The final night was a vigil. The freezing rain had ceased, leaving behind a world locked in glass, every pine needle, every twig, every stone encased in a shimmering, brittle casing that glittered in the light of a hard, cold moon. The silence was absolute, a deep-freeze of sound.
Inside the croft, the air was thick with the unsaid. Bjorn and Leif slept, or pretended to, their forms tense even in repose. The boisterous energy of departure had been extinguished by the raw confrontation of the day, replaced by a grim, embarrassed quiet.
Eirik could not sleep. He lay on his pallet, watching the moon-silvered light trace a path across the floor. His leg ached with a dull, persistent throb, a physical echo of the ache in his chest. The things Bjorn and Astrid had shouted at each other were not just accusations; they were the pillars of his world, and he had felt them crack. The stories he had built his identity upon were lies, or half-truths weaponized by generations of hatred.
He looked at Astrid’s sleeping form. She was turned away from him, a motionless mound of furs, but he knew she was awake. He could feel her wakefulness like a vibration in the air. The memory of her face, stripped of its defenses as she spoke of her mother and the truth of her own two hands, was seared into his mind.
He had to speak to her. Alone. Before the sun rose and the world of axes and longships reclaimed them.
Pushing himself up with infinite care, he tested his weight on his leg. The pain was a sharp reminder of his limits, but it was bearable. He took the carved staff Astrid had found for him, its surface smoothed by her own hands, and used it to lever himself upright. He didn't look at the sleeping men. This was not for them.
He moved as quietly as a ghost, each step a deliberate, pain-filled negotiation with the floor. He didn't go to her pallet. Instead, he went to the door, unlatched it with a soft click that sounded like thunder in the silence, and slipped outside.
The cold was a physical blow, so sharp it stole his breath. The world was a cathedral of ice, breathtakingly beautiful and utterly lethal. He stood for a moment, his body shaking, his breath pluming in the still, frigid air. He looked up at the hard, bright stars, feeling infinitesimally small.
He did not have to wait long. A few minutes later, the door opened again and she emerged, wrapping a thick cloak around her shoulders. She didn't look at him, but came to stand beside him, her gaze also lifted to the stars. They stood in silence, two shadows in a frozen world, the space between them charged with everything that could never be.
"It is time, then," she said finally, her voice quiet, the words hanging in the air like the frozen crystals around them.
"It is time," he echoed, the words ash in his mouth.
"You will go back to your father's hall. You will be hailed for surviving the storm. They will slap your back and fill your horn with mead. You will become Jarl Eirik, and you will lead your people." She stated it as a simple, inevitable fact.
"And you?" he asked, turning to look at her profile, pale and perfect in the moonlight. "You will stay here. Alone. With your loom and your carvings and the silence."
"It is the silence I chose," she replied, but her voice wavered, betraying her. "It is better than the noise of hatred."
"Is it?" The question was ripped from him. He gestured back towards the croft. "What happened in there today… that was not just noise, Astrid. That was truth. For the first time in my life, I heard it. I saw it. Because of you."
She finally turned to face him, her eyes huge and luminous in the dim light, filled with a turmoil that mirrored his own. "And what will you do with that truth, Eirik? Will you take it back to your father? Will you stand in his hall and tell him the stories he has lived by are lies? Will you tell your warriors that the Svartfjell woman who saved you showed you more honour than they ever have?"
He had no answer. The image was ludicrous, impossible. He saw the scorn on his father's face, the confusion and betrayal in Bjorn's eyes. The truth, he realized, was a weapon that could only destroy the one who wielded it in that world.
"I cannot," he whispered, the admission a confession of failure. "It would be seen as weakness. As madness. It would shatter my clan right before your father's wolves fall upon them."
A single tear escaped her eye, tracing a slow, silvery path down her cheek before freezing. "I know." The two words were an absolution and a death sentence. "So you see, the truth changes nothing. It only makes the leaving harder."
The distance between them was only a hand's breadth, but it felt like a continent. He could feel the heat from her body, a tiny sun in the frozen universe. He wanted to reach out, to pull her to him, to feel something real and solid against the crumbling facade of his life.
"Astrid…" Her name was a prayer on his lips.
"Don't," she cut him off, her voice breaking. She hugged her arms around herself. "Do not say it. If you say it, it becomes real. And if it becomes real, then having to live without it will be a wound that never heals."
He understood. To speak of what was growing between them—this impossible, terrifying connection—would be to give it a name. And a named thing had power. It could be yearned for, mourned for. It was better to let it remain a ghost, a beautiful, painful possibility that had never quite been born.
"They were not all lies," he said softly, desperately seeking a foothold. "The way you care for your home. The skill in your hands. The strength in your spirit. That is real. What I feel…" He trailed off, unable to finish, bound by her command.
"What you feel is gratitude," she said, turning her face away, her voice hardening, building a wall he could not scale. "And the confusion of a man whose world has been turned upside down. It will pass when you are back among your own people. You will see. This was just a storm. A strange, quiet dream in the heart of a winter gale."
She was giving him a way out. A narrative to cling to. A story to tell himself to make the pain manageable. She was healing him one last time, by offering him a lie to live by.
He wanted to argue, to roar his denial into the frozen night. But he was the heir to the Stórbrodir. His duty was to his clan, to their survival, to the perpetuation of the very stories she had helped him see through. To choose her was to choose chaos, war, and the betrayal of everyone who depended on him.
The truth was, he was already a prisoner, and his cage was not this cove, but his own name.
He looked at her, memorizing the way the moonlight caught the frost on her lashes, the proud line of her neck, the quiet despair in her stance. This moment, this frozen, silent communion, would have to last him a lifetime.
"Then it was a dream," he said, his voice hollow. "A beautiful dream."
She nodded, a sharp, painful jerk of her head. She could not speak.
They stood there for a long time, as the moon began its slow descent and the sky towards the east began to lighten from black to the deep, cold grey of pre-dawn. They did not touch. They did not speak again. They simply existed together at the unraveling edge of what might have been, watching as the night, and their chance, slowly bled away.
When the first sliver of sun finally breached the horizon, casting a bloody light on the icy world, Astrid turned without a word and went back inside, closing the door softly behind her.
Eirik remained, alone in the freezing dawn, the truth she had given him a frozen weight in his heart, and the ghost of her love a colder companion than any winter wind.