Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~8 min read
Chapter 18: Navigation
She had taken to walking the palisade at night.
It had begun as reconnaissance — she had told herself this, with the same half-honesty she was applying to many things by February — and had become, over weeks, something else. The settlement at night was different from the settlement during the day: quieter, more itself, the performance of community stripped away and only the essential shapes remaining. The smoke from the longhouses. The forge gone dark. The dogs at the fjord’s edge doing their patient survey. The sky, which was enormous here in a way it was not enormous in Ireland — the Norse sky went on forever, vast and cold and full of more stars than she had ever seen in the milder southern nights.
She had been mapping the night sky against the Irish one, noting the differences, building the navigation in both directions. This was practical. It was also the thing she did when she could not sleep and needed her mind occupied at the specific frequency that prevented it from doing something less useful.
He was already there when she came to the palisade’s northern walk.
He came here sometimes. She had known this, had arrived once before to find the space recently vacated and him walking back to the hall, and she had not said anything about it and neither had he. Tonight there was no opportunity to pretend she hadn’t seen him: he was standing at the palisade’s edge looking at the fjord, and the moon was bright enough that there was no question.
She came and stood beside him. She looked at the fjord. He looked at the fjord. This was ordinary.
“Orion,” she said, in Irish first, then the Norse word she had learned from Gunnar’s apprentice. “We use him for the winter crossing. South and slightly east from his sword.”
“Sword,” he said, looking up. “Which—”
“Three stars in a diagonal. Below the belt.” She pointed. “The belt is the three bright ones.”
“We use the belt for latitude,” he said. “The height above the horizon tells you how far north you are.” He shifted slightly to stand behind her left shoulder, looking along her pointing arm. “The sword we use for orientation in the fjord. The angle changes with the season.”
“Show me,” she said.
He stayed where he was — slightly behind her, looking along the line of her arm. He was close enough that she could feel the warmth of him against the cold, the specific warmth of a large man in winter, and she was very aware of it and she kept her arm level and her face toward the stars.
“In October,” he said, “when you arrived, the sword hung like—” he reached past her shoulder and traced the angle against the sky, his arm alongside hers “—here. At an angle. By April it will be nearly vertical.”
“Does the tilt tell you the date?”
“Within two weeks.” He lowered his arm. He did not step back. “Your navigators do the same with different stars?”
“With the Plough,” she said. “And with Cassiopeia — ” she found it “— there.” She traced it. “The W shape. My father’s navigator uses the top of the W to find north when Polaris is obscured.”
“The Irish Polaris is the same star,” he said.
“I know.” She had discovered this two months ago and it had felt important in a way she could not entirely articulate — that the fixed point was the same, that north was north from both sides of the sea.
He said nothing. She said nothing. The stars went on in their vast, indifferent patterns overhead, and the fjord was black and silver below, and she was aware of every inch of distance between them, which was not much.
She turned.
He was right there. She had known he was right there and she had turned anyway, and now they were standing in the cold and the moonlight and looking at each other and there was nothing to look at but each other and nothing to say that was about stars.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
His hand came up, slowly — slowly enough that she could have stepped back, that there was no question of anything other than a choice — and touched her face. Not her jaw, not her chin, the side of her face, at the temple, where the cold had reached and his hand was warm, and she felt it through every layer of the winter.
She did not step back.
He kissed her.
It was not the kiss she had been imagining — not that she had been imagining it, or not exactly, or the point was that what she had imagined had been something urgent and urgent things arrived with their own momentum and this was not that. This was restraint. This was the kiss of a man who had been careful with her for five months and was being careful now: asking without asking, staying until she answered.
She answered.
She put her hand on his jaw — the cold of it, the grain of the beard, solid and real under her palm — and kissed him back, and felt the quality of his stillness break open into something that was still careful but not at all contained, and she thought: there it is. That’s what’s underneath.
He kissed her the way he talked to her: completely present, nothing divided, all of his attention pointed at the same thing.
She pulled back.
Not because she wanted to. Because she needed to look at him — to see his face, to read it, to know what this was from the outside as well as the inside. She pulled back and she looked and what she saw was not performance or calculation or the managed face she had been watching for five months. What she saw was him, entirely, in the moonlight, looking at her with an expression that had no management in it at all.
She breathed.
“This changes nothing,” she said, “about wanting to go home.”
“I know,” he said. His voice was lower than usual. “I know that.”
She looked at him. “We said—”
“I know.” He did not move away. “We said spring. We said when you were home, with the sea between us and a real choice. This—” he paused “—this is still that.”
She looked at the fjord. At the black water and the stars reflected in it, the same stars, both directions. Ireland was out there somewhere, across that black, her father’s hall and Cormac and the manuscripts and the life she had been living before a Tuesday in October.
She looked back at him.
She was going home in spring. She was going home and she was going to stand on her father’s coast and ask herself whether the thing she wanted was what she would do, and she did not know the answer yet.
She knew what the want was.
She had stopped pretending she didn’t.
“I know,” she said quietly. “This is still that.”
Neither of them moved for a long moment. The cold was complete and thorough and she was not cold. She was standing in February on a palisade in Norway with his hand still warm against her face and the stars overhead and she was not cold at all.
“We should go back,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. He did not move.
She stepped back. He let her. She turned from the palisade and walked back toward the longhouse and she did not look back, not because she didn’t want to but because she understood, precisely and perfectly, that if she looked back she would not keep walking, and keeping walking was the necessary thing.
She went to her partition.
She lay in the dark and pressed her hand over her own face where his hand had been and thought: two months.
She thought: spring is in two months and you are going home and this is still that — a choice made freely, with the sea between you, with everything clear and nothing owed and nothing owed.
She thought: two months.
She thought: you have done harder things.
She thought: I am no longer sure that’s true.
Outside the palisade, she knew without knowing that he was still standing there, looking at the same stars, navigating by the same fixed point.
North was north from both sides of the sea.
She held onto that.
Reader Reactions