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Hytham was standing on the dock when Eivor and her crew returned from their latest raid. He might have just been standing and looking out at the view (he was a reflective sort of person), but Eivor seized on the opportunity for a conversation with eagerness. Dag had been pointing out her “mistakes” in leading the raid all the way back to Ravensthorpe. If Eivor heard him harp on what Sigurd would have done for a moment longer, she was going to do something unwise.
“Hytham!” He was already looking in her direction, but Eivor hailed him to make it very clear to Dag that whatever conversation he thought had been happening was over. The wooden boards of the dock creaked under her boots as she stomped over, and an idle thought occurred that it was one more thing on a long, long list to fix up.
“I see the raid went well,” said Hytham, eyeing the splatters of blood across Eivor’s armor. She grinned at him, pleased even if he hadn’t meant it as a compliment.
“It did. We bring home a bounty that will make our settlement stronger.” She could hear the ruckus of the crew bringing everything they had seized out from the shallow belly of the ship. “If you have any drafts in that new bureau of yours, just let me know.”
“The building is excellent,” Hytham assured her. “You made it well. I suppose the winds must blow harsher in Norway than they do here, and you are used to guarding against them.”
“That’s true. This country seems to have much milder winters.” Though winter had already been half leached away from the land when they arrived, snow curling back to reveal a welcome growing green on the rolling hills. “But harsher still than the ones where you come from,” Eivor added, trying to lead back to where she had been going with that comment.
“That is also true.”
Maybe talking about drafty buildings was the wrong way to go. Hytham seemed not too interested. “I should like to visit it someday,” Eivor said, glancing down as she raised her arm to examine once again the beautiful blade, Sigurd’s gift. “Maybe we could go a-viking n Miklagard like Sigurd wanted to, and come away with more treasures.” She imagined outfitting a whole crew with the cunning little weapons. It was a beautiful mental sight.
Hytham smiled faintly. “Perhaps one of the Zealots here, if you find them, may know something which will lead us south. Or - you, and your brother and Basim, I suppose.”
“You’re still not feeling better?” At least she had stopped herself from clapping him on the shoulder in greeting.
“I am...healing well. But slowly.” Haytham’s words were as stiff as the way he held himself, now that Eivor was looking closely enough to notice it. She put a brief hand to his shoulder, holding herself back from any force.
“Don’t hurry yourself through healing from the injury you took. If you let it take its time, you’ll only be stronger once you come out the other side.”
“It is easy to say that when you are looking at it from your perspective,” said Hytham. “I must remain here while you roam England, hunting our enemies.”
It was true that they were really more Hytham and Basim’s enemies than more Kjotves to Eivor. At least, they were before she’d started killing them whenever she crossed paths with one. They had probably started taking it personally. “Maybe you could take up weaving,” Eivor suggested. “When I was wounded and needed to stay still for long periods of time, my foster-mother would set me to work to while away the hours. And if you’re lucky and know someone who can sew, you get new clothes out of it afterward.”
Hytham did smile at that, properly. He seemed to find the idea humorous. “You would have me dressing like one of the Raven Clan, packed into your boat with you as soon as I could hold a sword.”
“Well, why not? You’re a bold enough warrior, I saw that much myself.” No ordinary man would have thrown himself at Kjotve alone, even if it had gone poorly for Hytham. “Unless your people are like a clan of their own, and you feel you can’t have another.”
“Basim and I are proud to be the Raven Clan’s allies.” And Hytham would not speak another word on the subject.
Another day, when Eivor was struggling with a few others to raise the beams for a new building, she saw Hytham dithering on the fringes of the knot of activity. He remained watching long enough that, once nothing would fall apart if Eivor let go, she went over to speak to him again.
“You could have lifted that whole log by yourself,” Hytham blurted out once she got close. Eivor laughed, wiping a hand over her forehead. She’d taken off most of her layers in anticipation of hard work, leaving herself sans sleeves, and Hytham seemed to find it very distracting.
“I’m flattered you came over just to remind yourself of my strength.” Eivor crossed her arms over her chest, tucking her hands behind her biceps.
Hytham flushed. “That is not-!” He paused, regaining a measure of control over his voice. “I meant to apologize for being so curt, on the docks the other day. I have thought many thoughts recently, on your clan and my own order, and...not all of them have been good.”
