There is a thickness in the air. It hangs heavy over the small burh, dread blanketing the wooden palisades and steep, sloped roofs like frost in the night. Osythe wanders out of the thane’s hall, half-drunk and half-starved. Too warm to care for the thin coating of ice at her feet, for the fear in the pit of her stomach.
Her skin ill-fits her bones.
Numb hands, clumsy and cold, fashion together her old tent. Furnish it with that which she has wandered so long without. She aches at the familiar touch, thick fur coarse and soft—it grazes past her fingertips, but she feels them with the hands of another.
“Do not forget that you are Osythe, daughter of Cadda.” Alweard’s weeks old accusation lingers still with each drawn breath. It pools in her lungs like water from a mountain spring, somewhere cold and north with warm Yule logs... Osythe crawls into her tent, solitary and wounded as a beast fleeing hunters. What became of the wolves? The question does not linger long. She curls up on her bedroll, her pillow soft and foreign to her after so long on the road. Their houses had been well-crafted for the winter. Round and warm, with strong arms to hold her. Not like these. Not like the walls of her youth. She closes her eyes, and opens them only to be met by the glare of her helm, beaten and elegant; it’s flaxen plume the only thing to set her apart from the men beyond the walls. She reaches out to touch it, and the metal bites her skin.
“No daughter of Aelwen belongs among cowards.”
“They are not all cowards,” she murmurs, quiet as though Carys might hear her still, from the far away heights of Tur Morva. She cradles her helm in her lap and wonders—without it, could the others discern friend from foe? Oath-sworn from oath-less? Her hoarse, weary utterance falls only upon the walls of her tent. Osythe rolls onto her back. It is silent here; solitude deafening. She does not long for it anymore, and when she dreams, she dreams of beasts, great and twisted; of dark brows and bright fires, and the warmth of another’s touch.
The winter wind batters her small abode, but it does not beckon. There is no whisper slipping through the weather-beaten canvas, no words to welcome her return. There is naught but the flutter of fabric. The quiet fall of snow by night. The distant howling of wolves.
