"Ye would ken, as ye have fallen intae the sea," another said. "Twice."
"Aye, and both times I was drier than this."
A third man looked up at the sky with the expression of someone who had a grievance they intended to file formally. "
"We couldnae have found the overhang ten minutes earlier," he said.
"We found it when we found it," Torvald said, from further along the rock face, wringing out his hood with the resignation of a man who had made peace with weather a long time ago.
"Aye well." The man looked down at his boots, which were soaked through and through. "Tell that tae me feet."
She stepped forward first, out from under the overhang, and the cold air hit her face. She breathed it in, trying to ignore that her heart was beating fast.
She snuggled deeper into his cloak.
The sea somehow seemed bigger than she remembered.
She had seen it years ago from a hillside so far inland it had looked calm. Back then, it had been a grey strip laid flat between sky and land, distant enough to seem like something God had placed there for decoration.
Her nurse had stood beside her that day, wrapping a shawl tighter around both of them to keep out some of the wind, and when Matilda had asked what lay beyond it, the woman had said,Men go there tae disappear.
At the time, Matilda had thought that sounded romantic. Now it seemed a far more practical warning.
Up close, the worst thing about it was not even its size, though it stretched so far that her eyes could not see the place where it ended it. It was the movement. The constant heaving, the sense that the whole thing breathed and shifted according to its mood.
Her fingers tightened on the edge of the cloak.
"First time on open water?" Ivar asked.
He had come to stand beside her without making any sound, which should not have been possible in a man of his size, yet somehow always was.
"Nay," she said automatically, and then, because there was no point in trying to preserve a lie he could clearly see through, she added, "Aye."
She did not look at him, but she could sense that his mouth had moved.
Before them, the birlinns sat low in the grey water, rising and dipping with a confidence that she found unsettling. The men moved around them with easy familiarity, coiling rope, checking tackle, stepping in and out of the shallows as though it was no stranger than crossing a courtyard.
Watching them ought to have reassured her. Instead, it only made her feel more keenly that she did not belong among people who treated the sea as a thing that could be managed.
"How dae we get in?" she asked.
"Here."
He had already moved toward the nearest birlinn.
The boat rocked lightly at the edge of the water as one of the men steadied it. Matilda looked at the narrow gap between shore and hull and considered, with complete seriousness, whether dignity might be preserved by refusing.
She drew breath, ready to announce that she could manage.
Ivar's hands closed around her waist before the first word left her mouth.
It happened so quickly she did not have time to object. One moment she was on the stones, the next the world shifted under her, and she was being set inside the birlinn with both hands on the rail and her pulse somewhere at the base of her throat.
The lift itself had been clean. Efficient. Effortless.
Which was precisely the problem.
He had not warned her. Had not strained. Had not seemed to think twice about taking hold of her and moving her where he wanted her.