Summary

When Freya’s moment of passion with Daniel Goss becomes a public scandal, she’s forced to marry all three Goss brothers and establish a homestead in zombie-infested territory. What starts as survival becomes much more as she discovers that her accidental husbands might be exactly what she needs

Chapter 1

The chilly end-of-winter air carried the scents of woodsmoke and fermented grain, familiar perfumes that usually meant home and comfort to Freya Stirling. Tonight, it just smelled like obligation.

She pressed herself deeper into the shadow between two massive hay bales, clutching a stoneware bottle against her chest. From here, she could see the festival torches painting the square in warm, flickering gold, could hear the fiddles starting up for another set. Could see The Hariss Mother prowling the edges of the crowd with her youngest son in tow like a hunting dog.

“Freya? Freya Stirling, where has that girl gotten to?”

Freya held her breath. Madam Harriss’ voice carried like a crow’s caw over the music.

Three days. It had been three days since Mother had sat her down in the brewery office and laid out her future like ingredients for a recipe. The abandoned Stirling homestead, ten miles north of town. Good soil. God water. Perfect for barley and corn. They’d set her up with everything she needed: tools, seed stock, a pair of horses, a clutch of chickens, three milk goats, and lumber enough for repairs and fences.Feya would grow ad develop grain socks for the Stirling Family’s distilling ad bewing operations.

All she needed were husbands.

“It’s time, love,” Mother had said, not unkindly. “You’re of age to start your own household. You’ve learned the trade. You’ve got a good head for cultivation. The family needs to expand our holdings, and we need more barley in the ground. Time for you to build something of your own.”

Your own. As if a holding ten miles into zombie country with a handful of men she barely knew would ever feel like her own.

The word had spread through town faster than Zombie Fever. Freya Stirling was to take husbands. Decent had a respectable family, decent looks, and decent teeth. She could shoot straight, knew her way around a still, and according to the gossips, was about the most marriable woman in town. Freya tried not to think about who was doing the evaluating. Every mother with unmarried sons had suddenly discovered urgent business with the Stirling household.

Hence: hiding behind hay bales at the Breaking Winter’s Back festival while the Harriss-Mother hunted her like a particularly matrimonial bloodhound.

“Looking for someone?”

Freya nearly dropped her bottle. Daniel Goss materialized from the darkness on the other side of the bales, moving with the easy quiet of someone used to patrol work. He grinned at her startlement, then peered around the hay toward the festival lights.

“Harriss,” Freya muttered. “With reinforcements.”

“Ah.” Daniel’s grin widened. He was flushed, she noticed, warm-cheeked in a way that suggested he’d been drinking. His shirt was half-unbuttoned despite the early spring chill, collar loose around his throat. “The great husband hunt. I’ve heard about that. My condolences.”

They knew each other, of course. Everyone in Carbon knew everyone. Daniel and his brothers Mattias and Edwin were fixtures at the garrison, and the Goss family had a sad history. Both fathers killed in the outbreak of ’71, leaving their mother to stretch just two pensions across seven children. The three older brothers had already married into the Marsh family in a group arrangement, but Daniel and his brothers…Well. They weren’t exactly prime prospects. Little wealth, no fathers, and worst of all, no sister of age to trade. On the frontier, brothers married together or not at all. Everyone knew that

Which made Daniel Goss perfectly safe company for a woman trying to avoid matrimonial entanglements.

“What are you doing back here?” Freya asked, scooting over to make room as Daniel folded himself down beside her.

“Avoiding my mother, actually.” He produced a bottle from inside his jacket, cheap whiskey from the Bitter Creek distillery up river. Competition. “She’s got opinions about how I spend my pay.”

“Does she know you were at the brothel?”

Daniel’s flush deepened. “How did you—”

“I can guess. You were thinking about the brothel, decided you couldn’t afford it, and bought rotgut whiskey instead to feel like you’d spent your money on something.”

He laughed, surprised and genuine. “Shit. You’re observant.”

“I’m a Stirling. I’ve been working a still since I was this high.” She waved an arm vaguely. “I know what men do with their pay.” Freya held up her own bottle. “Trade you. This is the good stuff.”

Daniel’s eyes lit up with genuine appreciation as he recognized the Stirling family label. “Now that’s what I call a fair exchange.”

They traded bottles. Freya took a pull of the Bitter Creek whiskey and grimaced. “God, that’s rough.”

“That’s why I was angling for an upgrade.” Daniel sipped the Stirling spirits and sighed with pleasure. “Now that’s civilized. Your mother’s work?”

“Mine, actually. New recipe. Smoked barley.”

“You made this?” Daniel looked at the bottle with new respect. “Damn, Freya. This is really good.”

The compliment warmed her more than even the whiskey had. Freya took another drink, this one going down easier. They sat in companionable silence for a moment, listening to the festival sounds wash over them like a tide.

“You know,” Daniel said eventually, voice gone soft and slightly slurred, “you could put your head here. If you wanted.” He rolled his shoulder in invitation, opening the space beside him. It was casual, friendly, the kind of offer you’d make to a comrade on a long night’s watch.

Freya hesitated only a moment before leaning into his warmth. He was solid, reassuring, and he smelled like whiskey and leather and gun oil.

“Are you nervous about it?” he asked quietly.

“Taking on a homestead? Marrying? Being away from family, town and garrison? Terrified,” Freya admitted. The word came out easier than she expected. “The old Stirling place is ten miles out. That’s not deep zombie territory, but it’s still a half-day out of town. And I’m supposed to just… move out there with however many men Mother selects for me and start growing and producing for the stills like it’s nothing? Absolutely fucking terrified.” She took another swig on the bottle.

“That’s rough.”

“And… marriage. I have to get married. Sure, I’ll finally get to have have husbands. But.” She sighed. “Dammit. I don’t know HOW. And suddenly I’ll be married to multiple someones. Men I’ll barely even know. Men who’ll expect…” She made vague motions, not quite able to articulate the tangle of expectations and obligations and physical intimacies that marriage implied.

“Hey.” Daniel’s voice had gone gentle. “For what it’s worth? Any man who gets you is lucky. You’re smart, you’re skilled, you’re—” He paused, seemed to reconsider his words. “You’re a catch, Freya. Really. A set of brothers would be really lucky to be chosen.”

She turned to look up at him. His face was very close, warm brown eyes slightly unfocused from the drink. On impulse, she reached up and touched his cheek. His skin was warm, slightly rough with evening stubble.

She signed. “Well, I certainly don’t feel brave or clever. Part of me wishes I could just stay at home with my family and…not.”

“S’ok, Freya. You’ll do fine. You know you will” slurred Daniel.

She laid her head back on his shoulder and they sat like that for a while, passing the bottle back and forth. The fiddles wound through another tune, then another. The festival noise seemed to fade, leaving just the two of them in their small pocket of darkness.

Minutes passed, maybe longer. The whiskey warmed her from the inside out, loosening the knot of anxiety that had been living in her chest for days. Daniel’s presence was comfortable and uncomplicated.

You know,” she said, echoing his earlier tone, “you could put your hand here. If you wanted.”

She guided his hand to her waist, just above her hip. This wasn’t harmless. She knew that. Did it anyway. Felt his fingers flex, uncertain, then settle with gentle pressure.

They sat like that, his hand warm on her waist, her head still against his shoulder. She could feel his heartbeat where her cheek rested against his chest. Steady, then faster. His thumb moved against her hip, a small circle she wasn’t sure he knew he was making. Heat bloomed between them like whiskey in the belly. Slow, spreading, undeniable.

“Freya,” Daniel said, and his voice was soft. “You’re drunk.”

“So are you.”

“I’m serious. You don’t want—”

She turned her face up and and kissed him. Cut off his protests with her mouth on his, tasting smoke and whiskey and surprise. For a heartbeat he was frozen, then he was kissing her back, one hand coming up to cup the back of her head while the other tightened on her waist.

It was nothing like Freya had imagined kissing would be. It was messy, urgent, with too much tongue and not enough air. She didn’t care.

She pulled back, breathless, hardly believing she’s been so daring. They stared at each other in the dim light.

“Christ,” he whispered. “We shouldn’t—”

She kissed him again, deeper this time, more certain. His hand tightened in her hair and she made a small sound of approval. Her own hands found his shoulders, gripping for balance as the world tilted slightly. When they broke apart again, his chest was rising and falling rapidly.

“Freya, if anyone sees, if this goes wrong,” he said quietly, “it doesn’t just go wrong for me.”

She shifted her weight, one knee coming up and over his lap. It was awkward at first, her head spinning and her balance off, his hands catching her hips to steady her. Then she was settled astride him, facing him fully, close enough to see the faint stubble on his jaw.

“Fuck,” he breathed. “Freya, we— Christ, we really can’t—” His hands were shaking where they gripped her hips. “We should stop.”

“Do you want to stop?” she asked.

His hands tightened on her hips. “No!” Then his eyes squeezed shut. “Yes. Shit. I don’t know. You’re not some brothel worker in a stuffed dress.” He opened his eyes again. “If anyone catches us, I’m dead, you know that, right?”

But his hands stayed on her hips, tightened even.

She kissed him again. He groaned into her mouth, the sound desperate, and kissed her back like a drowning man.

She rolled her hips experimentally, just a small movement.

“Freya,” he gasped. “Freya, we really shouldn’t—”

But his hands were already moving, settling on her hips, fingers flexing like he couldn’t quite help himself.

“That’s… you can’t…” His words dissolved into incoherence as she did it again, rolling her hips in a slow, deliberate circle. He was hard now beneath her, the evidence of that wanting unmistakable even though their clothes.

His hands moved up from her hips, sliding under the hem of her shirt to find warm skin. His fingers traced her ribs, her sides, mapped the curve of her waist with something like wonder.The touch was gentle and tentative, like he couldn’t quite believe he was allowed.

She ground down again and he groaned, his hips bucking up involuntarily. The ridge of him pressed up against her sex and the sensation made her gasp.

“Freya, please,” he gasped against her mouth. “If someone sees—”

She kissed him again, swallowing his protests. His hands found her breasts, cupping through the fabric of her chemise, and Freya heard herself make a sound she’d never made before, something between a gasp and a moan.

This. This was what all the fuss was about. This heat, this pressure, this desperate need for more, more, more…

Daniel’s hips bucked up again, harder this time. His hands were inside her shirt now against bare skin. She fumbled with the remaining buttons of his shirt, desperate to feel his chest, his heartbeat. When her palms found warm skin and the solid muscle beneath, Daniel groaned.

“You feel so good,” she whispered against his mouth. “I want—”

She wasn’t even sure what she wanted, just that she needed more of him. Needed to touch him, feel him, understand what all this heat and want meant. Her hand moved down between them, found the front of his trousers. She could feel him straining against the fabric, hard and hot.

“Freya, don’t,” he gasped. “I can’t— if you touch me I’m going to—”

But his hips pushed up into her touch, betraying his words.

Curiosity consumed her, curiosity and want and the whiskey-warm courage to act on both. She undid enough buttons at his fly to slip her hand inside, fumbling through the layers until she found bare skin.

The heat shocked her first. Then the silky-soft texture over rigid hardness, the contradictory blend of silk and steel. She wrapped her fingers around him experimentally, fascinated by the heft, the way he pulsed against her palm.

Daniel’s whole body went rigid beneath her. When she stroked upward, he made a broken sound and his hands clenched on her waist.

“Oh god, Freya, I’m going to—”

A hand like iron clamped around Freya’s upper arm and hauled her backward.

She had one disorienting moment of Daniel’s shocked face, his hands reaching for her, then she was airborne. She hit the ground hard enough to knock the wind from her lungs, hay dust exploding around her.

Goss-Mother Clara stood over her, chest heaving, face twisted with something between fury and horror. The older woman was broad-shouldered from years of military work, and she’d just thrown Freya like a sack of grain.

“What in the holy hell do you think you’re doing?” The Goss-Mother’s voice could have stripped paint. “Get your hands off my son!”

Daniel scrambled upright, fumbling with his fly, trying to make himself decent with fingers that didn’t seem to be working. “Ma, I can explain—”

“Explain?” Goss-Mother Clara rounded on him. “What’s to explain? I can see what happened perfectly clear!”

Freya tried to sit up, to say something, but her mother’s voice cut through the chaos like a whip-crack.

“Clara. Step away from my daughter.”

Freya’s mother emerged from the darkness between the hay bales like an avenging angel. Behind her, festival-goers were materializing from the shadows, drawn by the commotion.

“Your daughter just had her hands on my boy’s cock!” The Goss-Mother’s voice shook. “Don’t you dare tell me to step away when she’s the one who—”

“I don’t care if she was riding him bare-assed in the town square,” the Stirling-Mother said, voice like ice. “He put hands on a Stirling daughter. You will step back. Now.”

For a moment, the two women faced each other like wolves disputing territory. Then the Goss-Mother’s shoulders sagged slightly. She stepped back, though her eyes never left Daniel.

Stirling-Mother Alexia moved to Freya, helped her to her feet with surprising gentleness. Then her expression hardened again.

“Sheriff!” she called, voice carrying across the festival square. “Sheriff Brennan, I need you here!”

“Ma’am, that’s not necessary—” Daniel started.

“You don’t get to speak,” the Stirling-Mother said flatly. “You had your chance to show sense and restraint, and you failed. Sheriff!”

Sheriff Brennan pushed through the growing crowd, hand on his gun belt. He took in the scene with one sweeping glance: Freya disheveled and hay-dusted, Daniel with his shirt still half-unbuttoned, both mothers standing like combatants, and a ring of witnesses watching avidly.

“What’s the trouble here?”

“This man.” Stirling-Mother Alexia said, voice carrying to ensure the witnesses heard every word, “This animal put his hands on my daughter. Compromised her. At a public festival. With witnesses.”

“She kissed me!” Daniel protested. “I tried to stop her, I told her we shouldn’t—”

“You’re a grown man,” Stirling-Mother said. You know the rules. You should have walked away.”

“Ma’am,” Sheriff Brennan said carefully, “if the girl initiated—”

“Are you suggesting my daughter is a harlot, Sheriff?” Stirling-Mother Alexia’s voice could have frozen fire. “That she goes around accosting men at festivals? Or are you suggesting that a man of the Goss family, raised by military fathers, didn’t have the self-control to refuse a drunk girl’s advances?”

Sheriff Brennan’s jaw tightened. He looked at Daniel, then at the watching crowd, then back at the Stirling-Mother. He already knew how this had to end.

