markus! @turnofftheidiotbox - Tumblr Blog

The Archer and the (Im)menagerie Tree ⁀➴

Part One

Winter had led the Creature back, again and again, to a hungry house in the valley and the young woman at the heart of it. She unsettled not only what he thought he knew of mercy and restraint, but of desire too, and with it what he thought he knew of himself. Since he was made from the dead, what in him was his, if anything at all, and what was theirs, if not everything? He could be hers, such as he was, but whether she could ever be his was no a simple thing.

(fem!reader, graphic animal death, hunting, blood/injury, body horror, gun violence, being watched, poverty/starvation, moral quandaries, heated daydreams, slow burn, yearning with no end in sight (obsessive slightly), 26k words)

A/N: This was a labor of love, and I'd truly, with every bit of my heart, appreciate any feedback or just...nice words. :P

Northern Norway, 1858 (One year after the events on Horisont)

A damp rustle in a leaf litter drew his head up.

He knew it couldn’t have been the heavier drag of a fox or elk, or the brisk, chopping steps of a man. It was lighter, close to the ground, scratching through the sodden, rotten layer that smelt of mushrooms and rain.

Another sound followed, one he knew at once: the creak of wood bent under the draw.

That one he knew, so his feet turned toward it before he decided he should've.

The slope carried him down between birches with peeling bark and pines that dripped yesterday’s storm from their needles, the same wet clinging to the fur of his hide. A crow flapped out of a tree somewhere behind him, complaining loudly to anyone who cared to listen. He did not.

At the bottom of the dip, the trees opened up. A woman stood in the middle of it, boots slightly sunk in the wet earth, so still it looked as if the clearing had grown you. A thin coat, sap and old berry juice stained into the front, big at the shoulders, cinched at the waist with a strip of fabric to keep it from billowing out.

You lifted the bow, the arrow nocked and waiting. Face turned toward a patch of ground where the leaves looked like they were breathing, eyes dark ringed and sunken.

The hare’s ears showed first, trembling, testing the cold air as it nosed its way out from the bracken.

He leaned his chest against a tree and watched.

You drew the string higher, until it touched the corner of your mouth. Your hands were raw from the weather, knuckles red and little splits at your fingertips darkened with dirt. The bow didn’t look like much. It wasn’t impressive. Old, likely mended once or twice, but it did what you needed of it. He could just barely see a strain working through your arm, the same tiny shake he’d seen in men tugging heavy nets up onto a quay, muscles wanting to give out long before they let go.

Suddenly, the arrow went. A thrum through air, then a squeal twisted for a heartbeat and stopped.

For a moment, there was nothing, then the forest went on again: branches tapping, the trickle of unseen water, wings somewhere overhead.

All while the hare lay tipped on its side, one hind leg tangled under the other.

You didn’t move the way hunters usually did after a kill. The ones he’d watched lowered their bows quickly, shoulders dropping as the tension left their arms. Yours stayed up a few seconds, then the bow sank slowly, and your shoulders stayed bunched tight. It almost seemed possible you might turn and walk away, leave the arrow and the animal there, to pretend to not have been the one who had done it.

Instead, you went to it.

He slid a little closer, gliding across a slick chunk of mud and ducking under a low pine bough.

As your knees hit the ground, you set the bow aside, reaching for the hare with fingers stiff from the chill. You slipped your hands beneath its furry body, lifting its head, keeping its nose out of the wet.

Its legs kicked once, a last, bewildered protest, and you flinched as if struck. Your mouth shook, bottom lip wobbling.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered.

Your head bowed as one tear dropped straight onto the hare’s flank, beading on the fur before soaking in. Another one, then a third landed on your own wrist and clung there, shining.

He had seen men step over bodies on the floor, kicking limbs aside with the toe of their shoe. Victor had rolled him on the table much the same way, hands going over every seam, testing the joins, snipping away what had gone bad and stitching the skin down tighter without so much as a word.

But he'd left bodies behind him too, and he had never knelt like that over any of them.

You stayed like that for a while, crying and shoulders shaking. As wind combed through the canopy, it sent a patter of droplets down onto your back, but you didn’t seem to notice. You watched the hare go still, and waited longer than you had to, until no more air stirred in its chest. Only then did your hands move again. Fingers found the shaft in its chest, close to where he knew the heart sat, easing the arrow out in short, careful pulls so the body didn’t jerk.

Finally, minutes later, you sniffled hard, wiped your face with the back of your wrist, and looked up. Your eyes were rimmed red, lashes damp and spiky. You didn’t look around, didn’t check the woods.

As far as you knew, only nature was watching. He did not count.

“Thank you,” you whispered, and that was stranger still. “I’m sorry, but thank you.”

He watched you draw in one more breath, watched you tuck the hare into the bag at your hip with a care more suited to a swaddled child. It sagged with that new weight, swaying against your left side.

You took up the bow again and pressed the string with your thumb and forefinger, holding it there as if waiting for it to give way. When it didn’t, you let out a sigh and stepped back into the trees, following the spaces between them deeper into the fading year.

The forest offered him other paths: up ridges, down toward the fjord, along streams soon to freeze…away from you and your single rabbit. Away from a scene that should not have mattered to him.

And still, he went after your tracks.

He learned you by the days that followed. That you came out in the mornings when the light was breaking and cold gold, breath always showing in puffs. Sometimes you walked the same way, sometimes you cut across the slope, heading for the same rocks and rowans each time, though no clear path showed on the ground. The bag at your hip swung loose when you passed him and heavier when you came back. Hares, red squirrels, a grouse once, a fox another day with its red coat soiled and its mouth slack.

Every time, the same pattern: the shot, the tears, the apology.

Far off, in the direction you always returned to, smoke lifted above the treetops on certain days. Once he saw the edge of a roof through the branches. He did not go any closer.

He just stayed amid the conifers and watched when you hunted. He watched your bow arm over the days, saw tremor after tremor, and knew early on that the arm itself was not the problem. Watched your coat grow darker at the cuffs from sludge and blood and handling wood.

One day, when frost had shelled over the leaves, the animal you trailed was already hurt.

You’d gone out earlier than usual; the sky still held the last of night's color, a deep blue not yet brightened by dawn. He followed the same way you always took and found you farther out than he’d ever seen you go. You stood at the edge of a narrow strip of bog, frozen over in milky sheets with reeds sticking through the ice.

He saw what you were looking at when it moved. Across the stretch of ice, a reindeer calf limped out of the far tree line with one hind leg dragging instead of stepping. The fur there was clotted above the hoof from some wound he couldn’t see clearly from his distance.

You shifted your weight, heels punching the crust down another inch, then the arrow lifted.

He moved to a shelf of rock with a clearer view and crouched behind it, far enough that he sat outside the corner of your vision. From there, he watched the calf again, and each time it tried the bad leg, its head dropped with the stumble.

You drew the bowstring back, coming up to the corner of your mouth like before, but your arm shook from the start that time, not after holding.

The calf stopped, nose lifted and ears flicking. It didn't know where you were yet, though it would soon. He waited for the string to go.

It didn't.

It stayed pulled, the arrowhead aimed at the space just behind the reindeer’s shoulder. Your jaw clenched, and he could see your throat move as you swallowed. The tremor in your arm spread to your shoulder, into your back. A breath shot out of you in a rush, fogging the air around your face.

You let the bow sink a little, your aim with it.

Both saw as the calf took another step, lurching, but that time one of the front hooves slid on the ice and shot forward. It flailed, hooves skidding, then it found a rough, icy clump of browning grass and righted itself.

You tried again, and the bow came up slower, string pressing into fingertips gone almost purple. When you drew, the arrowhead danced, never settling where it needed to as the calf had turned a fraction, showing more of its ribs, the hollow along its side standing out.

He remembered hearing it once in a hamlet by the river, after a lamb had taken a hard butt from a ram. There was little to see at first. It only stood there breathing shallow and not moving. A child cried and begged the father not to shoot because it was still standing, still alive, but the man did it anyway, then said it was better that way. That it was mercy.

The child’s pleading stayed in his mind while he watched you keep the bow trained there and not let go as the calf limped on, reaching the other side. It paused under a branch, sides heaving, then it pushed into the wood and was gone.

You stood and watched the gap where it had vanished. The arrow was still in your hand, grip tightening until your knuckles went white.

Then you slid it back into the quiver.

There was no apology that time, not a single tear. Nothing had died for you.

He could see what you had done. What it meant, he could only guess at, and even less what in you had made you do it.

Meat was not an idea to him. He knew by that point there was a house past the trees, with a table and mouths waiting on what you brought through the door. The reindeer’s body could have filled that more than any hare or stringy fox; hide, marrow, fat and organs you and the others could boil down to stretch a broth. One arrow and all of that would have been yours.

Something in you had held your hand back and left you to go without, and he could not tell if that sat easier with you than the alternative would have. He had nothing like it. When his hands had closed around a throat or a spine, they had gone through with what they had started. Meat was meat, and death, for others, was death.

He had never stopped to wonder what that made him.

You turned away from the bog, from the hazy pocket of tracks already fading where the calf had crossed. Your face was hollowed out, eyes fixed on the ground as you walked back the way you had come.

He waited until you were a little way ahead before falling in behind, moving through the darker clumps of spruce.

Surprisingly, you did not take the straightest way back.

Almost instantly, you’d veered off, angling toward a plot of shrubs he had seen you pass by on other days. The start of winter had taken most of the color out of them, but a few red berries still clung there; skins wrinkled and some blackened. You dropped to a crouch and stripped them with quick pulls, thumb and forefinger raking the stems, letting whatever came loose fall into your palm. Good, spoiled, it all went into the bag.

He tracked the sound of you moving; the crackle under your steps, a sniff every now and again, the slight pat when a berry missed your hand and hit the ground. You didn’t go looking for better bushes, you went for every sad cluster you could see.

He thought the heaviness in you might’ve been from the cold, or from what you had just walked away from. He couldn’t tell how much belonged to one and how much to the other.

Men, as he had known them, did not step back from such choices. Victor would’ve made it and thought the making reason enough. Others like him took such things into their own hands and called whatever they did mercy, or necessity, or just sense. They did it to beasts, to the sick, to one another, to whatever life fell into their keeping, as if being men were reason enough.

He did the same thing when he killed. So what was he?

The bad leg would make it slow, the weather slower still. The forest would do its work either way. He almost thought of the animal as spared when you let it go, but the word did not sound right. Spared from your bow, yes. Not from the rest of that place.

You had not taken that right into your own hands. Whether that was mercy or weakness or something else, he did not know what to make of it.

Further on you stopped again, that time near a stump where grass and other hardy growth had knotted itself around the base. You set the bow aside and dug in with bare fingers, prying at the frozen top layer until it broke in plates. Under the moss, stringy white roots showed through. You pulled them out one by one, shaking off dirt, revealing harsh smelling onions that hardly filled your palm.

All of a sudden, you flinched with a hiss, hand flying up.

Blood beaded where a nail had torn loose, and for a moment, he thought you might stop, but you only wiped your hand on your coat and went back to the roots.

When you straightened, the bag had sagged only a little more. Not enough to stand in for the weight of a young reindeer. You slung the bow over your shoulder and kept going, cutting from scrub patch to scrub patch whenever you saw so much as a hint of color.

He followed at his distance, knowing the forest still offered other paths, as it always would. And yet, he only followed the one you made.

The first time he went up to your house, he told himself it was only because he’d killed more than he needed. That the fox was extra meat, and leaving it to rot when there was a door not too far off felt worse than leaving it behind.

He waited until the tallow candles inside had gone out and the column of smoke from the chimney weakened and floated away, the fire having burnt itself down with no one awake to tend it. The house stood in a stretch of forest cut back just enough to make room for it, with open ground here and there between the stumps. Snow crusted the ground, catching what little sky glow there was and showing him where to put his feet. All the while, the fox hung from his grip by the forelegs, body long and lank, and fur brushed clean where he’d wiped away most of the mud.

He stepped out of the darkness and it was the closest he had ever been.

The house was shorter than he had imagined from the bit of roof he’d seen; squat and squared off, logs laid one on another, and the gaps between them packed with clay and moss. A small lean-to huddled off one side, stacked with cut wood in uneven lengths. Everything about it looked like it had been built to sit through the weather and not move. He tried to picture the hands that had done it; one person or several, how many seasons it had taken to haul and fit each piece. Whether the one who had swung the axe still slept inside. Brother? Your father?

He paused at the edge of the property and listened. When he heard neither voices nor clatter, he kept going.

Closer in, he saw a line strung between two poles beside the house. A wool skirt, a blue shawl, and two little shirts no broader than both his hands. All frozen stiff. But nothing there that looked meant for a man.

The door was only a few steps away. Plain wood and an iron latch with no light leaking out around it.

He set the fox down on the threshold, careful to lay it straight, legs tucked. Blood had dried along its muzzle and throat in a crimson crust, so he turned that side away from the crack at the bottom of the door. For a heartbeat, he hovered there, hand on its tail, and almost moved it again, some part of him wanting it to look less like a body and more like…a gift? An answer? A mercy?

It was only meat. That was what he told himself. Meat you hadn’t taken when you could have. Meat for the table behind that door, for the small clothes on the line. Nothing more.

He straightened and stepped back until the shadows from the woodpile took him in. He waited long enough to be sure no one had heard him, that no light would flare up to catch him standing there, then he turned and walked back into the trees.

It was meant to be a one time thing. He decided that as he went, repeating it in his head.

Once.

Because you had let the calf go. Because there was no sense in making you do what he could do himself.

Once.

The next time he left something at the door, the candles were out again, and the clothesline held only your sullied coat, with new streaks along the front. He couldn’t tell if you'd tried to wash the fox innards off and it hadn’t come out, or if you’d just hung it there to dry after wearing it through the work.