Frowning, Eivor gave him a look over. His white garb, very similar to Basim’s, was cleaner than anyone else might have been able to manage, but Hytham himself looked tired and less than happy. “Come to dinner in the hall tonight,” Eivor said eventually.
“I usually do-”
“I don’t mean like normal.” Many in Ravensthorpe enjoyed Eivor’s - well, Sigurd’s via Eivor, technically - hospitality in the hall, even if they weren’t holding a public feast. Not everybody was as well kitted-out with a kitchen as everybody would like to be. “Come and sit up with me, and we’ll talk and drink as much as we need to sort this out.”
“Thank you, but I do not drink.”
“No?” Eivor said, blindsided. “Not at all?”
“No,” said Hytham, not even a little apologetic. “Basim will, to blend in, but he is...well, a little more forgiving of himself, as far as faith mixes with his work.”
“Faith to who?”
“To God, of course. Not quite the same God they have in their monasteries here in England, though there are similarities. In the kingdoms near Miklagard, where I come from, we abstain from drinking to keep God with us, and keep ourselves from falling into evil moods or ways.”
“I suppose I can see the logic in that,” Eivor said thoughtfully. She had known enough, and fought with enough, mean drunks in her time.
“Though I don’t think that of you at all, just because you enjoy your mead,” Hytham added hastily.
“Ha! Enjoy is one word for it. I don’t think you know what you’re missing, but I won’t force you, Hytham. If you ever join my table for a feast, though, the conversation is going to end up a little one-sided.”
“Only if I try to remain there talking until midnight,” said Hytham, going along with Eivor’s attempt to lighten the tone. “You Norse drink enough each day to keep yourselves sensible through a riverful of mead.”
“I do.” Eivor glanced pointedly towards Dag, still stomping around trying to figure out the best way to get the next beam up. “Some of the rest of us tip over that edge a little sooner.”
“Yes, well...” Eivor caught Hytham swallowing nervously as she looked back. “I should leave you to your work.”
“But you will come?”
“...I would not dream of refusing.”
In the smoky, flame-warmed interior of Ravensthorpe’s great hall, Eivor had to bend her head close to Hytham as he spoke in order to hear him over the din of laughter, singing, and drinking around them.
“Late at night,” he confessed, “I often worry over my future. However I may heal, if I do not recover to Basim’s satisfaction, he may choose not to continue my apprenticeship.”
“Worrying about the future is your first mistake,” said Eivor, with the confidence of someone who had already drunk a full horn’s worth of mead. “What will happen will happen - I told you this when you showed me how to fall. Why dread the inevitable when it hasn’t happened yet?”
“I became Basim’s apprentice when I was still young. I do not know what to do - who I am - if I am not of the order.”
“Then this injury is a blessing in disguise.”
Hytham blinked at Eivor. He couldn’t comprehend her meaning, and seeing this, she leaned back leisurely in her chair and went on.
“If your life is so tied up in this order that you fall apart as soon as you must venture too far away from it, then maybe you have this time away from it for a reason.”
“To do what?” Did she mean that it was intended for him to have this strange, at-loose-ends time among the Raven Clan? “I never expected to have a normal life. I could not return to one.”
Eivor shrugged. “What’s a normal life? You’re from several kingdoms away, and I’m a Norse running around four different English kingdoms trying to get other Norse and Danes and Saxons to agree not to come raid us like they do other places. We do what we must.”
“But I have nothing to do.” Nothing besides scrounge for any details on the Order of the Ancients, and where they might be hidden away in England’s kingdoms. That was a long, difficult task that often left him with no more corners to peer into.
“I’ll find something for you, if you like. But it won’t be glamorous, and it won’t be like my tasks.” Eivor leaned forward to hold out her cup as Randvi passed by, and Randvi smiled as she refilled it. “There’s no shortage of work to be done.” Hytham thought she sounded a little tired.
“Your brother does you a disservice, to leave this all to you while he wanders,” Hytham observed. Eivor grimaced, but it might have been because of the huge gulp she’d just taken from her cup.
“He’s doing important work. The Ragnarssons could be powerful enemies, and he has to stick with them if he wants them to be friends instead. You wouldn’t like to have to fight off Ivarr, if he set his heart on taking this place apart.”
Hytham thought he definitely didn’t want to meet anybody that was intimidating by Eivor’s standards. “But then you have much work as well,” he pointed out, “running around, as you say, after everybody who isn’t the Ragnarssons. If you are in charge of running this settlement, keeping it functional and its people happy, you should be here all the time, like a queen on her throne.” He snapped his mouth shut, mortified. Where had that come from?