“Daniel Goss,” he said heavily, “I’m placing you under arrest for public indecency and compromising a respectable woman.”

“What?” Daniel’s face went white. “Sheriff, you can’t—”

“I can and I am. Hands behind your back.”

“Clara!” The Goss-Mother’s voice cracked. “You know my boy. You know he wouldn’t—”

“What I know,” the Stirling-Mother said, “is that there are two dozen witnesses who saw your son with his hands on my daughter. What I know is that the law is clear. What I know is that my family’s reputation will not be destroyed because a soldier couldn’t keep his cock in his trousers.”

Sheriff Brennan pulled Daniel’s hands behind his back, securing them with practiced efficiency. Daniel didn’t resist, but his eyes found Freya’s across the space between them.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “Freya, I’m so sorry.”

Then the crowd parted as four men arrived like a stormfront. The Stirling-Fathers. All four of them.

Papa John got there first, hands clenched into fists. Papa Marcus and Papa Will flanked him like basalt. Papa Thomas brought up the rear with a kind of resigned and quiet fury that was somehow more terrifying than shouting.

Freya wanted to protest, wanted to explain that she’d started it, that Daniel had tried to stop her, that this was all wrong. But Papa Thomas’s hand on her shoulder was like a shackle, and her mother’s expression promised consequences if she spoke.

So she stayed silent as the sheriff led Daniel away through the festival crowd. Stayed silent as two men appeared from the shadows, moving to toward their mother and their arrested brother.

Mattias Goss looked like he’d been carved from stone. His face was completely expressionless as he watched his brother being led away in shackles. Edwin Goss looked like he might be sick. Newly back from schooling out East, his boyish face was pale in the torchlight.

Both brothers turned to look at Freya as they passed. Mattias’s expression didn’t change, but his eyes tracked her with the cold assessment of a tactical evaluation. Edwin’s gaze held hers with a kind of hollow recognition, like he’d seen this pattern before and knew exactly how it would end.

Behind them, Goss-Mother Clara stumbled through the crowd. She moved like a woman underwater, slow and unsteady. When she reached the sheriff, her hand went to Daniel’s shoulder—not restraining, just touching, like she needed to confirm he was still in the world.

Her eyes found Freya’s. There was no anger there, just the hollow, empty look of a woman who’d already buried two husbands and was now watching her son be led away to a fate she couldn’t control. A woman who’d survived the outbreak, survived widowhood, survived poverty, and was now facing the destruction of her sons’ futures.

Three men stood silhouetted in the torchlight. Mattias with his stony face and calculating eyes. Edwin with his sick horror and hollow recognition. Daniel with his head down and shoulders hunched, disappearing into the darkness between the sheriff and his brothers.

The Goss-Mother’s hand fell from Daniel’s shoulder.

Freya’s stomach turned to ice.

She understood, in that moment, exactly what she’d done. Not just to Daniel. To all of them.

The crowd murmured and whispered, already constructing the narrative that would follow the Goss brothers for the rest of their lives. Already calculating the social cost of association.

The Goss-Mother’s eyes stayed locked on Freya’s. Not accusing, only bearing witness to the moment her family’s future died.

Papa Thomas’s hand tightened on Freya’s shoulder.

“Home,” he said quietly. “Now.”

Chapter 2

Her mother didn’t speak until they were all in the sitting room. All four fathers arranged themselves around the perimeter like sentries, while Freya stood in the center of the room like a prisoner awaiting judgment.

“Do you understand what you’ve done?” The Stirling-Mother’s voice could have cut glass.

“I kissed him,” Freya said. “Why did you call the sheriff? I could have just explained—”

“Explained?” Her mother’s retort was sharp and bitter. “Explained to whom? The Harris-Mother, who saw you sprawled across that boy’s lap? The dozen festival-goers who came running at the commotion? Explained that you grabbed a man’s cock because you were curious what one felt like?”

Freya flinched at the crude language.

“There were witnesses, Freya. Once there’s an audience, there’s no such thing as private explanation. There’s only damage control.” Her mother’s voice was hard. “There’s only two versions of the story being told tonight: either you’re a wild, reckless harlot with no self-control, or you’re a respectable daughter who was taken advantage of by a man who should have known better. Which story do you think serves this family?”

“But it’s not true—”

The Stirling-Mother moved to the window, looking out at the dark street. “If I’d let Daniel Goss walk away tonight, do you know what tomorrow would bring? Whispers that the Stirlings can’t control their own daughter. Questions about what other lapses in judgment you might display. Mothers pulling their sons from consideration because who wants to marry into a household that tolerates that kind of behavior?”

She turned back to face Freya.

“Worse, it leaves Daniel free to make claims. His mother could argue that you compromised him, that you owe him consideration now. He and his brothers have cause to press for marriage because you initiated contact.” Her mother’s eyes were cold. “Arresting him ends that conversation before it starts. He has no standing to claim anything.”

“So you’re protecting me by destroying him? Even though everyone knows I started it?”

“Right now, the official story is that Daniel Goss put his hands on a Stirling daughter. That he showed an animalisticlack of self-control and respect for proper conduct. That story protects you.”

“And ruins him.”

“Yes.” Her mother’s acknowledgment was matter-of-fact. “A sensible man knows that. You walk away, because the consequences fall on YOU, not her. He knew this. He failed to act on it. And sadly dear, yes, he pays the price.”

Freya felt tears burning in her eyes. “That’s not fair.”

The Stirling-Mother looked at her for a long moment, her expression unreadable.

“Fair has nothing to do with it,” she said. “This family survives because we make decisions others can’t afford to.”

She turned toward the door.

“You’ll learn to carry that weight, Freya. Or you won’t. Either way, it’s yours now.”

She opened the door without another glance.

“Thomas. You wanted a moment with our daughter.” She left, the other fathers following. The door closed with a soft click.

Papa Thomas didn’t move from his spot. He studied Freya with the careful eyes that had always seen more than his brothers did.

“You understand what your mother said is true,” he said at last. It wasn’t a question.

Freya nodded, her throat too tight to trust herself to answer.

“Daniel Goss is in jail because your mother did her job. She protected this family.” He paused. “But you should also understand the cost.”

He swallowed.

“Three men won’t marry now. Any woman who might have considered them will think twice. Not because of what you did,” he added softly, “but because of what people will believe they did.”

He exhaled, slow and weary. “You will weather the scandal,” he said quietly. “Daniel Goss and his brothers will not.”

Freya’s voice cracked. “I didn’t mean to—”

“That’s the terrible thing, child,” he said. “You don’t have to mean to hurt someone for the hurt to be real.”

She looked up at him. “What do I do, Papa?”

Papa Thomas cocked his head at her. “Time’s long passed for asking your papas what you should do. Your mother, she’s made her choice clear. But I wonder, what’s yours?”

He shrugged slightly. “I won’t tell you what to do. But any daughter of age can offer marriage. Your fathers can witness it. That would stand, whatever your mother thinks.”

He left.

Freya stood alone in the parlour, heart hammering.

She should do what her mother wanted. Marry well. Let the Goss brothers fade into the distance. Forget Daniel’s face in the torchlight, and the way he’d apologized even as they dragged him away. Forget Mattias stony faced and stoic. Forget Edwin looking like his whole future had just been stolen from him. It made the most sense. It was for the best. It really was.

Freya opened the door.

All four fathers stood in the hallway. Papa Thomas raised an eyebrow.

“I’ll want to leave early in the morning,” she said.

Papa Thomas nodded once. “Then we’ll be ready.”

---

Daniel sat on the narrow cot, elbows on his knees, hands hanging loose between them. His gaze was unfocused, staring at the wooden floor. Mattias occupied the single chair outside the bars. One hand rested on the arm, the other traced the iron lock of Daniel’s cell in an absent motion.Edwin leaned against the wall near the door, shoulders rounded, eyes lowered.

“I spoke to the Commander,” Mattias said at last. Daniel didn’t’ look up. “You’ll be remanded to garrison custody later this morning. After that, an official reprimand. Then transfer.”

“Where,” Daniel asked quietly.

“Fort Charles or Fort Bleriott.”

“Well, it’s better than hanging, I suppose,” Daniel said without humour.

Mattias stopped touching the lock.

Edwin cleared his throat. “Well, Fort Charles is rough, but Bleriott’s not a death sentence,” he offered. “Prentice came back. After his stint there.”

Mattias stared at him numbly for a moment. He didn’t bother to mention Prentice came back missing an eye and half his right arm. He puffed out his breath. “You touched Stirling daughter. In public. With witnesses.” His voice was flat. “Hard to imagine how you could have fucked up worse if you’d planned for it.”

“I know,” muttered Daniel.

“Do you?” Mattias said. “Because this beyond a mere mistake. It’s a complete failure to think rationally.”

Edwin shifted. “Ma’s beside herself.”

Daniel nodded once. He accepted that as a fact, not an accusation.

Silence settled again. Outside, the town was just beginning to wake. A wagon rattled past. Voices carried faintly through the walls. Carbon was going about its day, unconcerned about the Goss-brothers’ ruined future.

Mattias stood and tilted his head toward the window.

“What is it,” Daniel asked.

“Looks like the Stirling-fathers, all four of them, come to demand frontier justice.”

Daniel scrubbed his hands wearily over his face. “Oh Christ. Do you think they’re going to shoot me or just beat me?”

Edwin peered over Mattias’s shoulder, confirming the Stirling-fathers were approaching in the dim light. “I’m not sure that makes any practical difference.” He muttered, “There’s four of them.”

There was a sound of heavy boots on wooden planks. Voices in the front office. A muffled discussion and protests from the sheriff. A louder voice cut the sheriff off.

“Enough, sheriff! We will see the prisoner now!”

The door swung open.

The Stirling-fathers filled the doorway, broad-shouldered and grim-faced. Behind them, barely visible, was Freya.

Daniel pushed himself to his feet. Edwin straightened.

Papa John stepped forward, hands on his belt. “Freya Stirling has come to make an offer to the Goss brothers.” The words hung heavy in the air.

“An offer?” Mattias said carefully. His eyes tracked Papa John, then the other fathers. “What kind of offer?”

“Let me speak it, father.” Freya pushed past Father Thomas. Her hands were fists at her sides, knuckles white. She stepped right up to the bars, close to Mattias.

“I offer marriage to the Goss brothers, Mattias, Daniel, and Edwin.” Her words came out fast, like she needed to same them quickly before her nerve faltered. “To bind our families in honourable marriage.

Silence. Daniel’s hands closed around the bars, gripping hard. Edwin made a choked sound, half indrawn breath, half disbelief. Mattias said nothing and studied the reckless idiot who’d gotten tangled with his brother and properly destroyed his life in the process.

She looked like an unmade bed. Pale, with puffy eyes and shadows under them. Her hair was pulled back severe, but pieces had escaped. She’d dressed carefully though, clean shirt, clean pants, everything buttoned proper.

This girl had walked into a jail, past the sheriff, with four armed fathers to witness, to offer marriage to three broke soldiers with nothing to offer her but scandal and hard labour. Against sense, reason and her mother’s wishes. Mattias didn’t know if that made her brave or stupid. But she’d come. That counted for something.

“Your mother know you’re doing this?”

She shook head, once. “No.”

The Stirling-fathers didn’t contradict her.

Well then.

“And when she finds out?”

Freya held his eyes. “My offer stands.”

Papa Thomas nodded once.

Mattias studied her. This reckless girl had detonated his brother’s life the night before. Now she stood in a jail cell offering to tie her future to the wreckage. She was as foolhardy as Daniel and then some, apparently.

“Give us a minute,” Mattias said.

Papa Michael’s hands went to his belt. “You’ll decide now.”

Mattias turned to his brothers.

“Daniel.”

Daniels’s voice was rough. “I don’t deserve this.”

“I didn’t ask what you think you deserve,” Mattias replied. “I’m asking if you can you live with it.”

Daniel looked at Freya through the bars. Then away. “Yes.”

“Edwin.”

Edwin swallowed. “I can live with it.”

Mattias turned back to Freya. She was still looking at him, still hadn’t dropped her eyes. Waiting.

Three capable brothers, soldiers. One woman, skilled, if reckless. A homestead ten miles into zombie country and a future none of them had chosen.

He’d faced worse odds.

“The Goss brothers accept your offer.”

Freya’s face shifted. Maybe relief. Maybe terror. Hard to say which.

Father John’s hand landed on her shoulder. “Then its agreed.”

The Stirling fathers closed around her like a wall and turned her toward the door. She twisted back, caught Mattias’s eyes one more time.

He nodded once. Acknowledgement. Agreement.

Promise, maybe.

Then she was gone, her fathers shepherding her out. The door swung shut.

Daniel’s breath whooshed out. Edwin slid down the wall until he was sitting on the dusty floor, head in his hands.

“Did that just happen?”

“Yes.” Mattias sat heavily in the chair. His hands had gone cold and his bones felt like lead. He looked at Daniel, still gripping the bars, and staring open-mouthed at the closed door.

“Congratulations,” he said. You got us a wife.

Chapter 3

The wedding had happened the day before at the homestead.

Stirling family and hands had camped for three days in tents scattered across the yard, helping make the place livable. The well was cleared, the barn roof patched, wagons unloaded. Supplies stacked in the granary and root cellar. The house was scrubbed, beds made, fires laid in fireplaces.

A magistrate rode out from Carbon to witness. Freya sput on a dress and stood on the porch with Mattias, Daniel, and Edwin and spoke her vows. They spoke theirs. Her mother watched from the yard with an expression like stone.

After the vows and feasting, Freya slept in a tent with the Stirling women. Her husbands slept elsewhere. This morning after breakfast, tents came down, wagons were loaded, horses saddled, and the Stirling party prepared to ride back to town. Tonight, Freya and her husbands would sleep in the house and make it theirs.

Her mother found her by the last wagon as supplies were being secured.

“You have everything you need,” the Stirling-Mother said. “Tools, stock, seed, defensible position. Good land, good water.”

Freya nodded. Her throat was too tight to speak.

“The Goss brothers would never have been my choice for you.” Her mother’s voice was even, honest. “But they’re soldiers. Trained and capable. They know how to work, how to defend, how to survive.” A pause. “They’ll do right by you if you do right by them.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Her mother’s hand came up, gripped Freya’s shoulder. Almost gentle.

“You’re determined. You’re capable. You’ve chosen this path and these men.” The grip tightened briefly. “Now make something of it. Do yourself proud.”

Then she released Freya’s shoulder, turned, and mounted her horse without looking back.

