Chapter 215: There Is A Girl Here

Chapter 215: Chapter 215: There Is A Girl Here

~Lila~

The coastal bird came in on a hard south wind and nearly took the handler’s glove with it.

I was in the lower yard watching Johan correct a yearling’s pivot when Sigrid appeared with the small sealed strip already free of the leg-band. She did not open it. She held it out and waited until I wiped my hands on my cloak.

Astrid’s hand was denser than her speech, ink pressed deep, letters crowded as if the page had been smaller than her need to talk.

Queen—

Nils says I’m to call you that on paper even when I can still hear you telling William Hauge to mend rails. Fine. Queen.

The water-road marks are not like ours. They use the shape of the current and the colour of the weed under the cut banks, not only posts and scent. I got three of them wrong on the first morning and a dock woman laughed until she coughed. Nils did not laugh. He made me walk the same stretch until the marks sat in my feet. I hate that it worked.

Bjornvik smells of salt and pitch and fish guts and wet rope. The young crews sleep in stacked bunks over the lower docks and argue about wind the way our border wolves argue about ridge lines. I ate something with too much smoke in it and pretended I liked it. I do like the boats. I did not expect to. When they push out at first light the whole den goes quiet for a breath, as if everyone is listening to the same thing.

Harald asked why Frostfang sent a young wolf instead of a captain. I gave him your line about education and room in the head. He grunted. Nils said that was approval. I’m choosing to believe Nils.

There is a girl here—Saga Mikkelsen—runs messages between the upper hall and the boat sheds. She knows every loose board on the docks and she does not care that I’m from the inland. We walked the outer markers after dark and she showed me where the tide leaves a false path that has drowned more than one proud visitor. I owe her a debt for that. Also she steals bread from the kitchens and shares it without making a speech.

I have not started a fight. I have not made theatre. Johan would still find fault with my laterals on a moving deck. Tell him I said so.

Nils sends respect and a count of the spring route crews. He also sends a private note that his father is less worried about the grounded freighter now that the crew is home and more interested in whether Frostfang’s inland eyes stay open when the coastal weather turns. I told him we don’t invent dragons out of mud. He almost smiled.

I want to stay the full three days. I want to stay longer than that and I know I can’t. When I come back I will not be only the yard. You should know that before I walk through the gate.

—Astrid

I read it twice in the yard with the yearling still blowing hard behind Johan and the wind worrying the edges of the strip. Sigrid waited without pretending she was not watching my face.

"She’s alive, learning, and slightly insufferable," I said.

"So unchanged."

"Changed enough." I folded the strip. "She named a dock girl. She admitted the boats got into her. She’s warning me she won’t fit the same hole when she comes back."

Sigrid’s mouth tipped. "Good. Holes that never change get underfilled or rotten." She held out a hand. "Anders will want the spring crew count. Nils’s respect can wait in your pocket."

I gave her the outer fold with the numbers and kept the rest. Johan called the yearling in again. The yard kept being a yard. Somewhere under my sternum a small, clean weight settled—not trouble. The knowledge that I had sent someone out and she was becoming someone the walls had not finished making.

Magnus found the letter on the map-room table an hour later and read it with his hip against the wood and his eyebrows up.

"She hates that Nils’s method worked," he said.

"She would."

"And she’s already in debt to a bread thief on the docks." He set the strip down. "You’re pleased."

"I’m pleased she didn’t perform. I’m pleased Harald got the true version of why I sent her. I’m—" I stopped, searched for the accurate word. "I’m aware that if I keep sending them out, some of them won’t come back the same shape. That’s the point. It still lands."

"It should." He flicked the edge of the paper. "You want her home in three days or do you want to pretend you might extend it."

"Three days. She asked for the truth of the limit. She gets it." I took the strip back. "If she walks through the gate different, we make room. We don’t shove her into the old drill and call it loyalty."

Magnus’s eyes warmed. "Listen to you."

"Don’t."

"I’m listening to you anyway."

I put the letter into the inner pocket of my vest, where it sat against my ribs through the rest of the morning’s ordinary noise—Anders with the crew count, Erik with a ridge report that contained no drama, a complaint about a shared woodpile that I refused to turn into philosophy. Astrid’s sentences kept rising between other people’s needs like a second current.

Karin Eide was in the stable aisle when I went to check the mountain string’s water, running a hand down a yearling’s foreleg with the concentration of someone who trusted bone more than talk. She looked up once, took in my face, and went back to the leg.

"You got paper," she said. "It’s sitting in your shoulders."

"Coastal bird. One of mine on the water road."

"Good paper or bad."

"True paper."

Karin straightened. Hay dust stood in her hair. "True is rarer than good. If you’re still offering the ridge this afternoon, I want it while the light holds. Father’s yearlings don’t care about your post. They care about whether your ground lies to their feet."

"Erik’s free after the second drill. We ride the east cut and the high marker. You keep up or you tell me where the path is wrong for your stock. I don’t need politeness."

"I don’t sell politeness." She slapped the yearling’s neck lightly. "I’ll be ready."

She went back to the leg. I left her to it and took the letter’s weight with me up to the hall for a midday meal I mostly forgot to taste.

We rode out under a sky the colour of clean iron.

Erik took point without being asked. Karin settled into the saddle like she had been born annoyed at inferior seat. I took the middle and let Frostfang’s outer dens fall behind, then the scrub, then the first real climb where the air thinned and the pine opened to rock.

The east cut was honest—steep, broken, the kind of path that punished a horse that only knew meadow. Karin’s borrowed mount picked through it with its ears flat and its feet precise. She talked to it under her breath in a mountain dialect I only half followed. Erik glanced back once and gave the smallest nod: the animal would do.

At the high marker we stopped. The keep was a dark geometry far below. The coastal haze sat in a distant band. Wind came over the ridge hard enough to make speech a decision.

Karin dismounted and walked the last stretch on foot, checking how the shale shifted under her boot. "Your mother used this line for the spring drives."

"She did."

"You’re using it for evaluation." She crouched, pressed a palm to the stone. "Different purpose. Same ground. Father will like the bone of it. He won’t like how narrow the safe margin is if the yearlings panic."

"Then we don’t put panic on this path until they’ve run the lower loops for a month."

"Agreed." She stood. Her cheeks were red from the cold. "You don’t oversell. That’s rare in people who sit on thrones."

"I don’t sit much."

"I noticed." Karin looked past me at Erik, then at the drop. "I’ll recommend the string. Two yearlings first, not the full five. Your grain weight against our training slots for two of ours in your spring rotation. If that holds through the first mud, Father will talk about more."

"I’ll have Anders put the numbers in a form Harald would call stingy and your father would call fair."

Her mouth flashed. "You learn fast for an inland queen."

"I learn when the alternative is wasted horses."

We rode a wider loop back so she could feel the secondary path Erik preferred for nervous animals. She argued with him twice, conceded once, and filed the rest away behind her eyes.

By the time the keep walls rose again the light had gone the colour of old brass and my hands ached from the rein and the cold.