Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~9 min read
Chapter 26: What She Proposes
The Ó’Briain men arrived at midmorning.
She heard them before the gate lookout called it — horses on the trail above the fjord, the particular rhythm of men who had been riding hard and had not slowed down because they were close, and she straightened at the gate and breathed.
There were eighteen of them. She counted from the gate as they came down the slope, taking the inventory automatically, and when she had the number she stopped counting and looked at faces.
Conall was at the front, which meant her father had sent his best and most trusted, which meant he had taken this seriously in exactly the way she had known he would. Conall was forty years old and had been riding with her father since before she was born and had the face of a man who had been given an assignment and was going to complete it regardless of what stood between him and the completion.
He saw her at the gate.
He stopped his horse.
She raised her hand. The Irish gesture — her father’s, the right hand, the one that meant *I am here, I am well, stand down.*
Conall looked at her for a long moment. He looked at the gate. At the settlement behind her and the Norse men visible at the edges. He looked back at her.
He got down from his horse.
She met him in the space between the gate and the first of the riders and she gripped his arm and he gripped hers — the Irish greeting, the one that was also confirmation, the contact that said *you are real and here* — and she felt, for the first time since October, the specific warmth of being reached by someone who had come from the same place as her.
“You’re well,” Conall said. Not a question. He was running the assessment he had been sent to run, checking it against her.
“I’m well,” she said. “I’m whole.”
He looked at her face. He had known her since childhood; he knew what he was looking for. She let him look.
He nodded. “Your father—”
“I know,” she said. “I know what he’s been. Tell him I know.” She paused. “Tell him the letter I wrote is my hand and my words. Tell him I am coming home and I am bringing a proposal that is worth his time. Tell him — ” she stopped. “Tell him Cormac. Is Cormac—”
“Alive,” Conall said. “Wounded in the raid. Healed. He’s been the one riding your father back from three different plans to come north himself since January.”
She breathed.
She had not, in six months of keeping that thought in the sealed room, fully accounted for what it would feel like to open the room and find it was alright. The breath went out of her and she breathed again and she held it, the fact of it, for exactly long enough to know it was real.
“Good,” she said. Her voice was not entirely right.
Conall looked at her with the expression of a man who had served her father’s family for forty years and had very clear opinions about the people responsible for that six-month sealed room. He looked toward the gate and the Norse settlement behind it.
“He is the one who took you,” Conall said. Not loud. Just even.
“Yes.” She met his gaze. “He is also the one who is proposing what I believe is the most valuable trade agreement the Ó’Briain clan has been offered in twenty years. And I wrote part of it.” She paused. “Both things are true. My father will need to hold both of them.”
Conall looked at her. “You’ve grown up,” he said. It was not quite what he had said to her before she left, which was *you were grown before, mind you don’t forget to be young,* and she understood the revision.
“I had the winter for it,” she said.
She turned back to the gate. Leif was there. He had come out while she was talking — she had been aware of his presence without looking, had felt it the same way she felt it in the settlement, the particular gravity of him — and he was standing at the gate’s edge with his arms at his sides and his face doing the thing it did when it was being deliberately, explicitly open. Not welcoming, not submissive — just visible. Here. Not flinching.
She turned back to Conall. “He will speak to my father in Ireland. He is sailing us south, as far as the Orkneys. Your Orkney escort takes me from there.” She paused. “He is coming to the meeting as a partner in the agreement. Not as the man who took me. Both things are true, and I need my father to be able to hold both things.” She met Conall’s eyes. “Can you carry that?”
Conall looked at the man at the gate. He took his time with the looking — the Irish assessment, slow and thorough, the way her father looked at people he was deciding about.
“I can carry it,” he said.
She turned. She walked back to the gate. She stopped in front of Leif.
She said, in Irish because she wanted to say it in her own language first: “Thank you.” Then in Norse: “For not flinching.”
He looked at her.
“They are going to camp outside the settlement tonight,” she said. “Tomorrow we sail. The day after is the Orkneys.” She paused. “Come to dinner tonight. In the hall. With Conall and two of my men.” She held his gaze. “Let them see you.”
He looked at her steadily.
“Yes,” he said.
The dinner was not comfortable. She had not expected it to be comfortable.
It was honest, which was better than comfortable. Conall spoke to Leif through her translation — she moved between Irish and Norse across the table, back and forth, keeping nothing back from either side, rendering everything faithfully — and the conversation had the specific, testing quality of men taking each other’s measure over food, which was older than any table either of them had sat at.
Leif held it. She watched him hold it: the questions about the raid, which he answered without deflection; the questions about the settlement, which he answered with the directness she had spent six months learning to expect; the questions about the proposal, which he answered by asking Conall what terms he thought Ciarán would need to see before he would consider it, and listening to the answer.
Conall stared at him when he asked that.
He waited for the stare to end and then genuinely listened to the answer.
She watched Conall watching Leif with the flat, precise gaze of a man revising an assessment in real time.
After, when the Ó’Briain men had gone back to their camp and the hall was quieter, Conall passed her at the door and said, very quiet, in Irish: “He’s a difficult man to hate.”
“I know,” she said.
“Your father will find a way,” Conall said. “Initially.”
“I know that too.”
He looked at her with the look he had been using since she was nine years old and he was managing a situation she was in the middle of. “Come home safely,” he said.
“I will,” she said.
She went back inside.
Leif was at the table, alone, looking at the fire. He looked up when she came back.
“He’s not easy to read,” Leif said. “Conall.”
“He is when you know him.” She sat across from him. “He was revising. That’s what that face means. He’ll tell my father that the Jarl is not what he expected.”
Leif was quiet. “What did he expect?”
“Monsters,” she said simply. “What they always expect.”
He looked at her. “What did you expect?”
She thought about October. About a dark path and a hand on her wrist and accented Latin in the dark. About the specific moment she had decided, standing on a longship in the Irish Sea, that what she expected and what she was dealing with were not the same thing.
“I expected someone easier to be angry at,” she said.
He held her gaze. Something in his expression — real, unguarded, the expression she had been earning since October in small, careful increments.
“We sail at first light,” he said.
“I know.”
“You should sleep.”
“I know.” She did not move. “I am not ready to sleep yet.”
They sat in the hall in the last of the fire and neither of them spoke much, and outside the settlement was quiet, and Conall’s men were in their camp, and the sea to the south was open, and Ireland was ten days away.
She thought: this is the last night.
She thought: I know what I’m going to say when he asks.
She thought: say it now. Say it while you’re here, in the place where it became true.
She looked at him.
“I am going to come back,” she said.
He went very still.
“I am saying it now, here, while I am still here,” she said. “Because I want you to know before the sea is between us and before my father’s face is the thing I see when I think about what I want.” She held his gaze. “The answer is yes. It will still be yes when you ask. But I wanted to say it here.”
He looked at her for a long time.
“Aoife,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “I know we said the sea. I know we said the free choice from the far shore. That is still — the shape of it is still that. I am still going home. But I wanted to say it here because here is where I know it, and here is where it became true, and I wanted you to know.”
He reached across the table and put his hand over hers. He did not say anything.
She turned her hand under his and held it and looked at the fire.
“Say it back,” she said. “Whatever it is.”
“I will be there,” he said. “When you are ready. Wherever there is.”
She looked at the fire. She felt the warmth of his hand and the warmth of the hall and beyond the walls the cold and the dark and the open sea and Ireland on the other side of both of them.
She thought: *tvíræður.*
She thought: both things. Both equally.
Home. And this.
She was ready.
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