Freya wrapped her arms around herself. She took a shaky breath and rubbed her knuckles against her eyes as everyone she’d ever known rode north out of the coulee that was now her home.

The Dead were out there. The isolation was real. And tonight there would be no family camping in the yard, no excuse left to avoid what marriage meant.

She looked about for her husbands.

Mattias was examining the granary like it was a tactical problem. He circled the building slowly, testing boards, checking the foundation, measuring angles with his eyes. Tall and broad-shouldered, he moved with the kind of precision that came from years of military discipline. He crouched by the corner post, ran his hand along the timber, stood and looked toward the coulee entrance. Already seeing threats that hadn’t arrived yet.

Edwin paced the property with a notebook, making sketches. He stopped every few yards to measure distances with his eyes, scribble notes, draw diagrams. Younger than his brothers by several years, slimmer build, he moved with the deliberate focus of someone who’d been educated. His eyes scanned the sagging fence line. The creek’s flow pattern. The approaches through the coulee. At the jail he’d looked pale and sick, as if watching his future die in real time. He looked much the same now.

Daniel, she found crouched at the side of the house, pushing aside dead leaves with a stick. He looked up as she approached, and his face brightened with a tentative smile that stirred a tiny flutter in her chest.

“Prints,” he said, gesturing with the stick. “Look here. Deer came through recently, four maybe five animals moving together. They probably followed the creek bed, up here on the lee side of the house, then cut over to that marshy area by the canyon wall. There’s a spring there, feeding into the creek. That’s a good sign. Clean water, and nothing to scare them off.”

He pointed further along the line of the house. “Rabbit tracks too. Coyote prints circling those. If coyotes think this is a good place, there’s game around. Nothing spooking them either.”

He sat back on his heels, satisfaction clear in his voice. “And I didn’t find a single thing that shouldn’t be here. No fires, no boot prints, no horseshoe marks from strangers. Place has been quiet.”

Something flickered at the edge of Freya’s vision. A large greyish shape moving at a lope around the corner of the house.

Her hand went to the pistol at her hip. Wolf. That was a wolf. Christ, were there zombie wolves? Could wolves even turn?

Daniel’s head whipped toward her, saw where she was looking. “Freya, hold—”

The creature stopped, head swinging toward them.

“That’s just Bela,” Daniel said. “Mattias’s dog.”

Not wolf. Dog. A very large, very ugly dog.

The lurcher’s wiry grey coat stuck out in stiff tufts all over, neither smooth nor curly, just aggressively unkempt. He was rangy and rough, with a whippy tail that hung low twitching at the tip. Pale yellow eyes fixed on Freya with intense assessment. One ear cocked at an odd angle where a notch disrupted its shape.

“Bela?” Freya said, hand still on her pistol. “Really.”

“Mattias has a sense of humor. Sometimes.”

The dog took two steps closer, nose working. Freya held very still. Bela sniffed her boot, her knee, then her hand, breath warm and reeking of something dead he’d probably eaten earlier.

She lifted her hand carefully. The dog’s lip curled, not quite a snarl but a clear warning. She lowered her hand again slowly, not quite daring to touch.

Bela flicked his ears, then pulled back and trotted off toward the granary.

“Well,” Daniel said, rising and offering his hand to pull her up. “That’s more than he gives most people. Usually he just snarls and pisses on your boots.”

“Charming creature,” Freya said.

“He’s Mattias’s dog,” Daniel said, like that explained everything.

He glanced at her face. She’d gone pale when she thought Bela was a wolf, and the color hadn’t quite come back. Her eyes were shiny and her chin was set too tight.

Women needed reassurance sometimes. God knew he was the wrong man for that job, but he was the only one standing here. He looked down at the stick in his hand and pushed aside more leaf litter near the foundation.

“Look at this, Freya.” He brushed dirt away from a cluster of tiny shoots pushing up through last year’s debris. “Someone planted something here. See these? Flowers, maybe?”

“Sweet peas,” Freya said quietly. She crouched beside him, touching the new growth. “My aunt must have planted them here. Before the outbreak.”

Daniel nodded slowly. “They’ve been here all this time. Six years, growing and thriving in this place with nobody to tend them.” He met her eyes. “That’s a good omen, Freya. Sweet, pretty, and tougher than they look.”

Her mouth twitched, almost a smile. “Like me?”

“Exactly like you,” he said, and meant it.

---

Freya paced the bedroom, bare feet whispering against floorboards. The wife’s room. Her room now. The largest room in the house, with windows facing north toward the neck of the coulee. A tall wardrobe stood against one wall for her clothes, a writing desk against another, and a washstand with pitcher and basin in the corner. The bed dominated the space, ample space for two, more if they didn’t mind being close. The door to the nursery stood ajar on her right, the empty room waiting.

Downstairs, beyond the window, three male voices rumbled low. Her husbands. The word still sat awkwardly on her tongue.

One of them would come up soon.

She’d left her door open. That was the signal, wasn’t it? In houses like this, built for multiple husbands, the wife’s door told the story. Open meant welcome. Closed meant not tonight.

She’d combed out her hair and stripped down to her shift. The pale cotton was thin and showed the shadow of her body beneath. Her hair hung loose in waves. She felt like an offering laid out on an altar. Virginal sacrifice. Except she was the one who’d started this whole mess with her hands down Daniel’s trousers behind a pile of hay.

She sat on the bed. Shot back up. Gnawed her thumbnail.

It would be Mattias, probably. He was the eldest. That was the way these things work, wasn’t it? Either that, or they were down there drawing straws.

She barely knew Mattias. Serious and stone faced. An officer at the garrison. What would he be like? Rough? Cold? Efficient?

Edwin was a stranger. He’d been back in Carbon less than a month since completing his studies down South. She’d perhaps exchanged a dozen words with him since the wedding. Even fewer before that, before he went away. She knew nothing about him, really.

And Daniel. Sweet, fumbling Daniel who’d gotten hard just from her kissing him. Who’d apologized even as they dragged him to jail.

What if it hurt? What if she hated it? What if marriage turned out to be closing your eyes and thinking of the Empire while a man grunted on top of you? And she’d have to do this three times. Three separate first times with three separate strangers.

Three men. Three times. God.

Footsteps on the stairs. A soft rap on the frame. Daniel.

Relief coursed through her so hard she nearly sobbed. Not Mattias. Not the stranger.

He stood in the doorway like he’d forgotten how doors worked. His hands hung at his sides, useless. His eyes dropped to her body and his throat worked as he swallowed.

“I suppose we should…” He gestured vaguely at the bed, fingers trembling.

“Yes.”

Neither of them moved.

“Or. We could wait,” he said, voice rough. “If you’re not ready.”

The bulge in his trousers said he was ready. Very ready. Freya shook her head. “Waiting just makes it stranger. Doesn’t it?”

“Yeah.” He swallowed again. “Yeah, I suppose it does.”

She took a step toward him. Then another. Close enough to see the pulse hammering in his throat. “I want to. I just don’t know how. Or what I’m supposed to do.” She looked down at her bare feet. “I’m scared.”

He reached for her hand. His palm was hot, damp with sweat. Nervous as her. That helped.

“Neither do I,” he said. “Know what to do, I mean.”

“We’re terrible at this.”

“Absolutely fucking hopeless.”

They both laughed, breathless and shaky, and the sound broke some of the hesitation between them. They were still fumbling beginners about to get naked together. It was absurd. Terrifying. Inevitable.

He unbuttoned his shirt with shaking fingers, pulled it off. Pale skin stretched over lean muscle, shoulders broad from hauling timber, arms corded from digging fortifications. His chest rose and fell with quick breaths. A faint scar curved across his ribs, long healed. The dark hair on his chest narrowed down past his navel, disappearing into his waistband.

He held out his hand.

She took it.

They climbed onto the bed together, clumsy as newborn foals. The mattress dipped under their weight.

He kissed her. Careful. Closed-mouth. Chaste.

She kissed him back harder, with teeth. His lips were softer than she’d expected. Warm. Real. She leaned in, wanting more.

His hand slid down her side. Ribs. Waist. Hip. She shivered hard.

“Cold?”

“No.” God, no. The opposite of cold. Heat was shivering in her belly, spreading outward like whiskey on an empty stomach.

He did it again, slower this time, learning the shape of her. She made a sound she didn’t recognize. Want crept in, along with the heat. His hands on her skin, his mouth moving to her neck, the solid weight of him beside her. Her body remembered the festival. Remembered wanting. Remembered heat. Remembered what he felt like under his clothes.

She touched him back. Tentative at first. His chest, the muscle of his shoulders. He sucked in a sharp breath when her fingers grazed his stomach.

“Okay?” she whispered.

“Very okay.” His voice had gone hoarse. “More than okay.”

“This was so much easier when we were drunk.”

“It was, wasn’t it?” He shifted closer, hand settling on her hip through the thin cotton. “We could pretend. You know, pretend we’re back behind those hay bales. Hiding from your mother and the Harris-Mother and every other scheming matron in Carbon.”

His voice dropped lower. “I think we were right about like this.” He guided her hand down. To his crotch. To the hard line of him straining against his trousers.

Freya turned her face away, eyes burning. “Daniel, I’m sorry.” The words scraped out of her throat. “I’m so sorry. About that night. About all of this. What I’ve gotten you into. What I’ve gotten all of you into.”

He went still. Sat up, looking down at her.

She kept her face turned aside, couldn’t bear to see whatever was in his eyes. Regret, probably. Resentment. He was only here because he had to be.

“Freya.” His voice was quiet. Serious in a way she’d never heard from easy-going Daniel. “Look at me.”

She didn’t.

His hand cupped her jaw, gentle, turning her face back to his. “My brothers and I never expected to marry.” Each word came out deliberate, like he needed her to really hear them. “We never expected to have a wife. Ever. We have no sister to trade. No bride price. No prospects.” His thumb brushed her cheekbone. “Marrying you was completely unexpected.”

“I ruined you.”

“You gave us something we never thought we’d have.” His hand slid down, fingers spreading across her ribs, thumb just under her breast. She could feel her heartbeat against his palm. “I never dreamed I’d have a wife. A real woman, not some…” He swallowed. “Not someone pretending. You. In my arms. In my bed.” His voice cracked. “You’re a gift, Freya. I don’t care how it happened. I’m just grateful it did.”

“I nearly got you killed. I may yet get all of you killed, out here ten miles into zombie territory with nothing but some chickens and a line of broken fences.”

Daniel lay back down, pulling her with him until they were face to face, breath mingling. “It’s not all that dire. Carbon’s only a half day away on a bad day. The water here is good and the well is sweet. The coulee’s defensible as hell. The house is solid.” He kissed her shoulder, soft and wondering. “Your mother didn’t send you here to die, Freya. She sent you here to build something.” His hand slid higher, palm cupping her breast through the shift. “And you couldn’t have picked three better men to build it with you.”

“I didn’t pick you. I destroyed you.”

His thumb brushed across her nipple through thin cotton and she gasped. “You gave us a future.” His forehead pressed against hers. “You gave us you.”

She kissed him then. Deep and desperate and meaning it. His hand tightened on her breast and she felt him, hard and hot against her thigh through his trousers.

“I want…” She didn’t know how to finish.

“What?” His lips moved against hers. “What do you want, Freya?”

“To touch you. Like I did before. At the festival.”

His whole body shuddered. “You do?”

“Yes.”

He rolled onto his back, watching her with dark eyes. Waiting. Trembling.

She sat up, fingers shaking as she worked the buttons of his trousers. He lifted his hips to help and she pulled them down with his drawers in one movement, leaving him bare.

The reality of him stole her breath. He was hard and beautiful. Flushed and already leaking at the tip.

“Christ, Freya,” he breathed, voice wrecked. “You’re really here. You’re really mine.”

“Yours,” she repeated softly, wrapping her hand around him.

His hips jerked up into her grip and he made a broken sound. ” “Oh god, Freya, I’m not going to last ten seconds.” He grimaced. “And I really wanted to impress you.”

She laughed, breathless, and stroked him again. His whole body went taut. “I don’t need to be impressed. I just need you.”

“Well, you’ve got me.” His hand found her thigh, slid up under her shift, fingers trembling. “All of me. For better or worse.”

“Mostly worse, from what I hear about wedding nights.”

“Then let’s make it better.”

His fingers found her under the cotton, pressed against her sex, and she gasped. Heat flooded through her. She was already wet, had been since he’d cupped her breast, maybe since he’d walked through the door.

“Can I…” He tugged at her shift.

She let go of him long enough to pull it over her head, toss it aside. The cool air hit her bare skin and she fought the urge to cover herself.

Daniel stared. Just stared, like he’d forgotten how to breathe.

“You’re…” He swallowed. “God, Freya, you’re so beautiful.”

His hands were careful, almost reverent, as they found her breasts. Warm palms, calloused fingers. He cupped her, thumbs brushing across her nipples, and she made a sound that was half gasp, half moan.

“Is this right…like that?”

“Yes.” Her voice came out breathless. “More.”

He did it again, watching her face like he was memorizing her reactions. His hands slid down, over her ribs, her waist, her hips. Between her thighs.

She opened for him, shameless, needing. His fingers found her wet and ready and he groaned like she’d hurt him.

“Freya, you’re…” He didn’t finish, just stroked her, clumsy and eager and genuine.

She rocked into his hand, chasing the sensation. It felt good. Better than good. Her own explorations had never felt like this, never built to this level of excitement.

“I want…” She didn’t know what she wanted exactly, just that she needed more.

“Yeah.” He shifted, settling between her thighs. “Me too.”

He fumbled for a moment, trying to find the right angle. She felt him press against her, hot and blunt, then slip. Tried again. His hand shaking as he guided himself.

“Okay?” he whispered.

“Yes.” She whispered back. “Keep going.”

He pushed in slowly, carefully, and she felt herself stretch around him. It burned. Not quite pain, but not quite pleasure either. Strange and full and too much. Her body didn’t know what to do with the intrusion.

“Freya?” His voice was wrecked, barely holding on. “Are you…”

“I’m fine. Just. Go slow.”

He held still, trembling with the effort. She could feel him shaking, feel the tension in his shoulders under her hands. After a moment, she shifted her hips experimentally.

The burn didn’t really ease, so much as a fierce desire crept in and wrapped around it. She shifted her hips against him strongly this time.

Daniel made a strangled sound against her neck.

“Move,” she said.

