Katla finds me before I find a decision.
“Tea,” she says like an order disguised as kindness, and I obey, because the wise woman has a way of making refusal feel like poor strategy. Smoke threads from the roof hole; the door creaks. Inside smells of pine pitch, dried herbs, and something bitter that could cure a cough or kill a man depending on Katla’s mood.
She sets a clay cup before me. The brew is the color of old secrets.
“If I die,” I say, “tell Erik it was definitely deliberate.”
“If you die, I’ll tell him it was his fault,” she returns, eyes bright with mischief. “Drink.”
It tastes like peat and thunder. Heat travels down my throat and loosens the tight places grief made. I hold the cup for warmth and for courage.
“You look like a woman paying a price,” Katla observes. “Which debt?”
“Truth,” I say. “The kind that changes shape when I touch it.”
She snorts softly. “Truth is a fish—slippery and best handled with a spear.” She tips her head, considering me like I am a puzzle piece that’s wandered into the wrong box. “Say it.”
I stare into the dark surface and find my reflection, merciless. “I think I’m falling.” The confession leaves a scorched path. “Not despite his darkness. Because he chooses it. He carries a blade in his mouth and a leash in his fist, but with me he… puts the blade away. He could crush anyone. But with me, he’s careful.”
Katla’s smile is the tired, fond kind you give stubborn children. “Love isn’t about finding someone perfect. It’s finding someone whose darkness doesn’t frighten you—because you see the light they’re protecting.”
“It frightens me,” I admit. “All of him frightens me. And still.” I swallow, but don’t continue.
“You’re trying to decide if you can forgive him,” she says gently.
“I’m trying to decide if what happened was real or strategic.”
“Why can’t it be both?” Her eyes glitter like wet stone. “A man can pursue a woman for calculated reasons and still fall in the pursuing. The question is: does it matter how it started if where you ended up was real?”
The words land like an oar striking water—sudden momentum. I think of the boathouse: salt and wood, tenderness braided with hunger, the care inside the ferocity, the way he held me after like I was a hard-won truth he didn’t dare set down.
I remember waking in his scent and hating that safety could wear the shape of the man who stole me.
“What if ‘real’ isn’t enough?” I whisper.
“Then do not choose him,” Katla says simply. “But choose by what your bones know, not by pride’s need to be right.” She stands and refills my cup as if the second dose might pin my flailing heart to the earth. “And stop asking the kind of questions that keep you safe from answers.”
I huff out something that wants to be a laugh. “What kind of questions are those?”
“The ones about beginnings. You can’t live there.” She gestures toward the door, toward the cold blue evening. “You live in what you do next.”
By the time I leave, the wind has teeth. The settlement hushes under dusk—the lull before another storm that isn’t weather. I walk the palisade paths until I hear it: the thud of a blade into wrapped straw, again and again, vicious and exact.
He is alone in the training yard.
Erik fights like he’s punishing a ghost. Each strike is clean violence. Sweat darkens his tunic; breath plumes in the cold; the practice dummy is a ruined man by the time he finally stills.
For a long moment he stands there, head bowed, chest heaving, hands loose at his sides as if he’s considering who he is when he is not swinging something sharp.
It does funny things to my body that I try to suppress. Unfortunate timings and all that.
I step out of the shadow.
He goes very still. Wary, like a wolf scenting trap. “Astrid.”
“I’ve been asking the wrong questions,” I say. The wind steals the heat from my face; I don’t let it take the words.
He turns toward me fully, guard rising without conscious thought. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve been asking whether the beginning was manipulation.” My boots crunch frost as I cross the yard. “But what I should ask is: what is it now?”
His jaw works once. “Now is complicated.”
“Good,” I say. “So am I.”
A breath that sounds almost like a laugh leaves him, low and disbelieving. “You picked a fine evening to dissect my soul.”
“I came to dissect mine.” I stop within arm’s reach and look up at him, at the ruin of straw behind him and the ruin of certainty behind my ribs. “In the boathouse, you said I was yours.” The words taste like smoke and salt. “Did you mean it? Or was I just a prize you were collecting?”
Moonlight slicks the scars on his knuckles. For a heartbeat he doesn’t move, doesn’t blink.
Then his control fractures—not into rage, but into something rawer. He closes the distance in two steps and the world becomes wall at my back, his body a living barrier. His hands bracket beside my head without touching me, like he’s holding himself on a cliff edge by tendon and will.
“You want the truth?” His voice is sanded down to bone. “Fine.”
Up close, he smells like iron and winter, like effort. My body remembers him with humiliating loyalty; I keep my spine against the timber and make my face quiet.
“Yes,” I say, and I mean it.
He looks like he wants to pace and there is nowhere to go. “Yes, I sought you out for strategic reasons.” The words come clipped, precise, each one an incision. “I heard prophecy, I weighed power, I planned. I walked into your life with a map in my head and a claim in my mouth.”
My lungs forget their job and then remember. “And the rest?”
“Yes.” He doesn’t flinch. “Yes, I planned to claim you because of the prophecy. Because my people needed what you are.”
“What I am,” I echo, and hate that I know he means more than my body.
His hands finally move—one rising slow as a truce flag until his knuckles brush my jaw. “But everything that happened between us?” His thumb ghosts the corner of my mouth, careful. “That terrified me.”
“Why?” The question scrapes out of me. I’m not sure I deserve the answer; I’m more afraid of getting it than of frostbite.
“Because it wasn’t part of the plan.” His eyes are stormwater, full and dark. “And I prefer following my plans.”
The sentence leaves a crater. The wind plucks at my hair. Somewhere a gate creaks. I make myself ask the rest. “And now?”
He swallows like the words fight him. The hand at my face cups my cheek; the other slides to my hip, anchoring, not trapping. There is gentleness in the grip, the same gentleness that undid me the first time. His forehead lowers until it almost touches mine; he holds there, a breath away, as if contact might detonate something he can’t control.
“Now,” he says, wrecked, “you’re all that matters, and I don’t know how to function with that knowledge.”