Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 23: Two Things at Once
The news came with the Bergen supply ship in the last week of March.
She was in the weaving hall when she heard the ship arrive — recognised the dock sounds, the particular acceleration of activity that meant something had come in — and she noted it and kept working and told herself the supply ship was not relevant to her.
The supply ship was relevant to her.
She was at the dock before the cargo was halfway unloaded, which was faster than was entirely dignified, and she stood at the edge of the dock while Gunnar’s men moved crates and she watched the Bergen master speak to Leif with the particular body language of someone delivering news he had not expected to carry.
She watched Leif’s face.
He controlled it well. If she had not spent six months learning the precise vocabulary of his expression she would not have seen anything. She saw: something, briefly, in the jaw. The controlled stillness that meant the thing he had just heard required management.
He looked at her.
She held his gaze.
He came to her when the Bergen master had gone.
“The Ó’Briain clan has been moving,” he said, in Norse, without preamble because he knew she did not want it. “Since winter. Your father sent men south to the Orkneys in January — before my proposal arrived, before any confirmation of you being well.” He paused. “The Bergen merchants heard from the Orkney trading post. The men your father sent are there, waiting for the sea to open. But there’s more.”
She waited.
“Another contingent,” he said. “Twenty men, possibly more, heading north along the Norwegian coast. Looking for the settlement.” His voice was even. “They’ll reach us within a week of the sea opening. Perhaps before.”
She stood very still.
She thought: my father. Her father had sent men north along the Norwegian coast, twenty men, in winter, which meant he had sent them before the first snow had fully cleared which meant he had sent them before the Bergen letter could have reached him which meant he had sent them on the strength of the original raid alone, because his daughter was taken and he did not wait.
She thought about her father sitting in his hall with the autumn closing and no word from her and his calculation: two options, negotiation or retrieval, and he had attempted both simultaneously.
She thought: of course. Of course you did.
She felt two things.
The first thing was entirely, wholly her father. Was the smell of his hall and the sound of his voice when he was angry, which was not loud but very precise, and the particular motion he made when he was done waiting — a brief, specific gesture, right hand only, that meant *we are past the time for deliberation.* She had seen it a hundred times. She felt the certainty of it now, across the sea, reaching her on a Bergen dock like a hand.
He was coming. He had sent people for her. He had not waited.
She had not known, entirely, what it would feel like to know that. She had known it intellectually since October — of course he would come, of course he would send men — but knowledge was different from the feeling of it arriving, actual and present and real, and the feeling was: he had not waited. He had sent twenty men north along a Norwegian coast in winter because she was gone.
She put that in the sealed part of her mind because otherwise she would not be able to think.
The second thing was: twenty men arriving at the settlement.
She looked at the settlement. She looked at it with both the eyes of the woman who had been here since October and the eyes of someone doing threat assessment, and she thought about what twenty Ó’Briain men looked like arriving at a Norse settlement’s gate and what the gate’s men looked like in response.
“They’ll be coming to bring me home,” she said.
“Yes.”
“They’ll be coming armed.”
“Yes.”
She looked at him. “You won’t stop them.”
He held her gaze. “No. I won’t.” A pause. “I was never going to try to hold you here by force.”
“I know.” She did know. She had known since October that this was not that kind of captivity, and she had spent six months in it, and she knew.
“But twenty armed Ó’Briain men in my settlement,” he said, “while my men are watching them—”
“Is a situation,” she said.
“Yes.”
She thought.
“I need to be there when they arrive,” she said. “At the gate. They need to see me first. If they see me first, standing freely, the situation reads differently than if they come through the gate and have to find me.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Yes.”
“And you need to not be armed,” she said. “Or if you are, then it cannot be visible.”
“The Jarl of his settlement without visible arms is not—”
“The Jarl of his settlement sending an unarmed message to armed men is,” she said. “It says: you have arrived here and I am not afraid of you and I am not threatened by you. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that you are not going to read as a threat if you are between me and them.” She paused. “They are there for me. If I am visible and free, they read you as the reason I am visible and free and not the reason I am not.”
He looked at her. “You have been planning this.”
“I have been thinking about it since January,” she said. “When the sea closed and I knew he would be counting the weeks.”
He absorbed this. “You didn’t tell me.”
“There was no point yet.” She met his gaze. “There is a point now.”
He held her gaze for a long moment. “And after,” he said. “After they arrive and see you and the situation is managed. What then?”
She looked at the fjord. At the entrance, the mouth of it, where the sea opened and the direction was south. Ireland was south.
She felt the two things again, both of them fully, neither of them winning.
“I go home,” she said. The same words she had said all winter. True as they had ever been.
“Yes,” he said.
“And you ask me,” she said. “Across the sea.”
“Yes.” His voice had the controlled quality she recognised as the thing under which he kept the things he was not saying. “I ask. And you answer.”
She looked at him. She thought about the morning after the storm, his arm around her and the silence and the grey light finding the door’s edge. She thought about *please* and she did not know he had said it and she did not need to know — she could feel the shape of it from here.
“My father will be furious,” she said.
“I imagine.”
“He will want to speak to you.”
“I will speak to him.”
“He will not like you.” She held his gaze. “Whatever he reads in the proposal, whatever I tell him, his first instinct will be to dislike you specifically and what you represent.”
“I know.”
“You are going to have to stand in his hall and let him look at you and not flinch.”
“I can do that.”
She looked at him and thought about a man at the prow of a ship looking at the sea. She thought about patience that did not come from passivity but from the deep certainty of someone who had decided what they wanted and was willing to wait for the terrain to become navigable.
She thought: I know you can.
She turned back to the dock, to the settlement, to the supply ship still being unloaded.
One week, perhaps less.
She was going home.
She held both things in her chest — the pull of Ireland and the pull of this — and she breathed, and she held them, and she did not resolve them because they did not resolve.
*Tvíræður.*
She was going home.
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