Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 25: What Bjorn Knows
She went to Bjorn on the evening before the Ó’Briain men arrived.
She had been thinking about it for two days — not about the conversation itself, she had not exactly planned it, but about the question she needed to ask and who was best placed to answer it and the clear-eyed assessment that pointed to Bjorn every time she ran it. She had been running it for a week and the answer was always Bjorn.
He was at the forge. He went there in the evenings sometimes, she had observed, not to work but to think — sat on the bench along the wall, the same place he sat when he was waiting out a difficult conversation, and looked at the fire. She had noted this as a similarity between the two men that she expected neither of them would acknowledge.
She came in and sat on the bench at the far end from him. He looked at her.
“I have a question,” she said.
“I gathered,” he said.
She looked at the forge. She thought about how to frame it and decided, as she always decided, that the direct version was the most efficient. “What is he like when I am not in the room?”
Bjorn looked at her.
He did not answer immediately. He turned it over, she could see him doing it — the consideration, the decision about what to give. She waited.
“Why are you asking me?” he said.
“Because you will tell me the true thing,” she said. “Not the thing you think I want to hear and not the thing you think is strategic. The true thing. I know you well enough by now to know that.”
He looked at her for a moment. “Do you.”
“Yes.” She met his gaze. “You have not liked me being here,” she said. “Since October. Not because you dislike me — I don’t think you dislike me now, whatever you thought in the beginning — but because I am a complication, and you are a man who thinks about consequences, and you have been watching the consequences of my being here accumulate.” She paused. “You will tell me the true thing because you have an interest in me understanding the full picture. You want me to make a good decision.”
Bjorn looked at the forge for a long time.
Then he said: “Different.”
She waited.
“He is different when you are not in the room,” he said. “I do not mean a different man. He is — ” a pause, the pause of someone choosing precision over ease “— the same man, and less of him. A smaller version. He works the same, talks the same, makes the same decisions. But the quality is reduced.” He paused again. “I have known him for fifteen years. I know all the versions of him. The version without you in the room is the version before you arrived, and that version is not—” he stopped.
“Not what?” she said.
Bjorn looked at her with the direct, slightly uncomfortable gaze of a man who had not wanted to say this and was going to say it because she had asked directly and he was constitutionally incapable of the other kind. “Not sufficient,” he said. “For him. It was sufficient before. It is not, now.”
She was quiet.
“I have told him this,” Bjorn said. “In the forge, in December. I told him to decide.” He looked at the fire. “I think he decided. I think he decided months ago and has been working out what to do with the decision.”
“He tried to send me away yesterday,” she said. “Before my father’s men arrived. A clean exit.”
Bjorn looked at her.
“I told him it was a coward’s answer,” she said.
Something happened in Bjorn’s face that was not a smile and was related to one. “What did he say?”
“He said yes,” she said. “He agreed it was.”
Bjorn was quiet for a moment. “That took something.”
“I know.”
“He doesn’t say things like that.” Bjorn looked at her with the expression of someone updating an assessment. “He is not a man who admits to — he doesn’t talk about the things underneath. Not to me, not to anyone. He keeps them managed.” A pause. “He told you.”
“I asked directly,” she said. “He finds it difficult to be indirect with me. We are the same in that.”
Bjorn looked at her for a long time. She did not fill the silence. She had learned, in six months of watching him watch Leif, that Bjorn used silence the way other men used speech.
“He will come to Ireland,” Bjorn said finally.
“I asked him to.”
“No. After.” He met her gaze. “When you ask him. Whatever you ask him. He will come.”
She looked at him.
“I am not telling you how to answer,” Bjorn said. “That is yours. I am telling you what it will cost him if the answer is no.” He said it plainly, without dramatics. “I am telling you this because I think you should know the size of the thing you are holding. Not so that it changes your answer. So that you know what you are deciding.”
She looked at the forge. She thought about the quality of a man’s absence being a smaller version of his presence. She thought about a great hall that was a different place in October than in March, and the single variable between those states.
She thought about what she was holding.
She thought: I have known the size of it for a while.
She thought: I have been deciding since February.
She did not say this to Bjorn. She stood up.
“Thank you,” she said.
He looked up at her. “Are you going to tell me what you’ve decided?”
She looked at him. At the man who had been suspicious of her from the dock and had watched her for six months with the flat, assessing gaze of someone who loved Leif in the specific, unsentimental way of a friend rather than a follower. Who had gone to him in the forge and said *arrive soon, she is not indefinite.*
“No,” she said. “I am going to tell him first.”
Bjorn nodded. Once, the decisive kind. “That’s right,” he said.
She went back to the longhouse. She lay in the dark on her pallet — her pallet, she had been calling it her pallet since November and the possessive had arrived without her noticing — and she thought about tomorrow.
The Ó’Briain men. The gate. The faces of men who had come from Ireland for her and were about to find her standing in a Norse settlement, free and whole and — she thought about the word *whole* — whole.
She thought about her father. His face when the proposal arrived. His face when she walked back into his hall after seven months.
She thought about a man in a forge at midnight saying *please* to an empty room, which she did not know and which she felt regardless in the way you felt things that were real without needing to witness them.
She thought: tomorrow.
She thought: and then ten days and then home.
She thought: and then.
She did not finish the thought. She held it open, the *and then*, like a door not fully closed, like a question waiting for its room.
She slept.
In the morning she got up early, which was how she met hard things, and she dressed carefully, and she went to stand at the gate of the settlement that had been hers since October and waited for Ireland to come and find her.
She was ready.
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