He did. Slow at first, hesitant, pulling back and pressing in with careful control. Then with more confidence as she gasped and tightened her legs around him, pulling him closer. The bed creaked beneath them. Their breathing filled the room, harsh and ragged.

It wasn’t graceful. It wasn’t skilled. He was too fast, the angle not quite right. But it was real and honest and theirs. His forehead pressed against hers. His breath came in pants against her mouth. She could feel his heartbeat hammering where their chests touched.

“God, Freya,” he panted against her neck. “You feel… I can’t… I’m not going to…”

“It’s okay.” She held him tighter. “It’s okay.”

He made a broken sound and his rhythm stuttered. She felt him pulse inside her, felt him come apart in her arms with her name on his lips.

He collapsed against her, breathing hard, face buried in her neck. For a long moment they just lay there, tangled together, hearts hammering.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled against her skin. “That was too fast. I wanted it to be good for you.”

She stroked his hair, damp with sweat. “It was good.”

“Liar.”

She kissed his temple. “It wasn’t awful.”

“Not awful,” he repeated slowly.

“Not awful. That’s good for a first time,” she said.

But he could see it in her eyes. The letdown. The uncertainty. The knowledge that she had two more first times waiting. Two more nights of “not awful.”

“Freya.” He rolled to his side, pulling her with him, tucking her against his chest.“I wish I’d been better for you. I wish I’d known what I was doing.”

“You were fine.”

“I was terrible.” He said it without self-pity, just honest. “But my brothers won’t be.”

She made a small skeptical sound.

“I mean it.” He shifted, propping himself up so he could see her face. “Don’t worry about them. I’m the biggest lout of the three of us, truthfully. And we’re yours now. Yours to do with whatever you like.”

He smiled, trying to give her something to hold onto. “And besides, you and Edwin, you’re going to get along like a house on fire.”

“Oh? How so?”

“You’re very much alike. Peas in a pod, practically. You both see the world the same way. Always curious about how things work.”

Freya stared at him. “You do have only one brother Edwin, right? The youngest? The one just back from engineering school?”

Daniel laughed. “Yeah, that’s Edwin. Tough to get a word in edgewise with him sometimes.” He paused, considering. “I saw him poking around down at the creek. Probably wants to divert the water course or somesuch.” He considered a moment. “Whatever you do, don’t let him start talking about sluicegates or cross-currents or some other engineering nonsense. You’ll never hear the end of it. He grinned. “He’ll be showing you sketches of irrigation systems and asking you about soil composition before breakfast.”

Freya blinked, filing that away for later. “And Mattias?”

Daniel’s expression softened. “Ah, Mattias can be a bit intimidating if you let him. Economical with his words, like it’s a point of pride, like being oldest and having been an officer. But don’t let that fool you.” He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “He feels things right proper. Deeper than anyone I know. He just doesn’t show it. If I were you, I’d make him work for it. Don’t let him go all silent and brooding. He likes that too much.”

She was quiet for a moment, processing. “You’re trying to make me feel better.”

“Is it working?”

“A little.”

He kissed her forehead, then her nose, then her mouth. Soft and sweet. “It’ll get better, Freya. All of it. We’ll figure it out together. All four of us.” His hand tightened on her hip. “And next time, I promise, I’ll do better. I’ll make it good for you. Really good.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

His breathing started to slow, even out, his face beginning to go slack. She felt the exact moment sleep began pulling him under.

Freya lay in the darkness, listening to his heartbeat beneath her ear. Between her thighs, she ached. Two more husbands waited downstairs. Two more first times.

Chapter 4

Freya woke to grey dawn light and the sound of male voices carrying through the floorboards. She stretched and lay still for just a few moments.

Her body ached in unfamiliar places, a pleasant soreness that made her flush remembering the night before. Daniel’s hands. His mouth. The fumbling, genuine wonder of it.

No time for that now. She was a married woman, with a place of her own and a daunting amount of work to get done. There were thirty acres of ground for planting. It would need turning, rock and debris pulled, harrowing, and finally planting. To be done with three men used to hard work, true, but who’d probably never hitched a plough in their lives. Time to set them to the plough. With luck they’d forget they’d been soldiers soon enough.

She dressed quickly. The voices downstairs went quiet when her boots hit the floor.

In the kitchen, all three brothers were arranged around the table like soldiers awaiting orders. Mattias stood by the stove with coffee. Daniel smiled, blushed, looked down at his boots. Edwin seemed engrossed in studying his hands.

Freya accepted coffee from Mattias and took a seat at the table, carefully spreading her gaze around so as not to embarrass anyone, least of all herself. Three capable men, all military trained, all waiting for her to tell them what needed doing. The realization settled over her like a coat.

“There’s a lot that needs doing,” she began. “We’ve got six weeks before barley needs to be in the ground. Which means we need the south field turned, harrowed, and cleared of rocks before then.” She held up a hand. “We’ve got nearly thirty acres, but not enough time to get it all planted with barley. We’ll make up the difference later with corn.”

Mattias’s eyebrow went up fractionally. Not challenge. Assessment.

“Daniel, you’ll start off on the plough. Mattias, Edwin, you’ll be pulling rocks and hauling. The horses will tire fast. Rest them every hour and give them water. Check their hooves for stones. Don’t push the horses, and don’t push yourselves. We’ll need to do this all over again tomorrow, and the next day, until it’s done.”

“Freya?” asked Daniel hopefully. “An army marches on its stomach, you know. When do we eat?”

“You’re not in the army anymore, Daniel. First toil, then the grave. That’s order of things on a homestead.”

She let that hang for a moment, then relented. “Get the horses hitched and get the plough in the ground. I don’t expect you to turn sod on an empty stomach, but I can’t cook and supervise at the same time.”

Daniel grinned, relief obvious.

“One more thing,” Freya added. “Stay in sight of each other. Always. No one goes off alone. Understood?”

“Understood,” Mattias said, approval creeping into his response.

They were not great farmers. They were able, though, to get the right end of the plough into the ground, attached to the right end of the horses. By the time the horses were taking their first rest, there was a respectable pile of rocks gathered, a properly deep furrow churned in the earth, and Freya walked out with a basket of bannock and brisket.

The men had stripped down to shirtsleeves despite the chill. The early spring sun was deceptive, bright and warm on exposed skin even as breath still fogged in the air. Sweat darkened the fabric between their shoulder blades and under their arms. Daniel had rolled his sleeves past his elbows, forearms corded with muscle as he worked the plough handles. His dark hair was damp at the temples, curling slightly.

Mattias hauled a boulder the size of a pig’s head to the growing pile, the motion smooth and practiced despite being new to this particular labour. His shirt pulled tight across his shoulders with each lift. Edwin worked beside him, thinner but wiry, surprising strength in his frame. Both men moved with the efficiency of soldiers, bodies accustomed to hard use even if the specific work was unfamiliar.

But their hands told the real story. Red palms, blisters already forming where the handles and stones had worn at skin more used to rifle stocks and reins. Tomorrow would be worse.

The horses stood patient in the traces, sweating lightly. Unlike the men, they already knew this work.

Daniel saw her first. His face split into a grin that warmed Freya’s chest.

“Is that food? Please tell me that’s food.”

“Bannock and brisket. Water in the jug.”

They fell on the basket like men who’d been working since dawn, which they had. Daniel ate with shameless enthusiasm, making sounds of appreciation that reminded Freya uncomfortably of other sounds he’d made the night before. Mattias ate methodically, efficiently, refuelling rather than enjoying. Edwin sat apart slightly, stretching his back, wincing at muscles that would scream tomorrow.

One by one they finished eating and sprawled on the turned earth, faces to the sun.

Freya gathered the remains of the meal, wrapping the last strip of brisket in cloth.

Something hairy and ugly caught the edge of her vision. Bela. The dog had been lurking about all morning, obviously too proud to beg but also too curious to slope off entirely.

She glanced at Mattias. His eyes were closed, face tilted toward the sun.

Freya held out a morsel of brisket.

Bela regarded her with profound suspicion. This was not his human. This was the new one, the female who had disrupted the proper order of things. His yellow eyes assessed her with canine skepticism.

Then, with the air of conferring an enormous favour, he stretched his long scruffy neck forward and took the meat from her fingers. Gently and precisely. His teeth never touched her skin. He chewed once, swallowed, and retreated to a dignified distance. But his tail moved. Just once.

Freya shook her head. It was a mystery how one dog could have come to be so ugly.

“Right.” Daniel pushed himself upright with a groan. “Another few hours and we’ll have twice the ground turned.”

“No.”

Three heads turned toward her.

“When this row is finished, the horses are done for the day.”

Daniel blinked. “But we’ve only worked half a day.”

“You’ve only worked half a day. The horses have worked a full one.” Freya stood, brushing dirt from her trousers. “They need to be walked cool, groomed, watered, fed, and turned out to the paddock. Pushing horses past their limits does no one any favours.”

Edwin was already nodding. Mattias too, once he thought it through.

“There’s plenty of work for humans,” Freya continued. “More rocks to clear from the north section. Water to haul from the well. Coal for the stove. Supper won’t cook itself.” She looked at each of them in turn. “But the horses are done.”

The groans that followed were gratifying.

Daniel hauled himself to his feet, moving like a man twice his age. Edwin managed to stand but pressed both hands to his lower back uncomfortably. Mattias rose slowly, rolling his shoulders with a grimace.

They’d toughen. They had to.

Daniel gathered the horses’ leads, murmuring to them as he prepared to walk them back toward the barn. Mattias and Edwin squared up to the rock pile, resigned to an afternoon of hauling.

Freya collected the basket, the empty water jug, the cloth that had held the brisket. She straightened. Turned toward the house.

And froze.

To the north, rising high above the canyon rim and into the bright blue sky, a thick roiling plume of sulphur-yellow smoke stained the sky.

“Mattias.”

Her voice came out strange. Flat.

His head turned instantly to the direction of her gaze. His whole body came alert.

Daniel dropped the horses’ leads. Edwin straightened from the rock pile.

They stood in silence, four people watching yellow smoke climb into the blue sky. Freya’s fingers had gone cold on the basket handle. She shaded her eyes against the bright sunshine, then looked between her men. “How far out is that? Do you know whose place it is?”

“The Grimley place,” Mattias said. “That’s about about twelve miles north of here.”

She turned to Mattias, grasping for answers. “Where will help come from?”

“Depends who sees it first.” Mattias didn’t look away from the smoke. “Carbon’s got the bigger garrison, but Stolz outpost is closer to the Grimleys by a few miles. They’ll both respond. A disposal crew, medical officer, a patrol to sweep the area.”

The smoke kept rising. Freya’s hands had gone stiff. She recalled Martha Grimley from her visits to Carbon. Grey-streaked hair and laugh lines and a way of haggling that made Freya’s mother smile despite herself. Four husbands. A handful of sons, and a daughter, maybe ten years old.

Someone at the Grimley place had just killed a zombie who used to be a person.

Daniel made a sound. Low, rough, caught in his throat. His weight shifted forward, toward the horses, and then stopped. Muscle and instinct pulling one direction, reality yanking him back.

Edwin still held a rock. His knuckles white from the grip.

Mattias didn’t move at all. That was worse, somehow. The absolute stillness of a man who knew exactly what needed doing and couldn’t do any of it. His eyes stayed fixed on the horizon, tracking the smoke, calculating distances and response times and probabilities that weren’t his to calculate anymore.

A week ago he’d have been shouting orders. Horses saddled in minutes. Disposal kit packed. Riding hard toward that yellow smear with his brothers at his back. Now he stood in a half-ploughed field with blistered hands and watched.

“Garrison’ll see it,” Daniel said. The words came out wrong. Too loud. Trying to convince himself. “Stolz or Carbon. They’ll send men.”

“That they will,” Mattias said.

The smoke thinned. The sulphur burning itself out, signal sent. Somewhere twelve miles north, a Grimley was standing guard over a corpse and waiting for help that was hours away.

Freya did the math without wanting to. They were ten miles from town. Half a day’s ride if the horses were fresh and nothing went wrong. If a zombie stumbled into their canyon tomorrow, she’d light that signal fire and then she’d wait. Three hours. Four. Hoping help arrived before something else did.

The last of the smoke dissolved into the blue.

“Back to work,” Mattias said. His voice was quiet. Stripped of everything.

He turned first. Edwin dropped the rock onto the pile with a thud that seemed too loud. Daniel gathered the horses’ leads, and Freya saw his hands weren’t quite steady.

She walked back toward the house with her empty basket. She didn’t look at the sky again, but she felt it there. All that blue, all that empty space, pressing down.

The day didn’t stop for yellow smoke. There was still work, still supper to cook, still the grinding rhythm of a homestead that didn’t care what any of them had seen.

By the time the dishes were cleared, Daniel could barely keep his eyes open. Edwin had stopped pretending his back didn’t hurt. They said their goodnights and climbed the stairs like men twice their age, leaving Freya and Mattias alone with the cooling stove and the silence.

He lingered, checking and rechecking the door and the shutters. Finally he nodded and headed upstairs.

In her room, Freya sat on the edge of the bed and waited.

The night before, Daniel had come to her door. Knocked softly. Asked if he could come in. Tonight was supposed to be Mattias.

She waited.

The floorboards didn’t creak. No soft knock came. The house stayed quiet except for the wind outside and the settling of timber.

Freya pulled her wrapper tighter around her shoulders. She thought about the yellow smoke. About Martha Grimley and her family. About twelve miles of empty badlands between here and there, and ten miles of the same between here and town.

She thought about Mattias standing in the field, absolutely still, watching smoke rise from a place he couldn’t help.

She waited until she couldn’t anymore.

The floorboards were cold on her bare feet. She pulled her wrapper close and knocked.

A pause. Footsteps, and the door opened.

Mattias stood in the lamplight, shirt hanging open, barefoot. He had a book in one hand, finger marking his place. His hair was mussed and his eyes were tired, but he hadn’t been sleeping. Hadn’t tried, from the look of it.

“Freya.” Not a question. Not quite surprise either.

“You didn’t come.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then stepped back, opening the door wider. An invitation.

His room was spare. A narrow bed, a chair, a trunk for his things. The lamp on the bedside table cast warm shadows. Freya stepped inside and heard him close the door behind her.

“Didn’t seem right,” he said. “After today.”

She turned to face him. “After the smoke.”

“You were shaken. Are shaken.” He set the book down on the trunk. Didn’t move toward her, kept his eyes carefully away from the figure of her body under the thin wrapper. “Didn’t seem right, coming to your door expecting what I’d be expecting. Not tonight.”