He set two hares on the threshold that night. Their limp bodies laid side by side, heads turned in opposite directions so the door wouldn’t open straight onto their faces. Once he had arranged them, he backed away until the yard blurred and then he turned and went.

He never came back either of those mornings to see what you and your family did, how you’d react. He did not want to see how your face might ease at the sight of food that had come from nowhere, how much that would tell him about what you all had left inside. He did not want to see fear, either. At the idea of some unseen hand laying dead things at the door. And he did not want to watch shame pass over you, shame for taking it and for being thankful you didn’t have to loose the arrow yourself.

It was enough to know that by the time he passed that way days later, there was no fox, no hares, no scraps left that he could see. The invisible path you used to walk stayed empty too. When he listened for the sound of your bow creaking, he only heard the forest and nothing more.

After a while, the smaller prey began to feel like not enough.

He brought down an elk cow next, thin over the ribs but more meat than everything he had left before put together, and dragged it to the open spot near the door where you would see it at first light. That one, he thought, would last you and your family a week.

Long enough that he could stay away.

He kept to other parts of the forest for a time. Dales whose snow had never known your tracks, ridges where the wind carried none of the firewood and lingonberry scent he had learned as yours. He walked and ate and slept, and none of it felt right.

Nothing in those woods seemed to have any use for him.

The elk should have been enough. He had meant it to be. But there had not been much fat on it…and little marrow either. Once cut up, once boiled, once eaten down to the bone, it might not go as far as he’d reckoned. He told himself you and your family would stretch it. Told himself people always did. Told himself to leave it be. Still the thought kept after him.

He did not stay away.

The next time he came with something in his hands, it was another fox.

As he set it down and knelt, the fox’s jaw fell open, its tongue slipping out between its teeth. He didn’t like the way it looked, it made the death seem clumsy and careless and undignified. He put his hand under the muzzle and stuffed the tongue back in with his thumb, clamping the mouth shut.

Then the door swung inward while he was still bent over it. He did not move.

“Who--” your voice broke on the first word, then came back pitched. “Who are you? What are you doing?”

The door creaked a little more as you shifted, elbow bumping it wider. He could feel you standing over him, the remaining warm air from the room spilling past your legs into the night. He merely kept his eyes on the orangy fur beneath his hands as he felt a deeper breath try to come, but cut it short and kept his chest from rising.

“Who are you?” you tried again, firmer.

He did not answer. His mind had emptied at the worst possible moment, and his tongue sat heavy and inert behind his teeth. He could feel his mouth open and close once, empty, like the fox’s had been. He shut it again.

For a more than a few second, he stayed that way, gaze lowered. Keeping his face from you a second longer felt safer. Once he looked up, there would be no taking it back.

When he finally lifted his head, he did it in pieces. First, your boots on the threshold, planted hard on the boards, one set back a little, as if you had opened the door without giving up the chance to shut it again. That ought to have been enough. He already knew what the rest of you would say, that you did not want him there.

He should have let his eyes drop again. He did not.

They went higher.

To the coat belted tight over your middle against the cold. To the knife strapped at your hip in case the bow could not be shot in time. To the quiver crossing your chest. You had opened the door expecting danger.

Whatever gratitude the meat had earned, it hadn't earned him welcome.

That should have been where he stopped. For his own sake, and yours. Before he had to see what your face would do when you looked at him. Before you had to watch him see it.

Still they climbed.

He met the point of the arrow.

It sat between his eyes, close enough that one small movement would touch skin. The shaft shook, but not enough to make it miss if you let it go.

Past it, he saw your face at last. Your eyes were wide, the dark in them spread so far he didn’t know what the color of them was, and they moved over him without stopping, snagging here and there on the cuts and seams and mismatched colors in his skin. Not one man’s body, but a gathered thing made to resemble one. He knew what you were seeing. He could feel it in the way your gaze searched him, trying to make sense of one part and then the next.

He looked at you just as hard and helplessly, and got no peace from it. Shock was there, certainly. Fear too, or something near enough to it. Beyond that, nothing he could trust. He did not know if you looked at him and saw only a stranger where no stranger ought to be, or something hideous enough to drive that broken sound from you before you could swallow it back.

He stayed where he was, hands still on the fox. There was nowhere useful to put them. He did not want to reach toward you, and he did not want to leave you defenseless either, not even against him.

Behind you, he barely made out a table, a narrow bed with blankets piled where someone small had turned over, and on the other side a longer figure under a wool coverlet. Your mother, he guessed. None of them knew he was there yet. Only you.

“You have been doing this?” The arrow tip didn’t move, but your fingers shifted on the string. “Leaving these?”

He managed a nod, the littlest he could make it. Any larger, his brow would have brushed the arrowhead.

“Why?” your voice rasped. “What do you want from us? Why would you do this?”

Your jaw was set so tight he thought it might ache later. You didn’t lower the bow as you blinked hard, as if willing your features not to give anything more away.

He wished, suddenly, that his hair had not fallen away from his face so much.

“It was never my wish to frighten you,” he said, his voice coming out rougher than he meant. “I did not come here to harm you.”

Your shoulders jerked at the sound, the arrow dipped, then rose, then dipped once more.

“What, then?” you whispered.

He searched for words, but none of them seemed right: that he had watched you longer than he should’ve, that he had seen enough to know you hunted because you had to, not because killing came easy to you. And that beneath all of it lay the thought that shamed him most; that he would sooner bloody his own hands than watch you do it again, because whatever in you recoiled from it was the very thing he could not stop not stop coming back to.

None of it would come into speech, and, perhaps, it was better that way.

“You had need of meat.”

His answer did nothing to soften your features as your gaze dropped from him to the fox, to the blood at his cuffs, then climbed back again. Those few words had only made him stranger to you.

“You’ve been watching us,” you said. It wasn’t a question.

He could not lie about that. He nodded.

For a few long, erratic heartbeats, both of you stayed as you were, the truth of it between you two.

Then you stepped back. It was hardly any distance, but he felt it all the same. He had put it there. Not only the fear for yourself, but for the others behind you, and for all the hours before when you had walked and knelt and thought yourself alone. He had taken that from you. He could not bear the thought of you carrying him into the woods with you from then on, in every silence, in every turn of your head.

What troubled him was that some part of him liked it though, that you would be thinking of him from then on, as he had so long thought of you.

He did not move, and he knew it was a poor offering beside what he had already taken, but it was what he had left to give you: the choice, such as it was, and the little ground you still held. If you released the arrow, the least he could do was give you a still target and not leave you with something uglier to carry afterward. He knew it would not kill him as you thought it would, and you’d be the one left with the pain of it.

Even then, from where he knelt, he could feel you still choosing. He wasn’t sure whether you balked at the act itself, or only at what it would leave behind: his body at the threshold, the others behind you, the knowledge that you had killed when you need not have.

Then he saw the choosing tip one way.

“Up.” When he pushed his weight off his knees, you added, “Slowly. Get up, slowly.”

He made a point of doing just that, slow and plain before you, giving you no movement you had not asked for. By the time he stood, you had to tilt the arrow back to keep the point between his eyes.

“Step back from the door,” you ordered.

He took a step back.

You just stood there, eyes flicking from him to the forest, to the dark around him, then back to his face.

“Further.”

He did as you asked, until the doorway had taken most of you from him, leaving only your face in the twinkling snowlight before that, too, began to soften into the dark.

“You have helped us,” you said, voice tight. “But you must not watch us anymore. Do not follow when I go out. Do not come near the yard.”

You were drawing a line, and he knew he had no right to cross it.

He forced himself to nod.

“Do not leave…” you gestured at what lay between you both. “Do not leave dead things at the door. My family is uneasy enough over what has been left already. I will not have them made afraid, and I will not have them begin to depend on a stranger.”

Uneasy.

His gaze dropped, and for the first time he thought of the hours between finding the meat and eating it: the looking at it with doubt, the question of whether it was safe, whether it ought to go near the table at all. Whether you had put it to your own mouth first before letting the others touch it.

Hidden or not, he brought fear to your door.

“Say you will not,” you insisted. “Say you will stop.”

He hesitated. The thought of going was one thing, but the thought of being sent was another. To stop meant being shut out of the one corner of the world he had come to look for. It meant giving you back to the woods entirely, and going with nothing of you but memory.

Some things might fade in time: the path to the house, the roof through the branches, the sound of you moving in the brush, but not you. It seemed only fitting that what would stay sharpest should be the thing he was made to leave behind.

“I will stop," he said at last. “I will not watch. I will leave nothing.”

Your shoulders eased a bit, and the arrow dipped from his face to his chest.

“Go,” you whispered.

He looked up once more, trying to find your face in the pale wash the ground gave back, but the dark had finally taken it from him completely.

As he turned toward the trees, he left the real you at the door and made another to carry away with him: the bow lowered, your hand in his, your steps beside his into the woods.

He let himself keep that, and no more, as darkness consumed him.

The worst of the winter seemed to arrive all at once.

One week the snow was something he could push through, the next an icy crust had formed over packed snow beneath, cutting at his shins when he broke through and holding his weight only when it pleased.

Streams froze over, and the sky forgot how to be anything but one unbroken cloud over the trees.

He moved as much to keep his limbs from stiffening as for any other reason. When he stopped too long in one place, the cold climbed him, starting in his fingers and toes and working its way inward. So he kept going, over ground he did not know and past glazed cliff faces, killing what he needed, cracking it open, eating, then moving on.

There was nothing in any of it that asked him to remember.

But when the wind found a way in under his furs, he wondered what such cold must do to your hands, your feet, the skin of your face. He did not always stop it there.

On bad nights, when the frost burned enough to bother even him, he let his thoughts go where he ought not to, if only because they heated him. Sometimes too much. He pictured you finding your way under his cloak with him, inching close. Your feet worked in between his calves for warmth, and your face tucked beneath his jaw, breath tickling his throat. In those scraps of fancy, he always went still at first, then your hand would skim down the front of him for his own as you nestled in, and the thought of that alone was enough to send him sitting upright in the dark, wrenching his cloak loose to let the cold in. It did little to help.

After thoughts like those, he thought the distance between you two was for the best.

He kept his promise and didn’t go back to the valley. When hunger drove him out to hunt, he went deeper instead, further away.

There, among blood and solitude, it was easier to remember what he was.

A reindeer had passed hours before, light enough on its feet that it had barely broken the top layer. He followed the scuffs anyway. He brought it down near a stand of scrub. It tried to break away on the ice, slipped, and that gave him the opening he needed. His arms closed around its neck and he held on until the kicking stopped. When it was still, he let it down and rolled it so the ribs showed.

The knife he’d taken off a dead man months ago went in at the chest, steam rising in clouds that smelled of stomach. He cut what he needed into long pieces he could carry, then slit the belly wide so the rest lay open. Wolves would come, along with foxes and ravens, hopping and screaming around the soaked patch. Leaving what he did not use where the forest could reach it felt, in a tiny way, like something you might respect him for.

He was bent over the animal’s side, hand buried up to the wrist in warmth, when he heard it.

A bow being drawn did not make much sound, but he heard the creak, and a scarcely audible inhale. Every hair along the back of his neck prickled, but he did not turn immediately.

He listened, and the forest said nothing useful. Not a single branch had betrayed a step, and in that pocket where the wind hit less brutally, it brought him no scent at all. Even if it had, the reek of the fresh kill under him would have drowned it.

“Do not move,” you called out, the cold air having dried and abraded your voice.

He took his hand out of the reindeer, slowly, and let it hang at his side.

Snow crunched under your boots as you came closer, then you appeared between two knotty young pines, coat drawn so tight it must’ve pinched your skin. Frost had got into your hair and eyelashes, and stuck there in little white specks. An arrow sat on the string, the head trained on his chest from a few paces off.

He stayed kneeling by the carcass.

“You should not be this far from your house,” he said, eyes on you as you stepped closer again.

“I know,” you glanced back once, as if your home might still be visible to run toward. “But I had to see if I could find you.”

Find him? He quickly wondered if it was to ask him to hunt again, perhaps, if the woods had been giving you little, as they had him on some days. Or for some other work, if you had been hurt and could not manage it yourself. His eyes went over you before he could stop them. You stood sound enough. No limp, no arm held close or bandaged, no blood that he could see. Then his mind betrayed him with the thought of you asking him in and out of the cold. He hated the thought at once. It was not that.

But if you had hunted him all this way, it made a kind of sense that you had come to put an end to him, to whatever he was. To stand in the open with no witnesses at your back and send the arrow where you had once held it.

He did not move.

More than once, lying beneath a rock or under the bole of a tree, he’d thought of you letting the arrow fly. Of the jolt of it going in. Of the mark it would leave. You had sent him away, and the ache of that had stayed in his chest ever since with nowhere to show for itself. An arrow there would have given the pain a place. He could have pointed to it and known what it was for.

“If you have come to kill me, come closer,” he said. “The wind is strong.”

“I am close enough,” you stated as a flake landed on your cheek and melted. “I did not come to kill you.”

His stomach dropped. If not that, then something had happened at the house. For one terrible instant, he saw a spade hacking at frozen ground and getting nowhere, a shrouded body laid beside earth too hard to open. He had seen how men buried their dead, and knew his own hands could force where yours might not.

You sucked in a breath and let it out warily. “I have come to ask for your help.”

His eyes went to your face as he searched it for grief, for some sign that one of the people in your house had been taken from you. He had seen you weep over dying animals, but he could not make himself picture what sorrow would do to you if it were one of your own.

“Tell me,” he said. Whatever it was, he would do what you asked the moment you named it. “What do you need of me?”

