“I Can’t Bear Children,” She Told Giant Viking — He Grinned, “My Five Sons Already Love You”

Chapter 4

The fever had come three years after Aar’s burial.

Brinhild still remembered the exact moment she knew something was wrong. She’d been washing clothes in the stream, her hands numbed by the cold water, when a wave of dizziness had hit her so hard she’d nearly fallen in. She’d laughed it off at first — probably just the heat, she’d thought, though it was autumn and the air was cool.

By nightfall, she was burning.

The fever raged for nine days. Astred, the village healer, had sat with her through every one of them — changing the compresses on her forehead, forcing water between her cracked lips, fighting for her life with the stubborn dedication of someone who refused to let another young woman die.

On the ninth day, the fever broke. Brinhild opened her eyes to a world that looked the same but felt fundamentally different.

She was alive. But part of her — the part that had dreamed of holding Aar’s children, of hearing small feet pattering across the cottage floor, of being called *mother* — had died in that fevered darkness.

“The womb sleeps now, child,” Astred had said, her old hands gentle on Brinhild’s cheeks. “It will not wake again.”

She’d nodded. She’d waited until Astred left, until the door closed, until she was alone in the cottage that suddenly felt like a tomb. And then she’d wept — not the quiet tears of acceptance, but the raw, animal sobbing of a woman watching her future collapse into ruins.

That was the night she’d found the wooden horse.

Aar had carved it during their first winter, holding it up with that hopeful grin that had made everything seem possible. She’d wrapped it in linen and hidden it at the bottom of her chest, unable to look at it, unable to throw it away — a relic of a dream that had died twice.

She’d kept it because throwing it away would have meant admitting that Aar’s dreams, her dreams, their shared future — all of it was gone.

But she’d never showed it to anyone. Not once. Not until the night she gave it to Ulf.

“I kept it like I kept the ring,” she said now, speaking to the fire, to the shadows, to Hal’s silent presence beside her. “As proof that I’d loved and been loved. As proof that I’d lost everything. I needed the pain. It was all I had left.”

Hal didn’t say anything. He simply sat beside her, his presence solid and steady, waiting.

“Aar knew he was dying,” she continued. “The winter before the fever took his life. He woke me up one night and told me. I tried to deny it — I said he was just tired, that the cough would pass. But he made me promise.”

She turned the ring on her finger, remembering that night with painful clarity. The moon had been full, casting silver light across their bed. Aar’s face had been pale, his eyes too bright, his breathing labored.

“Promise me,” he’d said, his hand gripping hers with surprising strength. “When I’m gone, you’ll find love again. You’ll have children — not from your body, maybe, but from your heart. You’ll build a life that honors what we had without being trapped by it.”

“And I promised,” Brinhild said. “I promised him. And then I spent seven years breaking that promise, because I was too afraid to keep it.”

She pulled the ring off her finger. It slid free more easily than she’d expected — as if it had been waiting for this moment, as ready as she was.

“I thought keeping it meant I was being faithful to his memory. But I think keeping it meant I was hiding from the future he wanted me to have.”

She held the ring out to Hal, its silver surface gleaming in the firelight.

“I’m not done loving Aar. I don’t think I ever will be. But I think — I hope — that loving him doesn’t mean I can’t love someone else.”

Hal’s hand closed over hers, his fingers warm and solid. He didn’t take the ring. Instead, he held her hand gently, as if it were something precious.

“I don’t want you to forget him,” he said. “I want you to show me how to love the way he taught you to.”