She wrung the water from her cuffs and did not smile.
It was hours later when the storm came from nowhere.
One moment the sky was the flat grey it had been all morning, low and still and unanimated. The next, the wind picked up with a purpose that made the horses toss their heads and Torvald say something short and Norse that she suspected wasn't a blessing.
"There," Ivar said, already moving, and she looked where he was looking and saw the rock overhang set into the hillside above the path, a shallow shelf of granite jutting out over a space just wide enough to be useful.
"Move," he said, to her and to his men both, and they moved.
The rain hit before they reached it. Not building up to itself, just arriving, heavy and immediate and horizontal.
By the time she ducked under the overhang she was already soaked across the shoulders and the wind was doing something very determined to her hair.
Ivar's men spread along the base of the hill on either side, pulling hoods up, settling into it with the resignation of people who had learned that weather had opinions and there was no point in having a conversation about it.
The overhang fit two people.
She became aware of how close Ivar was beside her. Which was not a choice either of them had made so much as a simple consequence of the space available, and the rain that was making the alternative very clear.
She pressed back against the rock face.
He stood at the edge of the shelter, close enough that the rain coming off the overhang was landing on his shoulder rather than on her, which she suspected was also not an accident.
A hard gust came sideways and pushed her into him before she could brace against it.
She caught herself with a hand against his arm and straightened, but the wind had its own ideas and the space had its limits. There was simply nowhere to go that wasn't into the rock or into him.
She stopped trying to go anywhere.
He reached up to steady her, before unclasping his cloak.
"Ye dinnae have tae she started.
"Yer teeth are about to start," he said, which was an outrageous exaggeration and also, she suspected, approximately true.
He pulled off his cloak, then stepped in behind her and settled it over her shoulders.
For a moment, his hands lingered at her collar, adjusting the fold where it sat against her throat. In the process, his knuckles brushed the side of her neck. Barely, but still, she felt it.
Then he stepped back.
The wool was warm with the deeper heat of something worn for hours against a man's body. It carried the rain, the cold air, and something unmistakably him beneath it. She drew it closed at the front with fingers that were entirely steady and refused to think about that at all.
"Thank ye," she said.
He said nothing. His eyes were on the rain.
The storm roared off the overhang and turned the path below into a running stream. It hammered the shoulders of his men until they were shapes in grey, hunkered and thoroughly soaked.
"Dae they ever complain?" she said, noting how patiently they tolerated the storm.
"About what?"
"The weather. Standin’ in it. Any of it."
He glanced at her.
"Erikson complains. Constantly. The others have learned to tune him out."