"Again," Sigrid said.
Her voice wasn't unkind, but it lacked the softness of pity; it was direct.
Matilda breathed, the air rasping in her throat. She did what her body demanded and did not scream. Screaming was a waste of the precious oxygen she needed for the work. She bit her lip until she tasted salt and pushed into the white heat.
"Good," Sigrid said, her own voice tight with the effort of watching. "Again."
The chamber was warm, too warm.
The fire had been built high, the great logs crackling and spitting, and the heavy oak shutters were latched tight against the biting November cold of the sound. The candles were lit in every corner, burning with steady, golden flames.
Oswin moved at the edge of her vision. He was steady and unhurried, the same way he had been when she’d watched him stitch Ivar’s wounds time after time. She had found his calm infuriating then; she found it desperately reassuring now.
"How much longer," she said. Or perhaps she only thought the words. Her voice felt far away, a ghost of a sound.
"As long as it takes," Oswin replied, his shadow long against the stone wall.
"That's a terrible answer."
"Aye," he agreed, wiping his hands on a clean cloth without any remorse. "It is."
She turned her head toward the window. Behind the wood and iron, she could hear the wind screaming around the castle walls.
November.
It had been nine months since the corridor full of oil smoke and the ring of steel. Nine months since Ivar’s forehead had pressed to hers in the dark passage, sealing a truth they had only just begun to speak.
"Sigrid," she rasped.
"Here."
"Is he still outside?"
There was a pause, a heartbeat where Sigrid very carefully did not smile. "He hasnae moved since the second hour."
"He's been out there since the second hour?"
"He was out there before the second hour, Me lady. He was there when I arrived, and I came early tae check the linens." Another pause, softer this time. "He’s been spoken to twice by Torvaldabout going to the hall and eating. He declined both times. I think he threatened the last messenger with the dungeons if they asked again."
Matilda closed her eyes. Somewhere underneath the searing pain and the bone-deep exhaustion of the last several hours, something warm moved through her that had nothing to do with the hearth.
"Leave him," she whispered.
"I had nay intention of moving him," Sigrid said, her thumb tracing Matilda's knuckles. "He's more useful in the corridor than he would be in here. He'd be trying tae fight the pain fer ye, and he'd be furious that he couldnae kill it with a blade."
"He'd be insufferable in here."
"Completely." Sigrid squeezed her hand once, brief and firm. "Now stop talking and dae what Oswin tells ye."
Matilda did what Oswin told her.
The hours passed in the way they only pass in rooms where life is being fought for, not linearly, but in thick, overlapping layers. Time became compressed, then elastic, then so immediate it had no duration at all. She went into herself and came back out, and Sigrid was always there, and the candles burned with a holy, steady light.
At some point, the world shifted in a way she felt in her very marrow. Oswin said something sharp and urgent, and then, a sound broke the silence. It was a sound she hadn't heard before, yet she recognized it in her blood. It was the most significant sound she had ever encountered.
High and indignant. Raw. Immediate.
Alive.