"The burn's faster than it looks."
Matilda didn't answer him.
She could see that perfectly well herself. The water moving quick and dark over the stones, catching the early light in ways that made the current look almost decorative when it wasn't.
She picked her way to the edge and crouched and cupped water over her face and didn't think about how cold it was.
Around her, Ivar's men were doing the same, spread along the bank, quiet and efficient in the grey morning light.
Nobody spoke much.
The camp had come down faster than it had gone up and the horses were already loaded. She'd woken, mortifyingly, to findthat she had in fact slept, deeply enough that Torvald had had to say her name twice outside the tent before she'd heard him.
She hadn't looked at Ivar when she came out.
She looked at him now, briefly, sideways.
He was upstream a little, washing his face with the brisk unselfconsciousness of someone who had done this in a hundred burns on a hundred mornings and found nothing remarkable about any of them.
His hair was pushed back. His cloak was off, folded over a rock. The cold didn't appear to be troubling him.
She looked away.
She reached further out over the water for a cleaner current, shifted her weight forward onto the next stone, and the stone moved.
It happened very fast.
The stone tilted, her foot went sideways, her balance went with it. She had one clear thought, not this, not in front of all of them, and then a hand closed around her forearm.
Firm. Immediate. Not grabbing, just there. Solid and certain.
Taking her weight before she'd finished losing it and holding until she found the stone again with her foot and her balance came back and her heart was hammering so hard she could feel it in her back teeth.
“I’ve got ye.” He said as he let her go.
Clean and immediate, the moment she was steady, his hand simply wasn't there anymore.
No lingering. No are ye all right said in that voice people used when they wanted to watch her face while she answered. Just the contact and then the absence of it, and he was already looking back at the water.
She straightened.
Her pulse was doing something she needed it to stop doing.
She was very aware of the exact shape of where his hand had been, the grip of it, the warmth, and she was also aware that she had not frozen. Not even the beginning of it.
Her body had simply registered. Caught, steady, safe and moved on, and she didn't know what to do with that so she cupped more water over her face and let the cold of it do something useful.
"Told ye it was fast," he said.
"Ye told me it looked fast," she said. "There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"Aye. One is an observation. The other is a warnin'. If ye meant it as a warnin' ye should've said so."
He looked at her then, and the ghost of something crossed his face, that almost-expression she was developing an unwilling familiarity with.
"I'll bear that in mind," he said.