She Sat Alone at the Wedding Feast — Until a Giant Viking Said, “Act Like You’re With Me”

Chapter 6

The king’s lawgiver arrived three days later.

Freya did not attend Eric’s sentencing. She did not watch them drag him from the hall in chains. She did not hear the proclamation of his guilt, the stripping of his titles, the redistribution of his lands to the families he had wronged.

She stood at the stone circle on the hill.

The place where her grandmother had taught her to read the runes. The place where she had come as a child to dream of her future, and as a woman to mourn its loss. The place where she had brought Rolf on their fourth morning together, sharing bread and cheese while the autumn sun painted the valley in gold.

She stood among the ancient monoliths, and she waited.

Footsteps in the grass behind her.

“I thought I might find you here,” Rolf said quietly.

“I didn’t want to watch him fall.” She kept her eyes on the valley below. “I wanted to remember my uncle the way he was. Not the way he died.”

“And how was he?”

“He laughed too loud. He hugged too tight. He believed in people long after they had given him reason not to. He used to tell me that the world would try to make me hard, and that my only defense was to stay soft.”

“Sounds like someone I know.”

She turned to look at him. “The king’s lawgiver has arrived.”

“Yes.”

“What will happen to Eric?”

“He’ll be taken to the capital for trial. The evidence is overwhelming. He’ll lose everything—his lands, his title, his freedom. If the king is merciful, he’ll be exiled. If not…”

“The axe.”

“Yes.”

She let the word hang in the air.

“Does that bring you peace?” Rolf asked.

She thought about it. “I thought it would. I thought that watching him fall would fill the hole my uncle’s death left in me.”

“And now?”

“Now I realize that nothing can fill that hole. It’s part of me. A scar.” She touched her chest. “The question is whether I let it define me or whether I build around it.”

Rolf came to stand beside her. His shoulder brushed hers.

“What will you build, Freya?”

She looked at the valley below—at the settlement where she had been shunned, the hall where she had been invisible, the people who had turned away from her.

“I will build a healing house,” she said. “Right here, on this hill. Where my grandmother taught me. Where I found the code that saved my uncle’s name. Where I learned that knowledge is the one treasure that can never be stolen.”

“A healing house.”

“People will come here with their fevers and their broken bones and their grief. And I will heal them. Not because they deserve it—some of them don’t. But because healing is what I was born to do.”

She turned to face him.

“I spent three months being a ghost, Rolf. I am done disappearing. I am done being ashamed. I am done apologizing for existing.”

He looked at her for a long moment. His gray eyes held something she could not name—pride, perhaps. Or wonder.

“Then build,” he said. “And I will stand beside you while you do it.”

—

Spring came early that year.

The healing house took shape on the hill, stone by stone, beam by beam. Rolf felled the trees and shaped the timbers with an axe that had seen more battles than forests. Gunnar the silversmith forged the hinges and the door handles, refusing payment. Thora the spice merchant donated cloth for bandages and jars for medicines. Even Astrid—the woman who had whispered *the blood tells* at the wedding feast—came with her husband to help raise the walls.

People brought what they could spare. Nails. Thread. Wool for blankets. Food for the workers. A community that had spent three months pretending Freya did not exist now competed to prove that they remembered her.

She did not turn them away.

She accepted their gifts. She thanked them for their labor. But she did not pretend that the wounds of the past had not happened.

“The scars are still there,” she told Rolf one evening, watching the sunset paint the half-finished building in shades of gold. “They will always be there. I can’t pretend otherwise.”

“Scars mean you survived,” he said. “They’re not weakness. They’re proof.”

“And what are your scars proof of, Rolf Thundertamer?”

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he pulled up his sleeve, revealing a network of pale lines that ran from his wrist to his elbow.

“This one is from a raid on the Irish coast. I was nineteen, dumb, and thought I was invincible. I learned that day that even the best warriors bleed.”

He pointed to another scar, deeper, near his shoulder.

“This one is from a fight in Constantinople. A man I had trusted sold me out for gold. I survived, barely. I learned that trust is a weapon, and like any weapon, it can be turned against you.”

“And this one?” She touched a thin line that ran across his palm.

He looked at it for a long time.

“This one is from the day I received your uncle’s letter. I was sharpening my axe when I read it. I cut myself without noticing.”

“Because you were angry.”

“Because I was *afraid*.” He met her eyes. “I had never been afraid before. Not of battle, not of death, not of anything the world could throw at me. But the thought of arriving too late—of finding you gone, like your uncle, because I had not moved fast enough—that terrified me.”

“Rolf—”

“I have crossed oceans and fought kings and walked through the gates of cities that most men only see in dreams. But standing in front of you, holding your uncle’s letter, I realized that none of it mattered if I lost the one thing worth coming home for.”

The words hung between them, heavy and fragile.

“Your uncle asked me to protect you,” he said. “But somewhere between the wedding feast and this hill, the debt stopped being the reason.”

“What is the reason now?”

He reached up and touched her face. His fingers were rough, calloused, scarred. His touch was infinitely gentle.

“The reason,” he said, “is that I do not want to live in a world where you are not in it.”