He crossed the passage to her.
She watched him, her breathing still working to settle, her eyes very bright in the gloom. She had the look of someone standing on the far side of a mountain she’d been climbing for eight years.
"Ye dinnae have a candle," he said softly.
"I noticed that as well."
"How was it?"
She considered the question with the bone-deep seriousness she gave most things. "Terrible," she said. "And also nae as terrible as I expected. Which somehow makes it worse." A pause. "Is that strange?"
"Nay." He'd said the same thing to himself once, standing at the edge of a different darkness entirely. "That's exactly how it works."
She looked up at him, her gaze searching. "Ye sound as though ye'd ken."
"I have some experience with the thing ye're afraid of turning out to be being survivable."
Something in her face shifted. It was quieter, warmer. She looked down at her hands for a moment and then back up at him, and he saw the moment she decided to let him see it properly, without the mask.
"I'm proud of ye," he said.
Her throat moved as she swallowed. "Dinnae."
"Too late."
Behind him, Sigrid made a small sound that was definitely a laugh, briefly and poorly suppressed.
Matilda pressed her lips together, looked at the ceiling, then back at him. "It wasnae the worst part," she said after a moment.
"What is?"
"The nighttime, in bed." She shook her head, the movement weary. "Walking in the dark, I've been afraid of it, aye. But it's nae the part that keeps me awake at night."
She paused, her voice dropping. "When it's fully dark and I'm lying still and there's nothing to count or walk toward, it's just dark. And I'm fifteen again, and the door is locked."
She said it plainly, with the precision of someone who'd examined the fear long enough to know exactly which corner it lived in. "That's the part that's still waiting fer me."
He looked at her for a moment, the weight of her words settling in his marrow.
"Aye," he said quietly. "Then that's the next one."
"I'm aware," she said, her voice dry enough to almost cover the tremble in it.
Sigrid stepped forward and touched her arm. A small, brief thing, and Matilda let it happen without flinching. Ivar noted it without comment.
"Come," Sigrid said, already turning. "Supper's been ready long enough."
"Ye could have sent someone tae find me."
"I did," Sigrid said. "They just couldnae find ye."
Matilda looked at Ivar.
He gestured toward the door.
She went, and he followed her out into the torchlit corridor, warm, amber, and ordinary. He watched her shoulders drop by afull inch the moment the light reached her. She didn't slow. She didn't look back at the passage. Her hand passed within a foot of a wall bracket candle and didn't reach for it.
He noticed. He said nothing. Like the water bucket in the training yard, the folded linen from her sleeve, the two candles she'd crossed the room to extinguish herself the night she'd decided she was ready.