Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 17: Intentions
She asked him on a Thursday in February, which was the deep middle of the winter and had been for weeks, the kind of cold that stopped being an event and became simply the condition of existing, something you breathed and moved through and stopped noticing the way you stopped noticing the weight of your own body.
She had been planning to ask since Ingrid’s conversation at the feast, which she had turned over many times and arrived at the same destination each time: that she did not know what he intended, and that not knowing was becoming a problem, and that the most efficient thing she had ever done with a problem was look at it directly.
She found him at the dock. He was talking to Gunnar about the spring repairs — she had started to know, by the quality of sound, what conversations were about before she was close enough to hear them, and dock-master conversations had a specific register — and she waited until Gunnar had gone and then she walked up beside him.
He looked at her.
“Tell me what you intend,” she said. In Norse, which was what she always used now. “Regarding my return home.”
He turned back to the fjord. “The sea opens in April. You’ll go home.”
“That’s what happens,” she said. “Not what you intend.”
A silence.
“I intend,” he said carefully, “to send you home with a proposal that serves your father’s interests and mine both. I intend that the return is under conditions that honor your position — proper escort, proper provisions, my ship rather than a trading vessel.” He paused. “I intend that what happened in October — the raid, the way you were taken — is addressed by the terms of what comes after it.”
She looked at the fjord. “That’s what you intend for the arrangement.”
“Yes.”
“I am asking what you intend for me.”
The dock was empty except for them. The fjord was grey and patient in the way of things that had been waiting for a long time and had stopped being impatient about it. She watched it and felt the question she had asked settle between them and did not rush to fill the silence.
He was quiet for a long time.
“I intend,” he said, finally and with the precision of someone who has thought carefully about the words, “that you go home to your family and your life and the things that were yours before I interfered with them.” A pause. “That’s what you deserve.”
She looked at him. At his profile — the jaw, the scar, the expression she had learned to read these past months, and what it was doing now was the thing it did when he was saying a true thing that was not the only true thing, when the full accounting was not present in the sentence.
“What do you want?” she said.
He looked at her.
“That is different,” she said. “From what you intend. Tell me what you want.”
A very long silence.
“What I want,” he said, “is beside the point.”
She felt something that was not quite frustration and not quite understanding and was located somewhere between them. “That is a coward’s answer,” she said, “for a man who is not a coward.”
He looked at her. Something moved in his face — not anger, it was never anger with him, but something sharper than his usual register.
“I took you from your home,” he said. “Against your will. Everything that has happened since has happened inside that fact. Whatever I want is contaminated by it.” He held her gaze. “I can not make a claim on anything — anything — that exists between us when the only reason it exists is because I did something you did not choose.”
She was quiet.
She turned this over. She heard what he was saying and she understood it and she found, on examination, that she did not agree with it entirely — she had made her own choices, she had spent the winter making choices, she had not been passive inside the situation he had put her in — but she also understood where the argument came from and she could not call it wrong from a position of clean certainty.
She thought about her father. About what her father would say about a man who arrived in his hall and said *I took your daughter and while I had her I fell in love with her* — because that was the full sentence, she was nearly certain, the sentence he was stopping before the second half, and she was nearly certain also about the second half.
She thought: I have spent four months watching this man and I know the shape of his thinking and I know what he is not saying.
She thought: I am also not saying it.
“I will tell you what I want,” she said.
He looked at her.
“I want to go home,” she said. “I want to see my father and my brothers and I want to know Cormac is alive and I want to sleep in a room I have slept in my whole life. I want to read the manuscripts I left unfinished and walk the coast where I grew up and speak Irish with people who speak it back.” She held his gaze. “All of that is true.”
“Yes,” he said.
“And,” she said, “I want to come back.”
He was very still.
“Not because you want me to,” she said. “Because the agreement will require it — there will need to be someone who understands both sides of it, who can carry negotiations back and forth, who knows both sets of terms from the inside. That is a practical function.” She paused. “And because I want to.”
He looked at her for a long time. She held the gaze.
“You want to,” he said.
“Yes.”
Another silence, longer. The fjord moved below them. The cold was very clean and precise.
“I need to go home first,” she said. “To everything I said. All of it. I need to go home and see my father’s face and know Cormac is alive and sleep in my own room.” She paused. “And then I want to come back. And I want it to be a choice that was made with the full accounting, with you on your dock and me on my coast and the sea between us and both of us able to say what we want without the question of captivity over it.”
He was quiet for a long time.
Then he said: “Will you?”
“Will I what?”
“Come back.”
She looked at the fjord. She thought about Ireland — the smell of it, the green of it, the specific quality of light that was nothing like this light. She thought about five months of winter and what it had built and what it was and what she was going to take home with her like something pressed between pages, kept carefully, taken out in quiet moments.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I know that I want to. Whether what I want is what I do—” she paused “—that is a question with a spring sea and an Irish coast in it and I can’t answer it from here.”
He nodded.
They stood at the dock in the deep February cold and neither of them moved for a while.
“Ask me again,” she said, “when I am home.”
“I will,” he said. Simply. With the certainty of a man who made promises rarely and kept them without exception.
She nodded. She turned from the dock.
She walked back to the settlement with the cold pressing through her cloak and the question still alive in her chest, warm and terrifying, and she thought: you have said what you wanted.
She thought: he has said he will ask again.
She thought: spring is still two months away and those two months are going to be the longest and the shortest of your life.
She was not wrong.
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