I laughed, but let it fade when more than one servant hurried into the rooms to salt meat or slice bread.
On instinct, I kept my face turned away and placed my basket on the oak table. “I’ve brought you thistles. Thought you could make one of those herb tonics to sell at the harvest trade.”
Selena patted my cheek and inspected the basket. “Many thanks, my girl. You know, some would say the gods did not see fit to bless me with children, but I see it as they merely saw fit to send me a beautiful girl and mischievous boy in another way. Now, get dressed. We’ve a great deal to prepare. I’ll be needing your touch with the honey cakes.”
Selena slipped through the ropes threaded with bone beads that divided areas of the cooking rooms from the great hall of the longhouse. She recited a few soft chants under her breath as she went to ward away the unheard fossegrim fiddle.
My chest burned with affection. Cruel as life could be, everywhere my fate led me, I found a few souls to love. I lived with a lie, heavy and terrible at times, but I could not hate how my path brought me Kael and a few kind folk in this house.
Selfish of me. I should not be glad Kael was a servant in the house of his birth. The house of which he should be the heir.
For the first twelve summers, Kael lived as Jarl Jakobson’s first son. Born to the first wife who went to Salur after the heir was born.
When the second wife grew envious that her husband’s sonwas blessed with bone craft but her children were not, she threatened to take the jarl’s new family away from Skalfirth to her father’s house lest Kael be cast out, disowned, and the jarldom left to be inherited by her firstborn son.
It was a spineless act, but Kael was stripped of his inheritance, his house name, and left to serve his own blood as a stable boy—no family, no title.
Jakobson saw it as a mercy to allow his son to remain in the house at all.
All the folk living along the shores of the Green Fjord knew his birth house.
No one mentioned it.
Kael was given the name Darkwin, a title from a Skald saga of a prince who fell from his throne to the dark roots of the gods’ tree and lived out his days in shadows.
“It is the way of things, Ly,” Kael told me once when we were tasked with watching a line of fishing nets. Jakobson and Mikkal, his second son, had ridden past without a glance our way. “He hardly spoke to me anyway. Thorian said I remind him too much of my mother, and it pains him.”
“That is nothing but weakness,” I spat.
Kael nudged my shoulder. “Let it be and don’t harbor such ill will toward the man. It’ll pinch your face.”
I did not speak of it again, but I never was the first to bow the head to Jarl Jakobson.
Inside a narrow alcove in the back rooms shared by the servants, I ripped off my dirty tunic, next my trousers and boots, tossing them on top of the narrow cot where I slept.
From a small wooden crate, I scrounged through my meager belongings, snatching up a plain woolen dress.
Simple. Dull. Invisible.
With trembling fingers, I stroked my braid free and knotted my dark hair behind my neck. Another horn blared from the watchtowers.
“Shit.” By now the jarl would be greeting the Stav Guard, and the rest of us would be expected to do the same.
I hopped on one leg, trying to shove my toes inside thin leather shoes.
On this side of the longhouse, I could see a portion of the main road. Like a pestilence, Stav Guard entered the inner market, spilling their blight across our dirt roads and blotting out any peace that lived here moments ago.
Doors on homes opened and people staggered into the streets. Others wore bemused expressions or carried platters of offerings and ewers of honey mead for their arrival.
Once dressed, I added more stinging dye to my eyes, wrapped the knife I’d thrown at the scavenger in a linen cloth, and used a thin leather belt to secure the blade to the side of my calf. Kael would roll his eyes, but the notion of remaining unarmed near Stav Guard rushed a noxious sort of panic through my veins.
Outside, sunlight spliced through the mists of early morning, dewdrops sweated off bubbled glass windows, and the damp, briny air dug into my lungs with each breath. As if Skalfirth wanted me to always remember its taste, its scent.
As if it knew this day would change everything.
Already, Kael and Selena took up their places near the back gates with the rest of the household.
I scooped up a handful of berries from a basket on the back stoop and rolled them around in my palm until some of the iridescent juice dribbled through my fingers. A ruse, a distraction, I’d learned well over time.