Freya studied him. The careful distance he kept. The way his hands hung at his sides, palms raw and blistered from the day’s work.

“You thought I wouldn’t want you tonight.”

“I thought you had enough weighing on your mind without me adding to it.”

Some of the tightness in her chest eased. He wasn’t avoiding her. He was giving her room to be frightened.

“I can’t stop thinking about the Grimleys,” she said. The words came out before she could stop them. “I wonder how many of the dead there were. Just one? A dozen? I keep wondering which one of them had to do the shooting.” Her lip quivered. “I wonder if there’s more shooting to be done when the medical officer gets there.”

Mattias nodded. He knew. Of course he knew. He’d seen it before. Been there before. He’d probably been lying there rolling the same thoughts around in his head.

She pulled her wrapper tighter against the chill in the room. “I don’t want to be alone tonight.” Her voice sounded small, even to herself.

Mattias didn’t move for a long moment. Just looked at her, standing there in her thin wrapper with her bare feet and her fear showing plain on her face.

Then he crossed to her in two strides.

His arms came around her and Freya discovered that Mattias Goss gave nothing by halves. He pulled her against his chest and held her there, solid and warm, one hand cradling the back of her head. She could feel his heartbeat through the open shirt. Steady and sure.

“You’re decent safe here,” he said. The words rumbled through his chest. “We’ve got good sightlines, clear approaches. Spring water, no contamination risk. You’ve got a good defensible position.”

She almost laughed. Trust Mattias to offer comfort in tactical assessments.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“It’s supposed to be true.” His hand moved on her back, slow and soothing. “Can’t promise you nothing will ever come. But I can promise you won’t face it alone, and we’ll stand up well to it if it does.”

Freya pressed her face against his shoulder. He had a clean shirt on and smelled like soap underneath. Her hands found the warm skin of his sides, and she felt his breath catch.

“Freya.” His voice had gone rough. “You came here for comfort. I can give you that. I can take you to bed, too, if you’re sure.”

She pulled back enough to look at his face. The lamplight carved shadows under his cheekbones, made his eyes unreadable. But his hands on her were gentle, and he was still giving her room and space.

Freya thought about the dark pressing in outside. About tomorrow, and the day after, and all the days stretching ahead full of work and worry and the constant weight of danger. She thought about this man who’d watched smoke rise from twelve miles away and knew exactly what it meant. Who’d torn his hands raw on rocks without complaint. Who’d stayed away tonight because he didn’t want to impose on her fear.

“I’m sure,” she said.

His face warmed. Not quite a smile. Not quite sympathy. Perhaps the beginnings of respect.

He kissed her forehead first. Then her temple. Her cheek. Taking his time, letting her settle into it. When his mouth finally found hers, it was slow and thorough, the kiss of a man who’d learned patience the hard way.

His blistered hands were careful on her skin. He touched her like she was something precious. And when he finally took her to his narrow bed, Freya found that all that iron control had another side to it.

He paid attention. To every sound she made, every shift of her body. Adjusted, responded, improvised, and tried to please her.

Afterward, he didn’t let go. Just pulled her close against him in the narrow bed, her back to his chest, his arm heavy and warm across her waist.

“Sleep,” he said. “Right now Edwin’s on the roof, watching. Daniel will relieve him in a few hours. You’re safe. Until dawn, I’ve got you.”

Outside, the wind moved through the canyon. The empty prairie stretched dark in every direction. Somewhere twelve miles north, the Grimleys were facing whatever they were facing, and there was nothing anyone could do about it tonight.

But here, in this room, Freya was warm. She was held. She slept.

Chapter 5

The afternoon sun was warm on Freya’s shoulders and the soil was cool under her knees. Good soil. She worked her fingers through it, breaking up clods, making space for the carrot seeds. The vegetable garden wasn’t large, but it would keep them in greens and roots through the summer and into fall, if she could keep the rabbits out.

Bela sat about twenty feet away, near the corner of the house. Not watching her. Definitely not watching her. His attention was fixed on something in the middle distance. A rock, maybe. A tuft of grass. Certainly not a woman planting vegetables. Every time Freya glanced up, the dog was there. Aloof. Disinterested. Just happening to be in her line of sight. It was beginning to become a habit of late.

“Ah, so you have my dog.”

Freya didn’t turn at Mattias’ voice. “I don’t have your dog. The menacing lout has taken it upon himself to supervise the planting of the vegetable garden.”

She cocked her head toward Bela. The dog’s ears twitched. He looked pointedly away.

“He’s doing that because you keep feeding him.” Mattias came around to where she could see him, arms crossed. “He’s supposed to feed himself. I’ve seen you. You hand feed him tidbits and drippings-soaked bread like he’s some pampered lapdog in the queen’s court. Of course he’s dogging your steps. He’s waiting for you to bestow a knighthood upon him in the form of scraps and tidbits.”

“What?” Freya sat back on her heels. “You don’t feed him? No wonder the poor creature is so damn thin. What on earth is he supposed to feed himself on?”

Mattias looked genuinely offended. “Of course I feed him. But he’s mainly supposed to catch his own supper. Rabbits, ground squirrels, frogs, mice, birds. He’s built for this. He’s a lurcher, for heaven’s sake.”

“A lurcher.” Freya looked at Bela, who was still pretending indifference. “He certainly looks like one. I’ve never seen a dog so thoroughly ugly. He looks like an assortment of leftover dog bits that got stirred together and taken out of the oven half-baked.”

Mattias smiled, just a little. “A lurcher is a cross between a wolfhound and a collie.”

“On purpose? Please tell me the wolfhound was the mother!”

“On purpose. And yes, that’s the usual way of it.” Mattias’s arms uncrossed slightly. “Wolfhounds are tall, fast, bred for bringing down large game. But they’re expensive to keep. Eat as much as a man. And they’re not clever, not really. Good instincts, but you can’t teach them complex work.”

“And collies?”

“Smart as hell. Learn anything. But small. But friendly. Not a dog for a soldier.” Mattias looked at Bela with something that might have been pride, quickly suppressed. “Cross them, you get the best of both. Big enough to matter, smart enough to train, fast enough to run down anything.”

“Not just game then?”

Mattias considered her. “No. Not just game. He weighs about eighty pounds. At full sprint, at the chase, if he hits a man at that speed, he’s going down. Doesn’t matter how big he is. Or sick. Or crazy.”

It was a chilling picture to Freya. Bela, all legs, teeth and patchy fur, transformed into something lethal, slamming into a body at full gallop.

“He doesn’t bark,” she said slowly, pieces connecting.

“No. Lurchers hunt quiet. Sight and speed, not noise.”

“So he can hunt.”

Mattias nodded once.

“Or…” She hesitated. “Or take down a threat. Hold it for you to get there with a gun.”

“So he’s a weapon,” Freya said. “That’s what you’re telling me. That ridiculous-looking dog is actually a weapon.”

“He’s a working dog.”

“Doesn’t explain why he’s so standoffish,” she said.

“Probably because he knows nobody loves him. Being so ugly and all.”

Freya watched Mattias’s face, the way he wasn’t quite looking at the dog or at her or at anything.

“You love him,” she said.

Silence.

“Dogs don’t turn,” she said. “Do they? If they’re bitten.”

Mattias’s throat worked. “No. Animals don’t turn. Pigs can carry the sickness, pass it to humans, but everything else just dies from it. Cows, horses, chickens, dogs. A bite’s a death sentence. A long, slow death sentence. But they don’t turn.”

“Not your first dog then, is he?”

Mattias didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

Freya turned back to her planting, giving him the space to not speak. She pressed another seed into the soil, covered it, moved on to the next. The rhythm was soothing. Seed, cover, pat. Seed, cover, pat.

After a while, she said, “Frogs?”

“What?”

“You said he catches frogs. For food.”

“Among other things.”

“That explains why he’s been after my salamanders, then.”

Mattias frowned. “Your salamanders.”

“There are salamanders in the spring.” Freya gestured toward the marshy ground near the sweet pea trellises. “Bright little things. Purple with orange spots, if you can believe it. Like something out of a fairy story. They live in the wet patches, between the reeds, under leaves. I’ve been seeing them since we arrived.”

“And Bela’s been catching them?”

“Harrying them, more like. Chasing them down, picking them up, mouthing them.” She shrugged, frowning at the memory. “But he doesn’t eat them. That’s the strange thing. He catches them, chews on them a bit, then just… drops them. Lets them crawl away. I’ve seen him do it four or five times now.”

“That’s not like him. If he catches something, he eats it.”

“Well, he’s not eating these. Maybe they taste bad? They’re slimy. Perhaps it’s bitter.”

As if reminded by the conversation, Bela’s head snapped toward the marshy ground by the spring. His body went rigid, ears pricked forward, every line of him suddenly focused.

The dog lunged forward, all pretense of laziness abandoned. He covered the distance to the marshy ground in three massive bounds and plunged into the reeds, water splashing, tail high and wagging.

“Bela! Damn it, leave them alone!”

Freya pushed herself up from the garden, brushing soil from her knees. By the time she reached the spring’s edge, Bela was already emerging, something clamped in his jaws.

The salamander was perhaps six inches long, fat-bodied and glistening. Its stubby legs paddled uselessly in the air.

Bela pranced back toward them, thin legs lifting high, clearly pleased with himself.

“You horrible creature.” Freya advanced on him. “Those salamanders aren’t hurting anyone. If you’re hungry, go catch a rabbit. Leave my salamanders alone.”

The dog’s jaw worked, not quite biting down. Mouthing. Tasting. The salamander squirmed and Bela made a face, nose wrinkling, but he didn’t let go.

“Bela,” Mattias said. “Leave it.”

Bela lowered his head to the ground and released the salamander, who shuffled away with slow, painful dignity.

“What is wrong with you?” Freya exclaimed. “You didn’t even want to eat the poor thing!”

“Damn fool dog,” Mattias said from behind her.

“I don’t understand it.” Freya watched the salamander disappear into the reeds. “He’s been doing this for days. Catches them, mouths them, lets them go. What’s the point?”

Bela sat down.

Or rather, Bela’s hindquarters dropped out from under him without apparent input from the rest of his body. He sat hard, tongue lolling from his mouth.

“Bela?” Mattias took a step toward him. “Are you all right?”

The dog’s head swayed. His eyes had gone glassy. He lolled his tongue at Mattias and wagged his tail.

“Something’s wrong.” Freya knelt beside him. “Mattias, something’s wrong with him.”

Mattias was already there, hands running over the dog’s ribcage, checking for wounds. “Breathing’s steady. Heart’s strong.” He tilted the dog’s face in his hands, studying. “What the hell…”

Bela’s tail wagged. Slow, dreamy. His whole body swayed with the motion.

“Is he having a fit?”

“Doesn’t look like a fit.” Mattias sat back, frowning. “He looks…”

Bela sank down into the grass on his side. Not a pained collapse. Not a sick collapse. He simply melted onto the grass like his bones had turned to water, rolled onto his back, and waved his paws in the air. His tongue hung out the side of his mouth. His tail kept wagging in slow, blissful sweeps.

“Drunk,” Freya finished.

Mattias stared at his dog. “He really does.”

Bela made a sound that might have been contentment. His paws kept waving, slower now, like he was swimming through honey. His eyes drifted closed, opened, drifted closed again.

“The salamanders.” Freya’s mind was racing. “That slime on their skin. What if it’s not poison? What if it’s…”

“Intoxicating?”

“He’s been chewing on them for days. Absorbing that mucus through his gums.”

They both looked at Bela, who had given up on paw-waving and was now lying flat on his back, all four legs splayed out, snoring faintly. His lips were pulled back in what looked disturbingly like a smile.

“My dog,” Mattias said slowly, “has been getting himself drunk on salamander slime.”

“It would appear so.”

“For days.”

“At least a week, I’d guess. Maybe longer.”

Mattias rubbed his hand over his face. “Christ.”

He reached out and rubbed Bela’s exposed belly. The dog’s back leg kicked reflexively, and he goggled at Mattias happily.

“At least it doesn’t seem to be hurting him,” Freya offered.

“Yet. Who knows if they’re poisonous long term.” He sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to feed him more to keep him from eating them.” He looked at the dog. “Or fence off the spring.”

“Can’t say as I’m sure that will work. I don’t think he’s after the meat. He’s after the drunk.”

Mattias stared at the reeds where the salamander had disappeared. Stared at his dog, lolling happily in the grass. Stared at Freya, kneeling in the mud, petting an intoxicated lurcher and trying not to laugh.

“Damn fool dog,” he said finally.

But when Freya looked up, the corner of his mouth was twitching.

Chapter 6

Freya sat at her dressing table, wrapper pulled around her, yanking a brush through her hair. The bristles caught on a tangle and she yanked harder, wincing.

Three days. Three days of marriage, and Edwin had managed at best twenty words to her. He answered direct questions with the minimum syllables required. He looked at the ground, the walls, the horizon, anywhere but her face. At meals he said nothing. Even working he positioned his body so that she couldn’t easily approach.

She’d tried. Asked him about his studies. Complimented his sketches. Inquired about his time away down South. Each attempt met the same response: a mumbled word or two, a ducked head, a hasty retreat to some urgent task that apparently only he could perform.

Daniel said they’d get along like a house on fire. Daniel was an idiot. Clearly, Edwin disliked her to the point that he could barely stand to be in a room with her.

And tonight was his night. Mattias, then Edwin. She’d left her door open. The signal.

And now she sat here, wrapper thin across her shoulders, hair loose down her back, waiting for a man who clearly wished he wasn’t married to her, and clearly dragging the point out.

The knock, when it came on the frame, was soft. Tentative.

She looked up.

Edwin stood in the lamplight, and Freya’s irritation faltered. Just a little.

He had on a clean shirt, crisp and white, buttoned properly to his throat. His dark hair was combed back from his face, curling slightly at the temples. A fresh shave and a faint waft of lavender water.

He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. He held something small in the palm of his hand.

Freya set down the brush. Turned on the chair to face him.

“You won’t talk to me.”

Edwin’s eyes dropped to the floor.

“You won’t look me in the eye.” Her voice came out harder than she intended, but she didn’t soften it. “I know you don’t like me. And it’s only fair if you don’t. I did nearly get your brother killed. Nearly got all of you killed or transferred to some godforsaken outpost.” She stood, pulling the wrapper tighter. “You don’t have to like me, Edwin. But you do have to respect me. I’m your wife. The head of this household. You can’t go on pretending I don’t exist.”