Your arms must have been screaming from holding the draw, because you let the string slip back a thumb’s width, then another, until the arrow pointed at the ground near his right leg. Your shoulders sagged.

“My mother is in a bad way,” you started. “She was always… she has never been strong, not since I can remember, and this winter has taken what she had.” Your gaze flicked to his bloody hands, then back to his face. “There is hardly anything left in the house. A few rotten potatoes. Bark. Water with spruce needles in it. She coughs until she cannot breathe, and there is nothing in her bowl that puts anything back into her. We have done what we can with what we had, and now…” Your mouth tightened. “Now I fear she will not see the spring.”

Things at the house must have worsened enough that staying by the bed had begun to feel useless, that watching was no longer enough. You’d come to him because you were trying, in the only way left to you, to keep your mother alive.

“You want me to hunt for your mother.”

“If you are willing,” you stepped closer. “I know I have no right to ask it of you, but I have found almost nothing in the valley. My sisters must eat, and my mother…” you swallowed. “I do not wish to sit and watch her starve.”

He stood, though you had not told him he could. You didn’t lift the bow again or tell him to stay down, but you did flinch ever so slightly.

“I would not see her come to that,” he said. “I would not have that for any of you.”

He tried, for a moment, to measure your fear for your mother against the nearest thing he knew. Victor came to him at once, and with him the old wanting; to be looked at and not seen as an error, to be wanted by the one who had made him. And with that, the pain of how late it had all come.

He had to let the comparison go before it could take him any further.

Your gaze dropped to the reindeer. “You can range farther than I can, bring down larger game, a-and…” Then your eyes flicked quickly over the breadth of him before you looked away. “You are better made for it.”

He had meant to leave the thought there, but then you said ‘better made.’ He wondered how you knew he had been made at all, and why you had said better. As if there were such a thing as a better making, as if chosen parts could add up to a better life, as if Victor’s hand had improved anything by assembling him.

For a second, he felt himself judged as workmanship.

Then he looked at you properly, and you had folded in on yourself and were starting to shake where you stood, waiting for his answer while the cold stung.

You meant his frame, his size, his strength, only that he could bear what was already wearing you down.

“I will help.”

He could not mend your mother’s lungs or put back what winter had taken from her, but he could put meat in the house. He could buy you all time with her, and time was not nothing.

“We have little, but I can skin what you bring, tan the hides, make you something from them. I can sew. Your covering…” Your eyes flicked down the front of him and back up. “It could be patched, or you may keep the furs yourself and I will do the work.”

“You would work for me in return,” he said, not a question.

To hear that you would spend those hours on him made any finer covering seem a poor thing beside it.

More white showed around your eyes. “I did not mean…I would make it for you. Mend it. Not--I would not be working for you.”

“Keep them,” he said. “I do not ask that of you. The cloak serves well enough as it is.”

A crease dug itself between your brows. “What would you ask for, then?”

He did not like the thought of you giving those hours to something that already served well enough, when what he wanted was not the making or mending, but the hours themselves, and that was not something he could name aloud.

He watched you shiver violently since the bow was no longer drawn to keep your muscles tight. You reached into your sack for your mittens, fingers clumsy from the chill, with eyes that never quite left him.

“Only to help,” he said at last. “Nothing more.”

To be of use was what he’d wanted from the beginning, and right then you were offering him the chance to be that much without blighting it. He would still be kept to the edges, he knew that. Still outside. But not, perhaps, as something ominous there.

You stared at him, searching his face as if there had to be more to it than he had said.

“I cannot just…” you broke off, jaw working. “If you bring so much, there must be something you would have. I cannot take from you for nothing.”

He tried to hold onto the simplest meaning of your words, and tried not to think that you might care, even a little, whether he went with nothing. He knew better than to trust such a thing, but knowing better did nothing to make it leave.

“You owe me nothing,” he said, then paused. “Why must it be made even?”

You blinked at him. “I…” Then looked away. “Because otherwise it would feel wrong.”

“It does not feel wrong to me,” he said.

Neither of you said anything more as the blizzard began to stir. As your teeth clicked together, he glanced down at the carcass between you two, a flurry of snow starting to cover it.

“We will begin with this one,” he gestured toward his former meal. He bent, gathered the strips he had cut for himself, and held them out between you both. “I had cut these for myself,” he said. “Take them.”

Your hand lifted, then faltered.

“No,” the word came out squeakier than you seemed to like, so you cleared your throat and tried again. “No, it is yo--”

“I have eaten already,” he stated. “You would not be taking from my mouth.”

Your gaze dropped to his mouth at that, then lifted slowly back to his eyes. “Then…all right,” you said quietly. “Thank you.”

You came to him in cautious steps, and he kept very still, lowering his head a little and holding the strips out, doing what he could to make the bulk of himself feel less. At the last moment, you tugged one mitten off and reached toward his palm, then paused and looked up at him as if to make sure. He nodded once, and only then did you take the pieces one by one, careful not to touch his skin.

“The rest will go to your house,” he said as you stepped away, closing the bag at your hip.

“The rest?” you asked, squinting against the falling flakes. “You cannot mean to bring all that back as well. The gully is bad enough, and the fen…” You nipped at the chapped skin of your lower lip. “You have already given enough.”

“I will manage it," he assured you as he went to the dead animal.

His hands closed around the reindeer’s forelegs, and he leaned his weight back, testing it once. The body lurched across the crust, leaving a streak where the hide scraped the snow.

Your hips tipped a little, the start of a turn back toward the way you came, then squared off again toward him. He wasn’t sure what kept you there when so much waited for you elsewhere.

He only knew his heart had begun to strike harder, and that he could not stop noticing the way you held yourself against the cold. More than once, in the space of a breath, he wanted to strip off his own cloak and put it around you. But he knew better. The smell of it, the sight of him removing and offering it, would likely drive you away instead of warming you.

And what shamed him was how quickly he accepted the thought that you might go on shivering, so long as you went on staying by him.

As he started the drag, you took a step as if to go to the other side, then stopped yourself, hands clenching and spine straightening.

“I suppose I will go ahead,” you said tentatively. “So you know where to go.”

He knew he wouldn’t anyway. The path from there to your home already lay clear in his mind: down through the gully you mentioned, past the snagged fir that leaned over the rock, across the bog where the ice sounded hollow in certain places. Snow could cover prints, wind could shift drifts, a tree could fall and change the look of a turn, and he would still know where your house sat.

Yet, he only nodded.

When he pulled, the dead weight made him slow. Within a dozen steps you were already a little ahead of him, picking the way between shrubs and frosty heather clumps. Every so often you looked back to be sure he was still there.

He met your glance once, the second time, then kept his eyes on the ground after that. It was enough to know you looked back for him at all, though he did not let himself ask how much of that was for him and how much for what he hauled.

Even when he looked down, he still saw you ahead of him at the edge of his vision. He could not help watching the way you moved across the terrain. Once, when a fallen trunk lay across the narrowest part of the path, you did not ask him to stop. You put your shoulder to the lighter end and shoved until it rolled just enough for the reindeer to clear. The movement pulled your coat tight across your back and arms, showing the strain before the fabric loosened again.

He found he liked watching the way you set yourself against whatever stood in your way.

Once the thought came, unbidden, of how that same resolve might look if ever it were turned on him. He did not have to think long to know he would yield to it, to you.

He left the reindeer in the yard the way you’d pointed out to him, near the stacked wood and the trampled path.

After that he kept to the trees again, and from there, he let the carcasses speak for him, and what they said…he did not know.

Twice since then, he had hunted for you and your family. Once a lean reindeer that had strayed downhill and once a boar that had rooted too long in the same patch. He dragged each kill to the line where the coppice gave way to stamped down snow, left it there, and stood back among the trunks until the door opened. Sometimes it was you alone, sometimes a smaller shape or two with you, one of your sisters in a big shawl. You all would come out with hooks and rope and a battered sled, and he watched your breaths fog the air.

He listened for the cough you had spoken of and did not hear it, but that told him nothing. It could have meant your mother slept easier, or that you had bundled her further from the door with new hides and furs. Or it could’ve meant she was too weak to make a sound at all.

More than once, as he stood with his hands empty, the same words climbing up his throat: How is she? Has the meat helped? Have I helped? They seemed simple enough, but each time he pictured your face turning toward him with surprise, fear, or even anger, and the words slid back down again. What place did he have, a thing who came and went with dead animals, to ask after a woman’s chances at another spring?

So he went on as before; he walked, he killed what he needed, and he left what he could spare. The valley sat behind him most days, a pull he ignored by setting his feet in the opposite direction.

Late one evening, when the light had started to ebb, something moved under a dwarf birch. At first, he took it for a lump of packed powder rustled by the wind, then it stirred again, and he saw a white bird hunched there, feathers fluffed as far as they would go. One wing stuck out from its side at the wrong angle, dragging a line when it tried to hop away.

When he stepped closer, it panicked, beating its good wing, the broken one flapping uselessly. It managed two lunges before one foot slipped. It went down on its breast, beak opening and closing. His hand reached out, catching it around the body. The bird fought, claws scrabbling against his palm, heart battering against the callus at the base of his thumb.

He could end it. The meat would not be much for him, barely a mouthful. Or he could set it down and let the night do what the forest would.

But, right then, with the bird in his hands, there was suddenly at least something easier to ask you about than how your mother was.

So he shifted the bird in his hold and tucked it against his chest so the wind would not strip what heat it had left, then he turned his back on the distant ridges and started toward the valley again.

You were already in the yard when he came out of the trees, and for once, he saw you before he saw the door. You stood near a frame leaning against the wall, a hide stretched over it. One hand worked a dull scraper along the flesh side, pushing up curls of frozen scrap that dropped by your feet. Your shoulders hitched with the motion, and each stroke made a wet sound.

He stopped where he always did, at the edge of what belonged to you and your family, then he stepped forward, and your hand stilled. You must've heard the snow under his boots, or perhaps you knew the way he sounded on it.

For a moment, you stayed with your back turned, then you straightened the rest of the way and faced him. The scraper hung from your fingers.

“Why are--” you stopped, looking around. “Is something wrong?”

You had not sent him away. Still, standing there, he could not help but think he had come to you with little more than an excuse; a small broken thing with no use to the table and no certainty it would live.

“I found this,” he said anyway, lifting his arms so you could see what he cradled. “I did not know what should be done with it.”

“Oh,” you frowned, trying to make it out from where you stood, then the bird moved, and you took six steps across the snow. “It’s hurt? What happened?”

He thought you meant him, that you had looked at the bird in his hands and seen only what damage those hands might have done. The thought made him hunch over it more closely instead, shoulders rounding as he lowered it between you two as you approached. Under your gaze, the tips of his fingers prickled where they curved around its body, suddenly aware of how plainly you could see the care he was taking not to injure it more.

“I found it this way,” he said too quickly. “The wing was already broken.” As you crouched a little, he looked down at you, at the crease between your brows as you squinted over the wing without touching it. “I did not know whether to leave it or end it.”

He had taken it up with death already in mind, and still the first thing he saw in it was where it might take him.

Straight back to you.

“It might not come to anything,” you said. “But it is here now. We can at least try.” You wiped your hand down the side of your coat without looking at the smear it left. “Come,” you nodded toward a stump near the wall. “Sit there.”

It wasn’t meant as a seat, but it would do. He went where you gestured and lowered himself until his knees bracketed the wood. The stump hardly reached the middle of his shins.

For a few seconds, you only stood there, looking at the ptarmigan as it squawked in his lap. The pause stretched long enough that he began to wonder whether you were thinking better of it.

Then you moved, first to the woodpile, where you rummaged through the kindling until you found two straight scraps of wood no thicker than a finger. From the wall by the door, you took down a rag hung from a nail, stiff with old grease, and tore a strip free with your teeth before coming back.

“All right,” you murmured, looking down at the bird. “We will see what we can do.”

Your gaze then slid to his legs, to the way his knees rose on either side, and briefly hesitated. Then you stepped in and folded yourself down into a squat a little farther back than was easy, close enough to reach the bird only when you stretched out your arms.

He made himself breathe smaller, with shallow breaths that didn’t push his chest so far over you.

“Hold it here,” you whispered, reaching for the bird. “Wait, no--not on the bone. Let the wing hang free.”

He caught only bits of what you said. His heart was going too fast, the pounding of it filling his ears. Heat gathered under his skin until he wanted to squirm from it, though he held himself rigid where he sat and in his grip.

He did manage to catch your huff before you set the slivers of wood down by his foot, and your hand came over his, pressing at his thumb, then his forefinger, moving them off the break. The ptarmigan wriggled, but he hardly felt it. What he felt was your skin on his; the warmth, the roughness at your fingertips, and the astonishment of finding your hand over his at all.

A shiver went through him before he could stop it.

You froze, then looked up at him for the first time since you’d knelt.

“Sorry,” you said hurriedly. “You were holding it in the wrong place. It would have hurt it more.”

“No,” he said, the word raspier than he meant. “It is all right. Go on.”

He forced his hand to loosen, letting you fully move his fingers where they needed to go. Your touch stayed longer than it had to, and the slight drag of your scabbed cuts against the ridges of his scars seemed to linger after your hand ought to have left him. For one unguarded instant, he found himself wanting to know how that same touch might feel elsewhere; up the length of his arm, over his shoulder, across his back--

He stopped the thought there. Seeing the seams was one thing, feeling them under your hand would be another.

“That’s it,” you murmured as your touch retreated. “Do not let it twist.”

You eased the broken wing out, feather by feather, until the joint showed. He watched your thumbs find where the bone had slipped, watched the careful pressure as she coaxed it back into place. The bird thrashed once, then sagged. Your knuckles brushed his again as you laid the first splint.

