Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 14: The High Seat
The solstice feast lasted three days.
The first day was the formal one — the great hall cleared and set for the full settlement, benches brought from the longhouses, the long tables weighed down with food in the particular abundance of a community that had put by enough to celebrate midwinter properly. Leif presided from the high seat at the hall’s head, which was where he sat when the settlement needed to see him as its Jarl rather than as a man, and the difference was visible: he was the same in all the obvious ways, but the authority was worn more openly, the distance maintained with a deliberateness that she recognised as performance of a specific kind.
She understood the performance. She had watched her father do it.
She sat at the lower tables with Sigrid and two of the weaving hall women and a man called Rolf who had recently broken his leg and was taking up more bench space than his share while looking deeply annoyed about it. She had a cup of something warm and spiced that was not the mead the men were drinking and was therefore, in her assessment, probably better. She ate what was put in front of her. She watched the hall.
Bjorn was at the high table, to the Jarl’s left. They had been in conversation for most of the first hour, the low, dense kind that was not celebration but work — she could tell from the set of Bjorn’s shoulders, which were doing the thing they did when he was dissatisfied with a situation and was being precise about it. Erik was further down the table, already three cups into the mead and telling a story to two men who were laughing with the helpless quality of people who had heard the story before and were going to laugh at it again anyway.
She watched the hall and thought about her father’s feasts. The similarity of it — the same human architecture, the same distribution of status and warmth and noise, the same function of a gathering like this: to demonstrate to the community that it was a community, that it was intact and abundant and worthy of its own celebration. She had seen it in Ireland; she was seeing it here. The specific culture was different in every surface detail and the bone structure was the same.
She was turning this over when she became aware of being watched.
She did not turn immediately. She finished her thought and ate a piece of bread and then looked toward the high seat.
The Jarl was looking at her.
He was in conversation — Bjorn was still talking, still with the unhappy shoulders — but his eyes were at the lower tables. At her. When she looked up and found him looking, he did not look away. This was different from being caught: he had been doing it deliberately, the look of someone who has made a decision about where to look and is not retreating from it.
She held his gaze for a moment.
He lifted his cup slightly. Not a toast — too brief for that, too private, the gesture aimed only at her. Just an acknowledgment. *I see you. I am aware of you, here, in this hall, in the place I have put you.*
She looked away first.
She looked at her own cup and thought about what the gesture had said, and she thought about it in the cold precise way she brought to things she needed to assess clearly and she found that clarity was not entirely available to her, that the assessment kept sliding toward something warmer and less useful.
She drank her spiced wine and told herself she had imagined the specificity of it.
She knew she had not imagined it.
The second day of the feast was quieter — recovery, essentially, with food still available and the hall warm but the formal ceremony gone, and people moving through it at the pace of people who had done their celebrating and were now simply being together.
She found Ingrid at the storage end of the hall, checking something in the account books with the focus of someone who did not stop working because the settlement was feasting.
Ingrid looked up when she came over. The assessment: still there, still measuring, but with something different in it than it had held in the first weeks. Not warm — Ingrid did not move toward warm easily, she suspected, it was not the structure of the woman — but something had shifted in the quality of the wariness. Less wall, more watchfulness.
“You have been here two months,” Ingrid said. In Norse, not making any accommodation.
“Yes,” Aoife said.
“You will leave in spring.”
“Yes.”
Ingrid looked at her for a moment. “Is that what you want?”
Aoife looked at the account books. She thought about the question — the specific shape of it, what it was actually asking, what Ingrid’s eyes were doing while she asked it.
“I want to go home,” she said carefully.
“That is not what I asked.”
She looked at Ingrid. Ingrid looked back with the flat, clear gaze of a woman who had been watching the Irish woman for two months and had made some observations.
“I don’t know what else you’re asking,” Aoife said.
“Yes you do.” Ingrid turned back to her accounts. “I am asking whether *home* is the only thing you want.”
She stood with that for a moment. The feast went on around them, the hall settling into its second-day warmth, children already asleep on the benches.
“I was taken from my home,” she said.
“I know.”
“I did not choose to be here.”
“I know that too.” Ingrid made a note in her account book. “That is not what I asked either.”
Aoife stood in the hall and looked at the accounts and thought about a man at the high seat lifting his cup a fraction, precisely at her, when the whole settlement could have been the target of the gesture.
She thought about what Ingrid had seen in two months of watching. She thought about what conclusions a woman of that precision would have reached.
She thought: *I’m going home. That’s what I want.*
She thought: *say it like you believe it.*
She left Ingrid with her accounts and went back to the lower tables and she did not look at the high seat again, or she looked at it once more, briefly, when she was sure he was looking elsewhere.
He was not looking elsewhere.
She looked at her cup.
The third day of the feast the children put on a performance of something she could not entirely follow but that involved a great deal of running and shouting and at least one prop that was not supposed to catch fire and did. She sat on a bench and watched and she laughed — the real kind, the below-the-diaphragm kind — and when she looked up from the laughing she found him watching her again, and this time she did not look away.
She looked back.
She let herself look back.
The child with the burning prop was escorted outside by a very calm man who seemed to have prepared for this eventuality. The hall erupted. She turned back to the scene, to the children and the noise, and she was still laughing, and the feeling in her chest was warm and complicated and inconvenient and entirely real, and she stopped pretending she didn’t know what it was.
She knew what it was.
She was going home in spring. She was going home in spring and she knew what it was and she was going to have to live inside that knowledge for four more months and navigate it without breaking anything she couldn’t afford to break.
She thought: you have done harder things.
She was less certain of that than she had been in the autumn.
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