Silence stretched between them. Edwin’s jaw worked. He opened his mouth, closed it. His hand tightened around whatever he was holding.

“Say something,” Freya said. “Anything. Tell me you hate me. Tell me you resent being trapped in this marriage. Tell me I ruined your life and you’ll never forgive me. But for God’s sake, stop standing there like I’m not even in the room.”

“I don’t hate you.” The words came out strangled. “Freya, I could never…”

He sighed. Stepped further into the room and set a stone on her dressing table beside her.

She looked down, thrown off balance. A shell, but not like any shell she’d ever seen. Grey stone, spiraled tight, whorls and ridges perfectly preserved.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “What is this?”

“A fossil. From the creek bed.” His hand came up, raked through his carefully combed hair, destroying the effect entirely. “I wanted… I’ve been trying to find the words to say… I’ve been working up the nerve to talk to you since… I thought if I brought you something I’d found, maybe I could…” He made a frustrated sound. “Find the words.”

“Edwin.” She set the fossil on the dressing table, keeping her eyes on his face. “Why can’t you talk to me? What did I do?”

“Nothing. You didn’t do anything.” He swallowed hard. He ran his fingers through his hair, ruining the careful combing. “Didn’t the garrison surgeon ever tell you about me?”

Freya’s head came up sharply. “The surgeon?”

Something cold trickled down her spine. Why would the garrison surgeon tell her anything about Edwin? Was there something wrong with him? Something medical? Some deformity or condition or… Her eyes dropped involuntarily toward his trousers, then snapped back up, heat flooding her cheeks.

Edwin must have seen where she looked because a strangled sound escaped him, somewhere between a laugh and a groan.

“Not like that.” He scrubbed both hands over his face. “God. Not like that. I’m not… everything’s normal. Physically.” His ears had gone red. “It’s just… Christ. I’ve been dreading this.”

“Dreading?”

“We met before, but you probably don’t remember. I was fourteen.” Edwin moved to the window, putting distance between them, his back to her. “I’d just started as a sapper’s apprentice. I was green as grass and twice as stupid. The surgeon needed a crate of raw spirits from town. His own apprentice was occupied, so he sent me.” He paused. “To the Stirling distillery.”

Freya tried to remember. She would have been fifteen, maybe. Barely more than an apprentice herself, working the stills with her mother and older sister, learning the trade.

“I don’t remember you,” she said gently. “The garrison often sent boys to the distillery for spirits.”

“No. You wouldn’t.” Edwin’s voice was quiet. “I was nobody. Just another garrison boy in a dusty uniform, collecting supplies. But you…” He turned, finally, and met her eyes. “You were definitely there.” He closed his eyes, remembering. “I hadn’t seen many women, you understand. You had on a worn work shirt, soft and thin from washing. It pulled—” he gestured vaguely at his chest. “You were wearing a skirt that day, a long one, like a real grown-up lady. It came down nearly to the floor. I could hear your boot heels on the floor, but you looked like you were floating. Like a swan.”

He looked up again, pained. “It was warm. Your hair was in a plait but most had escaped and was sticking to your neck.”

Freya’s breath caught.

“And your hands…” His voice cracked. “So small and dainty. But you hauled that heavy crate onto the counter like it was nothing. You had grain dust on your clothes, a flush on your cheeks, and I had no idea that girls’ eyes could be so pretty.”

He wasn’t looking at the floor now. He was looking at her like she was something holy.

“I was meant to run the spirits straight back to the garrison. The surgeon was waiting. But I didn’t.” Edwin’s throat worked. “I went to my bunk first. I couldn’t… I needed…” The red had spread from his ears down his neck. “The surgeon found me. He was furious. Not because I was… not because of what I was doing. Boys do that. He was furious because I’d delayed delivering his supplies. Because I’d shirked my duty.”

Freya’s hand had come up to cover her mouth.

“He dumped a bucket of water on me. On my bunk. On everything. And he said…” Edwin’s voice went thin. “He said if he ever caught me shirking again, he’d tell Freya Stirling to her face what a disgusting, horrible boy Edwin Goss was.”

The room was very quiet. Freya could hear her own heartbeat.

“The other boys teased me for months. Years, really. Not for the… not for that part. For being stuck on a Stirling.” A bitter smile twisted his mouth. “For imagining a Stirling would ever have anything to do with me. That’s what they said. And they were right. You were so far above me. So completely impossible.”

“Edwin…”

“But I never forgot you.” The words came faster now, tumbling out like he couldn’t stop them. “When I went South for my training, when I was homesick and lonely and so far from everything I knew, I’d think of home. And I’d think of you. When I imagined what it might be like to have a wife someday, it was always your face. When I dreamed about a future I knew I couldn’t have, you were always there.”

He took a step toward her. Then another.

“And then Daniel… the festival… the jail cell. When you walked in and offered for us, I thought I was dreaming. I thought I’d finally lost my mind entirely. Because this couldn’t be real. You couldn’t be real. Freya Stirling couldn’t possibly be standing there saying she’d marry us.”

He was close now. Close enough that the lavender water scent curled around her senses, and she could see the pulse jumping in his throat.

His hand came up, trembling, hovering near her cheek but not quite touching.

“I haven’t been avoiding you because I don’t like you, Freya. I’ve been avoiding you because I’ve been dreading waking up. Because if I looked at you too long, if I spoke to you too much, if I dared to touch you, the spell would break. And I’d be back in my bunk at fourteen, drenched and humiliated, knowing you’d never be mine.”

“I’m sorry, Freya. I never meant to make you feel like you were anything less than extraordinary. I do respect you. More than you could possibly know.” He knelt slowly in front of her chair. “Will you allow me to show you how much?”

Freya’s throat was tight. All this time. He’d been carrying this all this time. A fourteen-year-old boy, soaked and shamed, dreaming of a girl who didn’t know he existed.

“Yes,” she whispered.

Something shifted in Edwin’s face. The nervousness didn’t disappear, but something else rose beneath it. Purpose. Intent.

He laid his hands on her knees.

Freya’s breath caught. “Edwin, what are you…”

“Let me.” His hands gently pressed her knees apart. “Let me show you.”

He pushed the wrapper aside, baring her thighs. His breath ghosted over her skin and she shivered. His hands slid up, slow and deliberate, thumbs tracing the soft inner curve of her legs.

His mouth found the inside of her knee first. A soft press of lips. Then higher. Another kiss, lingering this time, his breath warm and damp against her skin. Higher still. The edge of his teeth, just barely grazing. Freya’s hands gripped the edge of the chair.

He smiled against her skin. She felt it.

His hands slid higher, thumbs brushing the crease where her thighs met her hips, and Freya made a sound she didn’t recognize. He was so close now. So close to where she was already aching, already wet.

And then his mouth was on her.

The first touch of his tongue made her hum. Soft and wet and warm, tracing along her folds like he had all the time in the world.

Freya’s head fell back. Her fingers found his hair, dark and thick, silky. She didn’t pull, just held on, anchoring herself as sensation washed through her.

He found her clit and circled it slowly. Once. Twice. Then his lips closed around it, sucking gently, and Freya’s head fell back against the chair.

“Oh god…”

He made a sound of approval against her, the vibration sending sparks up her spine. His hands gripped her thighs, holding her open, holding her steady, and his tongue began to work in earnest.

This was nothing like her own private explorations. Nothing like Daniel’s eager but clumsy touches, or Mattias’s intense but brief attention. This was patient, deliberate, and devastatingly thorough.

Edwin licked into her like he was savoring her. Long, slow strokes from her entrance to her clit, then circling, teasing, backing off just when the pleasure started to crest. Building her up, letting her fall back, building her higher. Over and over until she was shaking, until her thighs were trembling against his shoulders, until she was making sounds she’d never heard herself make.

“Please,” she gasped. “Edwin, please…”

He sealed his mouth over her clit and sucked, tongue flicking fast and relentless, and Freya folded in on herself.

The orgasm rolled through her in waves, pulling her under, dragging her down into pure sensation. She heard herself cry out, felt her body clench and pulse, felt Edwin’s hands tighten on her thighs as he worked her through it, gentling but not stopping, drawing out every last tremor until she sagged boneless against the chair.

He pressed a final soft kiss to her inner thigh. Then rested his head there, breath warm against her skin, and waited.

Freya stared at the ceiling. Her heart was hammering. Her whole body felt liquid, wrung out, remade.

“I’ve done that before,” she said, when she could speak again. “Pleasured myself. Lots of times.” She swallowed. “It never felt quite like that.”

Edwin lifted his head. His eyes were dark and satisfied.

“Good,” he said simply. “I mean to make you feel like that. Every night you spend with me. Every time you come to my bed, or I come to yours.” Another kiss. “Like that. And more.”

Her breath caught. “More?”

Edwin lifted his head. His dark eyes held hers, patient and waiting. A smile played at the corner of his mouth, knowing and a little wicked.

“Yes,” he said. “Much more. If you want it.”

“Show me more.”

Edwin’s smile deepened. He rose up on his knees, hands finding her hips.

He pulled her hips toward him, sliding her forward on the chair until she was barely balanced, her weight resting on the edge. The position opened her completely, exposed her, and Freya felt a flush crawl up her chest at how vulnerable she was. How much she wanted to be.

Then his mouth was on her again.

He licked into her with purpose, tongue working her clit in tight, relentless circles while his hands held her hips steady. Freya gasped, already sensitive, already trembling from the first orgasm, and the sensation was almost enough to make her float away.

Then she felt his fingers.

Two of them, pressing inside her. She was slick and swollen, and they slid inside easily. He curled them forward, searching, and then pressed.

Freya felt like she was melting.

“Oh god. Oh god, Edwin, what…”

“Shh.” His tongue circled her clit, slow and sweet, while his fingers maintained that maddening pressure. “Just feel it. Let it build.”

Even through the pleasure, she could feel how gentle he was being. How carefully he held that pressure without thrusting, without adding friction to flesh that was already tender.

“Were my brothers clumsy with you?” he asked softly, lifting his mouth just enough to speak. Not accusing. Concerned. “You’re sore, Freya. I can feel it.”

She was. She hadn’t wanted to admit it, but she was. Three days ago she’d never even had a man. Three firsts in three days. She’d been gritting her teeth through some of it, hoping to get the knack of it.

His fingers shifted, not withdrawing, just adjusting, finding the angle that made her gasp without adding to the ache. “Let me make it good. Let me make you feel nice.”

The pleasure built differently this time. Slower. Deeper. A warm wave rather than a sharp crest, rolling through her in long swells that seemed to ease the soreness even as they overwhelmed her.

“Edwin…” Her voice broke. “I’m going to…”

“I know.” He sucked gently, pressed a little harder, and this orgasm was like honey. Thick and golden and slow, spreading through her limbs, pulling the tension from her muscles.

Edwin withdrew his fingers slowly, carefully. Pressed one last kiss to her thigh. Then he rose to his feet. He set her upright and pulled her wrapper around her.

He stood before her, still fully clothed, and the contrast struck her. He was buttoned to the throat, neat except for his disheveled hair.

“I’m yours, Freya.” His voice was quiet. Steady. “Would you like to see me?”

She nodded, not trusting her voice.

His hands went to his collar. One button, then another, working downward with steady fingers. The shirt parted, revealing a sliver of pale skin, then more, then all of him as he shrugged the fabric off his shoulders and let it fall.

He was lean, built like a blade, all long lines and clean angles. The past two days of work had put color on his skin, a flush of sun across his shoulders and forearms that made the paler skin of his chest look almost luminous in the lamplight.

A scatter of dark hair spread across his breastbone, trailing down in a narrow line toward his navel. His stomach was flat, the shadow of muscle definition visible when he breathed. She could see his ribs expand and contract. He was breathing hard now, chest rising and falling, watching her watch him.

“Turn around,” Freya said. The words came out hoarse.

Edwin turned. Slowly. Letting her look.

When he faced her again, his eyes were dark. Waiting.

“Would you like to touch me?”

She nodded again.

He took her hands and pulled her to her feet. The wrapper slipped from her shoulders and pooled at her feet, leaving her bare. Edwin’s eyes swept down her body, then back up, but he didn’t reach for her. Instead, he placed her hands on his ribs.

Freya spread her fingers against his skin. Warm. Smooth. She could feel his heartbeat, rapid beneath her palm. Her hands moved up, over the planes of his chest, the sharp edges of his collarbones. Then down, tracing the lines of his stomach, feeling the muscles tense and jump under her touch.

Her eyes dropped to his trousers. The fabric was tented, straining. She could see the shape of him, hard and pressing against the cloth.

She looked up at his face.

“You’re mine?” she asked.

He opened his eyes. Met hers. “Yes.”

“Then show me.”

She led him to the bed.

He was careful with her. Gentle in a way that made her chest glow. When he finally slid inside, it felt like soothing. He moved slow and deep, watching her face, adjusting when she gasped, giving her more when she pulled him closer. And when she came apart beneath him, he followed her over, breathing her name.

Afterward, they lay tangled together in the wide bed. Freya’s head rested on his chest, rising and falling with his breath. She could smell the lavender water still, but fainter now, buried under layers of sweat and musk and sex. It wasn’t unpleasant. None of it was unpleasant.

That was the remarkable thing. All of it had been good.

“Edwin,” she said quietly. “How?”

Chapter 7

“Edwin,” she said quietly. “How?”

Edwin was silent for a moment. His fingers traced idle patterns on her shoulder, and she felt his chest rise and fall beneath her cheek.

“Ah.” He paused. “This is delicate.”

Freya waited.

“You know that I was sent away to the South, to Stagmouth City to be educated.”

“Yes, of course. It was quite the news for quite some time. When you came back, all educated, too.”

“Stagmouth, Freya, is an entirely different world. Not just bigger. Different.”

He was quiet for a moment, gathering words. When he spoke again, his voice had shifted into the cadence of a storyteller. A man describing a far-off country.

“Stagmouth is the end of the river. It’s as far south as one can go. The Mighty Red Stag River ends at Stagmouth, fanning out into a massive delta at the continent’s southern edge. The city itself spreads out across a half-dozen islands, connected by bridges and ferries and canals. It’s hot. Muggy. Damp. The air gets so thick with moisture you can taste it. It’s warm, very warm, even in winter. It never snows. Trees stay green all year. They never drop their leaves. The heat, it makes you slow, makes you languid, makes you forget there’s any urgency in the world at all.”

Freya tried to picture it. Failed.