“You have done this before.”

“A few times,” you answered without looking up. “A dog we had once, after it broke its leg chasing deer. My sister’s wrist, when she fell out of a tree. My own finger too. I set it poorly the first time and had to do it again.”

You wound the strip of rag around the wing in careful turns, drawing it snug, and the bird let out a shriek. Your nose scrunched before you could hide it.

His head tipped a little. “How did you?”

“Break it?”

“Yes,” he said.

He watched your thumb smooth the feathers back over the splint.

“Cutting wood,” you replied, mouth pulling to one side. “I swung badly and hit the block wrong.”

He tried, then, to picture another pair of hands at the woodpile, larger ones closing over yours on the axe haft to show you where the blow ought to land. But the question of who had taught you did not feel like his to ask, so he let it be.

You bent closer, head cocked, two fingers feeling under the feathers. “Still warm,” you murmured.

He did not know what warmth you meant. He found himself leaning after you, trying to see what your fingers had felt beneath the feathers, what you had learned from that touch alone. In the narrow space between you both, he forgot the size of himself, and his forehead knocked into yours.

He flinched, and his hands clenched on instinct.

Right as you pulled back, one hand flying briefly to your forehead, the ptarmigan lurched in his hold, good wing flailing as it screeched. He opened his mouth to apologize for the knock, but before the words could come, the bird released a hot, foul smelling mess into the fur in his lap.

He drew it away from himself, face tightening as he felt the mess begin to soak in. You grimaced too, though only for a second, the skin around your eyes crinkling before you reached for the bird.

“Here,” you muttered, sliding your hands under the ptarmigan. “I will put it inside by the stove. My sisters can watch it.”

Only when you stood, and the door had shut behind you, did he look down at the filth.

He got to his feet. The stink rose off the fur and into the back of his throat, rank enough that he nearly coughed. He swallowed it down and stood there as the mess began to skid lower. Whatever had been between you two a moment ago was gone now. You'd gone inside with the bird, and he could not see why you would come back out.

He had almost let himself believe he was not frightening you, then the bird panicked in his hands, as if something always must.

He turned toward the forest, back where he belonged. Unseen and easy to forget, where no one had to see what he had made of things, or smell it on him.

The latch lifted abruptly and the door swung inward, then shut just as fast.

“Where are you going?”

Your voice stopped him, and he half turned back. You stood in front of the door without the bird, wiping your palms on a clean rag. Your eyes went to the front of his cloak, then caught on the way he had folded the hem up over itself, covering the soiled patch so it would not drip onto the ground by the door.

“You cannot walk around with that on you,” you said, a little too briskly. “If you take it off, I can clean it.”

He only looked at you for a moment, then let his gaze drop.

“It is my doing,” he muttered. “I should see to it myself.”

The thought of you cleaning it from his cloak shamed him more than the odor. You had already had to correct his hands once, to move them off the break because he was too distracted to mind where he held the bird. Then he had clenched and scared it. If you washed the mess from his cloak, you would be touching the proof of what his hands were like.

Foolish as the thought was, he thought it anyway, that you might look at what his hands had done and know they would never be tender with you.

And if he could not keep his grip gentle on something so small and already hurt, then what business had he imagining those hands on you?

You switched the rag from one hand to the other, teeth biting on your bottom lip. He thought you might argue. Instead, you stepped back, unlatched the door, and dipped inside, hooking your fingers under something hanging on a peg within.

When you stepped out again, you had a folded pelt over your arm, fur showing through the turns. He knew instantly what it was.

“I was going to ask you to try this,” you said, eyes on the bundle instead of his face. “Not…not like this.” You picked at a loose stitch with your nail. “Not with that on you.” You shook the hide out with a snap. Stitches showed along one edge where you had shaped it, coarse seamwork meant to sit on the shoulders. “If you leave your cloak, it will dry better here than it will on your back. You can wear this until you come back for it.”

You looked up then, as if to check he was still there and listening.

“It is from your reindeer anyway,” you added. “I know you said you did not want skins, but it did not seem right to keep all of it. My sisters helped scrape it. We thought you should have something of it that stays with you.”

He could only stare as the words went in one after another. By the end, he felt hot all over. You'd thought of him in his absence. More than that, you had looked at him well enough to shape the hide for his frame, broad across the shoulders. He took a step toward you, drawn by the fact that you stood there shy with it in your arms, offering him something made for him and no one else.

His fingers went to the fastening at his throat, less nimble than he wanted them to be. The clasp fought him, then thankfully gave, and he dragged the cloak off his shoulders in one heavy pull. You stepped in to take it, catching the cleaner corner between your fingers. The stench caught you on inhale, and you let the breath out again a little too fast before smoothing your face.

“I will rinse it in the basin,” you said, nodding toward the rusty tub under the eaves. “The wind will do the rest.”

Before he could say ‘thank you,’ or find any words that seemed enough for what you were giving him, you laid the dirty covering over the stump and held the hide out to him.

He took it in both hands and only held it there a moment before lifting it higher to look at. The fur was darker and shorter than his other one, and the flesh side still held some stiffness from not yet being worn in. His thumb found the seam where you had joined two pieces and traced the puckered line of the stitches.

“Do you not need it?” he asked.

You shook her head lightly. “No, it is for you.”

Warmth clung to the coat from where it had rested over your arm, and he held it a little tighter.

Then the question he had been afraid to ask came out at last.

“Your mother,” he said. “If she is not better, should it not be for her?”

You glanced over your shoulder, as if you could see through the logs to the bed. “She is…a little better,” you admitted. “She sleeps more and is not always coughing. Yesterday she finished her broth and then asked if I would make it thicker, more like stew.”

On your way to the tub, you gathered his old cloak up and pushed it down into the water with both hands. When you spoke again, it was to the wet material and not to his face.

“She knows it is not from my bow,” you said. “She asked, and I couldn’t lie to her. She said I was to tell you that she is thankful.”

You stood and brushed the water from your palms onto your skirt. The wool there was thinned, and the hem uneven where strips had been cut from it and sewn back in elsewhere.

You let out a breath that smoked faintly in the cold. “I am too,” you murmured. Then you turned back to him. “So, no. She does not need it. It is yours now. Whether you keep it is your choice.”

He knew he was doing it when he stepped toward you, knew too that he might be asking meaning from things too tiny to bear it. You did not back away. Your throat moved once in a swallow, but your boots stayed where they were.

“Thank you,” he said, keeping his voice low.

With another step, he was close enough to see how your lips had split in the cold. Your tongue flicked over a cracked spot, and heat flooded him so suddenly he became too aware of his own body, of breath and blood and the space he took up before you. All the tenderness he had already begun to imagine living in your mouth, if ever it were turned wholly to him.

He had to drop his gaze, then busied his hands with the mantle, dragging it up around his shoulders. The inside was cold against his neck at first, and he scratched at the place where it wanted to chafe.

When he looked back up, your eyes were searching his face. Then they dipped to the way it sat on him, and back again. He could tell what you were looking for, whether he liked it, whether it pleased him. He did like it, too much. He liked the idea that you may have drawn the hide over your own shoulders once the work was done, if only from curiosity. It would have gone over you in a sweep, too broad and too long, the dark fur falling heavy and trailing at your heels. It would have swallowed your figure and left him to imagine the shape of you somewhere within, a shape he had learned too well over the passing months.

More troubling was how much he liked the thought that you might have used it. Whether you had slept with it near her, or under you, or wrapped in it through some bitter night. He could not warm you; he did that only in his thoughts. But perhaps the hide had. Something that had come to you through him had lain over you and held back the cold.

The thoughts were bad enough when he was alone with them, but in your presence, they made it hard to meet your eyes.

His gaze slipped toward the dusky woodland. “I should go,” he said. “It is late.”

From inside, he heard a burst of pitched laughter. A girl’s voice, one of your sisters, began to sing, words he did not know, the rhythm of it broken by giggles. He pictured the ptarmigan on the table, their hands smoothing the feathers down along its back.

Suddenly, remembered he had not asked after it since you took it inside.

“The bird…”

The corner of your mouth lifted a little. “My sisters are fussing over it already. We will do what we can for it.”

He had come to you with something he thought would soon be dead and had not thought much past that. But he had not expected you to try. Perhaps you would have helped the calf, if helping it had not meant bringing a sick animal home to hungry stomachs. Perhaps right then, with food in the house, a hurt thing could be met differently.

Or perhaps he still did not understand what had governed either choice. He could not tell.

“I--thank you,” he said again, hoarser than before, and drew the new fur a little closer around himself as he stepped back from the door. “Good night.”

You looked as if you might say something more, but then only nodded. “Good night.”

With a turn he went toward the forest, boots creaking on the sparkling crust. The melody inside faded behind him, but the sound of it, and the feel of the hide, went with him into the dark.

The fire he’d built was small, fixed in a hollow where the wind only came through feebly. Flames chewed at the sticks he fed them while smoke folded up into the branches, losing itself among the lichen and frost. He held his hands over the heat until feeling came back in like needles, the numb places waking up in pieces.

He ate sitting close to the flames, turning each strip on a flat stone set at the edge of the fire before tearing into it. The meat was crispy, leaving grease all over mouth and on his fingers.

There was plenty for him, and more tucked away in a pocket beneath the rock overhang for later. He thought of carrying some down to your house, but he had only just hunted for you and your family two days ago.

He had meant to ask about the bird as well, only the answer had shown itself that morning.

When he dropped the two hares at the place you both agreed on, he saw your younger sisters in the yard, bundled against the cold and chasing each other through the snow. The smallest bent herself forward with the ptarmigan perched on her back, arms spread wide as she ran, making little banking turns as though she were its wings.

And there, by the house, he saw you with your head down and your stiff fingers at the front of your coat, working at one of the buttons that would not go through, then you tried another and another, until you gave up and let your hands fall.

He tore off another piece of meat as he kept thinking of the buttons and how he might have tried them, one by one, to prove to himself that his hands could be gentle.

That he’d bend over and fasten them with care enough not to snap the thread or send a button skittering. The first two would take work, the buttons so tiny beneath fingers too large for them. He would have to pinch each one carefully and find the hole more by feel than sight, leaning back in his crouch for what little light there was. As he’d go higher, your breathing would begin to change. With each breath you let out, the wool would move against his knuckles over the curve of your breast, and he would feel it every time while he tried to keep hold of the button. Once it would slip from him, then again, and when he pressed in too hard, trying not to lose it, your hand would come over his wrist.

He had to stop. He had only meant to fasten the buttons, to do some small thing carefully, and no more. But by the end of it, he could think only of you stopping his hand, and of wanting to flatten his own there, to feel the beat of your heart beneath it, and to look up at you as he did. To find it racing under his palm, to see your eyes wide. He could not let himself imagine it as anything but fear at such a touch from him.

Because he could not have looked up, seen your lips parted as if to say keep going, and gone on calling it fear.

He held one hand above the fire until a flame licked the inside of his wrist. The sting scattered the thoughts. He was glad of it.

Then something moved; a swish of branches being nudged aside, one twig snapping back against another. He went still and tried to make himself part of the boulder at his back until he knew what came.

Soon enough, he knew it was your step. A light tread, picking its way through what lay under it.

When you came into view between two firs, it was your coat he noticed first. The old berry stains had been scrubbed until they spread, the deep spots blurred into wider patches. Near your throat, a few of the buttons were still undone, and he made himself look instead at the scarf at your neck, finer than the one you usually wore, though the ends had begun to fray. Below it, one hand held a lidded tin while the other carried his old cloak.

He pushed his hands down to his knees, suddenly aware of the way he sat, hunched over like some story beast. He made himself straighten and turned a little so he did not face you full on as you stopped at the outer ring of the firelight.

“I thought you might be here,” you said, sniffling and scrubbing at your nose with the back of your mitten. “I smelt smoke.”

He pushed a loose log back into place with the toe of his boot. “I did not mean to bring you this far from your house.”

“You didn’t.” You tightened your grip on the tin. “I needed to check the snares anyway. I…only came a little further than usual.”

He felt your eyes go to his face, lingering first near his ear and then lower, at the line that ran toward the corner of his mouth, before they dropped. He lowered his own gaze, letting his hair fall a little further forward as he looked to where his hands rested on his knees. The fire made the seams there look rawer than they were, picking out the old stitching and the fresher claw mark that had not yet calmed. He slid them off his knees and let them hang at his sides.

“I brought this,” you said, holding the tin out. “Salve. My mother and I made it. Tallow and spruce pitch. It helps when the skin splits. For your…for the places that do.”

He knew what you thought it was for, and suddenly the tin in your hand seemed too dear a thing to have been made with him in mind. You’d spent care on skin that would never close smooth, never fade, never heal as you supposed it might. At best, it might ease the newer cuts.

“These will not close.” His nails dug into the bark. “They are not wounds that heal that way.”

You frowned at that, then tucked his old cloak under your arm and pushed back the other sleeve. A puckered line showed along the inside of your forearm, deeper at one end where the skin had once been opened wider.

“This was worse than it looks now,” you said. “I used the salve on it. It did help.”

His eyes stayed on the mark longer than they should’ve. It looked like the flesh had been torn crudely, and he found himself wanting to ask what had done it, whether tooth or knife or something ordinary, but by then you were already pulling the sleeve back down over it and coming the rest of the way toward him.

He had to tilt his head up to see your face, and with you that close, he felt the selfish pull of wanting to know every other place life had marked you too.

He almost told you to keep the salve. You'd used it before and seen it work, and that alone made it harder to take. And what it was made from came from your house, from what you and your family had saved and rendered and not spared lightly. Your mother, your sisters, even yourself, had more claim to it than he did. To take it for his own felt greedy, almost indecent.

“Try it, at least,” you said.