Eivor looked pleased. “But I couldn’t stay here all the time,” she said, despite her warm reaction. “I like the excitement. You understand.”
“I believe I do.” Hytham missed excitement. Ravensthorpe held mostly drama and gossip, not excitement. Not unless Eivor was there.
“But I plan to be here for a few more days yet. Randvi is still gathering intelligence on where the next place we might find ready allies is, and until she’s finished altering her advice, she will give me none of it. I promise I will find something for you to occupy yourself with.”
“Thank you, Eivor.” Hytham meant to say something else, but he could not find the words for whatever it was. He looked at Eivor a moment longer, with the edge of her face outlined in flickering orange from the fire and the other cast in dramatic shadow. She did look quite regal. And with all the raiding she did, it wasn’t difficult to imagine her glittering with gold. Hytham thought - he thought-
Oh. Oh, dear.
Hytham made his excuses and left Eivor to make merry with her other companions and went straight to his bed in the corner of the newly-fashioned bureau, lay facedown with his head pressed into the pillow, and made a long, inarticulate, muffled noise.
It wasn’t that he disliked Eivor. He liked her a lot. Far too much to be reasonable. And what was he going to do with that? With his reaction being, every time she picked something up, to wonder how easily she might handle him, or when she smiled, to flush like an imbecile? He could only hope that she had drunk too much that night to notice anything in his behavior. Dear God, he had called her a queen even without drinking anything himself.
And it wasn’t as though he could do anything about it. Hytham knew nothing about how Norse men went about wooing women. He didn’t think Sigurd needed to have anything to do about it, not so long as it was Eivor who was concerned, but in addition to everything else (Hytham sighed into his pillow) Eivor had the whole of England at her disposal. More or less. And that meant everyone in England was available for perusal. She knew Ivarr Ragnarsson well enough to call him a friend, had been at a king’s side for his coronation, and was practically fostering in Sigurd’s place a prince of Mercia. In Ravensthorpe alone there were at least a dozen who were better matched to Eivor, warriors to rival her in strength. And in the ability to hold their mead. Eivor had only ever looked at him twice because he had foolishly injured himself trying to kill an enemy for her.
Hytham told himself he could bear it. Eivor was often away for weeks at a time. She would go eventually, and by her next return, he would have recovered his proper composure.
Eivor fulfilled her promise from their talk together, setting Hytham to combine his investigative skills with Randvi’s and help with more mundane matters when the Hidden Ones’ material dwindled. Hytham happened to glance to the side, curious to see the inside of the hall in daylight, and caught a glimpse of the interior of Eivor’s chambers. A tall spear gleamed, leaned up against the wall halfway through the process of being cleaned and polished. He looked away quickly, flushing, and hoped Eivor didn’t call him out on it.
But Eivor just left him alone with Randvi, and the prince Ceolbert. Both of them seemed to get along much better than they did with Hytham, or perhaps Hytham was trying too hard to be polite and reserved. He didn’t wish to idly spill the Hidden Ones’ secrets.
Even as welcome as something to occupy his mind was, he could not focus on Randvi’s rumors and reports of England. His fingers drifted over a narrow tear in the parchment on which the lady’s map was inked, perhaps a casualty of the Norsemen’s long journey to England, or their violent conquest of the bandits who had appropriated the hall.
“Are you well, Hytham?” Randvi asked. Hytham looked up with a start and realized that Randvi must have sent Ceolbert out on some errand; the two of them were relatively alone, cloistered in the map-room.
“I am,” he said. “My apologies.”
“Your mind seems distant.”
“Yes, I do not...it is not my intent. I am unused to such heavy work, after having so little to do, perhaps.” But that was not quite the truth in his lack of focus.
Randvi did not ask much of him, and he returned to the Bureau at the end of the day feeling disheartened, hoping she did not say anything unkind about his skills to Eivor.
Hytham was in the Bureau, not in the great hall, when the cries of alarm sounded and there was a clamor of clashing blades outside.
He had leaped to his feet and was checking the attachments on his hidden blade before he could think about it. He was still slow and stiff, yes - but if Ravensthorpe was threatened, there was no question of hiding without the intent to attack from whatever spot he hid in.
