Lili stood there with her hands still out as if she could hold together everything that was falling apart. Then her arms dropped, and she folded at the knees like a tent coming down. Halfdan crossed the space fast and knelt. She was shaking so hard her teeth clicked. He put a hand on her shoulder; she leaned into it the way a drowning person might lean into a plank.
"He is gone," she whispered, and her voice had cracked into little pieces. "He always leaves. Papa always leaves now. He did not so before.. He used to sit and listen to the river pretend to go somewhere new. He used to make the fish taste like oranges and rosemary and pretend a sling stone could skip all the way to the sun. He said the sea and the sky loved him because he was polite. He said names should be shorter so they run faster. He said -he said promises are bridges, and bridges-"
"-are things you cross together," Halfdan finished for her, quietly. "I know. You told me."
She nodded against his sleeve. "He… he didn't- He wouldn't- He would never hurt me," she said. The words stumbled. "But he was going to hurt you."
"You stopped him," Halfdan said, because what else could he say?
"He is not ill of heart," she murmured low, her tears burning as they fell. "No, he is not ill of heart, but stricken. He went to help them, and the sky fell on his head, and he could not stand anymore, and I brought him oranges with the fish so it would not be lonely because rosemary is for company. Yet when I turned, he was gone, and the trees would not whisper where. I sought and I sought and I sought, and when I found him… he was thus. He is not wicked, he is ailing and astray."
Halfdan did not say I know. He did not say Everything will be fine. Both were lies until they weren't.
He said, "You're not alone," softly, as he wiped her tears with his sleeve. "I've got you, kid."
And in the quiet that followed, he let himself think: If something can break a mind, something can mend it again.
It was childish logic. The only kind of logic worth holding onto in a world where the moon had once nearly fallen. Where people are brought back from the dead and given divine artefacts.
Halfdan sat back on his heel. Wind slipped through the clearing with a shiver that felt like someone drawing a knife across drum skin. Somewhere deep in the island, the storm cleared its throat. He glanced at the grey sky,
"I will help him," he said. "I'll figure out what happened and heal him."
She pulled back enough to look up at him, eyes blurry, raw but still stubborn. "You promised the lilies." Her small chin lifted. "And this matter is greater than lilies."
He managed a smile he hoped counted as brave and not delusional. "Lucky for you, I'm very ambitious, captain."
"I shall take thee at thy word, Tolerably-swift Hal."
He grinned as he helped her up. She smiled back, fragile, touched with sadness, but threaded through with a small, stubborn hope. Her small hand fit in his again, and they started back toward the harbor together because there were only so many things two people could do in a clearing where a father had broken in half. The path felt narrower now, the trees more interested in gossip. The birds had given up the conversation entirely. Halfdan kept Lili close, her small hand tucked in his. He let his senses stretch in that quiet, deliberate way he'd learned from Arash, every sound and shift of the forest noted. Brynhild's warning still rang clear in his mind.
He checked the MP again because habits were what you had when control wasn't an option. Four points still sulking in the jar.
Some minutes later, the forest went quiet in that specific way predators like. Then the growl came, low, layered, a chord of hunger. Lili stopped dead. Three shadows unstitched themselves from the trees and stepped into the path.
Wolves, in the same way a storm is "weather." Each stood at his shoulder height, coats bristling, eyes reflecting the last of the day like coins in a well. Their paws left deep, wet prints in the leaf mold. The breath from the one in front smoked in the cooling air.
Halfdan moved without thinking, sliding in front of Lili and nudging her back with the heel of his hand.
His mind did the quick arithmetic: how much power, how much time. The answer was stingy. Four points of mana, a mean little pile he could either stretch out like a single candle in the dark or throw onto the fire and hope the blaze scared the shadows back for just a moment longer than it should.
The lead wolf lowered itself, settling into that coiled-spring shape predation wears so well. He dipped his hand toward the deck by instinct and stopped it there. He set his feet and felt the ground through his boots and thought, All right then. Stupid way it is. Halfdan opened his mouth, the words "Include: Arash" balanced on the tip of his tongue.
Then the world ignited.