But the tin stayed between you two, in your outstretched hand, and he could not give it back to you untouched after you had come so far with it.

He told himself he would keep it only until one of your family members or you had need of it. He reached out and let his hand close around the metal.

“Thank you,” he murmured, looking down at the scratched lid.

“You only need a little,” you told him. “At night is best, when it has time to soak in. Or whenever it starts bothering you.”

After that, he said nothing. The thanks had already been given, and he did not know what else to say. He thought his silence might send you back the way you had come, make you see the whole errand as a mistake. But no sound came of you turning away. Perhaps you were only letting your body warm, nothing more. Or perhaps you just had not made yourself go yet.

Even so, he wanted you to stay. His mind went rapidly over what little he had to offer that might give you reason to.

“I have meat, if you have not eaten.” He nodded toward his stash. “I can put a piece on the fire for you.”

You shook your head, giving a small wave of your mittened hand. “I ate. Keep it for yourself.”

His thoughts went loose again after that. He nearly asked after the bird, then almost asked whether the cold had found its way through your coat or boots, and hated himself for how obvious that sounded.

Before he could settle on anything else, you looked down at what you carried and said, as if only then remembering, “And this is yours too.” You lifted his old cloak a little higher. “I washed it as best I could. It should smell better now.”

He took it from you, careful not to brush your exposed wrist with his fingers. “Thank you,” he said.

The fur was damp in places but it no longer reeked, only holding the scent of lye soap and hearth fire. He laid it over his lap, and rested his hands on top of it with the tin cupped between them.

Still, you didn’t move away.

If you left, then the ache would only go on as it always had, familiar enough by that point to endure. But if you stayed, even for a few minutes more, he knew he would let it mean something. Worse, he could feel how badly he wanted to.

“You could sit,” he said. “Warm yourself before you go back.”

Your mouth opened, then closed again, eyes dropping to the snow by his feet.

“Only for a moment,” you said finally.

He shifted at once, dragging himself along the fallen tree until he was more to the side, leaving the place in front of the fire empty for you. Bark scraped under him, snagging on the fabric of his tattered trousers.

You stepped in carefully, then sat down on the log where he had been. He watched as you held your hands out to the heat, fingers spread in the brown fabric, and felt relief rise in him before he could stop it.

For a while, neither of you said anything. The fire did what it always did: a pop, a hiss where sap had been trapped in a knot. Over it, he could hear you. One swallow that clicked in your throat. A breath that snagged in one side of your nose, you clearing it, trying to make it sound like nothing at all.

Your fingers flexed once, then flattened again toward the heat.

“Does it…” you trailed off. “Do they hurt?” Your gaze moved along one of the lines from his temple to his brow. “Did it all happen at once, or over time?”

He knew too well that they hurt, but not in any way he could tell you. He could not sit there and say that sometimes the joins in him burned, or that the nerves sewn together beneath the skin could flare until it felt as though he were being stripped alive from the inside. The pain itself was one thing. The loneliness of it, another. To speak of it would be to speak the truth of how he had been made, and that truth stood between him and too many other things already. Spirit, dignity, inwardness. You got to be full of mystery and history and personhood. And he felt reduced to what could be seen. And then, even in kindness, your eyes had gone first to the seams and stitching.

He looked away, out toward the dull light spreading between the trees. That way he did not have to see what, if anything, had changed in your face.

“Most of it happened at once,” he said. “A while ago.” His fingers went briefly to the line that ran through his neck. “They do not hurt like fresh cuts. They pull, now and then. Sometimes the skin opens again.”

Your mouth pressed in a flat at that.

“That is awful,” you said softly. “For them to keep opening.”

He let out a breath and nodded. When he looked back at you, he found you still watching him. Your eyes slipped away immediately, as if you worried he might not want them there any longer.

His own went over you then, and only after did he realize what was missing.

“You did not bring the bow.”

“No,” you said, still looking toward the fire.

He waited a bit before asking, “Not even for the snares?”

“Well…” One of your boots hooked over the other. “I did not think there would be anything in them.”

“I saw a boar nosing at one once.”

“I was in a hurry,” you tried to reason. “My mind was not quite right.”

“I would rather you carried it,” he said as the wind pressed the scarf at your throat up against your chin, and you caught it with one hand, tucking it back into place. He watched you do it, then added, “When you are out alone.”

Your eyes lifted at that, then slipped away again. “I know how to look after myself,” you said. “Bow or no bow.”

“I know,” he agreed.

And he did. He had seen enough to trust that much. What troubled him was not fox or boar, nor any ordinary thing the woods might set in your path, but the thought of a man with a quicker hand and less care than you had.

“Do you run into other hunters here?”

“Now and again,” you answered. “But mostly further off.” You were quiet for a few seconds, then said, more tentatively, “You mean the bow for them.”

He said nothing. There was no use pretending he had meant anything else.

“I thought that was what you were, at first,” you admitted as you tugged at one mitten, pulling it off. A stray hair had caught between the threads. You plucked it free, then let the hand remain bare. “Another hunter. It was the first time I had ever aimed at a man.”

Him, a man? He had always thought others looked at him and knew at once that he was other.

The men in the woods who shot him, and the ones who drove a scythe into his shoulder and chased him from the farm, had never known his story. To them, he had only been a stranger on their land, too large and too ugly. But a man before anything else.

And you had been no different. Your arrow had come up because he stood at your door in the dark, because there were children asleep behind you, because any man there would have been too much.

It had not been the stitching in his face that first raised the bow, nor some instant knowing.

If they had been afraid of a man all along, and not some other thing, then he did not know what that made him, or what it made them. He had been made in their image. All his flesh had been pulled from men, his face too, though the skin over the middle of it had a bluish cast no other man’s did, and no man he had ever seen had been so marked. But was that enough? Enough to tell them, before he ever spoke, that he was other?

At that moment, he did not think so. If they had been seeing a man where he had only ever felt something made, then where had the mistake begun? In them? In him? In the skin? He could not tell. He knew only that whatever had been lit in him, whatever kept him moving and waking and going on, was not natural. That had not changed. But neither had the flesh changed. Nor the face, nor the fact that fear had risen in others before they knew a single thing about him.

The outside of him had gone among men more closely than he had ever allowed. It was just the rest that would not follow.

He only became aware of his body again when he found himself bent forward, elbows on his knees, his hands hanging loose between them. When he looked to you, you were shifting a little on the log.

“I have taken your place by the fire,” you said. “You can come back, if you wish. I’ll go.”

He shook his head.

“I am warm,” he answered, and it was true enough. “Stay where you are.”

And you did, turning slowly back to the fire, holding your hands out once more, one mittened and one still bare.

It would take so little for you to edge nearer on the log, for your thigh to come against his and stay there as if you had not thought twice about it. He could have your hands between his own, bending over them, breathing warmth across your knuckles the way he did for himself when his fingers had gone stiff.

He looked away abruptly. You had the fire. You did not need him.

He dropped his gaze to the stones by his boots, sunk in the frigid earth, and held it there. If the silence stretched much longer, he would only go back to your hands. To the one still kept in the mitten, and how his fingers would find the cuff, wanting to draw it off.

“You live very far from others,” he rasped. “What keeps you here?”

You did not answer immediately, and he could almost see you weighing what to give him and what to keep.

“The house has been in my father’s family for generations,” you said hesitantly. “My father’s great-grandfather built it first, and the men after him kept adding to it.” You chewed at the inside of your cheek. “By the time I was born, there was nowhere else we belonged.”

The men after him. You had no brothers that he had seen. Even so, his mind set some other man there at once, one not yet come, or somewhere beyond those woods, but meant for the place all the same. A husband. A man who would take up what had fallen to you: the axe, the roof, a broken latch, the runners of the sled when they cracked. One who might add to the house in time, as the others had done before him, and be reckoned part of it.

His teeth came together hard enough to ache. It should have stopped there, but it did not. He had imagined himself there too. As if he had ever been a thing to keep a house. As if those hands could mend what broke and have you glad of them.

As if he might one day bend and kiss you as he had once seen a husband kiss his wife. As if you would ever have him, ever want to kiss him. It would be his mouth, yes, but not his alone. Would it be him you kissed, or the dead man’s mouth he wore?

He had to put the thought away as best he could and turned back to the thing itself; the house, and how such a place kept standing when so many of the hands that had once kept it were gone.

“Who keeps it now?” he asked.

“I do,” you said. “My mother, as she can.”

“Do your sisters help?”

“The youngest is just a child,” you said. “My other sister helps. Or tries to. She wants to learn the rest too.” You let out a breath. “But I would rather she didn’t have to.”

Looking at you, he might almost have thought such a life had not done its worst. There was still too much in you that had not hardened, then he remembered the hare in your hands, the apology, the tears, and knew better.

Fleetingly, he saw you elsewhere; hair pinned up, better clothes. A full table, dry wood, warm rooms, and no smell of blood on you, nor wet wool. But when he tried to imagine what such a life would make of you, his mind balked.

Worse, some part of him did not want to see it. Another life might have been kinder, and he knew that. Yet, he was thankful for the one that had put you in those woods and in his sight.

You cleared your throat. “And you?” you asked, looking at him. “Where is it you go, when you leave here?”

“I stay in the forest,” he admitted. “Under stone, if there is any. Under branches, if there is not. I have no place fixed as my own.”

You looked at him then, brows pinched. “Even during winter?”

“There is nowhere else.” He would not let you answer that, so he hastily said, “Your father--he is not here now.”

You leaned back a little on the log at that, and he knew he should have left it alone.

“He went to sea six years ago,” you murmured after a while. “There is a man from Breivika who takes hands north for the cod season, and my father went with them.” He watched from the corner of his eye, your bare hand pressing into the wood at your side. “The others came back. He did not.”

He looked at you then, but said nothing as snow slipped somewhere, a thud off a branch.

“They say that a boat went down,” you went on. “My mother says he is in God’s hands now.” Your mouth twisted. “No one saw it so no one can tell me where the water took him. He was there, and then he wasn’t. That is all anyone can give me.”

As you paused, his hand drifted to the log between you both, fingers splayed toward you, nails picking at the bark.

“You do not like not knowing.”

You let out a breath through your nose. “He is my father,” you said, as if that ought to have been answer enough. “I would have buried him at home, if I could have. Down by the graves.”

He had never seen the graves. Some part of the valley still lay outside his knowing, and he thought that was likely as it should be.

His fingers moved again, spreading a little closer to yours without quite touching.

“Do you have family?” you asked.

He heard what you meant by it. If there had been anyone to love him, or anyone he might have called his own, he would not have been there. But there was not, and so he had stayed where the smoke from your fire sometimes reached him.

“No,” he admitted. “No one of my own.”

There could not be. Being made had left him with no kin at all.

He had not known his hand had gone so far until his fingertips brushed yours. He was just about to draw away, but your fingers brushed back against his and stayed, the bare tips of them resting lightly over his own.

His heart struck so hard it hurt. His eyes went first to your face, then to your hand, waiting for you to take it back, but you did not.

“I’ve always had my mother and sisters,” you whispered. “I know there will be a day I won’t. Have them, I mean. And I can’t imagine being alone.”

“I would not want you to know it.”

Your ring finger moved against his, the slightest stroke. “I wish you had not had to.”

Every part of him wanted more of it, more of your hand, more of that voice speaking gently to him, and in the same instant, some other part wanted to wrench his hand away before the wanting could grow any fiercer. It felt too near hope, and too near the torture of imagining what he could not have and being made to feel it all the more keenly for having once, however lightly, been given a taste.

His fingers moved against yours before he meant them to. The touch of it startled him more than yours had, and he drew back.

You did not move at first. Your lashes just fluttered once, then again, and for a second, you seemed to lean too much of yourself into the hand you had planted on the log, as if the wood had become the only solid thing under you. Then you sat back, gathered that hand in, and pulled the mitten over it again.

He curled his fingers in against his palm, trying to keep the feel of your touch there.

“I should go,” you said as you rose to your feet suddenly. “The wash will be nearly frozen by now. I’ve left it too long before.”

His body wanted to rise with you. To go as far as the first bend, perhaps further if you had let him. More than that, he wanted your hand again; not only the brush of fingertips, but it slipping into his and staying there, and himself not pulling away from it. But he stayed where he was, fixed to the fallen tree.

He lifted his eyes to you. “You should not leave it then,” he said.

You looked back at him then, and for a few moments neither of you moved. He had the sense that if you stood there any longer, he might have said something he could not take back.

Before you turned away, you whispered, “I hope the salve helps.”

He kept his eyes on the fire as it cracked and sank in on itself while the sound of your steps faded and the snow covered your tracks, until there was only the hiss of the flames and the place where you had been.

Your woodpile had shrunk.

On other days when he’d passed above the house, the split logs had sat in a neat ridge against the wall, higher than your youngest sister’s head. By then, the line barely reached the bottom of the window. Each time smoke went up stronger from the chimney, the stack went down.

He tried not to measure it after that. If he began counting what remained, he would have to reckon with how little it was, and once he did that, he would be down there with the axe in his hands before he had sense enough to stop himself. So he told himself there was still a stack, and while there was wood left, you all had enough.

That lasted four days.

On the fifth, one glance told him how far it had fallen. It sat well below the windowsill. Wood burned fast in a house with four bodies in it; one weak, two still growing, and the last already worn down.

The pile had told him long before that chopping wood was work you put off as long as you could. And by that point, it was low enough that you would be forced to do it soon. He was there, so why should you do it? What cost you strength would cost him little.

So he waited until the smoke from the chimney thickened again the next day, and the wintry light had waned enough that he knew you and your family would be sitting down to a meal, not near the door. Your talk and the scrape of spoons might cover most of the sounds he made.