“The buildings are made of stone,” Edwin continued. “Not timber. Stone, and brick, a few are even fronted with marble. Some of them are four stories tall, five. They have glass in every window. And inside…” He shook his head. “The floors are tile. Colored tile, laid in patterns. Or polished wood so smooth you could see your reflection. Carpets thicker than your mattress, woven with silk thread. Wallpaper.”

“That sounds like a palace.”

“That was a boarding house. A middling one.” Edwin’s voice was dry. “The wealthy live in mansions with fountains in their courtyards. They have servants whose only job is to tend the gardens. They eat off porcelain so fine you can see light through it, with silver forks and crystal glasses.”

Freya thought of the Stirling household. The finest family in Carbon. Their great luxury was rugs on a wooden floor in the parlor.

“The port is massive. It never closes,” Edwin said. “Ships come from everywhere. From the Empire, Madagascar, China. They bring spices that burn your tongue and fabrics that flow like water and fruits in colors I didn’t know existed.” His fingers found a strand of her hair, lifted it to catch the lamplight. “They have a jam made from oranges.”

“Oranges? Like we get at Winterfest?”

“The very same. But in Stagmouth, they’re common as apples. Lemons too. Limes. Citrus grows on trees in the courtyards.” He lifted a strand of her hair, turned it in the lamplight. “They make jam from the peels, with ginger and sugar. Call it marmalade. It comes in shades of gold and amber and deep burnt orange.” His voice softened. “Almost exactly the colors in your hair.”

Freya pulled her hair free from his fingers. “What about the Mongolian Spice? Is it real? Can you buy it there?”

Edwin laughed, short and harsh. “It’s for sale on every street corner.”

Freya sat up. “You can’t be serious. It costs more per ounce than a working family earns in a year.”

“Every corner. And none of it real.” His voice went flat. “Con men selling hope to the desperate. Spend a month’s wages on a bag of sawdust and poppy seeds to dose your bitten daughter. You think she’s protected. She turns anyway.” He met her eyes. “You have to shoot your own child because someone sold you lies.”

“If you want real Mongolian Spice,” Edwin said quietly, “you need an aristocrat’s purse, a private parlor, and the sense to keep your mouth shut about it afterward.”

Freya was quiet for a moment. “It sounds dangerous. Stagmouth.”

“Dangerous. Beautiful. Overwhelming.” Edwin settled back against the pillows, pulling her with him. “I’d never seen so much of anything in my life. The markets alone could swallow Carbon whole. Stall after stall, street after street. Fruits heaped in baskets, red and gold and brown. Perfumes made from flowers that only bloom once a year. Silks dyed colors so bright they hurt your eyes.” His voice had gone distant. “And the people. So many people. You could walk for hours and never see the same face twice. The streets are packed, day and night. Music pouring out of every window. Laughter. Arguments. Songs I didn’t recognize.”

Freya tried to imagine a place with so many people you’d never see them all. Her mind couldn’t stretch that far.

“People live different lives there,” Edwin said, and his tone shifted. Careful now. “Women in Stagmouth live differently. Some of them choose not to be heads of households at all. They retreat into leisure. Attend parties and salons while their husbands earn. They wear gowns that cost more than our homestead, and jewels, and paint on their faces. They’re soft. Decorative. Protected.”

“That sounds tedious.”

“For some, perhaps. But others…” He paused. “Others break away from family expectations entirely. They pursue vocations. Become architects. Physicians. Scholars.” Another pause. “Teachers.”

Something in his tone made Freya’s breath catch.

“The rules are different there,” Edwin said quietly. “What’s expected. What’s permitted. Men and women…” He struggled for words. “They take lovers. Outside of marriage. It’s not spoken of openly, but everyone knows. It’s considered sophisticated. Worldly.”

Freya stared at him. On the frontier, a man was expected to come to marriage untouched, same as a woman. Perhaps more so.

“And at the very highest levels of society,” Edwin continued, his voice dropping lower still, “at the tables of the truly wealthy… they serve meat.”

Freya frowned. “We have meat. Beef. Mutton. Chicken.”

“Not that kind of meat.” Edwin’s jaw tightened. She could see him wrestling with something. A word he didn’t want to say. “The kind that comes from… from swine.”

Freya’s whole body went rigid.

“They raise them,” Edwin said, barely above a whisper. “Behind high walls. Locked compounds. Very few animals. They control their feed and water and waste. Monitor their health, slaughter them under controlled conditions.” He swallowed. “And then they serve the cured flesh at dinner parties. As a delicacy. A status symbol. For the very wealthy only, you understand.”

“That’s…” Freya couldn’t find a word. Obscene. Monstrous. Unthinkable.

“I know.”

“They eat… pork?” She couldn’t say the real word for that cured meat, that preserved flesh, that abomination. It wasn’t a word you spoke. Not in polite company. Not ever, really.

“I never did,” Edwin said quickly. “I couldn’t. Even being in the same room with it, seeing it on a plate… I made my excuses and left.” He shuddered. “But they do. They brag about the quality, the preparation, the expense. Like it’s sophistication instead of…” He trailed off.

“Eating plague,” finished Freya. “Eating the very bodies of creatures that have spread more disease and death than any war.”

“How can they?” Freya’s voice came out barely a whisper. “How can anyone?”

Edwin shook his head slowly. “Stagmouth is another world. Beautiful and terrible. Full of pleasures I’d never imagined and horrors I’ll never forget. I learned things there I never could have learned here. Some of them good.” His hand tightened on her shoulder. “Some of them not.”

Freya was quiet for a long moment, processing all of it. The wealth, the decadence, the casual transgression of every rule she’d ever known.

Then she narrowed her eyes.

“Edwin.”

She poked him in the ribs. “You’re telling stories. Leading me down garden paths about marmalade and markets and… swine.” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word for that dreadful meat. “You said this was delicate. You said you’d explain. But you haven’t.”

Edwin’s mouth twitched. Caught.

“How,” she said firmly, “did you learn to do what you just did to me? And don’t tell me about the architecture.”

He sighed. Rubbed a hand over his face.

“I was two years in Stagmouth City.” He paused, giving the memory time to settle. “After my apprenticeship with the garrison, the army paid for me to have formal schooling as an engineer.

“I had the same lessons and training as the Royal Corps of Engineers. The same classrooms, the same instructors, the same examinations.” His mouth twisted. “I don’t have the pedigree to ever become a Royal Engineer, of course. But the army wanted sappers with proper training, and the University was willing to take frontier students for a fee.”

“So you learned engineering. That doesn’t explain…”

“The education assumes that students are gentlemen.” Edwin’s voice was carefully measured. “And that gentlemen will need to marry well. For the glory of the Empire, of course.” He paused, letting this sink in. “As such, there are Gentleman’s Finishing Lessons.”

Freya’s mind raced. Finishing lessons. For gentlemen. Who would want well-placed marriages.

“You mean…”

“How to please a wife.”

Freya stared at him. “The Empire teaches its Royal Engineers how to…”

“How to conduct themselves in the marriage bed, yes.” Edwin’s ears had gone pink again. “It’s considered a gentleman’s duty. A well-satisfied wife is a happy wife, and a happy wife makes for a stable household, and stable households make for a stable Empire. It’s all very logical, when you think about it.”

“Logical,” Freya repeated faintly.

Heat crept up her neck. She thought of his mouth on her, his fingers, the devastating precision of it all. “That was… book learning?”

“Diagrams. Anatomical models. Detailed descriptions.” A hint of amusement crept into his voice. “Very thorough descriptions. The Empire takes the satisfaction of its officers’ wives quite seriously.”

“But that wasn’t just book learning,” she said slowly. “What you did. That was… real.”

Edwin’s hand stilled on her shoulder.

“No,” he admitted. “That wasn’t from the lessons.”

“You mentioned teachers. Did you have a teacher, Edwin?”

He met her eyes. Held them. And nodded.

“Did you love her?”

“No.” The word came without hesitation. “And she didn’t love me. She was the finest engineering instructor at Stagmouth. Brilliant. Exacting. She took an interest in my education because I showed promise, and she wanted to see me graduate well.” A ghost of a smile crossed his face. “I was a diversion. Entertainment. She made it quite clear from the start that a romantic entanglement would not be appropriate.”

“But she…”

“She took me under her wing. Taught me well.” His eyes held hers, steady and unflinching. “In both curriculums.”

Freya absorbed this. A brilliant woman in a decadent city, taking a young frontier boy to her bed. Teaching him things that had nothing to do with engineering, or everything to do with it, depending on how you looked at the matter. Sending him home when she was done.

“I didn’t come to your bed a virgin,” he said quietly. “And I didn’t come to this marriage innocent.” His voice dropped. “Do you think me sullied? Are you horrified?”

Freya considered the question. Considered him. A boy who’d harbored fantasies about her for years. A man who’d seen wonders and horrors she couldn’t imagine and had become her husband.

“No,” she said. “I’m not horrified.”

Relief flickered across his face.

“But,” she continued, “I do think you should tell your brothers.”

Edwin blinked. “Why? So they can share in my shame? So they can shelter you from my wicked, corrupting influence?”

“No.” Freya poked him in the chest. “So you can teach them what you know.”

Chapter 8

They were just slightly ahead of schedule. That was a happy astonishment. The south field was already half‑turned, the rock piles growing like cairns marking their progress. The brothers were stiff and blistered, but they moved with a rhythm now. Not quite graceful or practiced, but competent. Freya was feeling a little proud of them. And a lot more optimistic.

Edwin had even started talking at breakfast. Not much, but enough start explaining ‘atmospheric stability and cloud formation’. The brothers listened with blank faces until Edwin trailed off, even though Freya was interested in hearing it.

After midday, Freya walked out with the lunch basket to share a break with her husbands. The sun was warm, warm enough that Daniel had stripped off his shirt while he worked the plough, skin going pink across the shoulders. Sweat had gathered in the hollow of his throat, running in thin lines down his chest before disappearing into the waistband of his trousers. His gloves were still on, dark leather scuffed and dusty, the fingers worn shiny from gripping the plough handles.

He looked… solid. Broad through the chest and shoulders, arms corded from the morning’s work. Not sculpted like a statue, Daniel was built like a man who used his body, who hauled and lifted and strained without thinking twice. He moved…earnestly. Like he was trying his best at every task set before him.

He saw her then, and the basket, and his face lit up in a welcome smile. Then, as if remembering himself, he snatched up his shirt and dragged it over his head quickly.

She held up the basket. “Lunch.”

Daniel’s grin widened, “Sweet merciful angel!”

They took their time over the meal, sprawled in the grass like schoolchildren. Bannock, cold roast chicken, pickled carrots. Freya brushed crumbs from her shirt and lay back to watch clouds drift across the pale blue sky. Daniel didn’t see the sheep that she did. Edwin corrected him – clearly it was a cow. Mattias told them both they were wrong without offering an alternative.

For a moment it felt like the world had shrunk to this coulee, this patch of sky, these four people. Work behind them, work ahead, but right now there was sun on their faces and food in their bellies. Even Bela had laid down with his big ugly head on his paws.

Freya closed her eyes and just let herself breathe.

“Mattias,” Daniel said quietly.

His tone made Freya sit up. Daniel wasn’t looking at the clouds anymore. He was squinting toward the north, shading his eyes with one hand.

Mattias followed his gaze, rising to his feet Edwin too.

A faint smear of dust above the coulee rim. Her stomach tightened.

“Can you tell how far?” she asked.

“Couple miles,” Mattias said. “Riders. Six, maybe.”

“Patrol?” Daniel asked, though he already knew.

Mattias nodded once. “That’s a certainty. Response to the Grimley signal.”

The easy mood evaporated. Freya felt the shift in all three brothers, the way their bodies came alert, the way their eyes sharpened. Soldiers again, even if just for a moment.

She stood, brushing crumbs from her trousers. “Tidy up, but away, and lets get ready for company, then.”

They moved quickly, efficiently. Daniel led the horses toward the barn, murmuring to them as he loosened the traces.

Freya walked briskly to house, filled the big jug with well water, then uncorked the stoneware bottle and add a generous splash of spirits to the jug. Old‑fashioned, maybe. But she was a Stirling. And Stirlings didn’t serve unfortified water to anyone, least of all men who’d just ridden from a place where someone had died of zombie fever.

By the time she stepped back into the courtyard, the brothers were assembled — shirts straightened, boots brushed off, faces set. Dust and the clatter of horses came through the coulee’s neck and into the flat area at its base, distinct shapes emerged.

Bela trotted to the edge of the courtyard, hackles lifting, tail stiff. He clearly hadn’t decided to hate the people arriving, but he certainly wasn’t welcoming them either.

The riders left the coulee neck at a trot, then slowed as they approached the yard. Bela gave one sharp bark and Mattias laid a hand on his head.

Six men. Dust‑coated, sunburned, horses sweating from the ride. The man in front swung down first, broad‑shouldered, sun‑creased, sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve.

“Sergeant Prewitt,” Mattias said, stepping forward.

“Lieutenant Goss.” Prewitt said with a broad smile on his open face. He checked himself. “Stirling-Father Goss.”

Mattias’s nodded, acknowledging his new title. “Not your officer anymore.”

“Still feels like you are,” Prewitt admitted, then cleared his throat. “We’re riding from Grimleys. You saw the signal? We’re checking in on you and your holding.”

Freya stepped forward with the jug and tin cups. Prewitt accepted a cup, sniffed, and his eyebrows rose. “Stirling whiskey.” he said appreciatively. “Thank you, ma’am.”

The others dismounted, stretching stiff legs, accepting the fortified water gratefully. Daniel pointed the youngest trooper, barely more than a boy, toward the creek. “Water the horses there. Slow, not too much at once.”

“Yes, sir,” the boy said, and hurried off leading the horses.

Mattias waited until the men had drunk, until the horses were tended, until the dust had settled around them.

Then he asked, quietly, “What the report from the Grimley place?”

Prewitt’s face shifted. “Just one. A woman. Poor shape, terrible thin. Medic thinks she would’ve lasted another day, maybe two at the outside.”

Mattias’s voice stayed steady. “What was the vector?”

Prewitt hesitated. “Between bite, blood or bacon, medical officer says bacon.”

Mattias kicked his boot sharply. Prewitt winced. “Begging your pardon, Stirling-Mother,” He mumbled, turning pink.

Freya swallowed. “I’ve heard the word before, Sergent. Kindly explain what you mean by it.”

“Garrison talk, ma’am.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Zombie fever spreads four ways. We call that the vector.”