A line of red light arrowed through the trees, and all three wolves turned at once as if the light had been a sound. Heat hit Halfdan's face a heartbeat later. The lead wolf was two steps into its leap when a blade cut through it in a clean, obscene division, fire licking the cut edges. The second turned to flee and the blade found it with an upward stroke that turned fur into smoke. The third tried to go through, not around; a boot met it mid-charge and the blade ended the argument.
Lukka stepped out of the smoke with the expression of a man who'd been asked to do a chore and found it, regrettably, easy. His hair looked like it had been on fire recently and enjoyed it. His eyes did the same trick.
"Brynhild sent me to find the strays," he said, propping his claymore on his shoulder like a rake. He glanced at Halfdan, at the gauntlet, at Lili's wide eyes. "Found them."
Lili lit up like an altar. "You are wondrous!" she said, bouncing once like her heart had just reset itself to joy. "You are very flaming and also very large."
Lukka made a noise that might have been a laugh trying to escape its owner. "Thanks."
Halfdan lowered his gauntlet because keeping it up would have looked silly at that point. "You know," he said mildly, "when I killed five wolves earlier, I didn't get that reaction." He caught himself thinking, Is it the hair? The sword? Is there a redhead buff I don't know about?
Lili blinked at him, earnest. "I didn't know you then."
He tried very hard not to grin and failed. Lukka's mouth did a thing at the corner that could have been pity or amusement or both. "Jealousy doesn't look good on you, kid," he said.
"Kid," Halfdan repeated, reasonably offended. "I'm-" He remembered the body he was currently renting. He shut his mouth.
"Thought so," Lukka said, and the corner of his mouth did the thing again. "Come on. Brynhild has the harbor turned into a pulley system. She'll make you tie knots until you repent."
"Lead on, your fireliness." Halfdan's reply almost got a grin from Lukka.
They went together, Lili humming under her breath like she'd decided the day might still be allowed to have a good ending. The trees thinned, and the path opened onto the slope down to the harbor, where the world had taken on the glow things get before a storm: lamps already lit, sky low and sullen, the sea the color of a blade. The giant's carcass lay half in the river, a mountain with ideas. Men with ropes and poles swarmed it like ants debating a wheel of cheese. Brynhild stood on the pier giving orders with the effortless authority of someone who never had to wonder whether anyone would listen. She saw them coming, and the tightness in her shoulders loosened in a way that made Halfdan's stupid heart do a thing.
Get it together, Skarsgård.
Lukka peeled off without asking and picked up a beam the size of Halfdan's adult self and walked it where she pointed. Gods, how he missed his adult form, tall and strong and handsome. It would be another year or two before he even hit his first growth spurt.
He looked at Lili and crouched until they were eye to eye.
"Still all right?" he asked.
She nodded, solemn, the way children do when they're trying on adulthood to see if it fits. "He is here," she said. Not about the giant, obviously; about the man who had stood in the clearing not long ago and was now somewhere in the woods. "He is here, and not here. When the wind changes I can hear him."
Halfdan glanced toward the black line of the pines, which had gone perfectly innocent again the moment they were far from them. "Then we'll go where the wind goes," he said lightly, careful not to let the words carry too much weight. "But not today. The day's almost over. We rest, we eat, and tomorrow we start our quest. Tonight you can order two different kinds of bread and decide which is better."
Lili considered this with the gravity of a field commander mapping a campaign. "Flat bread for company," she declared at last. "Round bread for stories."
"Then both," he said.
"Both," she agreed, and leaned into him for exactly one heartbeat before pulling away as if she hadn't done it at all.
Lili sat by the stones on the river shore, looking at the water with contemplation, and Halfdan joined a knot-line because he could tie things and pull on them, and that counted. The work was ugly and necessary; if they left the giant to steep, the river would carry rot into the wells and the wells would carry rot into the lungs, and then you'd have a different kind of calamity on your hands. He set his jaw and hauled. Lukka lifted a brace with one hand while he scratched his eyebrow with the other, and Halfdan tried very hard to be unimpressed and failed at that, too.
"Okay," he muttered to himself, "maybe he's not entirely a dick. Just ninety percent."
A laugh escaped him before he could stop it. Lukka glanced over like he'd heard the percentage and decided not to contest it. They caught each other's eyes for a beat and the ridiculousness of it, the day, the storm, the corpse, the ropes, the whole disaster of being alive, cracked something brittle between them. Not friendship, not yet. A truce made of sweat and the memory of fire.