The axe leaned where it always did, head buried in the block. He reached for the haft, fingers closing where yours must have, and lifted it free. The wood was worn smooth in the grip; you had used it enough for that. He remembered you saying you had broken a finger holding it wrong, and shifted his own grip.

Too high, perhaps. Or not firm enough. He could not know.

You were there then, standing before him at the block. No coat on either of you, only linen. He came up behind you awkwardly at first, leaving too much room between you both, his hands closing over the haft to either side of yours, his arms bracketing you in.

“Closer,” you murmured, as if it ought to have been obvious.

So he stepped in until his chest met your back, and the strain went out of his shoulders. He dipped his head to watch your hands, and it put his mouth near your ear.

“Not so tight,” you said. “You’ll lock your wrist.” Your thumb pressed again, easing one finger loose, settling another in its place. “There. Let the haft sit lower in this hand. And this one--” you nudged his right wrist with the side of your thumb, “--not so far ‘round.”

He let you move him where you pleased.

"That's your grip.” You did not take your hands away. “Shall I show you the rest?”

“Yes,” he rasped.

He heard the faintest hitch in your breathing, and from where his head bent near yours, he glimpsed the slight parting of your lips as his breath warmed the shell of your ear.

When he didn’t move, you turned slowly within the frame of his arms and looked up at him.

“Bend a little,” you said.

He did not. Not until you set both hands high on his chest. Then he followed the pressure of them without thinking, leaning in as you drew him lower. His eyes dropped to your hands. Your nails caught lightly in the fabric as your palms moved lower, dragging the cloth with them, pulling it taut across his chest and then his middle before it gave again in little ripples under your touch. By the time your hands reached his abdomen, one of his hands had fallen from the axe, and the other had dropped with it until the haft hung at his side.

“You are still too straight,” you said. “You’ll never get a proper swing that way.”

Your hands moved lower, to his hips that time. You took hold of them and nudged him square before the block. “Your feet,” you instructed. “Widen them.”

He heard you, but he did not move. The pad of your thumb pressed into his hipbone, and he only stood there under it, unwilling to do anything that might end the moment. He stared down at you, his breathing heavy.

When he still did not obey, you tugged his hips again. It was hardly anything, yet under your hands, he was unsteady enough that his free hand came out and gripped you at the waist.

You looked up then, blinking too fast. “You are not listening.”

“No,” he said. “I am not.”

You drew in a quick breath when he did not let you go. “Then I’ll have to show you again,” you whispered.

His stomach knotted as heat crawled down his spine and around his hips, and he clutched the real haft until the wood bit into his palm. He had made you touch him, made you speak as he liked, when you had never been asked and he had no right to make the answer for you. And he had wanted you to want it, to want him. That was the worst part of it.

It would’ve served him right to hold the haft wrong, to break a finger on it as you once had.

He reached for one of the shorter cuts, setting it on its end across the stump until it stopped wobbling. When he brought the axe down, he let too much of himself fall with it; the blade went straight through the birch and deep into the wood beneath. No broken finger though.

His brows pulled in as he worked the iron loose, telling himself the next would be cleaner. Instead he reached for a thicker piece and saw the twist in the wood only when the blade had already sunk a hand’s breadth and stopped hard, the jolt of it running up through his arms until he had to roll his shoulder to shake it out.

He set a new cut on its end and raised the axe again. As he brought it down, the latch lifted and clicked, and more than one voice carried out into the yard. His head turned before his arms could stop, and the iron met only the block with a thud.

“What are you doing?” you called from the doorway.

You had a blanket pulled around your shoulders, one hand still on the latch. Behind you, two smaller figures nudged at your sides, keen to get past you and into the open.

The older of the girls, not little anymore but not grown either, slipped by first, eyes on the chopped lengths and the axe in his hands. She took three steps forward before she looked up the rest of the way and saw his face. Her feet stopped where they were.

The youngest, all furs and mittens, tried to follow, but the older girl’s hand shot out, catching her by the hood and yanking her in against her chest. The smaller girl’s boots skidded on the packed snow as she was pulled back, her head tipping up to stare at him from the shelter of her sister’s arm.

The older girl’s mouth went tight, and she glanced back at you only once.

His fingers loosened on the haft, and instead of driving the head back into the block, he let the axe down onto the ground at his feet, head turned away from you and the girls, handle resting against the stump.

You stepped out, blanket slipping from one shoulder, boots pulled on in such a hurry the laces dragged. As you came up beside them, your fingers brushed the older girl’s elbow.

“Marit, take her inside,” you said.

Marit’s feet stayed where they were; her arm cinched tighter around the small one.

He wanted, suddenly, to shrink. He had frightened your sister, and right then you had to stand between them.

As you began to walk forward, the little one twisted, turning one way and then the other as if she meant to spin out of her sister’s hold. Then she dipped suddenly at the knees, trying to slide out of her coat and drop to the ground.

“Is that Runi, the Bird-Friend?” she asked, the name lisped a little around the gap in her front teeth.

“No,” Marit snapped under her breath, trying to wrestle the young one into standing.

You stopped just ahead of him and cleared your throat, drawing his eyes down to you.

“I had thought there would be a little more time before you met the girls,” you said, glancing back.

His gaze followed. The youngest bounced up, and the crown of her head caught Marit under the chin with a blunt little knock, making the older girl hiss and snatch her hands back before catching hold of her again.

“I did not mean to put this upon you.” He made his voice low. “If you wish it, I will go.”

“No. Stay.”

Before, he’d been told to go, told not to watch, not to come near, not to leave things at your door, and he had kept all of it. Every word. Wanting the opposite was nothing new. He had been feeding himself on the thought that obeying your wishes and hunting for you and your family from the dark was a kind of closeness in itself, that it was enough to know you were better off and never ask for more.

But hearing you tell him to stay showed him how little it had been holding together.

He was quiet for a bit, then his hand came up and caught the blanket where it had slid. You tipped your head a little, giving him room, and his knuckles touched the warm place where your neck met your shoulder before he could stop them. Then the blanket was between you two again, and he dropped his hand.

His eyes fixed on the place he had just touched before he wrenched them down, clasping that hand behind his back and rubbing his thumb once over the knuckles.

“You are cold,” he murmured.

“We all are,” you said. “That’s why the wood is welcome.”

He turned to the hacked top of the stump, to the uneven splits and the stray pieces scattered about.

“I have done it badly,” he said as he stooped to pick up the first of the logs.

“The fire has never complained about the way I split it,” you said. “It all burns the same.”

You drew the blanket closer at your throat, then bent for one before he could take the next. You tucked the chunk against your side under the arm holding the wool shut and turned toward the wall.

He moved hurriedly, reaching for the pieces you had left behind. His hand closed around one, then another, trying to gather more before you could come back for the rest.

“I have it,” you said over your shoulder. “You do not h--”

“Synne, no!” Marit called out, louder than she’d spoken yet.

He straightened at the shout, and by the time his head came up, the little one had slipped free, coat half off one shoulder, boots stomping as she scrambled for him. She tumbled to a stop so close that the toes of her shoes almost met his. For a heartbeat, she only stared, head tipping back and back to find his face, mouth a little open with the effort of looking up that high.

Then her hands flew to her stomach, and she gave a swift, wobbly dip that wanted to be a curtsy.

“Hallo,” she said, still a little out of breath. “I am Synne.” She rocked on her heels, then added, more boldly, “I know who you are. You’re Runi.”

She glanced over her shoulder after she said it, and you were crossing the yard now, setting the split birch down. Marit came a step behind, boots thudding harder than they needed to on the packed snow, jaw set.

“You’re in Hvit and the Queen of Moss and Bells,” she said, working her arm back into her coat. “It is a very good story. Do you want to hear it?”

He had never expected to be the kind of thing a child made stories about, much less to hear them. And he wondered briefly which part he played in hers. Whether he was the dark thing in the trees, the one meant to frighten.

“Synne,” Marit’s hand came down on her sister’s shoulder, fingers tightening. “They are only made-up things. He has not done all that.”

Her nose wrinkled at that, shrugging off Marit’s grip without daring to step away.

“You were not there,” she grumbled, not looking at her sister. “So you do not know.”

“Nor were you,” Marit shot back.

Synne's mouth opened, then closed, and her head turned toward you. “You know,” she insisted, a little louder. “You told me about him. You said so.”

You hesitated before your eyes came to his face, then slid away before they fully arrived.

“I did tell you about him,” you said, only looking at your youngest sister. “But once a thing gets into one of your tales, it does not stay quite the same.”

“See, it is true,” she said to Marit under her breath. “I only tell it the right way.”

“That is not what she said,” Marit muttered.

Synne’s chin lifted. “He can find hurt things before anyone else does. He found Hvit.”

Marit snatched her hand back and folded her arms hard across her chest. “You’d hang bells on a stump and call it magic. One day it will get you hurt.”

Synne was already answering. “Then Runi will be abl--”

“Marit,” you cut in, and Synne stopped short. “You would say that of her? She can make kingdoms out of mushrooms or weave tussocks into crowns if she likes, and there’s no harm in it.” You glanced toward him from the corner of your eye. “And he found Hvit, that is true. He’s fed us for most of the winter too. You know Synne did not make that up.”

Part of him thought he ought to turn and walk, and keep walking, until he could no longer have found his way back, even if he tried. Perhaps it would be better for you and your family if his feet did not know the way.

If the truth of him were plain, would they not all have seen the same thing?

He took a step back, then another.

“That is just it,” Marit burst out, her cheeks flushing darker in the cold. “You let her make stories of him, and now you speak as though they must be true because he found one bird and brought us meat. How does--” She broke off, biting the word back, then swung her glare from Synne to their sister and finally to him. "Who does this for nothing? Who brings that much food and asks for nothing back? People do not do that. What do you want from us?"

He had an answer, but not one he could have given. That he had first done it so you need not kill with your own hands. That until then, that had seemed enough. Only standing there by the stump had he understood that it had spread further than that, to the wood, to the thought of you spared one more task in the cold, and warm for it. The rest of them had come with you in it, as anything near you did. But Marit had asked what he wanted, and the truth of that was not fit for speech. From your mother and sisters, nothing but that they should be fed and well. From you, you. He wanted to live in your mind and body. He wanted you to want him near, and not by chance or necessity. To miss him enough that he might hunt faster to come back to you. He wanted more. He wanted all of it. And he could not have said as much without making his own wants larger than yours, and that would have been uglier than silence.

Marit would not have understood, and he did not think anyone would, so he did not say anything.

“He does not want anything bad,” Synne blurted, as if that settled it. “He is strong. He carried a whole reindeer, and did not eat us.”

Before Marit could gainsay her or drag her back again, she took the last step in and set one mittened hand against his coat, testing. When he did not move, she set a boot on the toe of his and reached for his forearm through the material.

“Synne,” Marit barked. “Do not--”

Too late, she was already climbing. For a fearless child used to trees and fence posts, he was only another tall thing to climb. Hand over hand she went, one boot scraping his shin before she hooked a knee and hauled herself higher. He held himself rigid, afraid that any movement from him would shake her loose.

Marit’s voice cracked as she yelled, “Get down!”

With a few clumsy pulls, she got herself far enough up that he had no choice but to catch her. His arm folded in, elbow bending under her weight so she sat there in the crook of it, short legs dangling against his ribs.

“I knew it,” she panted, pleased with herself. “He is strong and good.”

Synne reached up and pushed the hair back from the side of his face, parting it as she might part grass to see what lived underneath. She traced the line across his forehead, following it where the color of his skin changed.

He went very still.

He wondered if Marit had been right. If her wonder might one day be the thing that harmed her. It had led her here, into the arms of something unnatural, something that had killed men.

“You are very tall, Runi,” she whispered. “Like the trees that do not move in the wind.”

His eyes went to you over the top of Synne’s head and found you standing a little off to the side, head canted. Your gaze moved from Synne, perched in the bend of his arm with her fingers still wandering over his face, to his eyes. You blinked once, slowly, and held his look.

"Runi," he said, his eyes still on you. “Why does she call me that?”

“Because that is who you are in her stories,” you said as you stepped in, placing a hand at the small of Synne’s back. “She has another name for all of us in them. She calls me Eir, the Archer. Mother is Aslaug, the Light-Bearer.”

“And you are Bird-Friend,” Synne added, setting her tiny palm against his cheek, cupping it. “Because of the ptarmigan.”

He dragged his gaze down to her, expecting her to laugh and change it to something else, something more fitting. She only grinned, as if to say yes, that was true, and she was proud of it.

His fingers shifted where they held Synne, tightening the teeniest bit.

“It is near seven,” Marit said. “Hvit will want his mash.”

Synne paused for a second, then wriggled higher against him before anyone could take her down.

“You must hear it. The bird story,” she told him earnestly. “Once there was Runi in the forest, and he found a bird with a wing that went--” she twisted her wrist to show the wrong angle, “--all mangled, and all the woodland critters trotted past, but Runi picked it up and brought it to Eir. And Eir took it to Sassa-drotting, because Sassa-drotting was the only one who knew the secret mix that made broken things mend faster. She fed Hvit every day, and when the wing was almost right again, she held him up when he flapped, and then she took him out into the open worlds and--”

His arm had started to lower while she talked, and he meant to set her down gently, boots back on the compacted snow, but she tightened her grip on his collar, yanking the fabric a little.

“The good part is next,” she protested. “She was teaching him to fly again.”

“Another time, Synne,” you said.

The little one whirled to look at her. “But he has not heard it all.”

“And he will not if he freezes out here first,” you answered, your eyes flicking to his face and then back to your sister. “You can tell it when it is warmer. Or…” you hesitated. “When he comes again.”

