"Again," he said.
She did it alone this time. He'd stepped back, leaving her to the cold air. She drove from the back foot, forward, not backward, and executed the motion cleanly. She stood at the end of it with the blade at the right angle and her breathing perfectly steady.
Silence fell over the yard.
"Aye," he said, quietly.
She turned around.
He was looking at her with the expression he kept most contained. The one that was neither analysis nor approval, butsomething raw that lived in the space between them. He held her gaze for a heartbeat too long.
"Carry it," he said. "From now until the gathering. In the sheath on yer left side, nae the right, ye draw faster across the body."
She looked down at the dagger. "Ye're giving it tae me?"
"Aye." He went to the rack and came back with a short leather sheath and a belt strap. "Turn."
She turned, and he fitted the sheath at her left hip. He adjusted the strap for her size with that practical efficiency he applied to everything physical.
She stood still and let him, thinking about how different this was from every other time a man had moved around her body with a purpose. There was no careful management here. No performed patience. Just the assumption that she was capable of using the thing he was fitting her with.
"There," he said, coming around to face her. "Draw it. Slowly."
She drew it.
"Again. Faster."
She did it three more times until the motion was clean and automatic. He nodded once, a commendation she’d learned was worth more than a hundred flowery words from anyone else.
"Dinnae show it unless ye intend tae use it," he said. "The moment it's visible, ye've committed."
"And when will I use it?"
"Ye'll ken when." He took the practice sword from the ground and headed back to the rack. "Go in. It's nearly dark."
"Are ye coming?"
"Shortly."
She went up the steps and through the upper door into the torchlit corridor, pausing just inside to feel the weight of the dagger at her hip.
Forward, nae backward. Drive from the back foot.
She sheathed it and went to find Sigrid.
The two days that followed moved with a compressed, urgent quality, like time being measured against a ticking fuse.
The gathering was coming the way a winter storm came. Visible from a great distance, and then suddenly, entirely, there.
The harbor path was strung with lanterns, two dozen of them throwing amber pools of light across the worn, salt-crusted stone.
Islanders poured through the castle gates with contributions, bread, benches, and lengths of rope for the presentation area. The Great Hall had been stripped back, smelling of fresh rushes and woodsmoke and the cold salt air that found every gap in the masonry.
Matilda moved through the chaos with Sigrid.
She worked because it was the only answer to the helplessness of waiting. She oversaw the placement of the lanterns, climbing the stone steps with the harbor master's lad. She organized the tables with the kitchen women, who had stopped watching her with caution and started watching her as a woman who had earned her place.
She slept the second night without the candle again.