Chapter 209: Three Days
By midday the weather thinned to a steady drip. Children appeared as if the lighter sky had released them—chasing each other between the houses, ignoring Marta’s shouted warnings about the soft edge of the strip.
Ada Olsen’s brother, whose name turned out to be Liam, had appointed himself counter of every beam and brick in the settlement. He followed me to the hall with a fresh charcoal count and the news that Sofie’s roof was dripping in the back corner again.
I found Sofie already under the drip with a clay pot catching the water and a look that dared the roof to do worse.
"I can get up there," I said.
"You can get up there and put a foot through the thatch. Bjorn said he’d look when the rain stopped."
"Rain’s stopping."
"Bjorn’s on a cart brace with the new one." She shifted the pot. "I’ve lived under worse drips. Go count your pines."
Tuva, passing with an armload of wet kindling, paused. "I’ll look at the thatch. You’re heavier than you think when you’re trying to be helpful."
Sofie glanced at her, then at me. "She’s smarter than you."
"She is."
Tuva went for the ladder. I left them to the roof and took Einar and two of the older boys up the north path to walk Bjorn’s marked pines before tomorrow’s cut.
The path was slick. The trees stood the way Einar had promised—straight enough, thick enough, not waiting for another season of neglect to hollow them out. Liam counted under his breath the whole way and corrected himself twice.
Einar put a hand on the trunk of the third pine and looked back toward the bowl of the settlement, small from here, smoke rising from the forge and the hall.
"You’ve got more people than you did when I walked in," he said.
"We’ve got more work than we did."
"Same thing, if you’re lucky." He patted the bark once. "I’ll run a wider loop this evening. If anyone’s watching the smoke from the ridges, better we know before the timber starts moving."
"Anyone in particular?"
"No. Habit." His eyes were flat and practical. "Places that start growing attract eyes. Some of them are just curious. Some of them count."
I didn’t ask him to soften it. We marked the sled path on the way down and came back into the settlement with wet boots and a clear morning’s work ahead of us.
---
The argument started over the hall.
Not a loud one. The kind that lived in the way people stood. Marta wanted the next stretch of labour on the lower stores—food would matter before pride if the freeze came early. Bjorn wanted the roof closed before the beams he was about to cut sat out and twisted. A few of the older residents took sides without speaking. The boys watched. Alfred watched from the forge door with a piece of bread in his hand and the sense not to enter it.
I listened to both of them at the hall’s open end with the rain finally done and the light going thin and yellow.
"If we lose stores to wet, the roof won’t matter," Marta said.
"If we lose the beams to weather, the roof doesn’t happen until spring," Bjorn said. "Spring’s a long time to live under a hole."
Tuva stood a little apart, arms folded, letting me hear it. Sofie was mending a basket on the steps and not pretending she wasn’t listening. Einar cleaned a hare at the edge of the path and kept his eyes on his knife.
I looked at the open end of the hall—the sky still visible through the gap, the stack of beams short of what we needed, the stores Marta had counted three times this week alone.
"We cut tomorrow," I said. "Beams under cover by tomorrow night, even if the cover’s temporary. Day after, half the hands on the roof, half on the store walls Marta wants braced. Alfred helps Bjorn. Einar and the boys help me on the path. Nobody works the strip until the ground firms. That covers food, roof, and timber without making anyone pretend the other thing doesn’t matter."
Marta’s jaw worked. Bjorn already had the look of a man measuring hours. Neither of them loved it. Neither of them fought it.
"Temporary cover means more work later," Marta said.
"Later we’ll have the hands for it. Right now we’ve got rain that already tested the strip and a freeze that won’t wait for us to finish arguing."
Bjorn grunted and went to sharpen the saws. Marta walked down toward the stores without agreeing out loud. Agreement wasn’t always a sound here. Sometimes it was just the absence of the next objection.
Tuva came up beside me. "You’re getting faster at that."
"At disappointing everyone a little."
"At keeping them in the same bowl while you do it." She looked at the hall gap. "I’ll take the store braces. You take the pines. If you fall off a sled path I’ll leave you for Einar’s loops."
"You’d come find me."
"I’d come find you. I’d complain the whole way."
---
Night put a hard cold into the ground after the rain. Fires showed sharper. The hall filled with the usual mix of stew and low talk and Liam’s ongoing census of objects.
Alfred sat with Bjorn and talked joins with his hands. Einar cleaned his bow by the door. Sofie patched a shirt. Marta counted with her lips moving. The children who had spent the day testing every puddle fell asleep in piles near the heat.
I stepped out when the noise started to thin and walked the edge of the lower strip in the dark. The cut still ran a thin thread of water. The stakes held. Somewhere up on the east ridge a lamp moved behind a hide window—the family that had decided to stay. The forge glowed and dimmed with Bjorn’s last work. Tuva’s shape crossed the yard from the stores to the hall, steady and known.
Einar’s voice came from the dark to my left, not close. "Ridge is clean. No new watchers. Old trail sign further east, days old, not aimed here."
"Good."
"Tomorrow’s timber will show on the slope. Anyone with eyes will see the place is choosing to stay."
"Let them see."
He faded back into his loop. I stood until the cold worked through my boots, then went in.
Tuva had left a space on the bench near the wall. I sat. She passed me a cup without looking over. The steam smelled of the weak herb mix Marta allowed after full dark.
Across the hall Alfred laughed at something Bjorn said—short, surprised, the sound of a man who hadn’t expected to laugh that day. Liam had finally stopped counting. Softie darned by firelight. The hole in the roof showed stars where the rain had been.
I drank. Tuva’s knee rested against mine under the table edge.
"First light," she said.
I nodded, finished the cup, and let the settlement’s tired quiet stand in place of anything else we might have added.
Outside, the north path waited with its eight marked pines. Inside, the hall held enough people that the dark at the open end felt less like a failure and more like a job that had simply not finished yet.
================
~Lila~
Astrid knocked before first light and didn’t wait for a clean invitation.
I opened the door to find her already dressed for the road, hair braided tight, a satchel on one shoulder and the particular brightness in her face that meant she had decided something overnight and intended to make it my problem before breakfast.
"I’m going to Bjornvik," she said.
Magnus, still half-asleep behind me, made a sound into the pillow that might have been a laugh.
I stepped into the corridor and pulled the door to. "You’re going to Bjornvik why."
"Nils sent word with the last coastal bird. They’re holding a water-road marking at the lower docks—boats, crews, the young ones who’ll run the spring routes. He asked if Frostfang would send someone who isn’t a full border captain. Someone who can watch and learn the coastal marks without turning it into a formal visit." She adjusted the satchel. "I asked Anders. He said it was your decision. I’m asking you."
"You’re asking me after you’ve already packed."
"I’m efficient."
Sigrid appeared at the end of the corridor as if the argument had summoned her, slate under one arm, expression already disappointed in advance. "She’s been talking about the coastal marks for a week. Johan says her laterals have improved. I say she’s still half in love with being sent places."
Astrid’s jaw tightened. "I’m standing right here."
"I know," Sigrid said. "That’s why I said it out loud."
I looked at Astrid—twenty-something, competent, restless in the specific way of wolves who had grown up inside walls that were finally stable enough to bore them.
The freighter business had put Bjornvik closer in everyone’s minds. Nils was a known quantity. A water-road marking was not a crisis and not a slight.
"Three days," I said.