I spend days wrestling with the proposition, my emotions a storm I cannot quiet.
The routine of castle life continues around me—council meetings where I offer tactical insights without hearing the responses, training sessions where I watch my sons improve without truly seeing them.
My body moves through duties my mind has abandoned, every thought circling back to that firelit room.
Hands in my hair. Lips against my throat. The hard press of bodies that wanted me with an intensity I had never known.
The impossible offer hanging between us like a blade waiting to fall.
On the fourth morning, I seek counsel from the only person I trust to speak truth without agenda.
Solveig tends her herb garden in the quiet hours before the castle fully wakes, her weathered hands moving among lavender and rosemary with the practiced ease of decades.
She does not look up when I approach, simply shifts to make room on the stone bench beside her.
"You have been circling this garden for three days," she says, pinching dead leaves from a sage plant. "I wondered when you would finally sit."
"I do not know where to begin."
"Begin with what keeps you from sleeping. The rest will follow."
So I tell her. Haltingly, in fragments that do not quite connect, I spill the confusion that has made a battlefield of my heart. The proposition. The hunger in their eyes.
The terrifying possibility that I might want this, might want them, as much as they claim to want me.
Solveig listens without judgment, her hands never pausing in their work. When I finally fall silent, she sets down her shears and turns to face me fully.
"Do you truly want them, not merely respond to wanting?" she asks. "There is a difference, child. The body can be convinced by skilled hands. The heart is harder to fool."
My silence stretches long enough to become its own answer.
"I thought as much." She nods slowly. "Then the question becomes whether wanting is enough. Can you trust them? Not with your body—that is simple. But with your heart? With your sons?"
A harder question. I think of Ragnar's cold fury when Erik was poisoned, the way his composure cracked for the first and only time.
I think of Leif's patient hours at the boy's bedside, telling stories until his voice went hoarse.
I think of the way they look at me—not as a prize to be won or a conquest to be claimed, but as something precious they fear losing.
"I believe they would die to protect the boys," I say slowly. "I have seen it in them."
"That is not what I asked. I asked if you can trust them with your heart. Can you be vulnerable with these men? Can you let them see the parts of you that are not strong?"
I have no answer. I have been strong for so long that I no longer know what lies beneath.
Solveig's hand covers mine, her grip warm and steady.
"One more question, and then I will leave you to your thoughts. Can you forgive what cannot be undone? That night ten years ago—can you build something new on those ashes, or will resentment poison whatever grows?"
"They did not know what they were doing. They were as drunk as I was drugged."
"That is not forgiveness. That is explanation."
Her eyes hold mine with uncomfortable intensity.
"Forgiveness is choosing to release the wound, even when the scar remains. Can you do that? Can you look at them without seeing the girl who woke ruined in the snow?"
I cannot answer. I do not know.
I walk the castle grounds for hours afterward, turning Solveig's questions over like stones in my palm.
I watch the twins with new eyes.
Ragnar sits in his study with Ivar, the two of them bent over a painted map that shows the movement of armies across contested territory.
My youngest asks questions in his quiet voice, and Ragnar answers with patience I would not have expected—explaining strategy, pointing out weaknesses, treating the boy as a student worth teaching.
"Why did they attack from the north?" Ivar asks, tracing a line with his finger.
"Because the southern approach was too well defended. A wise commander chooses the path of least resistance, even when it takes longer."
Ragnar glances up, his ice-blue eyes meeting mine through the open doorway, and something passes between us—an acknowledgment, a question, a hope.
I move on before I can dwell on what I saw in his face.
In the training yard, Leif races Erik between obstacles, both of them laughing breathlessly as they dodge and weave.
My copper-haired son moves with his father's same restless energy, the same joy in physical exertion, and the resemblance makes my chest ache.
"Again!" Erik demands when they reach the finish. "Best of five!"
"Best of five? You only won because I let you." Leif's grin is pure mischief. "Very well, little warrior. But this time I will not be so merciful."
He catches my eye as they line up again, and his smile softens into something more tender.
I see them as fathers now. Not merely as kings or captors or the ghosts of my fever-dreams.
That night, alone on the battlements where Leif first kissed me, I remember.
Not the trauma of waking ruined and alone. Not the cold water and Astrid's cruel laughter. But the moments before—the feeling of being wanted, claimed, cherished by gods who turned out to be men.
My body remembers what my mind tried to bury. The pleasure that cracked me open. The completion I had never known before or since. The sense of finally, impossibly, belonging.
The stars wheel overhead, the same stars that watched me surrender my innocence in the snow.
But I am not that desperate girl anymore. I am a woman who has bled and killed and survived. I know the weight of my own worth.
My decision crystallizes like ice forming on still water.
***
I find Ragnar first, in his study where candlelight carves shadows across his face. He looks up when I enter without knocking, and I see the vulnerability he hides from everyone else.
"I have decided," I say.
He rises slowly, waiting. The restraint costs him something; I see it in the tension of his shoulders, the stillness of his hands.
"I will not give myself unless I am choosing freely—clearly, fully, with complete knowledge of what I am doing."
I hold his gaze without flinching. "Everything that night ten years ago was not. If you want me, truly want me, you must court me properly. Win me. Do not simply claim me."
A smile touches his lips—small, rare, devastating. "You set terms with kings."
"I set terms with the fathers of my children. That is different."
He crosses to me, his hand rising to cup my face with a gentleness that still surprises me. "Then I accept your terms, shield-maiden. I will win you."
He seals the promise with a kiss that leaves me breathless—slow and thorough, a declaration of intent rather than conquest.
I find Leif in his chambers and deliver the same terms. His response is a laugh of pure delight and a kiss that lifts me off my feet, spinning me until I am dizzy with it.
"If there is to be a courtship," he declares against my lips, "I will not be outdone by my brother."
The competition begins.