. But the ice in the words has begun to thaw.
Yet beneath the healing, tension coils tighter.
Leif has been distant since the night he witnessed Ragnar kissing me in the healing room.
His usual warmth has cooled to something polite and remote—courteous greetings in the corridors, formal nods at council meetings, smiles that no longer reach his eyes when they land on me.
The man who pursued me with relentless charm has retreated behind walls I did not know he possessed.
The absence of his attention leaves a hollow ache I refuse to examine too closely.
I find him alone on the battlements one evening, staring out at the darkening sea.
The wind whips his copper hair across his face, wild and untamed despite the braids woven through it. He does not turn when I approach, though he must hear my footsteps on the stone.
"You have been avoiding me," I say.
"Have I?" His voice carries an edge I have never heard before. "I thought perhaps you preferred my brother's company. He certainly staked his claim clearly enough."
The bitterness cuts deeper than I expect. "Leif…"
"I watched you kiss him."
He turns then, and the raw hurt in his green eyes steals my breath. The playful king, the laughing flame, has been stripped down to something wounded and desperate.
"I stood in that doorway and watched you hold his hand like he was the only solid thing in the world. I watched him kneel beside you, and I saw the way you looked at him."
"Erik had just survived. I was not thinking clearly."
"Were you thinking clearly on the road to Skálholt? When I touched you at the camp's edge?"
He steps closer, his voice dropping to something raw.
"I have pursued you for weeks, Hild. Brought you gifts, made you laugh, shown you every part of myself that I show to no one. And he simply takes what he wants, and you let him."
"It is not that simple."
"Then explain it to me."
He closes the remaining distance between us, his presence overwhelming in the confined space. The wind carries his scent—smoke and leather and the salt of the sea below.
"Tell me you feel nothing when I touch you. Tell me I imagined the way you looked at me, the sounds you made when I brought you pleasure. Tell me, and I will leave you to my brother's cold bed and never speak of this again."
I cannot speak. Cannot lie. Cannot move as his hand rises to cup my face, his thumb tracing the path Ragnar's had taken days before.
The same gesture, yet entirely different—fire where there was ice, desperation where there was certainty.
"I thought not," he murmurs, and then his mouth is on mine.
Where Ragnar's kiss burned with possession, Leif's blazes with desperate hunger.
He kisses me like a man starving, like he needs to prove something—to me, to himself, to the brother who is not here to witness. I answer with equal fervor, my hands fisting in his tunic, pulling him closer.
My back meets the cold stone of the battlement wall. His body presses against mine, all heat and hard muscle, his hands tangling in my hair as he angles my head to deepen the kiss.
Heat pools low in my belly as I gasp against his lips.
"I have wanted this," he breathes between kisses, "since the moment I saw you in that courtyard. Wanted you like I have never wanted anything. And watching you with him…"
His voice breaks. "It is killing me, Hild. Do you understand? It is killing me."
"I know." I pull back enough to meet his eyes, my chest heaving. "I know, because wanting you both is killing me too."
The admission hangs between us, dangerous and true.
When we finally break apart fully, both breathing hard, Leif rests his forehead against mine. His hands still frame my face, trembling slightly with the effort of restraint.
"I will not lose you to him," he says roughly. "I cannot. You are not simply another woman to warm my bed and fade from memory. You are…"
He struggles for words, this man whose silver tongue has never failed him. "You are everything."
"You will not have to choose." The words escape before I can stop them, before I fully understand what I am offering.
Leif pulls back, searching my face with intensity that burns. "What are you saying?"
I do not know. I only know that I want them both—the ice and the fire, the silence and the laughter.
Ragnar's devastating control and Leif's overwhelming passion. That choosing one means losing the other, and that loss would break something inside me I have only just discovered.
"I am saying," I whisper, "that perhaps no one needs to lose."
The words settle between us like stones dropped into still water, their ripples spreading outward into implications I cannot yet see.
Leif stares at me, his green eyes wide, his expression shifting through shock and hope and something that might be the beginning of a smile.
"You would have us both," he says slowly. "You would ask us to share."
"I am asking nothing. I am simply... admitting what I want. What happens next is not mine alone to decide."
He laughs then—a sound startled out of him, rough and wondering. "You magnificent, impossible woman. Do you have any idea what you are proposing?"
"Something that has never been done. Or something that has been done a thousand times and simply never spoken of."
I meet his gaze without flinching. "I know only that I cannot choose between you. And I will not pretend otherwise."