[This post is from Thordin’s point of view.]
After a few moments of silence, he said, “It’s a natural storm.”
Sif exhaled, her eyes sliding shut. “Good,” she breathed out. “Bloody good.”
“You were more worried than you let on.”
“Maybe just a little,” she said, twisting to curl against him. “I think the last thing you want to be doing right now is wrestling with someone for control of a storm.”
“You’re right on that,” he murmured, pressing his lips to her temple. Sif sighed.
“I love you,” she whispered, reaching up to tangle her fingers in his short hair. “I love you so much it hurts.”
“I know,” Thordin said, closing his eyes again. “Christus, I know.”
She huffed a soft laugh. “Why do you do that?”
“Why do I do what?”
“Use that term. His followers killed you.”
Thordin sighed, wrapping his arms around her shoulders again. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “I guess it’s always something I’ve done since I came back, since I was old enough to know what the word meant. You have to understand, Sif, for more than a decade, I had no idea what I was, who I’d been. I picked up things when I was growing up as someone else’s son, as who I’d been reborn as. I picked up things from the people who took me in after they were killed. Some habits stuck. That…that was one of them, I guess.”
“It has power when you say it,” she whispered. “Like when Phelan and Seamus and Neve say that phrase in their tongue.”
A shiver worked its way down his spine and he buried his nose against her hair. “Some things are hard to shake even when you know the truth.”
“Do you think you could use it?”
He startled. “What do you mean?”
“Do you think you could use it? Against things like Leviathan? The word has power when you use it—when Jacqueline uses it, too, I can feel it. Do you think you could? If you had to?”
He realized he didn’t have an answer. Perhaps he didn’t want one. His lips thinned.
“I don’t know,” he whispered into her hair. “I just don’t know.”