He had not yet let himself think of that as something that might happen more than once. Yet, you saying it so simply, as though there would of course be another time, felt like a promise you had not meant to make. Perhaps not to him, perhaps only to soothe Synne. He took it all the same and kept it.

“I will remember it.” He stood straight once more. “You can tell me all of it another day.”

Synne tipped her head back to check his face for any sign he didn’t mean it. When she saw he did, she nodded once. “Good night, Runi. I will see you next time.”

Only then did she let your hand turn her toward the house. As Marit and Synne went back inside, you stayed behind. When the door hadn’t yet swallowed the younger two, you stepped in front of him.

“Hold still,” you murmured, fingers finding the front panels of the cloak and straightening them where they had been pulled askew across his chest. The sides of your hands brushed the top of his abdomen. “Marit is afraid, and she lets it talk for her. It doesn't make her right about you.”

You glanced toward the door, where Synne’s voice was already rising in singsongy bursts, then back up at him. He meant to keep his hands where they were, but his index finger found a loose bit of wool lifting from your blanket and stayed there, twisting it gently between his finger and thumb.

“By tonight, you will be the tallest thing in her stories. Some great, shaggy tree she can climb whenever she likes.”

At that, the corners of his mouth pulled, the skin there stretching tight over old stitching. Muscles he barely knew woke and bunched in his cheeks.

He smiled.

“Whatever good I am in them,” he said, “that came from you.”

He went further than he had any business going for flowers.

The snow had pulled back in places so the forest floor showed through: dead bracken, last year’s papery leaves, and moss just beginning to green. Down toward the fjord, the wind came from a different side, smelling of brine and kelp instead of only resin and rot. Between the rocks, meltwater was already weaving its way through.

He had already killed what he meant to kill, two foxes draped over his shoulder and tugging the fur of his coat sideways with their weight. The red one’s brush showed through the dried mud he had not yet cleaned off it, and the other was pale, white along the belly.

He could’ve turned back long before the valley was almost lost behind him. The path home was long enough with the foxes alone.

Instead, he kept going.

Down the slope, toward where rock showed through in slabs and the trees stood farther apart, where winter had started to let go first. He did not bother telling himself it was for hunting. The foxes were enough, the meat was enough.

He went on for something that had no use beyond being looked at.

At the far side of the drift, in a pocket where meltwater had eaten the snow back, a clutch of shoots poked through. He crouched, dragging one fox around in front of him so it sagged across his knees, and brushed the snow aside with the back of his hand. White bells hung there. Snowdrops, he thought, surprised the name had stayed with him at all. A little further on, in a pocket where the earth had more light, small anemones opened and trembled on slender stalks.

Synne would have liked them. She would have made something of them immediately. Little staffs, perhaps, once Sassa-drotting had them, or some small queen-thing with a use only she would know. Marit would not. She would look at the flowers once and then at him twice, and ask why he had gone so far for something that could not be eaten or worn, what he meant by it, what he wanted in return. He would have brought them to her anyway. Their mother, he was not sure of. She might only see them when someone would set them by her bowl or on the table near the bed. Still, he thought they were pretty to look at, and hoped she might think so too.

You…he only knew he wanted to see what your face would do when the flowers were laid in your hands. Whether you would smile before you meant to. Whether you might tuck one or a few into your hair, or keep them near you a while because they pleased you to look at. He thought, and could not help it, that if you smelled them, she might think of him.

He wanted suddenly to have them in his hand and be on his way back.

He set the foxes down and reached in among the sprouts. The first stem he touched, he pinched the way he would have any other plant, and the head came off in his fingers, the neck of it popping with almost no effort at all. The white bell fell into the snow and lay there on its side.

He frowned and tried again, gentler that time, but his fingers still felt too big. One stem bent under his touch and sprang back when he let it go. Finally, he held a stem closer to the ground and pulled softly until the roots gave.

He gathered only what he could carry without crushing anything, tucking the anemones in among the snowdrops, all their petals cold against his palm. By the time he bound the stems with a scrap of hide to keep them from splaying, his fingertips ached from being too careful.

With the foxes on one shoulder and the flowers cupped in his other hand, he turned back the way he’d come. The sky was one unbroken sheet of cloud that day, light behind it but no color to say how late it had grown. Above the thawed pocket the snow had crusted over again, brittle at the surface. It held him for a step, then broke under the next, scraping at his boots. He picked his way where scrub and stone broke through.

He had almost reached the trees again when the air cracked.

A ball hit his leg; a blunt, burning punch at the side of his shin, far too small for the wreck it made. It met the bone, cracked it, and his lower leg folded in on itself where it had no joint anymore. He went down hard, foxes and flowers and his own weight coming after him.

His ribs struck rock, and lay facedown, panting, breath steaming the inch of world in front of him.

“Got him?” a man shouted from somewhere above, his voice hoarse with weather and hard drink.

“Aye. Low in the leg,” another answered, younger by the sound of him.

He pushed his palms into the snow and tried to get his good foot under him. The bad one screamed when the ends ground together. His body tried to rise anyway, but he got only halfway before the leg refused. He toppled onto his side hard enough to jar his shoulder, the foxes squashed beneath him.

“Lie still,” the older one called down. “You won’t get far on that leg.”

He rolled just enough to see them. Two figures against the slope, wrapped in dark cloth and leather, rifles in their hands. They came on, dropping from rise to rise. One had a grey beard that blew a little in the wind, and the other’s hair was more brown than not, his jaw was clenched so hard the muscles jumped. Both held their guns ready.

The brown-haired one was already reloading, fingers moving without needing his eyes.

Smoke and sea salt clung to them, and the greasy tang of wool that’d seen too many wet crossings. Men from farther along the fjord, perhaps, or from one of the farther inlets he had never had cause to visit.

“Must be what’s been at the traps,” the bearded one muttered, chin tipping toward what lay crushed beneath him. “Lying right on what he took.”

They stopped just beyond the reach of his arms, barrels trained on his chest. He lay where he had fallen, blood spreading under his calf, the heat of it caught in the soaked fabric.

A throb started in his temples from how hard he was clenching his teeth, at the wrinkle at the corners of their noses, as though the forest were so small it could've yielded no foxes but the ones in their traps. As though there were not hundreds more he might have killed without ever coming near them. They had shattered his leg and still watched him as if they might prefer him dead to wheezing at their feet. Some of that anger turned on himself, for how fast his thoughts went to breaking them, straight to gutting and ripping and skinning.

He pressed his cheek into the snow and held it there.

The flowers lay close to his hand, scattered from where he had dropped them. Some had slid toward him, some had been trodden into the top layer by the hunters. He edged his fingers toward the nearest anemone, only enough that the stem came to rest against his knuckles.

“You move that hand again, I’ll put a hole through it,” the older one barked as he brought the butt of his rifle down on the back of his hand.

An animalistic growl tore out of him, dragged up from the deepest part of his chest.

“Helvete,” the brown-haired one breathed, his eyes going wide as he thrusted the muzzle closer.

The bearded man glanced toward him, but the younger man stayed fixed on him, watching for any sudden movement, his thumb running the curve of the trigger guard. The older hunter ground his molars, then let his gaze travel from the break in his leg to his face, where it stayed.

“Mikkel has children,” the older man said. “Torsten too. Half the men on this side of the fjord do, sending them out to check the lines and fetch water.” He kept his head bent, only his eyes shifting to the younger man. “And your Geir.”

The brown-haired man’s mouth pressed flat, his fingers tightening on the stock.

The bearded one lifted his own rifle, the barrel rising from his chest to his forehead. “I’d not leave a man like this for him to meet,” he said. “So I say we end him here.”

The younger one’s grip slipped on the stock. “He’s lamed,” he muttered. “That ought to be enough.”

“Lamed?” the bearded one spat. “Then he’ll mend with reason to remember you. Your boy too.”

The hollow at the end of the barrel was only a black ring. He knew what it held, and had felt it before, knew what it would do and what it would not.

“What do we do with him then?” the younger man asked.

“Into the trees,” the older man replied. “Get him off the open ground. Let the forest have him. The woods will see to the rest.”

If he killed the hunters, there would be more. Men with families did not go missing without other men coming to find out why. If he sent them home broken instead, they would still carry something back with them, and not the right part. Not the shot in his leg, nor the time he had lain in the snow beneath their guns doing nothing. Only what he had done in return. One way or another, it would lead back to a valley he knew, a door he knew, a woman who had told him to stay.

But if he took the shot and gave these men no more pain to carry home, perhaps nothing there needed to change. There could still be more time, and he could go on. Learn to split the wood better and stack it dry, to set turf right. And learn you too. Not only the woman who held the house together, who your family needed you to be. Not only the archer and butcher, the healer, the sister, the daughter. The rest of you. What you were like when you no longer had to stand in any of those places. How you softened, how you showed anger, and how sadness looked on you when you did not put it away. What in the world you loved when no use had to be made of it. Whether you had meant only to defend Synne before, or something of yourself as well. Whether you had been the one to make the tussock crowns.

He stayed where he was and let the muzzle keep its place on him. They could drag him off the slope for dead and leave him among the trees. He would wake later with his skull ringing and firs over him, and pull himself together again a handspan at a time.

The brown-haired man stepped in by his shoulder, gun angled down at his head too. “Herre, tilgi meg,” he muttered, setting his finger to the trigger.

It was wrong, he thought, that the one doing the hurting should ask forgiveness. If he ever asked such a thing, it would be of you. For the night he stood at your door with a fox at your feet and fear in your eyes, and for whatever of that fear still remained in you when you looked at him, because his face was his face.

Metal ticked faintly as the man’s finger tightened.

Lighter steps came then, at a run at first, slowing as they hit the harder snow. The rhythm of them was familiar, the way they picked their way between hidden hollows and exposed rock. He almost wondered if he had imagined it, if his mind had only gone back to those first mornings he followed you, learning the sound of your run between the spruces.

Then he heard your voice.

“Stop!”

It came out a little shaky between breaths.

The younger man jolted, the barrel dipping away from his brow. The bearded one’s gun swung toward the sound, then lowered when he saw you, as if the threat had lessened with a woman attached to it.

He tipped his head up to see you.

You were halfway down already, coat hardly buttoned, trousers rucked up over one boot, scarf dragged half out from where you’d shoved it into your collar. The bow was in your hand, an arrow clutched along the stave, but not yet on the string.

His heart began to pound at the sight of you. You should not have been there. Not with the guns in their hands and his blood in the snow. Not for him.

Go back, he thought, turn around and leave me there.

Your gaze moved fast, first to the muzzle held on him, then to the nearer man’s face, then the older one’s, the scattered flowers, the foxes crushed beneath him. When it reached his leg, it stopped. He saw you take in the way the lower part of it sat, bent where it should not have bent, and the dark blood spread into the ground around it. Her mouth tightened, and for a heartbeat, you looked as though you might be sick.

“What is happening here?” you asked, your voice still unsteady. “Are you all right?” you were looking right at him. “You’re blee--“

“Go back to your house,” the older man said. “Leave this be.”

“He’s hurt,“ you said, eyes narrowing. “Why are your guns on him?”

You took another step down instead. The snow there crusted under your boot, then gave, but you caught yourself before you slid. Your gaze kept pulling back to his leg, then to the sightline still trained on him.

Of all the things he might have done, he wanted most to crawl to you.

“Did you shoot him?”

“He’s been at our traps,” the younger man blurted, as if that answered everything. “Taking from us.”

“Foxes?” you asked, looking at the tail of the red one. “All of this for foxes?”

Your fingers found the notch at the end of the arrow without you looking, and he saw the fletching brush the string as you reached the foot of the slope.

Each step you took toward them drove his heart harder, until he could hear it in his ears.

You should not have been coming closer. You were seeing him laid out and didn’t know he kept still because it was the safest thing left to do. The worst of it was that the same part of you he had seen with the calf, and never understood, was what put you at risk. You had once looked at a hurt thing and would not do more harm to it. And right then, you were looking at him that same way, and he still didn’t know whether that had been mercy then, or was mercy in that moment.

He had to get up. Broken leg or no, riddled with holes or not, he had to get between you and the men.

The tip of his shoe bit into the crust as he tried to heave himself off the ground.

“Foxes are reason enough,” the older man said.

Before he could rise any farther, a boot caught the back of his head and drove his face down. Ice and grit raked along his cheek as his jaw slammed against a jutting rock beneath. Something in the hinge shifted with a sick crack. Pain shot up into his ear and flooded the side of his skull. His teeth knocked together so hard one felt odd in his mouth, higher than the rest, and the next breath filled with iron as blood ran under his tongue.

Above him, a sound broke out of you and cut off at once. It had started as a word and come apart halfway through.

"Let’s see you rise now,” the bearded man hissed, boot still on him. "Go on then.”

When his vision righted, you were closer than before. The bow was up in your hands, string to your cheek, arrow trained on the older man’s chest.

“Don’t touch him again.”

The younger man’s chin dipped as the bearded one’s fingers clenched on his stock. He looked you up and down, and in his face was the plain thought that you would not loose.

“You take up for a thief?” the bearded man sneered. “Against men who work for what’s theirs?”

He waited for you to say something, but you didn’t.

You only came on, one slow step and then another, and stopped when you had come far too close. From where he lay, he could see the arrow trembling on the string.

Deep in the ruined leg, bones began to set themselves back into place, hot pulses running through vessels that were already closing again. It was working; he could feel it, but not fast enough. All he managed was a jerk of his heel that only sent pain up his spine and left him no closer to getting between you and their guns.

“Step back from him,” she said.

The younger man’s eyes cut sideways to his companion, waiting to see whether you would be heeded at all. The bearded man did not move.

“You’re quick to defend him,” the younger one said.

