The second traveler to misjudge Bj?rn’s age did it in front of Haldis, which made it a better show than the first time.
It was early autumn. The last warmth of Bj?rn’s summer culling run still lingered in the wood of the walls. Eirik was creeping up on his second year. Sigrid’s belly had begun to announce the next baby with quiet certainty, like winter clouds gathering where only the patient noticed.
A wool-trader from the coast had come through hoping to winter his surplus stock somewhere the roads wouldn’t wash out. He was broad and cheerful, the sort of man who treated conversation like a handshake: something you did often, firmly, and with confidence. He’d been moving through the settlement for two days, swapping news for soup and counting people the way he counted barrels.
Haldis had joined them at the common fire that evening—rare enough that Eirik always paid attention when she did. The old shrine-keeper moved through Járnvik’s social life the way a hawk moved through sky: on purpose, without hurry, because she didn’t have to.
She sat across the fire with a cup of something steaming and watched the evening unfold with her water-over-stone eyes.
The wool-trader worked toward his pitch with small talk and easy laughter. He asked Bj?rn about the passes. He asked Sigrid about the healer’s house. He watched them as he did, measuring, guessing. Eirik had started recognizing the look on outsiders’ faces right before they said something dumb.
The trader looked at Sigrid’s belly. Looked at Eirik beside her. Looked back to Bj?rn and let the thought fall out of his mouth.
“Your first was young to be having a second,” he said to Bj?rn. “How old is the boy—one, nearly two? That means you’d barely be what, eighteen when you had him? Younger wife then, given—” He gestured at Sigrid in a way that finished the sentence for him.
Silence held for three full heartbeats.
Bj?rn didn’t bristle. He didn’t laugh. He answered the way he answered perimeter reports and supply counts—flat and calm, like the subject wasn’t even worth a spike of emotion.
“I’m thirty-eight.”
The trader blinked.
Looked at Bj?rn. Looked at Sigrid. Looked back at Bj?rn like the man in front of him might politely rearrange his face into something more believable.
“Thirty-eight,” the trader repeated, weaker this time.
“Thirty-five,” Sigrid added, still warming her hands around her cup. Her voice wasn’t sharp, but it ended the moment cleanly. Then, because he still looked like he was trying to force the world into a shape that made sense: “High-realm cultivation slows the body’s aging. You’ve heard of it.”
He had. In the way most people had heard of dragons: as a category of story, not something you expected to meet at a fire in a muddy outpost.
“High-realm,” the trader said carefully.
“Significantly,” Sigrid said.
That was it. Door closed.
The trader recovered, like a man trained by commerce to pretend surprise was never real, and slid into his pitch again. But Eirik had seen what mattered.
Haldis hadn’t reacted at all.
No widening eyes. No shift of posture. Not even the smallest spark of surprise.
She was watching Eirik watching his parents.
Not hunting him. Not threatening. Just… curious, in that old way she had.
Eirik gave her his best impression of a two-year-old who had understood none of it.
The corner of Haldis’s mouth twitched—not a smile, exactly. More like a private amusement.
Bj?rn’s crooked almost-smirk had competition.
- · · ? · · ·
Leif arrived in Eirik’s life the way weather arrived—no warning, and suddenly everything was about him.
He was Knut’s son, which explained the limbs: long and wiry, built for running. What it didn’t explain was Leif’s approach to existence, which seemed to be: investigate everything until proven uninteresting.
He found Eirik at the yard on a morning when Eirik and Astrid were sitting in the dirt near the weapons rack, arguing about what counted as “real training” and what counted as “playing,” a debate they kept having because neither of them wanted to admit it was mostly the same thing.
Leif walked up, stared at the sticks they’d arranged like a little battle map, and asked, “What are those for?”
“We’re figuring out the ?ttirmál,” Eirik said, because he was two and had decided big words were a weapon.
Leif thought about this for half a breath.
“That’s the most boring thing I’ve ever heard,” he said sincerely. “And I’ve heard my father explain rope repair. Twice.”
Astrid pointed at him like she’d found a stray dog worth keeping. “I like him.”
Leif plopped down in the dirt with the comfort of a child who believed the ground was a chair if you committed to it.
“The big stick is fighting,” he said, tapping one. “The small stick is running away. Those are the only two you need. My father says.”
