Chapter Text
The day Floki's family arrived, the air in the village was thick with whispers and the smoke from a dozen cookfires. Klaus, ten years old and already simmering with a frustration he couldn't name, watched from the shadow of the great longhouse. He saw the ox-cart creak to a halt, saw the big, bearded man swing down and clap his hands together, assessing the soot-stained smithy with a craftsman's eye. He had the wide, easy stance of a man who had never questioned his right to occupy space. Klaus, who had spent years watching his father fill a room with menace rather than warmth, noticed the difference.
But his gaze slid past him quickly. Past the woman with the kind, distant face and the traveling cloak stained with plant matter. She was reaching for her husband's hand, and he was lifting her with ease. His gaze slid past the older boy and girl who clambered out of the cart with weary curiosity, already cataloguing their new surroundings with the practiced efficiency of children who had moved before. It landed on the youngest daughter and stopped.
She wasn't doing anything, not like the others, who were performing the necessary theatre of arrival. She had hopped down from the cart and was just standing, her honey-blonde hair tangled from the wind, her traveling dress muddied at the hem. But her hazel eyes were not on the people gawking. They were on the line of ancient oaks that bordered the settlement to the north. She had tilted her head, only slightly, as if listening to a conversation happening just beyond his hearing.
Strange, he thought. He looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. No one had. They were all watching the father, the mother, and the older children. The girl with the tilted head and the far-off gaze was already invisible to them.
---
Over the next few days, a pattern emerged. The village mistrusted the healer-mother, Rena, for her southern ways and her quiet, examining stare. But they needed her, and the need was a jagged hook in all their self-satisfied wariness. Old Healer Sven's most potent remedy was a cup of well-water and a weary sigh, offered with such weighty ceremony that most people felt shamed out of staying sick. Rena's poultices, made from roots and leaves Klaus had never seen, actually drew fever. Two days after her arrival, she had pulled a splinter of iron from Floki's apprentice without so much as a prayer or an incantation, just quick hands and a confidence that made the apprentice look faintly embarrassed for having screamed. So they watched her, wary but grudgingly respectful, which in this village was the highest possible form of welcome.
Freydis was largely ignored. She was just a girl, seen trailing behind her mother to the forest edge or sitting silently by the river, her small hands sifting through moss. Girls who were quiet and undemanding were essentially furniture to most of the village. Klaus had noticed, with a cold clarity that had been growing in him for two or three years now, that adults paid attention to children only when they were beautiful enough to flatter, troublesome enough to punish, or useful enough to exploit. The quiet ones were allowed to exist, which he supposed was their own kind of freedom.
His own mother, Esther, was different around Rena. Not openly hostile, but there was a careful, tight politeness about her, the kind she reserved for people she was uncertain how to manage. His father, Mikael, just scowled and called them "forest-folk," using the phrase the way he used most things, as a short club to end any conversation that might require nuance. Klaus, feeling the familiar low burn of rebellion against his father's easy contempt, found his interest in the new family hardening into a point of focus. If Mikael disliked them, that was practically an endorsement.
---
One afternoon, he was meant to be practicing sword forms with wooden sticks in the yard. A tedious exercise that Mikael insisted upon with the unwavering certainty of a man who had never considered that boredom might itself be a kind of violence. Klaus had managed twenty minutes of dutiful chopping before he'd thrown the stick into the dirt and walked away. Let him find out. Let him say something about it.
He was slinking past the smithy now, drawn by the rhythmic clang of Floki's hammer, a sound that had already become part of the village's daily grammar. The man had a quality about him that Klaus couldn't quite articulate. He laughed too easily for a craftsman, sang fragments of songs no one knew, and talked to his tools the way the priest talked to the gods, with familiar affection and specific requests. The other adults treated him with polite bewilderment. Klaus found him interesting in the same way he found all people interesting who didn't seem to care what anyone thought of them.
He saw Freydis then, sitting on an upturned log near the tree line, her back to him. She had a small wooden bowl in her lap, grinding something with a flat stone in a slow, patient circle. Her whole posture was absorbed, interior. She wasn't watching for anyone.
Curiosity, sharper than his boredom, propelled him forward. He moved carefully, picking his way over a patch of dry leaves, telling himself he was testing his own stealth. He was three feet behind her when she spoke.
"You'll scare the finches. They're in the hazel bush."
Klaus froze, one foot still in the air. He hadn't made a sound. He was certain he hadn't made a sound. "How did you know I was here?"
She turned to look at him over her shoulder, unhurried. Her eyes were startlingly clear in the afternoon light, which mixed hazel with threads of something greener running through it. "I heard your belt buckle. It jingles when you try to walk softly. The little metal piece, the one on the left side, caught on a twig just there." She nodded toward the ground behind him, then turned back to her grinding.
He looked down at his belt. His father had given it to him at Yule, leather and iron-hammered fittings, a thing Mikael had presented with the air of someone delivering a great honor. Klaus had worn it every day since, in the automatic, obedient way he did most things that came from his father, without thinking about whether he actually wanted to. Now he grabbed the fitting on the left side and squeezed it, testing, and felt the faintest rattle.
