Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~8 min read
Chapter 13: Locked In
The last ship south left on a Tuesday.
She stood on the dock and watched it go. She did not go to the dock for this specific reason — she told herself she had gone to check the fishing nets that Gunnar’s men had left drying at the eastern pier, which was true and also not the full truth, and she stood at the dock’s edge and watched the ship’s sail take the wind at the fjord’s mouth and diminish and become a shape and then become nothing.
The sea was closed.
She had known it was coming. She had been tracking it the same way she tracked everything: the changing colour of the water, the increased chop at the fjord’s entrance over the past two weeks, the conversations on the dock about the last supply run, the faces of the men who knew the crossing and were watching the sky with the specific attention of people who knew what was coming.
She had known. Knowing had not prepared her.
She stood on the dock until the sail was gone and then she stood there a while longer because she was not yet ready to turn away from the last place she had seen it, the way you stayed facing a door after someone had walked through it and you were not going to follow.
Ireland. Her father’s hall. Five months, and spring, and a sea route, and the proposal letter somewhere between here and there — she did not know if it had made it, whether the ship that carried it had crossed before the conditions shifted, whether her father had read her section and what his face had looked like if he had.
She thought about Cormac’s red cloak. She had been putting this thought away every time it arrived since the shore, sealing it behind the part of her mind she used for things she could not carry and still function, but sometimes it got out — in the dark before sleep, in the moment on the dock when the sail disappeared — and it was getting out now and she stood with it in the cold and she let it run for the length of time it took to walk back from the dock to the longhouse.
*He was still fighting when they left. His cloak was still moving. You could not see clearly, there was smoke, you were fifty yards away by then. You do not know.*
She did not know. She could not know until spring. This was a fact and she would not let it become more than a fact.
She went back to the longhouse and she sat on her pallet in the partition space and she let herself feel the closed sea for exactly as long as necessary and then she stopped, and she thought about what the winter gave her.
Information. Time with the language — she was past functional now, past survival Norse, she was beginning to dream in it, which was the sign you had gotten somewhere real. Time to understand the settlement’s rhythms, its people, its dependencies. Time to understand the trade routes from this end rather than the Irish end, which was a different picture and a useful one.
Time with him.
She noticed this thought and put it back where it came from and moved on.
What the winter gave her was everything she needed to negotiate from strength rather than desperation when spring came. She had come here with nothing but her mind and she had used her mind and by spring she would have built something — not a home, not that, but a position, a knowledge base, a set of arguments that served Ireland well. She would go home with more than she arrived with.
She was still working out the full accounting of that.
Leif found her in the longhouse in the late afternoon. He did not often come to the longhouse — he had been careful about that, she had noticed, maintaining a distance that the rest of the settlement was not maintaining, that was specific to him and not required of anyone else. He came now and stood in the doorway of her partition and said, in Norse: “The sea is closed.”
“I know,” she said.
He was quiet for a moment, looking at her from the doorway. She looked back. She was not going to pretend she was fine with the ease of the preceding weeks, but she was also not going to come apart in front of him, which was not a concern because she did not come apart, she just catalogued and managed and kept moving.
“You have been here a month,” he said. “You haven’t been mistreated. You have been fed and housed and left to move freely.”
“Yes.”
“I know that this does not make it what you would have chosen.”
She looked at him. He said it plainly, without the softness that turned statements like this into performance — not an apology, not an absolution, just an acknowledgment. He was good at this: saying the true thing without dressing it.
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”
“Five months,” he said. “You’ll be home before the solstice next year.”
She held his gaze. “And my father. He’ll know I’m well?”
“The letter went on the last ship,” he said. “If it crosses before the conditions close. If not —” he paused “— there is a land route. Slow. Expensive. But it exists.”
She thought about her father at his hearth, the maps on the walls of his hall, the arguments he had with the lesser clan chiefs that she used to listen to from the staircase when she was supposed to be asleep. She thought about him sitting with the letter from the Norse Jarl who had taken his daughter.
“He’ll be planning something,” she said.
“I know.”
“He won’t wait for spring.”
“I know that too.” His voice was even. “Whatever he plans, it will take time to organise. I have until spring before anything he sends arrives here. I intend to have an answer ready before it does.”
She looked at him. “What answer?”
“The trade agreement. Real terms. Something he can take to his allies and present as a gain rather than a concession.” He met her eyes. “Which requires more of the conversations we have been having.”
She was quiet.
She thought about five months of conversations like the ones on the dock and at the map. Five months of that specific, precise attention, of talking to someone who heard what she said and responded to what she said rather than to some version of her that was easier to manage. Five months of the most interesting conversations she had had in years and the most discomfiting self-knowledge she had ever accumulated and the winter going on outside and the fjord locked in grey patience.
“I’m not going to escape until spring,” she said.
“I know.”
“So you don’t need to manage the escape risk. You can stop calculating distance and start — ” she paused, looking for the word “— just talking to me.”
He looked at her. Whatever was in his expression was complex enough that she could not read all of it at once.
“I have been just talking to you,” he said.
“Some of it,” she said. “Not all of it. You still keep a part of yourself—” she gestured vaguely “—managed.”
A silence.
“So do you,” he said.
She held his gaze. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”
They looked at each other across the partition space, and between them was the winter, the five months of it, the cold sea and the grey fjord and the settlement going on outside in the ordinary way of places where people lived, and Aoife thought: this is the moment you decide.
Either the winter is a waiting room or it is what it is, and if it is what it is then you stop managing it and let it be something.
She thought: you’re going home in spring.
She thought: I know.
She thought: then stop wasting the winter.
“There are three herbs in this settlement I haven’t identified,” she said. “Ingrid knows what they are and won’t tell me because she still doesn’t trust me enough. Tell me what they’re called and I’ll find them in my father’s manuscripts when I get home and write you a full account of their properties.”
He stared at her for a moment. Then he came in and sat down across from her on the partition floor, back against the wooden wall, long legs stretched out, and he began talking about herbs.
She listened. She talked back. The afternoon went grey and then dark and they kept talking, and outside the last ship south was gone and the winter had closed over them like a hand, and neither of them mentioned it.
Neither of them moved to leave.
Outside the partition, the longhouse filled with the evening sounds of the settlement coming indoors, and the cold pressed against the walls, and somewhere above the fjord the first stars came out over a sea that was not going anywhere for five months.
And inside, two people sat and talked, and the winter began.
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