The door creaked softly as Sif pushed it open and Neve followed close on the warrior’s heels as the other woman turned up the wick on a lamp left near the door. Thordin lay in front of them, stretched out in the bed and covered by a pair of quilts—probably Jacqueline or Tala’s handiwork, if Neve had to guess. His beard had started to come in with a faint red sheen in the time he’d lain unconscious and as Neve stared at his pale, abused face, she thought he looked older somehow. The gash down his cheek had mostly healed, leaving behind only a thin, pink ridge of flesh and a few slowly flaking scabs that would disappear with the first good scrubbing once he woke up—or once Jac or Sif took it upon themselves to give him a scrub.
The small, close space smelled of sickness and blood but not of death. It was a strange realization, Neve realized, even as another rumble of thunder shivered her bones, but a true one nonetheless.
She lingered near the lamp and the door as Sif crossed the floor toward Thordin’s bedside. There was a chair there, another blanket haphazardly draped across its back. Sif had been sleeping there more often than she hadn’t—Neve knew that, it was hardly a secret.
It was what worried her the most about all of this—not the precariousness of Thordin’s condition, how he hovered silently somewhere between life and death, surviving only through the ministrations of their healers. No, she worried about Sif, who seemed to be spiraling ever closer to grief-stricken madness.
We have to do something about it, Neve thought, chewing hard on her lower lip. But what? What’s going to snap her out of this? Another fight? Something else?
She was starting to worry that the only thing that would bring the old Sif back to them would be for Thordin Amundsen—once called Thordin Odinson—to open his eyes once again.
We can’t afford to lose her to madness and grief. Neve closed her eyes, resting her head against the door. I have to think of something.
Then, a voice, whisper-thin and weak.
“Sif?”
Beautiful.