Chapter Text
It was still dark. The chill of the air and the sounds from the lake below told Bard that morning was upon them. He adjusted his neck on the pillow and stretched out his arms so that he could get up; his two youngest were still curled up behind him, so now he was cramped up against the damp, musty clapboards. The blankets were completely in possession of his children. He might as well get out of bed.
Carefully, he got to his knees and clambered over the offspring who had taken refuge in his bed from a particularly loud thunderstorm. He lit a single tallow candle which filled the tiny area with light. Behind a cloth partition in the area he called his “room” he put on his clothes from the day before. The rustling must have been more substantial than he realized, because Bain was awake when he came back around the partition.
“Go wake your sister.”
A positively mischievous glint shone in the boy's eye, and Bard clarified that his sister was to be woken nicely. Once Bain had gone, Bard tidied the sleeping space. It was more of a habit from army days than anything else. The family didn't have enough possessions to make much of a mess. Sigrid came back with Bain. The soot on her hands and knees told him that she had already been up, about to stoke the fire in the fireplace for the day.
“I'm going up river today,” Bard told them quietly, “I expect you to be good and stay out of trouble.” They always were. “Sigrid?”
“Yes Papa?”
“I can't go with Tilda for her fitting, so could you…?”
His daughter smiled wanly, adjusting her threadbare smock and transferring the soot to otherwise-clean cloth. He wished he could afford more than one new garment at a time for his children.
“When I come back I'll have some fish with me, so I'll need you and Bain to get the barrel ready for salting.”
Before leaving the room, he pulled the blankets up a little higher on Tilda. He probably shouldn't indulge his little girl's tendency to sleep late. Ah well.
He beckoned them to go with him around the screen which separated his sleeping space from the kitchen and dining table. Curtains had been pulled back from the other windows. Some of the rays of dawn were peeking in, but the light was supplemented by a number of candles. There was bread on the table next to the cutting board which had a block of cheese impaled by a knife. At Sigrid's favorite place setting was a half-finished sketch of the food; a trait she shared with her mother. He cut off a slice of the cheese and tore a chunk of bread away. The long-suffering sigh of his eldest told him that she found his actions as annoying as her mother had. With a smile, he gave those to her and walked away, opting instead to take the already-prepared basket of lunch.
“Papa,” Sigrid whined.
“Food is for eating,” he teased. He knew this would not deter her from her passion for drawing. When Bain laughed at Sigrid, he added, “It's also not for stuffing into the trumpets of the town heralds.”
“Ha-ha,” his daughter taunted.
The two children tagged along behind him in the growing light of morning, all the way to where his barge was docked. They helped push him off – though he'd been doing this on his own long before they'd been born – and as an afterthought, he called back, “Don't forget to eat that breakfast!”
He could just make out Sigrid's exasperated huff.