Chapter 217: Pull It Off

Chapter 217: Chapter 217: Pull It Off

Freja put her head in, saw the map, and whistled once under her breath. "That looks like a way to get lost with confidence."

"It’s a way to see what people used to believe was connected," I replied.

"Same outcome if you’re stupid about it." She glanced at Henrik. "She’s got the fever-watch face. Ingrid asked for an extra pair of eyes on Anna Moe’s sister in the lower dens—baby’s feeding hard and the mother’s colour isn’t right. Can your archive spare her."

Henrik’s jaw worked. "Two hours. Then back to the weights."

I went.

The body under my hands was real and warm and temporarily more important than any struck road. We adjusted feed, heat, and rest. The sister’s colour improved enough for Ingrid to stop looking at the door as if death might knock out of politeness.

When I climbed back to the library my fingers still smelled of milk and fever-sweat.

Henrik nodded me toward the map without asking for a report. He trusted Ingrid’s claim on my time more than he trusted my ability to rank priorities; the nod meant only that the priorities had shifted back.

I returned to the fold.

Oscar came through near midday with mud on his boots and a bundle of wintergreen. He stopped behind my shoulder, studied the sketch, and made a low sound.

"East fork’s real," he said. "I’ve seen the stone. Travellers still touch it. Past that, the trail goes thin fast—blowdown, old slides, no kept blazes. I took a day-loop that way two summers ago and turned around when the second marker was only a stump."

"Did you see claw cuts."

"On the stone, yes. Three. Weathered. I thought it was trail-humour or an old warning mark. Didn’t follow it like a map." He set the wintergreen down for Freja’s pots. "If you’re asking whether a person can walk it, yes—slowly, with food, with someone who can read deadfall. If you’re asking whether a person should, that’s Henrik’s sermon, not mine."

"I’m asking what it connects to in living memory."

Oscar shook his head. "Not mine. Ask coastal runners if you want stories. Ask me if you want a path that won’t kill you before supper."

He left. I wrote *Oscar: stone confirmed; trail thin; day-loop limit* under my copy of the fork.

---

By late afternoon the red-threaded sections were finished enough that the rest of the index could wait without feeling like cowardice. I closed my book, flexed the cramp out of my hand, and found Henrik watching from his end of the table.

"You have enough to be dangerous," he said.

"I have enough to be curious."

"Same species at your age." He capped his ink. "Here is the boundary. You may ask Oscar what a safe day-loop requires. You may ask market traders whether they still hear the struck names. You may not vanish onto an unkept fork because a dead keeper wrote *linked* under a claw mark."

He paused and lifted his head higher. "If the east road has something left to say, it will still be there after you have lived a winter in this valley without treating every margin as a summons."

"And if a caravan stone south of Ravnsund carries the same mark."

"Then someone else can have seen it first, and you can hear it second, in a kitchen, with witnesses, like a scholar instead of a child chasing a ghost story." His eyes were flat and not unkind. "You have made this room useful again. Do not repay that by becoming a missing-person note on my door."

I held his gaze. "I won’t ride out on a footnote."

"Good." He tipped his head at the weighted map. "Roll it before the damp takes the crease. Use the linen in the left drawer. Not your hands."

I rolled the map as ordered. The parchment whispered. When it was sleeved and returned to the back board, the ledger looked ordinary again—black, dull, closed. My own book stayed open on the table with the claw column, the fork, Oscar’s confirmation, and Freja’s grandmother saying *Vinterhall* like a warning that might once have been a place.

Felix appeared in the doorway with his coat already on and the expression he used when he had decided I needed air that had not been filtered through paper.

"Walk," he said.

We went down as far as the river wall. Market debris still clung to the lower path from the last trading day—a scrap of leaf-wrap, a smear of fish oil on stone. The water ran cold and loud. Felix leaned on the wall beside me and watched the current rather than my face.

"You’re further east in your head than you were this morning," he said.

"The map makes Norddal look like an edge instead of a centre."

"Edges still need people who stay." He shifted his weight. "I’m not asking you to stop reading. I’m asking you not to turn into someone who only lives on the page where the roads end."

"I’m here."

"Be here tomorrow too."

I put my shoulder against his. He left the quiet alone after that. Upstream a lantern moved between dens. Downstream the dark took the river whole.

In my pocket my fingers rested on the edge of my book where the claw column began, not as a summons, as a fact that had joined the ordinary inventory of my days—along with fever watches, paste pots, Freja’s bread, Henrik’s boundaries, and a stone on an east fork that travellers still touched without knowing why.

Behind us, on the library path, Freja’s voice rose once in complaint about a lid left off a pot. Henrik’s answer did not carry. The valley held both sounds and then let them go, as if the living dens had more claim on the night than any name the ledger had struck through.

===============

~Lila~

The keep ran ordinary until it didn’t.

Karin’s second day on the ridge paths ended without argument. Anders had the grain-weight draft ready for Eidsmark. A coastal bird sat in the roost for Astrid’s remaining hours in Bjornvik.

William and Lucas ran paired drills without drama. I did the work that did not need a speech and felt the day stack itself into muscle and lists the way stable days always did.

Magnus was present in pieces— at the hall edge, at the stable talk with Erik, a hand at the small of my back as we passed in the inner corridor—and then he was not, gone into the kind of absence that meant he was waiting rather than busy.

I felt it without naming it. By the time the evening meal thinned and Sigrid took the last slate out of my hands with a look that said she was done watching me postpone rest, the wanting had sat under my skin long enough to turn sharp.

I went up.

Our rooms held the lamp low and the fire banked. Magnus had already barred the outer door. He stood by the window with his shoulders set and his eyes on me the moment I entered, and there was nothing polite in the way he looked.

"You’ve been walking around all day like you didn’t notice," he said.

"Well, I noticed." I replied.

"Then come here." He moved closer and reached for my arm.

I did. He met me halfway and kissed me like he had been holding the line for weeks and the line had finally broken. Mouth hard, hand in my hair, the other already dragging my belt loose. I loved it.

I shoved his coat off his shoulders. He backed me toward the bed without breaking the kiss and when the edge of the frame hit my legs he lifted me and put me down on the furs with his weight following, one knee between my thighs, still dressed enough that the friction of cloth on cloth made me impatient.

"Pull it off," I said against his mouth.

He pulled my tunic up and over. I got his shirt open and my palms on the heat of his chest. Boots took longer than either of us liked. When he finally got my leggings down and his hand between my legs he found me already wet and made a sound low in his throat that went straight through me.

"Fuck," he muttered. "You’ve been like this under all that queen work."

"Now you’ve caught me." I smiled.

He stripped the rest of the way without ceremony. His cock was thick and already hard and veiny when it slapped against my stomach, and he didn’t ask if I was ready.

He just dragged the head through my clit once, twice, coating himself in my juices, then pushed in his cock with one steady drive that forced the air out of my lungs.

Full. Stretching. The kind of entry that left no room for thought.

I gasped and locked my legs around him and he started to fuck me in earnest—deep, heavy strokes that shoved me up the furs until I had to brace a hand on the headboard.