Page 40 of Bought By the Jotunn
“My heat.”
He considers this for a while. Then he nods, the way he nods about everything. Slow. Like he’s filing it away.
“Good,” he says, and leaves.
She says a word in Jötunn at dinner and gets it wrong.
“Hrothvan,” she says, reading from the book propped against the bread basket.
“Hrothvän.The vowel is longer.”
“Hrothvän.”
“Better.”
“What about this one?” She points. Her finger on the page, the nail still dark with soil from the garden. She’s been digging all afternoon. Her hands are rough and brown and she hasn't bothered to wash them because she’s reading and the reading won't wait and food is a thing that happens between pages.
“Rauðminän,” I say.
She goes still. She knows this word. She’s heard it. In the dark, in the heat, in the moments where the old language breaks loose and I can't hold it back and she doesn't want me to.
“That’s in the book?”
“It’s an old word. The histories use it.”
“What does the history say it means?”
“The person you came back for. The fire you keep lit.”
She looks at the page. Looks at me. Her eyes are warm and her face is open and she’s not guarding anything.
“Say it again.”
“Rauðminän.”
She tries. “Rauðminän.” Closer this time. The vowels are still wrong but the shape of it is right. The sound of my language in her mouth, in her voice, filling the hall.
“Again,” I say.
“Rauðminän.”
She smiles. Not the controlled almost-smile she gives to strangers. The real one. The one that changes her whole face and makes my hands grip the table edge because if I don't hold onto something I'm going to reach for her.
I reach for her anyway.
The book slides off the table. The bread basket follows. She laughs against my mouth — a real laugh, surprised and warm — and her hands come up to my face and she’s saying the word again, broken by the kiss, syllables scattered between her lips and mine.Rauð — minän —
I pick her up. The table gets knocked aside. Her hands find the back of my neck and she says the word one more time, correctly, right against my ear, and the fire in the pit flares bright enough to throw our shadows across the ceiling.
“Show-off,” she says.
“You started it.”
“I was reading.”
“You were reading my name for you.”
She pulls back. Looks at me. Her hands on my face, small and rough and warm. Soil under her nails. Rosemary on her cheek from where she leaned against the jar.
“Take me to bed,” she says. “The book will be there in the morning.”
The book is there in the morning. So is she. So is the bread basket, on the floor where it fell. The fire has burned down to embers and the hall is warm without it. The comb is on the table where she set it last night. Her garden is outside the south wall, green things pushing up through dark earth in a place where nothing has grown in centuries.
I lie on the platform with her back against my chest and her breathing slow and deep.
My arm tightens around her and I listen to the hall.
It’s not silent anymore. The drip of meltwater from the eaves. The creak of the timber frame adjusting to the thaw. The sound of her breathing. Small sounds. Living sounds. The kind that fill a space without crowding it.
The fire doesn't need tending. Neither do I.