“Your father is a scout,” Eirik said. “Running away is literally his job.”
“He calls it tactical repositioning.”
“That is what running away is called by people who are paid to do it.”
Leif stared at him, checking whether that was true.
Then he decided it was at least funny enough to accept and moved on.
“Can I have a stick?”
Eirik handed him one.
Leif held it for about four seconds before using it to draw a huge fish in the dirt—bold lines, confident curves, like he’d been born knowing how fish were supposed to look.
They sat there for the rest of the morning: Eirik explaining, Astrid arguing, Leif contributing stray observations that sometimes—accidentally—made something click.
By midday the dirt in front of them featured the fish, a shape Leif insisted was a cave bear (Astrid said it was a badly drawn dog), and a surprisingly accurate layout of the garrison’s perimeter that Eirik had sketched during a quiet minute without thinking too hard about it.
Sigrid came by, took one look at the perimeter sketch, then looked at Eirik.
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It wasn’t anger. It was that look mothers had when they weren’t mad yet, but were deciding how mad they should be once they fully understood what you’d done.
Eirik scuffed the drawing out with his foot like a saint who had never seen it in his life and went home for lunch.
- · · ? · · ·
His sister arrived in late winter, on a night when the fjord ice groaned under a cold that had come down hard from the north and decided to stay.
Bj?rn was home—winter runs were shorter, hemmed in by the passes—and he spent the night on the healer’s house step with the expression of a man who had accepted that he was useless and was choosing to be useless as loudly as possible, by being there.
Eirik sat with him for a while. Not because he was worried. His ?nd-sense could feel the steadiness inside—his mother’s cultivation working, firm and sure.
But Bj?rn was on the step, and being where Bj?rn was had become a habit worth keeping.
They watched the settlement’s winter dark. The fjord lay below the stars like a black mirror.
After a long stretch of silence, Bj?rn said, still watching the ice, “You’re not worried.”
It wasn’t a question.
“She’s the most capable person in there,” Eirik said. “Including herself.”
Bj?rn glanced sideways, just once. The look on his face was part amusement, part something else—something that reached forward into years Eirik hadn’t lived yet.
“She is,” Bj?rn agreed. Then, quiet as if it wasn’t meant for anyone but the night: “She’s the most capable person in most rooms she enters.”
Most rooms.
The words carried a horizon behind them.
Bj?rn stayed looking at the fjord as he spoke again.
“Whatever you’re figuring out,” he said, “take your time with it. Some things make more sense when you’re bigger. Some questions land better after you’ve got the right words for them.”
He didn’t look at Eirik when he said it.
Which made it land harder.
Eirik let the words sit.
Then the sound inside the healer’s house changed—brief silence, then something that wasn’t silence.
Bj?rn stood with that yard-economy of motion.
For one heartbeat, Eirik felt something from his father he’d never caught cleanly before: not the disciplined flow of cultivation, but a raw warmth underneath it, unguarded and human.
Then the door opened. Ragna said something quick. Bj?rn went in.
Eirik stayed on the step and listened to his sister announce herself to the world with full-throated competence.
She was loud.
His first solid fact about her.
He thought, not for the first time: I’d better be good at this.
- · · ? · · ·
Her name was Astríer.
Not Astrid—that name had already been claimed by the smith’s daughter—but the older, longer version, the kind that sounded like it belonged in a saga even if the person currently wearing it was the size of a loaf of bread.
Within a week the household shortened it to Rí, because families did that to names they intended to say a thousand times.
She was small. Newborn-small. Grey-eyed like Sigrid. And when she was annoyed—which was often—she made the flattest expression Eirik had ever seen on a baby, like she’d already formed an opinion and was offended nobody had asked for it.
Eirik watched her with the careful attention of someone trying to see the shape of the future through a foggy window.
Her cultivation seed felt… clean.
Not blazing. Not strange like his own.
Just clean, steady, well-laid. The kind of foundation that didn’t crack when you leaned on it.
Good bones, he decided.
He turned that thought over once, satisfied, and went back to the project of being a two-year-old brother who didn’t accidentally drop his sister.
- · · ? · · ·
Spring returned. The fjord ice broke and drifted out. The mud came back. And with it came Bj?rn’s preparations for another run.
