She sat up again.
Outside, nothing changed.
The camp breathed in the slow even rhythm of sleeping men. She could see the shape of Ivar through the canvas. Still upright, still facing outward.
Something about that, the simple fact of him there, steadied her enough to lie back down a second time.
She lasted approximately six minutes.
The problem wasn't noise. The problem was the dark.
The specific quality of it inside the tent, the way it pressed in from every angle with a completeness the dark outside didn't quite manage.
Outside there was always something. A sliver of moon, the glow of the fire, the pale suggestion of sky above the trees.
Inside the tent there was nothing. Just black, thick and close and total, and her own breathing getting shallower than she wanted it to, and the familiar beginning of the thing she'd spent years learning to talk herself down from.
She moved closer to the entrance. Not outside, but closer to it.
She picked up her bedroll and repositioned it so her head was near the opening, near the tied-back flap, and the thin strip of firelight that came through the gap.
That was better. Marginally.
The black receded to something manageable and she lay on her side facing the opening and made herself breathe slowly and watched the strip of light and counted the way she'd taught herself to count.
One. Two. Three.
Outside, Ivar shifted.
She hadn't asked him to. She hadn't made a sound. But his position changed. She could see it in the shadow his shape threw against the canvas, angling slightly, moving without standing, so that he sat between her and the tree line more fully than before.
His back was no longer partly toward her. He was facing her direction now, or close enough to it, close enough that if anything came from the forest it would reach him first.
He hadn't looked inside and hadn't spoken. He'd simply adjusted, quietly, as though he'd noticed a draft and moved out of it, and gone still again.
She watched his shadow for a long moment.
Then she reached into the pocket of her cloak and found her candle.
The flint was in the satchel.
She found it by feel, struck it twice, and the wick caught, and the inside of the tent went from black to amber and she exhaled a breath she'd been half-holding since she'd lain down.
The small flame threw soft light against the canvas walls and made the space feel like something with edges again.
The smoke gathered almost immediately.
Canvas, she discovered, was not designed for candlelight.
Within a minute the air inside the tent had taken on a quality that stung her eyes and sat heavy at the back of her throat.
She was considering whether to endure it or extinguish the candle and endure the dark instead, which was not really a choice at all, when the tent flap moved.
Not opened. Just moved, the way it moved when someone touched it from outside.
"Aye," she said.
Ivar's hand came through the gap first, then the short blade he carried at his belt.