Page 80 of Iron Beneath the Snow

She did not answer at once.

Something in her expression stilled too completely, as if the response had already formed and she was deciding whether to let it be heard.

“I already did.”

The words came evenly. But not without cost.

Soren studied her for a moment longer, as though testing whether the answer would hold under pressure.

He inclined his head once—acknowledgment, not agreement—and turned away.

Eira did not move until he had gone.

Chapter 22: Awake

Eira

She did not return to her rooms immediately.

Instead, she walked the corridor without paying attention to its turns, aware only of the steady contact of stone beneath her feet and the faint, repetitive rhythm of her own steps. It was only after she passed the same break in the wall a second time that she realized she had already been here, that she had been moving without direction long enough for the space to repeat itself.

Only then did she turn back.

Inside, the room felt smaller than it had that morning, though nothing in it had changed.

She closed the door quietly and remained where she was, her hand still resting against the wood, as if the pressure of it might anchor something still shifting beneath the surface.

The silence here did not behave like the silence outside. It did not hold structure. It did not respond.

It simply remained.

She crossed to the basin and reached for the water, intending something controlled, but the movement came sharper than she had planned, cold spilling across her hands and face in a way that forced her to inhale more abruptly than she liked. The shock steadied her for a moment, but not enough to sustain itself.

When she lifted her head, the reflection in the surface wavered, disrupted by the movement she had not controlled as cleanly as she would have preferred.

The braid had loosened again.

A few strands had come free entirely, falling across her cheek, no longer held in the pattern she had set in the morning.

She reached to fix it, then stopped, her fingers lingering instead at the side of her neck, where the mark lay hidden beneath the fabric.

For a moment, she did not move.

Then she pressed her hand there—not enough to hurt, but enough to feel the place it had flared, as though pressure alone might confirm that she had not imagined the connection, had not read something into it that was not there.

It did not answer.

That, more than anything, unsettled her.

Her breath caught, not sharply, but in a way that disrupted its rhythm, forcing her to draw it back under control, slower this time, deeper, until it aligned again with something she could maintain.

There had been no structure to what happened on the ridge.

No ritual to contain it. No language to place it safely within expectation.

Only a body, placed where it would be found, and a response that had already begun before anyone had spoken.

Her eyes closed briefly.