Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 9: Inconvenient
She thought about the laugh for three days.
This was embarrassing and she was dealing with it by pretending it wasn’t happening, which was not working, which was the reason she had been staring at the same patch of loom for the better part of an hour while Sigrid watched her with the expression of someone who had a question she had decided not to ask.
The problem with the laugh was that it had been real. She had studied him for three weeks with the focused attention of someone whose life depended on accurate assessment, and in three weeks she had not seen him lose control of his face once. He was the most contained man she had encountered outside of Brother Ciarán, who had raised containment to a spiritual practice. He was careful with himself in the specific way of someone who had learned, at some cost, that what showed on your face was a resource that could be used against you.
She understood this. She practised it herself.
And then she had told him the tiller was badly rigged and he had laughed.
Not the polite kind. Not the managed, socially functional kind that men in positions of authority produced when they needed to seem approachable. The genuine kind. Short, surprised, genuine — gone almost before it happened, controlled back with what she could tell was some effort, but real.
She had not expected it. She had planned for anger, suspicion, perhaps a flat and unreadable reaction that told her nothing. She had not planned for laughter, and because she hadn’t planned for it, it had gotten through.
She had almost smiled. She had felt it happen before she stopped it, the involuntary response to something surprising and genuine, the thing the body did before the mind caught up. She had stopped it in time — she was almost certain she had stopped it in time — but almost was not the same as definitely, and for the rest of that conversation she had been operating with the slight disadvantage of a person who had been briefly caught.
She had told him he had a good laugh.
She could not account for that. She had been going over it since. She had been watching her own mouth say the words with the detached horror of someone watching a disaster unfold in slow motion, and she had not been able to stop it any more than you could stop a sentence that was already in the air.
It had been the truth. That was the problem. She had a deep inconvenience with the truth — she said it when she should have been saying something more strategic, always had, it was the thing her father had tried to train out of her and failed because it was structural, it was the way her mind worked, straight lines rather than angles.
His laugh had been good. Warm, surprised, self-deprecating in a way — the laugh of a man who didn’t take himself entirely seriously even when everything around him suggested that he did. She had filed it before she knew she was filing it and then she was standing in the weaving hall watching him leave and realizing that she had filed his laugh.
This was a problem.
The problem was not the laugh itself, or not only the laugh. The problem was the accumulation. Three weeks of watching a man who did not behave like the stories said, who spoke Latin on a dark path instead of drawing a sword, who gave her a sleeping space and wool blankets without requiring anything in exchange, who had known she was learning his language and had let her learn it, who had offered to let her read his proposal before it went to her father.
Who had corrected his own map when she told him the navigation was wrong. In front of her. Without comment.
She knew what she was supposed to do with all of this. She was supposed to note it as strategic behavior, as the calculated generosity of a man who understood that treating her well was the most efficient path to the trade agreement he wanted. She was supposed to hold it at arm’s length and keep the assessment clean. She was supposed to be doing what she had always done — applying her mind to a problem until the problem resolved — and not standing in a weaving hall thinking about a laugh.
She was thinking about a laugh.
*Stop it,* she told herself. *You are going home in spring.*
This was true. The sea routes would reopen in spring. His proposal would reach her father — she was going to write part of it, had said so, and she had meant it as strategy and it was strategy — and the negotiation would happen and she would go home. She was going home. That was not a question.
The question that was starting to develop an uncomfortable shape at the edges was not whether she would go home but what she would take with her when she did.
She already knew more Norse than she had any practical use for in Ireland. She already had opinions about the rigging on the south dock’s small boat. She already knew that Bjorn had been awake when his nephew Erik fell off the dock at sixteen and had reportedly pulled him out of the fjord and then given him the worst talking-to in the settlement’s living memory, and that Erik still went slightly pink when it was mentioned, and that Bjorn’s expression when it happened was the expression of a man trying extremely hard not to be found loving.
She knew these things the way you knew things about a place that was yours.
It was not hers.
*You are going home in spring,* she said again, more firmly.
*Then stop filing his laugh,* she told herself.
She went back to the loom. Sigrid was still watching her.
“What?” Aoife said, in Norse, and Sigrid looked away immediately with the expression of someone who had seen something and decided the discretion was worth more than the comment.
Aoife wove in silence and tried not to think about spring and what it meant that she was already thinking about spring the way you thought about a deadline rather than a destination.
She thought about Ireland instead. Her father’s hall, the smell of the sea there, the softness of the west coast light that was nothing like the Norse light, flat and grey and clean. Her brothers. Cormac’s red cloak.
She thought: I am going back to all of that. I am going back to all of that and I am going to negotiate a trade agreement that protects us and I am going to bring this winter with me as knowledge and nothing more.
She thought: that is the plan. Stay on the plan.
She thought about the laugh. She thought about the almost-smile she had not quite stopped.
She kept weaving, and outside the fjord went on in its grey patience, and the five weeks until the sea closed ticked down one by one, and Aoife Ó’Briain sat in a Norse weaving hall and fought the inconvenient accumulation of a man she had absolutely no intention of feeling anything about.
She was not winning.
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