Eirik understood more now, which mostly meant he noticed more.
The pack was leaner this time—faster travel, or less stopping.
The long sword came out of the chest without ceremony, like it belonged in the world instead of hidden under the floor. Bj?rn checked the edge for a long time, slow and sure, the way you checked something you might bet your life on.
Ulf met with him two days before Bj?rn left. Eirik wasn’t there, but he saw the aftermath: Ulf’s face had the look of a man who’d been given a job he didn’t love and couldn’t refuse. After that, the garrison’s ranging schedule shifted. Two scouts on the southern approaches more often than usual.
Whatever Bj?rn said, it changed the shape of watchfulness.
On the morning of departure, Eirik had his question ready. He’d been building it for days.
“When you go past the mapped territories,” he asked as Bj?rn crouched to say goodbye, “are you going to the same place as last time?”
Bj?rn looked at him the way he looked at the yard when he was deciding whether someone’s stance was going to hold.
“Further,” he said.
“Because the same place wasn’t enough resistance?”
A pause.
Shorter than it would’ve been months ago.
“Yes.”
“Because you need genuine resistance or your cultivation goes soft.”
This pause was different.
Not weighing words.
Weighing Eirik.
Bj?rn glanced over Eirik’s shoulder to where Sigrid stood in the doorway holding Rí, watching quietly. Then he looked back.
“Yes,” he said again. Then, softer: “You understand what that means.”
“It means Járnvik doesn’t have enough for you,” Eirik said. “For either of you.”
Bj?rn didn’t answer.
He didn’t have to.
They looked twenty-five, but they weren’t. The sword in the chest didn’t feel like anything made in Realm I. The way Sigrid healed when she decided to stop pretending… didn’t feel like Realm I either.
Járnvik didn’t have enough resistance.
Eirik kept that thought, careful as a coal in the palm, and said nothing else.
Bj?rn stood and shouldered the pack.
“Work your foundation while I’m gone,” he said. “Earthroot. ?nd-current. Basics.”
“I know.”
“I know you know.” A beat. “Do it anyway.”
He left.
Ulf gave his careful nod. Sigrid didn’t move from the doorway until Bj?rn was out of sight.
“He said further,” Eirik said.
“I know,” Sigrid replied.
“He’ll be fine.”
She looked down at him—silver-grey eyes, tired but steady—and something moved through her face that wasn’t just amusement. Something softer. Something proud, maybe, or simply grateful that her son was… like this.
“He will,” she agreed. “Come inside. Rí is about to want her meal, and I’d prefer not to stand here for it.”
Eirik went inside.
- · · ? · · ·
Leif knocked on the door a few minutes later, because Leif had apparently decided the Bj?rnsson household was an acceptable destination for urgent discoveries.
He held up a very large beetle.
“I named it Ulf,” Leif announced.
Eirik stared at the beetle. Then at Leif.
“You cannot name it Ulf.”
“I already named it Ulf,” Leif said cheerfully. “It doesn’t listen and it has a thick neck. The name fits.”
“If Ulf finds out—”
“Ulf is not going to find out about a beetle. Ulf doesn’t even know beetles exist. He’s very focused.”
“Ulf knows everything that happens in this settlement.”
Leif nodded solemnly. “Then he already knows about the beetle and has decided not to address it, which means the name is fine.”
It was not good logic.
It arrived at a defensible position by taking a path that should not have worked.
Eirik was going to have to adjust his expectations accordingly.
“Fine,” he said. “But if Ulf asks about a beetle—”
“I’ll tell him it was your idea,” Leif said, and marched inside to present Sigrid with the beetle.
Sigrid looked at it.
Looked at Leif.
Then, with the same calm she applied to wounds and fevers and other people’s nonsense, she held out her hand.
The beetle crawled onto her palm.
Rí made a delighted little sound from Sigrid’s shoulder like the world had personally offered her a gift.
Sigrid’s mouth softened. Just a fraction.
Eirik was two years old.
He had ?nd-Sense and Earthroot, both Grár (Common). He had two Blár (Uncommon) birth skills. He had a sister who was loud and sturdy. He had friends who drew fish and named beetles after commanders. He had parents with a past that kept leaking through the cracks.
And he had a long road ahead.
He was going to be fine.