You only said it again. “Back.”

Then something changed in the bearded man’s face. “So he’s yours, then. Bringing you pretty pelts, was he? To throw over his face when he takes you--”

You loosed.

The snap of the string cracked past his ear as the arrow hissed across the space and struck just before the older man’s boots. It buried itself in the crust and struck stone; splinters of ice and chips of grit leapt up and stung his shins. He jumped back with a curse, his heel slipping.

“Have you gone mad?” he snarled, jerking his rifle up.

The muzzle swung and found you.

His body moved, palms driving into the snow as he shoved himself up on the good leg as far as it would take him.

He tried to say no, but the moment he opened his mouth, the hinge of his jaw shifted and more pain shot into his ear.

Then the bad leg came under him, and when it did, the break buckled under the weight. He nearly went with it, then hauled himself higher on the good leg, dragging the rest of himself after it. Snow slid under his boot, and the world framed in red at the edges. He made it upright anyway, swaying once.

Below him, the brown-haired man went white and swore. “Faen.”

Only then did he look down into the dark mouth of the barrel.

The gun went off.

The flash burned the world white and wiped the men, the trees, and you from his sight. The ball struck his brow just above the bridge of his nose. There was no searing push like the leg, only a single, dull blow that drove straight in and seemed to knock everything loose behind his eyes.

After the light went out, so did he, for a breath or two.

Sound came back first, the only thing left to tell him what was happening. A crackle that might have been the shot still breaking against the trees, then boots grinding in the snow, closer than before. Someone swore under his breath. The younger one, by the pitch of it. Spittle landed near his neck with a wet smack. The older one must have spat. His voice came after, saying something about hell. He could not keep the words together, they slipped around the hole in his head.

He tried to open his eyes, but nothing happened. Tried to lift a hand and could not feel where his arm ended.

Then you.

Your voice burst through the roaring in his head, higher than he had ever heard it. The words did not stay with him, only the sound.

Something thudded close by as you must've dropped to your knees. Then came the scrabble of your bow along the ice as you crawled to him. Your hands came to his face a second later, quick and searching at first along his jaw, then softening when they found his mouth slack and his head limp in your grip. Wet warmth fell on his cheek and slid toward his ear.

The men spoke again. One said he’d be mad to touch him. Another said one should take the shoulders and the other the feet.

“Get away from him!”

That he heard clearly. The anger in your voice cut straight through the fog. After that, he could make out the others too.

One of the hunters kept moving in, metal chinking as he came.

“Go,” you gasped. “Did you hear me? Go! Take your foxes and--”

The rest broke on a sob as something jolted under his ribs as you yanked. The crushed bodies dragged against his coat, flesh sticking before it let go with a squelchy pull. In two hard tugs, you tore the bodies free from under him, then came the slap of meat and fur on packed snow, one, then another, thrown back at their feet.

“Leave.”

A boot scuffed close to his hand, and he heard the crush of a stem under it. One of the flowers.

“The fjord’s safer now,” the older man said. “I’ll sleep better tonight for it.”

Leather rubbed as he bent and gathered up the pelts. He heard the pair dragged over the ground, fur whispering and bumping over stone. The younger man muttered something low that he could not make out. Their steps moved away, growing weaker as they hauled the foxes back up the slope and out of earshot.

Then there was only you.

You kept crying until your breath hitched so hard he thought you might choke on it. At some point, you drew his head into your lap, one hand cupping the side of his face, your thumb moving back and forth while the other kept brushing the heel of your wrist under your nose.

He wanted to lean into your palm, to drag his cheek along it so you would know he was there. His tongue felt dropped into the back of his mouth, too far toward his throat to do any speaking with yet. If he could have moved anything at all, he would have lifted a hand to your face, thumb to the corner of your mouth where he knew the tears gathered, only to draw you back to him through it.

Instead, he had to lie there and listen to you come apart over him.

He had no sense of how long you both stayed like that. He couldn’t name it in minutes, only in what his body was doing to itself; pressure gathering behind his brow then relenting, an oozing heat along the edges of the wound as bone and meat crept toward each other, the hinge of his jaw ticking and grinding back into place.

Then he felt the pressure at his neck change. You’d eased his head down off your knees, one hand cupping beneath it, and set it back on the ground as if afraid it might crack further if you were careless.

He lay there and thought you meant to leave him where he was and go back to your house.

But then he felt himself move. You had hooked your hands under his shoulders and heaved. At first, nothing happened; you slid, the snow squealed under your soles, and then he lurched only an inch, then another. His skull bumped over crust and stone in short, jarring jerks. Once you lost your footing and dropped hard onto one knee beside him with a hiss, then pushed up again and dragged. Twice you had to stop, breath coming hard above him, before you set yourself once more and hauled him on.

At last, the back of his head met something solid, maybe a log, and you eased him up against it bit by bit.

Wool swiped across his face once you had him set so he wouldn’t slump over. It must have been the scarf from your own throat; he knew it by the weave and by the warmth still clinging to it. You wiped slush and blood from his eye sockets, his mouth, his jaw.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered. “I should have stopped them. I should have come sooner, I--"

Minutes later, you sat down beside him, and the sobbing seemed to lessen. He felt you lean in, the tremor still running through you when your shoulder touched his. He knew you were still crying, but the sound had gone out of it.

You had nothing to be sorry for, and still you had said it, when all of it had begun with him.

From the first time he saw you in the forest and did not stay away. From every lie after, each one cut down to look like less than it was. That he only wanted to understand. That he only wanted to look. That he only wanted you fed. That it was enough to leave meat and go. It had never been enough, and he’d always known that too. He kept going after more, and because he hadn’t stopped, those men would go back to their village with you in their mouths as well as him. Not only the thief they thought he was, but the woman who stood up for him. The woman who put an arrow in the snow at his feet and did not deny that he was hers. They would tell it until it dirtied you. The thief’s lover. The one who would shoot for such a hideous thing. And all of it had come to you because he had wanted and kept wanting and had never once done the decent thing and let you be.

As if it were not enough that he had given those men a story to carry back about you, he was about to put one more horror on you. You would have to watch the holes close and the flesh pull itself back together. To think him dead and then see, with no way to make sense of it, that he had not died at all.

Because behind his brow something in his sight began to crawl together. Light seeped in where there had only been black, first as a glare, then as smears of white and grey with the faintest wash of color where you sat beside him. His first instinct was to blink the blur clear, but the movement only dragged it across itself. The surface of his eyes hadn’t righted yet, so the world doubled, two lines of trees and two shapes of you, all sliding over one another. He kept blinking until the doubles shivered and pulled into a single version of each thing. Only then did he see how dim the light truly was, and know that it was night.

At last, he could see you.

You sat at his side, turned toward the churned slope where the hunters' tracks stamped uphill, both arms wrapped tight around yourself. Your face was blotched from crying, lashes clumped and spiky, and your hands were stained red.

He let his head roll back until his gaze found the branches above. Carefully, he tried his damaged leg, the tiniest pull to see if it would answer him. It did by shooting pain up from his shin to his upper thigh, and his breath whirred out of him before he could hold it in.

Your head turned at once.

"What--" you choked, eyes wide and glassy. "No, no, no--"

You lurched forward on your knees, hands going straight to him. Your fingers dug first into the fur at his shoulders, then moved to his face, as if you had to be sure he was truly there. Your palms found his cheeks, thumbs skidding over the ridges of old seams and the crusted blood there.

"I thought--" you started. "He shot you right…"

Your trembling fingers pushed his hair back from his forehead. The place where the ball had struck throbbed under your touch, and the skin there felt tight and strange with the work of closing. He could feel the torn flesh, the bruise already rising around it, the singed hair where the powder had scorched.

"There was blood," you said, breath hitching. "So much. All over your face. You just…"

Your thumbs swiped at the dried streaks caked along his temple. The heel of one hand grazed a tender place and pain shot through his head again. He grunted, and you flinched back an inch, then came right back in. You hardly seemed to know what your hands were doing. You kept sliding them over his brow, along his jaw, down the side of his neck, back up into his hair.

“You went down,” you whispered, still sounding as though you did not believe it. “You just…you didn’t move.”

He watched you as you looked down, your hands moving over the top of his chest. He could tell you were feeling for the beat of his heart.

“I should have shot him,” you said. “He shot you because I didn’t.”

You had cried over hares that kept you from starving, so he knew that would’ve gone deeper and stayed longer, and might never have left you.

He would take the shot again before letting you live with such a thing.

Instead, he dragged his good hand through the snow until his knuckles touched your knee, the back of his index finger rubbing over the fabric. It was the only answer he could give, the only way left to tell you that even without the shot, he was still here.

Your gaze dipped to watch his hand, and he could tell by the quick blinking that you were holding back more tears. Then your hands clutched tight in his furs and stayed there, and he could just make out you squeezing your eyes shut, waiting for whatever had come over you to pass.

He did not know how long it took, but he would have let you hold onto him for as long as you needed.

When your eyes came back to his face, they passed over his mouth before returning to between his brows. Your gaze held there, fixed on the inner brow, and only then did he become aware of the faint itch in the skin, a fine prickling under the new flesh.

Your head tipped a little as your hand rose to smooth his hair back again.

His finger stilled against your knee as you narrowed your eyes.

“No, that was open,” you said.

You sat back on your heels, hands slipping from his face.

He watched the distance open between you two, barely the span of his forearm, and still it felt too far.

He did the only thing he could think to do then. He rested his hand on his thigh, palm up. His fingers splayed a little, then stilled again, leaving room for yours.

“How…” you whispered.

Though his jaw had mended enough for speech, he did not try to respond. He did not know what to say or where such an answer could begin. To tell you how would mean starting with his making, and that would only breed more hows after it. There had been science in it, he was sure, but he understood it no more than you may have. And even if he had, what answer could have made that moment less terrifying for you?

When he gave you no answer, your gaze dropped first to his shin, taking in the leg, the cloth stiff with dried blood. Then your eyes moved toward the hand at his side, but before you could get a full look at it, he drew it in against his thigh. From where you sat, the mantle hid the rest.

For a while, you did nothing, and he stayed as he was, while the wind flicked snowflakes against the side of your neck.

“Are you still with me?” you asked gently.

He was, and the wanting in him to be with you went farther than that moment, farther than the log and the dark and what had happened. It went to always. It went where it should not. He should not take any more of your days. Not if your days might be turned to that for him again, and surely they would've been. He had to stop. He had to go and leave you to a life that did not hurt for having him in it. He would go on thinking of you anyway. Always. Of what you were doing, and with whom, if you were happy. Of Synne’s tales changing as she got older, whether Marit learned the things you had wanted to keep from her, and of your mother, whether she ever got her strength back, or went into God’s hands with her husband.

Perhaps that was the closest he could come to mercy. Gone, he could do you no more harm.

He gave the smallest dip of his chin.

“I saw inside y--I saw…” Your face pinched, and you looked briefly sick at the memory. “And now I do not.” You let out a breath. “How?” you asked again, quieter. “How can you be alive and sitting in front of me, and still say nothing?”

Still, he did not answer.

“Then why,” you continued. “Why are you not frightened? Did you know this would happen?”

And when he met you with silence again, you wiped at your cheeks with a hasty swipe of your sleeve, as if angry at the tears themselves. He wondered if you thought you had wasted them on something that didn’t deserve them. What use was crying over a death that would not last?

You were still watching him, waiting, when a shiver went through you, and you shoved your bare hands under your arms, crossing them.

“You are freezing,” he said at last, voice coming out scratchy. “We should not stay here.”

You opened your mouth to speak, then swallowed it down and nodded.

So he set his other hand on the log and tried to stand, but the leg still protested. The bone had not yet set firm. He got halfway up before the world tilted and he had to catch himself on the trunk again.

“Wait,” you breathed, and were up almost at the same time he was, catching at his arm.

Your shoulder came only to his ribs, but you wedged yourself under him anyway, taking what weight you could.

“I can walk,” he said.

He pushed again, slower that time, and got himself higher, his bad leg stinging.

He swayed.

Your hands shot up, one to his side, the other to the fur at his shoulder. You pressed in and simply held on. He could feel your heart beating through the layers between you two.

“I can’t catch you if you fall,” you said.

One of his hands found your back, fingers spreading over the thin wool of your coat to keep you both upright. The last thing he wanted was to pull you off your feet with him. Better he hit the ground first than have you trapped under his weight.

“I only need a moment,” he managed.

He bowed his head to ease the throb behind his eyes, and the crown of yours met his chin. He let it rest there, as lightly as he could.

Neither of you spoke for a few minutes. At one point, when he felt your fingers slip under his cloak, over the linen, and onto the warmth of his chest, he nearly pulled you against him just to stop that searching touch from moving seam to seam. You didn't ask what he was, but he felt the question in it, as though the stitching might tell you what he would not.

“Please,” you whispered.

His hand closed tighter on the fabric at your back. He knew what you wanted, and still he could not give it to you.

He cleared his throat. “I am ready,” he said. “If you are.”

You paused before saying, “I am.”

He took his hand from your back and lifted his chin, letting the cold come between you two again. He managed one step, then two.

The forest leaned in around you both as you went. More than once, he caught the round shine of owls’ eyes in the branches, and moonlight in the knotted burls along the trunks, till it seemed there were eyes on him from every side.

He kept his gaze down, picking every place his bad leg would have to land.

You both walked for miles in silence, and it was only when the trees began to thin and the first glimpse of your valley showed below that you spoke again.

“I can make more salve, if it would help any.”

He still had the first salve you had made him, unused in his cloak. He would not be there to need the next one either. Better you make it and have it, he thought, for one of your family members or you when any of you had need of it than have it go with him while the other sat untouched in his keeping.

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

To be continued.

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