"I don't jingle," he said, even though he clearly did.
The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile. She kept grinding.
Klaus stepped closer and peered into the bowl, looking for something to find fault with, because it was easier than acknowledging he'd been heard coming. The contents smelled sharp and green, astringent in a way that caught in the back of his throat.
"What's that? Some poison?"
"Willow bark," she said, her tone exactly as patient as if he'd asked a reasonable question. "For Helga's headache. She reads too many of Papa's runes and squints at the carving until her head aches. The willow helps better than the squinting."
He grunted. He sat down on the log, leaving a careful distance between them, and picked up a stray feather from the grass. He turned it in his fingers, not looking at her directly. "My mother says your mother's a völva."
The grinding paused. Just a fraction of a beat, the barest hesitation, before it resumed.
"My mother's a healer."
"Same thing, isn't it?"
"It's not." She didn't say it sharply or defensively; she just stated it the way she might say that the bowl was wooden. "A völva sees the threads of fate and moves along them. My mother sees the threads of sickness. She sees where something's gone wrong in the body, in the blood, where something's been cut or knotted that should be free. Sometimes those are the same thing. But it's not the same work."
The distinction settled on Klaus with unexpected weight. He had never thought about it that way, that there might be different kinds of seeing, different purposes. His mother dealt in words that wound and silences that pressed like stones. His father dealt in judgment, delivered loudly and without appeal. Neither of them had ever offered him a category into which to fit what they were. He wasn't sure they saw themselves as anything but right.
He looked at Freydis properly. Her hands were stained with soil and plant dyes, dark under the nails in a way that no amount of washing would entirely shift. Her dress was simple, her hair still tangled from the journey, and she had apparently made no effort to change either of those facts. There was no artifice about her, no careful arrangement of herself for his benefit or anyone else's. She was just present. Entirely, quietly, unself-consciously there, the way the log was there and the hazel bush was there.
It made something in his chest feel strange. Not bad. Just strange, like a muscle being used that hadn't been used before.
"Don't you ever want to just run into the forest and not come back?" he asked. The words were out before he'd decided to say them. He hadn't said them to anyone before. He'd barely admitted the thought to himself, keeping it in the very back of his mind where his father's voice couldn't reach it.
Freydis stopped grinding. She looked at the tree line for a long moment, and he had the odd feeling she was genuinely considering the question rather than just filling time before her answer.
"Why would I run?" she said at last. "The forest is always right here. You have to be quiet enough to listen to it." She glanced at him sideways. "Most people aren't."
It was such an odd, simple answer. Not a yes, not a dismissal, not an attempt to sound wise beyond her age. Just an observation, offered the same way she offered everything, without performance. He didn't know what to do with it. He turned it over in his mind the way he was turning the feather in his hands, looking for the angle that made it make sense.
She scraped the ground bark into a small square of cloth, folding the edges over with practiced neatness and tying it with a length of thread from around her wrist. Then she reached behind the log and pulled out another, smaller bowl, holding a handful of wild strawberries. They were tiny, the forest kind, not the cultivated berries from the village gardens, each one barely larger than his thumbnail and so dark red they were nearly wine-colored. She set the bowl on the log between them with no ceremony, no comment, no expectation. Just an offer.
Klaus looked at the berries. Then at her face. There was no pity in it, no performance of generosity. She wasn't watching to see how he'd react. She had already looked back at the hazel bush, tracking something in the branches with calm interest.
He reached over and took two. He put them in his mouth, and the taste struck him like something remembered rather than new, summer distilled down to its essential character, sweet and sharp and a little wild.
"They're good," he said.
"I know." She took a small handful for herself, unhurried. "They grow by the old oak, the one that leans east. The birds miss them because they're too small and too dark for them to see easily against the ground cover. Which means there are always more of them than there should be."
"You found that on your first day here?"
"I found it on my first morning." She said it without pride. Just a fact. "I woke early, and the forest was there."
Klaus took two more strawberries. He didn't ask permission, and she didn't track whether he was taking his fair share. They just sat there, the two of them, while the sound of Floki's hammer rang out in a steady, almost musical rhythm and the scent of crushed willow bark hung between them in the warm air.
The finches in the hazel bush, apparently having determined that the two still figures were not a threat, had returned to their quick, darting work among the catkins. Klaus watched them. He could not have explained why he was still sitting here instead of finding something to break or someone to argue with. He couldn't have explained why the silence felt like something given rather than something merely absent.
He was still sitting there when the hammer stopped for the day, and the light went amber through the oak leaves, and neither of them had said anything in some time, and he realized he hadn't thought about his father once.
It wasn't friendship, not yet. He didn't know what it was. But when Freydis finally stood and picked up her bowls to take them back, and said only "Tomorrow the blackberries will be ripe, if the birds don't get to them," he understood that it was an invitation of some kind, quietly extended, with no requirement that he accept it.
He didn't say anything back. He picked up the feather he'd been turning in his fingers all afternoon and set it on the upturned log, for no reason he could have named.
Then he walked back across the settlement toward the longhouse, where his father's voice was already rising in some evening displeasure, and he held onto the wild taste of strawberries like something he'd found and not yet decided whether to keep.