“If this is true, Sig, then it’s time you and I discussed something important.” Frida settles into a seat beside the fire.
He nods to Avina while he massages his temples, releasing her from the strained situation.
She doesn’t need telling twice and nearly runs up to his bedroom, half wishing she would have lingered to eavesdrop on them and half rejoicing in leaving him to deal with Frida.
Growing up alone did little to prepare for the caged sensation of being someone’s captive, even if Sigvid’s temperament of late has been tender, almost like he might care about her well-being. Almost as if he may even like parts of her personality.
Do I reciprocate his affection?
After everything that man has done to her, can she look at him again as if he is the prince who would rescue her from her miserable existence?
Everything he has done? You loved his axe handle buried in your womanhood.Avina argues with herself. Her conscience versus whatever inferno desires he has created.
She slumps against the doorframe to his bedroom. Since leaving the arena, the tug-and-pull of her emotions has become exhausting.
A blur of orange fur tears from the study, sliding down the hallway toward her and into the bedroom.
“Carrot Chubbs?” She questions the fat cat, now perched on the bed panting.
A flash of black zooms under her legs, bouncing across the room. Chubbs watches it with narrowing unamusement in his eyes. Nellie reappears at the foot of the bed, crouched low. Chubbs growls in warning right as Nellie pounces. The cats roll in furious shrieks and hisses off the bed and across the floorboards.
She sighs, knowing the two needed to work out the tiff between the younger and older cat.
The bathtub nearly summons her for a hot bath. She is halfway across the bed chamber when a board underneath her feet creaks as if it’s loose. She kneels, peering between the boards, catching sight of a shiny object. Glancing over her shoulder at the open door, she decides to be nosey.
After removing the loose floorboard with a dagger she finds in the washroom, she sits back on her heels.
Oh. My. Goddess!
Squished into the cavity is every item she sent him throughout the war.
A silver compass embedded with rubies after the Drengr lost themselves in the Great Forest, an unopened bottle of dryer than the desert Ridge wine, and every letter she ever sent him include the many items inside.
Only two gifts are missing: the jars of her floral-scented bath soap and the lock of her hair. Joetta was vehemently against sendingsomething so intimate as her hair. He must have burned the golden curl the second he withdrew it from her rambling message meant to distract him.
One of the letters sits open, revealing her curly handwriting. Since it isherletter, there would be no harm in re-reading her own words…
Her brow furrows as her eyes scan it. Of all the correspondences, why is this the one Sigvid last read?
In it, she chastised him for restraining her favorite wandering merchants, particularly the woman from whom she purchased her signature lavender and rose bath soap.
“Wait,” she says aloud, realizing she had sent him an entire set of her jarred bath necessities as a jest.
Her curls fly over her shoulder as she sprints into the washroom, re-examining the jars she has been using.
How did she not realize these are the same ones sold by her merchant? Did he keep these in his washroom?
Such a minute gesture shakes everything she thought she knew of Sigvid. She can finally see through her own frustration and hatred for him to the complicated mess at his center.
What if fate has woven a tapestry of our lives? What if the gods have always destined the Keeper and the Guardian to unite for the stones?
By mid-afternoon, Frida releases Sigvid from whatever forced discussion she insists on having with him. Avina watches through his study windows as he stomps outside with his axes to cut firewood.
Since they arrived, he has added six more piles of stacked wood running the length of the inn. Judging by his earlier gait, he is about to slew enough logs for a seventh row.
Avina takes up residence in one of the spare rooms as the sun dips into the western corner of the sky, painting the cloudless blue in brushstrokes of deep orange. She has readied herself alongside Sigvid once or twice, but this evening soiree with Thrain has her anxious. Especially when her only allies–Grim and Thora–will not be present.
“Is that the dress you are wearing, Avie?” Frida knocks on the door. Behind her stands a footman bearing a medium-sized chest in his arms.
