Knotted By The Three Feral Alphas

What we got was a stone lofted from the right-hand scrub that cracked off the sled frame hard enough to spit splinters into the dirt. The ewes shied.

Tiril planted her feet and hauled the leads short with a curse that was older than her face. A second stone followed, wider, meant to spook rather than maim.

Einar was already gone into the trees on that side. Tuva took the left flank without waiting for a word. I stayed on the path with the stock and the girl and the sudden sharp understanding that someone wanted to see what we’d do when the road pushed back.

"Down," I told Tiril.

She dropped to a crouch beside the near sled, hands still white on the leads, eyes bright and angry. I shifted far enough to put more wolf in my shoulders and less invitation in my stance, and held the path.

A voice called from the scrub, male, not close enough to own the sound. "Market goods walk easier when the guards pay passage."

"No passage on this road," I said. "Only walking."

Laughter, thin. Another stone. Then Einar’s shape broke the right-side brush in a hard, silent rush and someone else made a noise that wasn’t laughter.

Tuva’s side stayed quiet long enough to mean she’d found nothing or something that had already decided against her.

Two figures scrambled out of the right scrub further up the path—young, underfed under the noise they’d been making, one clutching a shoulder. They saw the path held and the trees no longer friendly and chose distance over pride.

Einar didn’t chase past the point of contact. He came back with a scraped knuckle and a flat look.

"Boys," he said. "Hungry ones. Not organised. They’ll talk about the stock before they talk about the stones.".

Tuva reappeared on the left, knife still in hand, uncut. "Clear through to the bend."

Tiril stood up slowly. The ewes had tangled a lead around the sled runner. She freed it with hands that only shook once.

"You get this often?" she asked.

"We’re new to being worth throwing at," I said. "Move."

We moved. The rest of the path home stayed empty of stones. The settlement’s first thin smoke showed against the darkening bowl as a reminder that walls, even partial ones, beat a road when the light ran out.

---

Marta met us at the edge of the cleared ground with a lamp and a face already counting.

"Two ewes. Half the seed. Salt. A blade. A girl." Her eyes flicked to Tiril. "You lose anything."

"Some paint off the sled and a little road manners," Tuva said. "Nothing that eats."

Einar took the horses. Tiril stood with the leads until I nodded her toward the partial byre we’d braced the week before. She went without needing a tour.

Bjorn came out of the forge, saw the saw blade, and made a sound like a man refusing to admit relief.

Alfred appeared behind him, curious, then went to help with the ewes when nobody told him not to.

I gave Marta the grain mark copy for Hedvig and the short version of the south spur. She listened with her mouth tight.

"Hungry boys throw stones until someone feeds them or runs them off," she said. "If the road’s getting eyes, our smoke’s doing what smoke does."

"We’ll tighten the west approach watch for a few nights."

"Do that." She looked at the seed bags as if they might argue with her. "I’ll get these in the ground the hour it firms. Sofie’s already talking about a second cut if the melt runs heavy. You’re creating expectations."

"Good."

Tuva had gone to find food. Liam materialised at my elbow with charcoal on his fingers and demanded to know whether ewes counted in his census. I told him they did if they were still here in the morning. He ran to verify.

The hall took us in with noise and heat and the smell of something that had been stew a long time.

Tiril ate at the end of a bench with her shoulders hunched until Sofie put a second ladle in her bowl without comment.

Alfred asked Einar about the stones and got answers short enough to discourage romance.

Bjorn set the new blade on his workboard like a guest he respected.

I sat with my back to the standing wall and let the settlement move around the things we had brought home. Tuva dropped onto the bench beside me, passed a cup, and stole the heel of my bread when I didn’t move fast enough.

"Market’s uglier than the bowl," she said under the noise.

"Most places are until you stay long enough to name the ugly parts."

She ate the bread. Across the hall Tiril finally said something to Liam that made him scowl and recalculate.

Marta folded the grain mark into her book.

Outside, the west path held whatever eyes the boys would bring once their shoulders stopped aching and their stomachs started talking again.

Einar paused on his way back toward the dark and the loops he trusted more than beds.

"I’ll walk the spur at dawn," he said. "If those two have friends, better we know the count."

I raised the cup a fraction. He went.

Tuva’s knee pressed once against mine under the table, then settled. The ewes bleated in the byre, offended by new walls. Someone laughed near the fire.

The saw blade caught the light on Bjorn’s board, clean and paid for, and the settlement—still half a roof, still a list of shortages—felt for a moment like a place that had gone out into the world and come back with more than it left with.

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

~Elara~

Freja decided I had lived in the library long enough to need a reminder that Norddal had streets.

She said it while prying a green binding out of my hands and replacing it with a basket. Henrik, at the long table, did not object. That was the closest thing to permission the building ever offered.

"Market day," Freja said. "You will walk. You will smell things that are not paper. You will meet people who think a dosage note is less important than whether the root was dug before or after frost. Try to look like you have a body."

Felix was already outside with Oscar, loading a short list of supplies for the side hall. He glanced at the basket, then at my face, and only said, "Bring back something that isn’t a leaf."

The path down into the settlement was wet from overnight rain. Smoke stood in thin columns over the lower roofs.

Norddal on a market morning was not loud the way Frostfang’s yards could be loud; it was layered. A woman arguing soft and steady over the weight of dried fish. A boy running a wheel of cheese between stalls on a rope harness. Someone sharpening knives on a treadle stone that squealed every third pass.

The air held fried onion, wet wool, crushed mint from a spilled bunch, and the colder smell of the river where it cut the valley floor.

Freja steered me first to a stall of roots laid out on clean hide. The seller was an older man with soil permanently under his nails—Herman Eriksen, who dug the north-facing slopes and did not care who had read what about his plants.

"She thinks she knows nettle from memory," Freja told him.

Herman looked at me without interest. "Memory’s fine until the leaf lies. Taste."

He held out a small raw piece. Bitter, green, correct. He nodded once and named three stands up-valley where the same root ran stronger after a dry spring.

I asked about harvest timing. He answered in the short grammar of someone who had lost patience with theory years ago and still showed up every market with full baskets. I paid for a bundle and put it in Freja’s basket like a peace offering.

Further along, a midwife I had not met—Ella Isaksen, broad hands, a laugh that arrived without warning—was trading clean linen and a thick dark syrup she swore settled afterpains better than the eastern standard. Ingrid was there too, arms folded, testing

Ella’s claim with the scepticism of a woman who had caught too many children to trust a smile. They let me listen. When Ella passed me the stopper to smell, the syrup was clove and something resinous I did not have a northern name for. Ingrid watched my face.

"Write it down if you must," Ingrid said. "Then watch a real recovery before you put it in a book as truth."

"I will."

"You’d better. Paper forgives. Bodies don’t."

Freja bought bread that was still warm and tore it in half as we walked. I ate without pretending I had remembered breakfast.

At a narrow stall under a faded awning, a trader from the coastal approach—salt white on his boot seams—was complaining about a delayed cart from Ravnsund.

Oscar drifted past, exchanged three words with the man, and drifted on. Nothing for me to solve. Just the sound of a road that kept moving whether the library was open or not.