The hall was thick with smoke and the clatter of a feast winding down. The fire pit crackled, spitting amber into the dim rafters. Mead sloshed in wooden cups, laughter rolled like distant thunder, and the air reeked of sweat, roasted boar, and pine-tar cloaks still damp from the sea. Styrbjörn sat at the high seat, one elbow resting on the carved wolf-arm of his chair, a half-empty horn of mead hanging loose in his grip. But his eyes were elsewhere.

He had faced down shieldmaidens with blades sharper than wit, crushed the throats of men who dared mock his claim, and taken cities whose names he never cared to learn. He had known women, taken, shared, left behind. But this... this creature standing near the hearth, still as snowfall and just as arresting, made the noise of the hall fall away. Like frost creeping over steel, she occupied his thoughts without permission.

He watched the way her hands folded when not working, the tuck of hair behind her ear. She did not preen like the others no eyes cast up to his throne, no perfume or painted lips. She was not trying to be seen, and that made it impossible to look anywhere else.

Styrbjörn exhaled slowly, the breath of a man who'd just realized the battle had already been lost. Not in fire or fury, but in quiet certainty. She will not come easy, he thought, nor will she be taken like a prize. But she will be mine. Not for one night, nor to warm a bed through winter. His knuckles tightened around the horn. She will bear my blood and keep my hall. And I will burn Skeldheim before I let another lay claim to her.

A flicker of movement caught his eye nothing more than the shift of her weight as she glanced toward the doorway but even that stirred something feral and anchoring in his chest. He did not know her laugh yet. He barely knew her voice. But in her stillness, in that unguarded grace, he saw the line of her spine as straight as any oath. She would not fawn. She would not break.

And that that was how he knew. not because of the softness of her face or the gentle rise of her breath in firelight, but because she had not knelt, and never would. He would have her loyalty one day, not her submission, when she gave it freely, it would mean more than all the gold he'd spilled blood for.

The noise of the hall pressed in again, but now it was distant. Styrbjörn raised his horn, drank without tasting, and let the fire cast long shadows behind his eyes, his land was claimed, his hall was built now it was time to win the only thing that ever truly mattered.

He would not use force not with this woman. He rose without ceremony, the bench creaking in protest as his weight left it. The scrape of fur and steel against wood turned a few heads, but no one dared question a Jarl's direction not when his jaw was set like stone and his eyes had locked onto a single, unmoving point in the room. He descended the dais slowly, not like a predator stalking prey, but like a man approaching a shrine he hadn't dared lay hands on until now. Every step echoed softly against the timber floor, muffled by the hush that followed him uncertain, curious, but instinctively reverent.

He stopped just within the edge of the firelight, where the glow painted half his face in gold and left the other half in shadow. For a long moment, he said nothing. His gaze, usually sharp enough to unsettle warriors twice her size, now held something stranger something bordering on uncertain. His voice, when it came, was low and raw worn with salt air and old battles, but carried none of the boast he usually wore like a cloak. "You do not bow," he said, almost to himself.

It wasn't an accusation. More like a fact he found himself turning over in his hand, the way one might test the edge of a blade gently, reverently, not to cut, but to know it. His eyes lingered not on curves or softness, but on the places where stillness hid strength, the jaw that did not tremble, she did not shrink from silence.

He took a step closer still not near enough to touch. The fire warmed his skin, but her nearness made his pulse shift, drum slower, harder. He hadn't felt this since his first raid when everything was new, and the wrong move could end a name before it began. "I have spilled blood across three seas," he said, voice now rougher, though quieter. "Built this hall from gold I tore from dead men's ships, for all that, I have never stood in front of something I didn't know how to conquer."

His gaze dropped for a breath, then rose again, and his jaw tightened with decision. "I do not want to conquer you." He let the words sit between them, as solid and heavy as the carved beams overhead. His fists clenched, not in anger, but to anchor himself against the urge to close the distance. "Say nothing, if that pleases you. I've no need for false words."

The hall buzzed behind him laughter returning, fire crackling but it felt far away. "I will ask nothing of you tonight. But know this," His voice dipped, almost reverent. "I see you not as others do, not as a man sees a passing glance or a pleasing shape. I see something the gods shaped with care. Something meant."

He inclined his head, just enough to acknowledge her space, her silence, her right to walk away, then, voice low enough for her alone: "When you're ready to speak... speak to me. No one else." He turned then, slowly, deliberately, and walked back to the high seat not as a man dismissed, but as one who'd thrown a line between two souls and knew the tide would bring it taut in time.