"There," Oswin said. There was a worn, profound satisfaction in his voice, the sound of a man who had done this a thousand times and still found the miracle in it. "There ye are."
Sigrid made a sound. A soft, broken hitch in her throat. Matilda had never heard the stoic woman make that sound before. She filed it away for later, a small treasure of the day.
Matilda reached out her arms without asking.
Oswin placed the child in her embrace, and she received him with a trembling reverence.
He was warm, he was furious, and the weight of him was extraordinary, real in a way she hadn't been fully prepared for despite nine months of carrying him. She looked at his face.
Dark hair, damp and silk-fine against his head. Eyes squeezed tight against a world he’d just arrived in and apparently found objectionable. His mouth was still open from his first protest,the sound already fading to a soft whimper as the warmth of her skin reached him.
His hand, a tiny thing, was curled into a fist the size of a plum.
She held him close.
The warmth that arrived in her chest had no shape and didn't need one. It simply expanded there, the way the golden light of the candles pushed back the shadows, retreating from every edge of her life, leaving room for something entirely new.
"He's perfect," she said.
Her voice sounded unfamiliar, hollowed out by the work but vibrating with a new, fierce light. She didn't mind it.
"Aye," Sigrid said, her voice thick and quiet from somewhere close by. "He is."
Matilda looked at him for a long, long time. He settled against her breast with absolute, immediate trust.
She thought about trust like that. The terrifying, beautiful cost of it, and what it meant to be the person someone decided to trust without a shred of evidence.
She thought she understood Ivar better than she ever had before.
"Let him in," she said.
"Lady Matilda, ye should rest."
"Sigrid. Let him in."
A pause. "Aye," Sigrid said.
She heard the heavy oak door groan on its hinges. She heard footsteps she knew better than her own heartbeat. Then Ivar was in the room.
She didn't look up immediately.
She heard him stop. She heard the quality of the stillness that came over him. The kind of stillness she knew, the silence of a man confronted with something so vast he hadn't found the words for it yet.
She looked up.
He was standing three feet from the bed, looking like a man who had walked through a war to get there. He'd been in the corridor for hours, and he looked it. His heavy cloak was still on his shoulders, and his eyes were hollow with a desperate sort of relief.
He looked at the child in her arms.
Something crossed his face that she'd never seen on it before. A raw, terrifying tenderness. She had been watching his face for a long time now, but this was a new language.
"Come here," she said.
He crossed the distance to the bed and sat on the edge of it. He looked at the child.
"He's angry," Ivar said, his voice a rough whisper.
"He's just arrived. He'll settle."