Knotted By The Three Feral Alphas

Halvar raised a cup from further down the table. I returned it. William Hauge, off the rails at last, sat among the border wolves with quieter shoulders than he’d had the week before.

Lucas said something that made him almost smile. The keep absorbed the mountain visitor the way it absorbed most things that weren’t on fire: with curiosity, appetite, and a low-level readiness to take offence if offence was offered.

It wasn’t.

After the tables thinned I walked Karin to the corridor that led to the guest rooms. She paused at the turn, hand on the stone.

"Your yard’s tighter than I expected," she said. "Father thought Frostfang might’ve gone soft with the borders quiet."

"Father can think what he likes. The yearlings will tell the truth on the ridge tomorrow."

"They will." She tipped her head. "Thanks for not putting me through a formal dinner. I hate formal dinners."

"So do I."

She grinned and went. I stood a moment in the corridor’s cool quiet, then headed for the east stair and the list I still had to put backs to—the ditch behind Hermine’s row, the spring markers, the coastal bird for Astrid’s check-in.

Magnus was in our rooms with a lamp lit and his boots already off. He looked up when I entered.

"Mountain girl settled?"

"Mountain girl is arguing with the stable design in her head. She’ll be fine."

He stretched out a hand. I took it and let him pull me closer to the lamp’s circle, the day still on my clothes—yard snow, ditch water, the sharp clean smell of a stranger’s horse.

Outside, Frostfang held its ordinary night. Somewhere on the coast Astrid was learning marks I didn’t know by heart. Tomorrow a woman from Eidsmark would ride my ridges and tell her father whether our form was worth his yearlings.

I sat on the edge of the bed and started on my laces. Magnus nudged a cup of water toward me with his foot and went back to the small repair he’d been doing on a bridle strap, the quiet between us easy and unfinished in the way that didn’t need closing.

=================

~Thorne~

We left for the market road before the settlement was fully awake.

Tuva rode point. I took the middle with two empty sled frames lashed behind the pack horse. Einar faded in and out of the tree line on our flank the way he always did when the path went somewhere people might count us. Marta had given us a list written in her hard, square hand: seed if the price wasn’t insulting, salt, a saw blade if one existed that hadn’t already been used to death, and news of anyone selling breeding stock small enough to survive a winter in the bowl. Bjorn had grunted something about nails and then pretended he didn’t care whether we came back with them.

The road west was little more than a scar through scrub and second-growth pine. Cart ruts held last night’s freeze. By mid-morning the trees thinned and we started smelling other people’s smoke—not the thin domestic kind, but the thicker mix of horse and iron and too many bodies in one place.

The market sat in a flattened clearing where three weak paths met. Nothing like a town. Stalls under hide and canvas. A smith working off a portable anvil. Livestock penned in rope squares. A woman selling bread from a board across two barrels. People from dens I didn’t know by name, a few faces that might have been Haverdal by the cut of their coats, one older man with coastal salt still whitening his boots.

Tuva swung down first. "We don’t need half of what they’ll try to sell us."

"We need what Marta wrote," I said. "Everything else is noise."

Einar took the horses to a picket line where a boy was charging a copper for water and the illusion of safety. I kept the list in my fist and started walking.

---

Seed came dear.

The woman running that stall had sharp eyes and a habit of weighing the bag with her palm after the scale, as if the scale might have developed opinions.

I paid for half of what Marta wanted and didn’t haggle past the point where pride would’ve cost us the purchase. Salt was easier. The saw blade took longer—three stalls, two refusals, and a final exchange with a narrow man from Fjellmark who wanted dried meat we hadn’t brought.

Tuva traded him a set of repaired snare lines from her pack and a promise of first look at any extra timber if our pines came down clean. He spat on his palm. She matched it. The blade changed hands.

News travelled between the stalls without anyone admitting they were offering it.

A dens east of the road had lost goats to something that wasn’t wolves. A coastal freighter run had grounded weeks back and the story had already grown teeth it didn’t earn. Someone from the high valleys was buying more grain than usual. None of it was our business until it was.

I was checking the sled lashings when a voice cut across the nearest pen.

"You’re the ones putting smoke up in the old Hedvik bowl."

A woman stood with one hand on the rope of a sheep fold. Forty or so, solid, a scar along her jaw that had healed without a healer’s neatness. Behind her a younger man watched us with the careful boredom of someone told to look harmless.

"We’re in the bowl," I said.

"Name’s Hedvig Johansen. I run stock between here and the south tracks when the weather lets me." She nodded at the empty sled frames. "People said the place was dead. Then they said it had a forge again. Then they said someone was planting like he expected to eat there in spring." Her eyes moved over Tuva, then Einar returning from the picket, then back to me. "You buying animals or just tools?"

"Depends on the animals."

"I’ve got two young ewes that won’t fetch proper price here—too small for the valley buyers, too honest for the ones who like pretty counts. They’ll take rough ground if you don’t rush them. I want grain weight and a guarantee you won’t turn them into winter meat the first time your strip fails."

Tuva’s mouth twitched. "We’re not that kind of hungry yet."

Hedvig’s gaze sat on her a moment. "Yet is doing a lot of work in that sentence."

We looked at the ewes. Small, as promised, clear-eyed, coats thick enough for wind. I thought of Marta’s list, of Sofie’s wall, of Liam counting beams like numbers could hold a roof up.

"Grain weight we can mark," I said. "Guarantee on the meat is easy. We didn’t clear a strip to feed it to livestock before it feeds us."

"Then we write it before the light goes." Hedvig jerked her chin toward a board stall where a man was already sanding a secondhand yoke. "I’ve got a girl who can follow the animals as far as your turnoff if you don’t want them bolting the first time a branch cracks. She’ll walk back alone. She’s done worse roads."

Einar, who had come up quiet, murmured, "Ridge was clean last night. Road home won’t stay empty if we’re trailing stock."

"Then we don’t trail slow," I said.

---

We left the market heavier than we arrived.

Seed. Salt. Saw blade. Two ewes on short leads. A girl of about sixteen named Tiril Sivertsen who walked like the road owed her nothing and talked even less. Hedvig had taken our grain mark without smiling and told us if the bowl was still smoking by thaw she might bring more stock through. I didn’t promise her a market we didn’t have yet. She didn’t ask for one.

The light was already thinning when the scrub closed back around the path. The ewes disliked the sled noise and made it known. Tiril clicked her tongue at them until they settled into a grudging pace. Tuva dropped back to walk beside her for a stretch and came up again without reporting anything except, "She’ll do."

Einar vanished and reappeared twice. The second time he fell in at my shoulder with his voice low.

"Fresh tracks off the south spur. Two, maybe three. Not running parallel. Cutting in and out like they’re bored or careless."

"Ours?"

"Not from the bowl. Boots are wrong."

Tuva had heard. Her hand settled near her knife without making a show of it. "How close."

"Close enough that if they wanted the stock they’d have tried before the trees thickened." Einar’s eyes stayed on the scrub. "Could be curious. Could be counting what a dead place spends at market now that it isn’t dead."

I adjusted my grip on the lead. The ewe nearest me pulled and then gave up. Ahead, the path narrowed between two stands of pine where the ruts forced us single file.

"Keep moving," I said. "If they want a conversation they can have it in the open, not in a cut."

We didn’t get the conversation.