He closed the door behind him and crossed to the hearth.
"You were supposed to stay in bed."
She held up the book. "I got bored."
He lowered himself into the chair across from her, the wood creaking under his weight, and stretched his legs toward the fire. He looked tired, worn at the edges in a way she had not seen before.
"Tormund?"
"Handled." His eyes dropped to the book in her lap. "What did you find?"
She turned the book so he could see the page. Thornfield Pass. His own handwriting crowding the margins.
"You named them," she said. "The orc dead. In a Valdaran history that didn't bother to count them."
"Someone should."
"The Archive doesn't do this." She traced the edge of the page with her fingertip, careful not to smudge the ink. "We preserve. We catalogue. We don't—" She stopped. "We don't argue with the text."
"Then your Archive is incomplete."
She laughed, a small huff of air that surprised her. "Yes. It is."
His eyes met hers. "You are holding that book very carefully," he said.
She looked down. Her fingers had curled around the spine, pressing it against her chest, the fur slipping off one shoulder. She had not noticed.
She should put it back. She should return to the bed, where he had told her to wait, and let him finish what he started. Her body remembered what his mouth had done. Her body wanted more.
But her mind was turning over the marginalia, the names, the careful corrections written into hostile text. The patience required. The discipline. The grief, compressed into ink and pressed into margins.
"How long did it take you?" she asked. "To annotate all of them?"
"Years," he said. "I read slowly. I verify. Some names I had to recover from warriors who remembered. Some I never recovered at all."
"The ones you couldn't recover—"
"I noted their absence." His jaw tightened. "An unnamed death is still a death. It should be marked."
She thought of Corvin. Twenty-three soldiers in a census. A body that never came home.
"Yes," she said. "It should."
The fire crackled. The fur had slipped further, baring her shoulder, the upper curve of her breast. She did not pull it up. She watched him watching her, and she saw the moment his gaze dropped to her shoulder. Traveled lower. Came back to her face.
"You are still not in bed," he said.
"No."
He rose from his chair and took the volume from her hands. Set it on the table beside the chair without looking at it. His attention was fixed on her, on the fur slipping down her arm, on the skin it revealed.
His hands closed over the arms of the chair, caging her. The wood groaned under his grip. He leaned down until his face was level with hers, close enough that she could see the firelight reflected in his eyes, the faint lines at their corners, the way his nostrils flared as he breathed her in.
"You smell like my bed," he said. "Like my furs. Like me."
Her breath caught. "Is that—"
"It is exactly what I want."