The undergrowth still grew strong and thick among the village’s houses, and Hytham was shielded by them and by the dark of the night as he crept out of the Bureau. There were curses and blood flying in the night air, which was sharp as a knife on every inhale. The fingers of his left hand curled, the abrupt end of his middle finger a potent reminder of the weapon burning like a coal against his arm. Where was Eivor?
The torches were still burning in the great hall, and there was fighting at the door. Hytham crept around, unseen by those already locked in combat, until he could see that space clearly. The muddy road was churned up by the deadly dance being held on top of it, and he could see Eivor now, fighting alongside Randvi and Dag. Eivor’s axe came down on her enemy, splitting his head from his neck in a single heavy hew. But behind her-!
Hytham leaped forward, heedless of the painful pull of muscle in his torso. Dag was already swinging around, but too late, too delayed. Eivor spun as Hytham reached past her, the night-cooled blade springing past his fingers through the gap it had once before created to strike deep into the enemy’s heart.
The man gasped a choking breath, the breathing of punctured lungs, as his sword fell from weakening fingers. He staggered, half pulling Hytham with him before Hytham could withdraw the blade. Eivor leaped back, the cold air rushing in to fill where her warm presence had been, and brought her axe down again.
Already three more enemies were swarming over the hill. Eivor and Hytham turned to face them. Hytham ducked behind the great tree, coming up around the other side and taking one man unwary in the back. His friend knocked Hytham to the ground, howling, but Eivor struck him in the arm. When he turned to face her, Hytham kicked at his legs, taking him to his knees and his neck to the height of Eivor’s axe. Eivor had no difficult job from there. Randvi, sword to sword, kept the third busy as Eivor hauled Hytham to his feet. He winced, sucking in a tense breath.
“You’re injured,” Eivor said, full of concern, still holding him by one arm. The battle paused for breath, too.
“I already was,” Hytham said tightly. Eivor’s gaze darted away, checking Randvi as she kicked her enemy’s corpse down the hill, looking to the shore where the screams were already turning to more triumphant yells. “Eivor - my arm?”
“Oh.” Eivor let go, her attention dragged back to him. But she took the same hand and turned his over, to look at the blade on the inside of his arm. “I see the trick with the finger now. It looked like you were going to punch him, and then-” She laughed. “What a surprise for him.” A fierce grin was growing on her face. Hytham was aware of every bit of his hand that was trapped in her warm grip.
“I am glad I could help,” Hytham said, helpless to summon up anything less trite. “I - it would be terrible to let you die.”
Eivor laughed again. “Oh, I’ll prove to you how alive I am.” She let go of his hand to catch him by the front of his shirt and press him back against the trunk of the tree, and press a kiss against his lips.
Hytham had time to react, but he could not have moved if God himself had come down and shoved him to the side. He melted into the heat of it, grasped with his unarmed hand for a similar purchase on Eivor to pull her closer. He found the crook of her neck a welcome spot, holding on with her braid lying heavy against the back of his hand and the ripple of an old scar under his thumb.
Eivor pulled away just far enough to say, breathless, her voice low in her throat, “You make a habit of throwing yourself at my enemies.”
Still dazed by the kiss, Hytham said, “It is my honor.”
“I like the sound of that.” Eivor’s nose was almost bumping against him, her face close enough that the billows of her breath in the chill air wafted against his cheek. The light at her back turned the wisps of hair at the sides of her face to gold thread.
Hytham leaned in and Eivor cupped the back of his head, turning the kiss to a bruising strength. He could have stayed there forever, but someone ruined the moment, a voice calling, “Eivor!”
Eivor sighed, pressing her forehead against Hytham’s. “Still more to be done,” she said, but remained there for a moment longer than necessary. “You shouldn’t stay in your Bureau so often. There are less drafty places to spend a night.”
Hytham flushed scarlet, suddenly putting together several threads from various conversations. “Another night,” he managed, half his mind too incredulous at the idea that Eivor would come on so strongly to him to be clever.
“I’ll hold you to that.” Eivor stepped away, but her hand lingered. Hytham raised his own, his fingers brushing hers as she let go. He kept that hand pressed to his chest as Eivor answered whoever had been calling for her, still pressed against the tree, and let his head fall back as a smile spread across his face. Perhaps Eivor had been right. It was, in some ways, a very good thing that Basim had left him behind to recover for so long. The rest of his time in Ravensthorpe was starting to look like a very bright future.