Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 8: Fluent
Bjorn came to him on a Wednesday — he had begun to track the days in the Norse way, which was its own small act of adaptation she resented — and told him, with the flat delivery of someone relaying information he would have preferred not to have, that the Irish woman had been on the dock for the second morning running asking Gunnar’s dock-men questions about the sea routes.
She had been asking in Norse.
Aoife had been in the settlement for three weeks.
She was in the weaving hall when Leif came to find her, sitting at the loom with the particular concentration she brought to things she was doing adequately rather than brilliantly — a small crease between her brows, hands steady, head down. She heard him come in, she always heard him come in, and she did not look up.
He stood at the loom’s edge. Waited.
She kept weaving.
He said, in Norse: *You’ve been asking about the sea routes.*
Her hands did not stop. She said nothing.
He said: *Gunnar’s men think you’re planning to take the small boat from the southern dock. The one that needs two people and a detailed knowledge of the fjord rocks to get out.*
Her hands stilled.
She looked up at him. Her face was doing the careful nothing, but her eyes were doing something else entirely, the quick calculation of someone deciding in real time how much ground had shifted.
He waited.
She said, in Norse — steady, direct, the accent Irish-edged but the grammar clean: *The small boat requires two people because the tiller is badly rigged. If it was rebalanced you could manage it alone.*
The hall went very quiet.
He looked at her. She looked back at him with the expression of someone who had just put down a hand of cards and was watching to see what the table did.
She had been speaking Norse for three weeks and he had known for two of them and they were now both standing in the room where the pretense had ended and neither of them had decided what came next.
He felt something happen in his chest that was not professional assessment. It was sudden and unplanned and he had no immediate use for it.
He laughed.
Not the controlled kind — the genuine kind, the kind that came from being surprised past the point of managing your reaction. It was a short sound, not long, and he stopped it quickly, but it had been real and she had heard it and when he looked back at her face the careful nothing had cracked open and something else was there, something startled and undefended.
She looked at him the way you looked at something that had done the unexpected thing. And then, very briefly — so briefly he might have missed it if he’d been less attentive, if he’d been the kind of man who looked at surfaces — she almost smiled.
Not a full smile. Not even a half one. The shadow of one, at the corner of her mouth, gone before it fully arrived, controlled back into nothing by whatever discipline she brought to everything she didn’t want him to see.
But he had seen it.
He let the laugh finish. He let the moment settle. Then he said, still in Norse: *You’re right about the tiller. I had it noted for repair before winter.*
She blinked. She had not expected that.
*I’m not going to stop you learning the language,* he said. *I haven’t been stopping you. You know that.*
*I know,* she said.
*But the small boat—*
*Is not seaworthy for the crossing,* she said. *I know that too. I wasn’t going to take the small boat.* A pause. *I was finding out how they thought about the boats so I could understand what questions to ask next.*
He looked at her. *What questions?*
*Whether the larger ships go south in autumn. Whether there are traders who cross to Britain before the sea closes. Whether there is anything moving in the direction of Ireland in the next six weeks.*
He held her gaze. *And?*
She looked at him steadily. *The sea closes in five weeks. The last trading ship south passed three days ago.* A beat. *I am not going home until spring.*
He did not fill the silence that followed. He let it sit, let her say it without his voice over the top of it, because she had said it plainly and plainly said things deserved room.
She looked at the loom. Back at him. Something in her face had shifted — not broken, nothing in this woman broke, but settled into a different configuration, the expression of someone who has stopped fighting a fact and started working with it.
*The proposal you mentioned,* she said. *To my father.*
*Yes.*
*When does it go?*
*It can go with the last supply ship. Ten days.* He paused. *If you want to read it before it goes.*
She looked at him. The surprise again — real, unguarded, there and then managed back. She had not expected to be offered that.
*I want to write part of it,* she said.
He considered this. *What part?*
*The part that will make him listen,* she said simply, *instead of reaching for his sword.*
He looked at her for a long moment. At the three weeks of work she had put into the language, the careful mapping of the settlement, the questions on the dock, all of it leading here — to this conversation, these words, this particular negotiation. She had been building toward this from the first night at sea. He had been watching her build.
*Fair,* he said.
She turned back to the loom and he turned to leave, and then she said, without looking up: *You have a good laugh.*
He stopped.
She kept weaving, face down, the crease back between her brows.
He walked out of the weaving hall and stood in the cold Norwegian air and thought about the moment the pretense had ended and both of them had been briefly, entirely visible to each other.
He thought: be careful.
He thought, with considerable certainty: you are already not being careful.
He went back to the great hall and tried to concentrate on the supply ship manifest and failed, completely, for the first time in years.
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