"What was it?" she whispered.
Sverrir did not answer. He was looking at her as if he were watching a boat go out of sight.
"Ask him tomorrow," said Thorhalla gently, and took Kari by the shoulder, and led him away toward the hall.
VIII
She asked him in the morning.
He did not tell her in the hall. He took her down the frozen path to the shore, to the boathouse with its tarred planks and its smell of rope and cold sea, and sat her on an upturned bucket by the door, and told it to her there: the storm, the lantern, the drift-net off the skerry, his hands. What he had said. What she had done. The light through the planking.
"You told me afterward," he said, "that was when. That morning. You said it in our bed a year later, as if you'd only just decided I could be trusted with it." He looked down at his palms, long healed, pale-scarred across the creases. "I didn't know it would choose that. I'd have — I don't know what I'd have done."
"You'd have held my arm," Eydis said.
He looked up.
She did not say it cruelly. She was looking at the boathouse floor, at the place where he said her father had lain, and she felt nothing there at all. A floor. Some old sailcloth. It was like being told a saga in which she was the woman, and he was the man, and both of them were strangers.
"I believe you," she said finally. "I believe it happened. I can feel where it was." She pressed her fist against her breastbone. "But I remember your hand on my arm in the yard. It left me that one. I remember it exactly. And I'm still angry, Sverrir. I'm angry it was you that stopped me, and angry that you were right to, and angry that I'll never know if you were. I can't make that go away by morning just because you told me a good story about a boathouse."
"I know."
"I don't want it to go away like that. Do you understand? I don't want to forgive you because something got taken out of me and there's nothing left to be angry with. If I forgive you, I want to do it with all of it still in my hands."
"Then don't forgive me yet," he said. "I'll be a year in Grimsfjord. You'll have time."