Chapter 199: You’re The Frostfang Healer

Chapter 199: Chapter 199: You’re The Frostfang Healer

*

Tuva came back. Her boots were wet to the ankle from the creek edge.

"The water’s good," she said quietly, for my ears. "Soil’s better than it looks. You could feed more than twenty families off the lower strip if someone cleared it properly."

I nodded once.

Bjorn caught the exchange. "You two planning to camp and move on, or is there a point to the inspection?"

I could have given him the easy version—passing through, needed water, moving south by morning. It would have been clean. It would have left this bowl of broken houses exactly as we found it.

Instead I looked at the patched thatch, the garden plots, the children who had started edging closer now that no one was shouting, and the way Marta stood like she was already bracing for whatever disappointment came next.

"I’ve built watches and walls for other people’s ground," I said. "I’ve held lines that weren’t mine. I’m tired of leaving places the moment they stop being a problem someone else assigned me."

I met Bjorn’s eyes, then Marta’s. "If you’ll have the help, we’ll stay a while. Clear the lower strip. Get the hall closed in before the next hard freeze. See whether this place wants to be more than a ruin with a creek."

Marta laughed once, short and disbelieving. "You don’t even know what we’re called."

"You said it doesn’t have a single voice. Names can wait."

Bjorn studied me for a long time. Then he looked at Tuva, as if checking whether she was the sensible one who would talk me out of it.

Tuva only shrugged. "He’s worse when he pretends he doesn’t care. If we’re staying, I’m going to need a dry corner and a list of what’s actually broken."

Something in Marta’s face loosened by a fraction. "You’ll get both. And you’ll get every opinion in this bowl whether you want them or not."

"Good," I said. "Opinions mean people still think the place is worth arguing over."

---

By nightfall we had a space in the back of the partial hall, a shared supper of thin stew and dense bread, and a rough count of what the settlement still possessed. Eighteen standing shelters. A forge that worked if you didn’t ask it for miracles. Twelve adults who could still do heavy labor. Too many children. Not enough stored grain. Tools that had been repaired past sense.

Tuva sat beside me on a bench near the wall after the others had drifted toward their own fires. The hall roof covered only two-thirds of the space. Stars showed through the open end.

"You’re sure," she said.

"No."

She snorted. "Honest, at least."

"I’m sure I don’t want to ride past it and spend the next month wondering what it could have been." I turned the cup in my hands. "You?"

"I like the creek. I like that the woman with the food counts didn’t pretend to be impressed. I like that you’re looking at roof beams instead of border markers for once." She leaned her shoulder into mine. "We stay. We work. If it turns into nothing, we leave with clean hands. If it turns into something..."

"Then we keep going."

"Then we keep going."

The hall had gone quiet except for the low crackle of the main fire and the distant fussing of a child who didn’t want to sleep. Tuva’s hand found the back of my neck, warm and familiar. I turned into it.

We didn’t need a long conversation about it. The road had been long enough and the decision was already sitting between us like a third presence.

I kissed her once, then again properly, and she rose with me and pulled me toward the darker corner we’d been given, where a patched screen and a pile of decent furs made the closest thing the place had to privacy.

She pushed my coat off with impatient hands. I got her belt undone and her tunic up and my mouth on the skin of her throat, and she made a low sound that belonged only to me.

We didn’t stretch it out. The day had been cold and full of other people’s eyes, and what we wanted was simple and immediate. I got her down on the furs, got my hand between her legs, and found her already wet. She swore under her breath and pulled me closer.

When I pushed into her she bit my shoulder to keep quiet. I fucked her in steady, deep strokes, one hand braced beside her head, the other under her hip, and she met every thrust with her legs locked around me.

The hall’s distant fire threw just enough light to show the flush across her cheekbones. She came first, tight and shaking, face pressed into my neck. I followed hard, buried deep, the release pulling a rough sound out of my chest that I muffled against her hair.

We stayed like that until our breathing evened. Tuva’s fingers traced idle lines along my spine.

"Tomorrow we look at the hall roof," she murmured.

"Tomorrow we look at the hall roof." I repeated.

"And you don’t try to fix the entire settlement in a week." She added.

"No promises." I smiled.

She pinched my side. I huffed a quiet laugh into her skin and finally rolled off, pulling the furs up over both of us against the open-end cold.

Outside, Hedvik—whatever it had once been called, whatever it might become—settled into the uneasy quiet of a place that had just been offered help it didn’t fully believe in yet.

---

I woke before dawn to the sound of the forge.

Bjorn was already at it, the hammer blows steady and unapologetic. I pulled on my clothes, left Tuva still half-asleep under the furs, and stepped out into the grey light.

A few people were moving. A woman swept ash from a doorway. Two boys carried water. Marta stood near the garden plots with her arms folded, as if daring the dirt to disappoint her again.

She glanced over when she heard me.

"You meant it," she said.

"I meant it."

She jerked her chin toward the lower strip along the creek. "Then start there. If we don’t get something green in the ground before the ground hardens, help won’t matter."

I nodded and went to find tools.

Behind me, the settlement watched with the careful attention of people who had learned not to hope too quickly. Ahead of me, the lower strip waited—wet, neglected, and still better than it had any right to be.

I had ridden into a ruin on a quiet road.

I was still there when the sun cleared the ridge.

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

~Elara~

The eastern road climbed for half a day before it finally gave us the valley.

I smelled Norddal before I saw it properly—woodsmoke, dried herbs, the particular damp of old stone that had held books longer than most dens had held people.

Felix rode close enough that our knees almost brushed when the path narrowed. Neither of us had spoken much since the last waymarker. There wasn’t much left to plan. We were either going to be received or we weren’t.

The settlement sat against the slope like it had grown there instead of being built. Low halls, slate roofs, a central structure larger than the rest with narrow windows and a door that looked older than the trees around it.

People moved between the buildings with the unhurried purpose of a place that didn’t need to perform for strangers. A woman carrying a basket of roots glanced at us, nodded once, and kept walking. A boy chased a chicken past the main path and didn’t bother staring.

Felix exhaled. "Quiet."

"It’s supposed to be." I swung down and felt the ground under my boots—packed earth, cold, clean. "If it were loud, I would’ve worried we’d come to the wrong end of the east."

A man stepped out of the large stone building before we reached the door. Broad-shouldered, greying, ink stains on his fingers, a leather apron over ordinary clothes. He looked at our horses, our packs, and then at me with the flat assessment of someone who had already decided how much of his day this interruption was worth.

"You’re the Frostfang healer," he said.

"Elara. This is Felix."

"Henrik Dahl. I keep the library." He didn’t offer his hand. "I received word you might come. I didn’t receive word you’d bring a household."

Felix’s mouth twitched. "I’m not a household. I’m the part that carries the heavier bags."

Henrik’s eyes flicked to him, then back to me. "The archives aren’t a clinic. We don’t take in every travelling pair with a curious reputation and a need for shelter."

"I’m not asking for a clinic." I held his gaze. "I want access to the records. Herbal, surgical, historical—whatever you’ve kept that the northern dens never copied. I’ll work for the privilege. I can teach, I can take shifts with your midwives, I can copy texts until my hands seize. I’m not here to rearrange your shelves or put my name on your door."