He lifted is cup slightly. “Contaminated water’s rare nowadays. Folks are smarter about it. Mostly it’s one of the big B’s. A direct bite from one of the Dead, a blood-splatter – eyes, mouth, or broken skin – or…pigs. Pigs are filthy with it. They carry the Zombie Fever even if they don’t turn from it. Touch ’em, get bit—“ he paused choosing his words carefully “consume the flesh. Any of that’ll do it. We use a rude word for it in the garrison.”

Daniel exhaled. “Boars, then.”

Prewitt nodded. “This one had no bites on her, no head wounds, but a deep gash on her leg. Pine needles in her hair and clothes, from forest country. Officer thinks she ran afoul of a wild boar up in the boreal north of Bitter Creek. Ran away when she realized, instead of going home. She would have Turned out there, alone, and wandered south till she hit the Grimley draw.”

Freya pressed a hand to her chest, face going pale.

Mattias’s voice cut in, low and firm. “And the Grimleys, Sergeant?”

Prewitt shot a quick look at Freya and saw the distress there. He straightened. “The Grimleys are all untouched. The zombie never got within a hundred yards of the house. Grimleys keep dogs, good ones. Grimley‑Father Graham was alerted and dropped her with a single rifle shot, clean, from distance. She never got close enough to trouble the family.”

The boy returned with the horses. Freya offered the jug again, but Prewitt shook his head. “My thanks, Stirling‑Mother, but we want to reach Carbon before dark.” He looked to Mattias. “Patrols from both Carbon and Stoltz are sweeping. No other sign yet. Keep sharp. We don’t have the trees for boar this far south, but we’re asking everyone to stay alert.”

Mattias nodded. “We will.”

Prewitt swung back into his saddle. “Ma’am,” he said, tipping his hat. “Stirlings. Let’s go, boys.”

Then they were gone, dust rising behind them, the sound of hooves fading into the coulee.

Freya stood very still in the courtyard, the empty jug hanging from her hand. The sun was warm, but she felt cold. Her eyes kept darting to the coulee neck, the creek, the distant hills. Imagining shapes. Imagining shadows. Imagining boars and zombies and the thin line between them.

Her chin trembled.

Edwin stepped up beside her, quiet as a shadow. “Your relatives built well,” he said softly. The house, and the yard can easily be defended by three guns.

Freya swallowed.

“The well is deep and clean,” Edwin continued. “A zombie would have to fall straight into it to contaminate it.

“The coulee is a natural defense,” he added. “The south end is blind except for the creek break. The walls are tall. The only real approach is the neck. The house faces it, makes a funnel. A kill‑box. Shooters from the second-floor gunslits. Even the cupola, if needed.”

“And we have Bela.”

Bela, was currently glaring at the retreating patrol, like it had personally offended him.

“Bela hates everyone,” Edwin said. “Especially zombies.”

Freya tried to smile. It didn’t quite reach her eyes.

Edwin touched her elbow. “Come on up to the cupula. I’ll show you.”

Mattias gave him a look that said he already knew what Edwin was about, and Daniel fell in behind them without question. The four of them climbed the narrow stairs to the second floor, then up the steep ladder into the cupola.

Edwin waited until Freya had taken it in, then pointed toward the narrow mouth of the coulee.

“That’s the only real way in,” he said. “Everything funnels through that neck. Nothing comes at this house from the sides. The walls are too steep.”

Edwin pointed to the layout below. “Your family built this place like a fortress. Three wings in a U shape. The courtyard faces the neck. Anyone coming in has to walk straight toward the open end of the U.”

Freya frowned. “And that’s good?”

“It’s perfect,” Edwin said. “Look at the angles. The wings aren’t square. They’re set a little wider. That gives you overlap. If you put one shooter in each wing and one up here, you cover every inch of ground between the neck and the front door.”

Daniel leaned forward, following the lines with his eyes. “Crossfire.”

“Exactly,” Edwin said. “Three guns. One in each wing, one above. No blind spots. No dead ground. Anything that comes through that neck walks straight into a triangle of fire.”

Freya looked again. The coulee neck seemed narrower from up here. More contained. More manageable.

Edwin tapped the timber wall beside him. “Gun slits on the upper floors so you can shoot out without exposing yourself. And the cupola gives you height. Height means time. Time to see. Time to aim. Time to act.”

Mattias nodded. “Your people knew what they were doing.”

Freya let out a slow breath. “So… we could really hold this place.”

“Easily,” Edwin said. “Zombies don’t flank. They don’t think. They don’t talk. They don’t shoot back. They walk straight at whatever they want.”

Freya’s shoulders loosened a little. Not much. But enough that she could breathe again.

Edwin’s voice softened. “You’re safer here than almost anywhere on the prairie. The coulee walls protect the sides. The creek blocks the south. The neck is the only path in, and this house was designed to defend that path with very little manpower.”

“Three guns really could defend, Freya,” Mattias said.

“Four,” Freya answered. “I can shoot.”

Mattias glanced at her, slowly and sideways, like he was reassessing her from the boots up.

“She’s won the ladies’ shooting contest at the midsummer festival two years running,” Daniel said. “Didn’t even break a sweat.”

Mattias’s mouth curved. “Is that so? Care to show me?”

They headed downstairs. Mattias grabbed the rifle from its place by the front door and handed it to her without ceremony, like he already knew she’d handle it right.

“Can you hit that rock?” he asked, pointing to a chunk of limestone halfway down the slope.

Freya lifted the rifle, sighted, and fired. A clean crack echoed off the coulee walls. A pale chip jumped off the rock.

Daniel let out a low whistle.

Mattias pointed to another rock, farther, half hidden behind sage. “What about that one?”

Freya broke open the gun and reloaded smoothly. She took her stance back up, breathed out and fired again. Another chip flew.

Daniel laughed. “Give it up, Mattias. She’s good. She’s really good. Got the ribbons to prove it, too. Don’t you, Freya?”

“I do,” she said, lowering the rifle.

She looked at the three of them, then cocked her head. “Of the three of you, which one would you say is the best shot?”

Daniel straightened. Mattias jerked his chin toward him. Edwin didn’t argue.

“Daniel,” Mattias said. “No question.”

Daniel shrugged. “Zombie fodder’s gotta be the best shot. Officers get to hide behind maps. Engineers hide behind sandbags. I had to hit what I aimed at or die tired.”

Freya smiled. “Alright. Let’s settle this with a wager.” She reloaded again. “Me against your best shooter.”

Daniel blinked. “What’re we wagering?”

“Loser heats and hauls the winner’s bathwater tonight. Pick a target.”

Daniel pointed to a reddish rock near the far fence line. “That one.”

Freya lifted the rifle and smiled slow and wicked. She sighted carefully. “Daniel? I like my bathwater very hot and all the way up to my chin.”

She fired. The shot cracked sharp and clean, and a fist‑sized chunk jumped off the rock.

Daniel took the rifle, jaw set. He loaded, sighted, fired, and came very close. His shot kicked up dirt just to the right.

Mattias clapped him on the shoulder. “Best light a fire and get to hauling, brother. She beat you fair and square.”

Daniel groaned, handed the rifle back, and trudged toward the wash house like a man heading to his own execution.

Mattias made to put the rifle away.

“I could’ve hit that with my pistol,” Freya said.

Both Mattias and Edwin stopped mid‑step.

“You have a pistol?” Mattias asked.

“Yes,” Freya said. “A birthday present from my fathers.”

Mattias looked at her like she’d just told him she slept with a knife under her pillow. “Freya. You need to wear your pistol. Like boots. Like a hat. You have it, you wear it. It’s no good if you don’t.”

She nodded. “Alright.”

Edwin’s gaze swept over her, thoughtful and appreciative. “Pistol’s not about distance,” he said. “It’s about steady hands and presence of mind. Remember that.”

Freya nodded. Steady hands. Presence of mind.

She thought of the woman from the Grimley place. Thin. Terrified. Running south through country she didn’t know, already feeling the fever take hold. Knowing what she was becoming.

Freya might have to shoot a woman like that. That was the awful truth of it.

She went inside to fetch her pistol.

Chapter 9

The bath had been worth every bucket that Daniel had to haul and heat. It had been worth every lump of coal it cost to heat it. It had even been worth putting up with the grumbling Daniel had done trudging back and forth from the pump with bucket after bucket, feeding the copper boiler in the wash house until the water finally ready, even if he had resolutely kept his shirt on the whole time. Freya had won her wager fair and square, and a Stirling always collected a debt.

As she walked to the wash house, wrapper tied tightly around herself, Edwin had pressed a small glass bottle in her hands. “Lavender. For your bath.” A wink, and he was gone, with no explanation trailing his gift this time.

Mattias had poured her a generous measure from the stone crock of whiskey, setting it down on stool beside the tub for her.

All so worth it. Freya had sunk into the wash tub until hot water lapped at her chin, wiggling her shoulders in the spreading warmth. She was sore, she admitted. All over. Days of work – bending hauling, kneading, hoeing, planting, wringing, lifting. Running a homestead was more work than she’d calculated. And she’d calculated a lot. Husbands – now that was the least of it. It was the work, the endless work that tired a woman out.

She drank her whiskey. She closed her eyes. She slid under until only her nose poked out of the water. She wondered, idly what would happen if she called out for Edwin to read to her while she was in the bath. Or for Daniel to bring more hot water. Or Mattias to bring more whiskey. All of which appealed to her. She stayed until the water cooled and her fingers had turned to wrinkled pink prunes. Eventually though, she hauled out, dried off, wrapped herself in her cotton wrapper, and made her way into the house and upstairs unsteady on her feet from the heat.

Back in her bedroom she left the door open.

The bed was wide and soft. Freya loosened the wrapper, let it fall to her waist, and collapsed face-down onto the mattress, arms spread, cheek pressed to the pillow. The evening air was cool on her bare back. She might never move again.

Footsteps on the floorboards.

A pause at the doorway.

“The door’s open, Mattias,” she mumbled into the pillow.

His steps came closer. Something thunked softly on the bedside table. Freya opened one eye, hoping faintly that it might be more whiskey.

“Oil. For sore muscles.” A pause. “If you want.”

Freya turned her head just enough to see him. Mattias stood by the bed, hand on the top of a small clay bottle. He looked uncertain, which was strange for a man who generally looked like he’d already decided how every situation would end.

“Oh. God, yes.”

The mattress dipped. She heard him pour oil into his palm, rub his hands together. Then his thumbs stroked the knotted sore spot between her shoulder blades, and she groaned into the pillow.

His hands were big. Warm. They spread across her back like he could span half of it with one palm. He found the tight spot again and pressed, and Freya’s tense, aching back loosened slightly against his fingers.

“Right there.” Her voice came out muffled. “That spot.”

He didn’t answer. Just worked the oil into her skin with slow, firm strokes. Shoulders. The wings of her shoulder blades. Down along her spine. He found every place the work had settled into her body and eased it loose with patient pressure.

“There is a mountain of work to be done on a homestead,” she said. “Most of it involves lifting, carrying or hauling something heavy.”

He chuckled. “Don’t need to tell me that.” His thumbs traced her ribs. “Hard to find a patch of hand that isn’t torn or blistered to rub the oil with.”

“It’ll get easier. Eventually”

“Certainly can’t get harder.”

She smiled into the pillow. His hands kept moving. Sweetly warm and soothing.

“Mattias.”

“Mm.”

“What would you have done if my door had been closed tonight?”

His hands didn’t pause. “I would have found my way back to my own bed. Reckoned you were tired. Or wanting time alone. Had your courses. Didn’t want to fuss with a husband.” A shrug she felt rather than saw. “Sometimes a man just wants to sit quiet by himself with his own thoughts. Can’t imagine it’s any different for a wife.”

“We’re all grown men. Know how to take care of ourselves.”

Silence stretched. His hands stilled on her back.

Freya waited.

More silence.

“What.” His voice was flat. “You think Edwin’s the only one who knows how to take matters into his own hands in his own bunk?”

Freya laughed, surprised and genuine. “Oh god. Does everyone know about poor Edwin?”

“What do you mean, poor Edwin?” His hands resumed their work. “Every boy in the garrison knows how to do that. Edwin just did it more often than most. Developed a name for himself.” A pause. “Did he tell you a different story?”

Freya kept her face pressed into the pillow. Kept her voice carefully blank. Wiggled her shoulders inviting more touch.

“No. Has he been telling you any tales of his time in Stagmouth?”

A long silence. Mattias’s hands slowed.

“He might have mentioned a thing or two.”

“Educational things?”

“Mm.”

So Edwin had been coaching his brothers already. Freya bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. She a rolled onto her side, pulling the wrapper up to cover her breasts, and looked at him. Mattias sat on the edge of the bed, oil gleaming on his hands. His face was unreadable, but his ears had gone faintly dark.

“Edwin shared some anecdotes,” she said. “With me.”

“Did he?”

“Detailed ones.”

Mattias’s jaw tightened. Not anger. Something else.

“He does talk in details. Hard to follow sometimes. Did he give you a demonstration?”

“He did.”

Another silence. Mattias looked at his hands. At the oil. At her shoulder, bare where the wrapper had slipped.

“He’s better at explaining than I am.”

“I’m not asking for explanations.” Freya reached out, caught his wrist, tugged gently. “And my door wasn’t closed.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he stretched out beside her on the bed.

He kissed her like he’d been thinking about it all day. Maybe he had. His oil-slicked hands slid over her skin, leaving trails of warmth, and when he cupped her breast she arched into his palm. His hand found her hip through the wrapper and stayed there, not pushing, just holding. She tugged at his shirt. ““Mattias.” She pulled back enough to see his face. “I’m not made of glass, and this needs to come off.”

He pulled back long enough to undo buttons and pull his shirt off over his head, then he was pressing her down into the mattress, the weight of him settling over her. Skin to skin. His chest hair rough against her nipples. His mouth on her throat, her collarbone, the swell of her breast.

His hand slid between her thighs and she was already wet, had been since he’d started working her back, and his breath caught.

“Christ, Freya.”

“Touch me.”

He did. It wasn’t the devastating precision Edwin had shown. It was rougher, less certain, his calluses catching on her skin in a way that was almost too much. But he was paying attention. Adjusting when she gasped. Pressing harder when she arched into his hand.

“Mattias.” Her voice was strained. “I want—”

“Yeah.” He was already fumbling with his trousers, shoving them down. “Yeah.”

He settled between her thighs. She felt him press against her, hot and blunt.

“Mattias. If you don’t get inside me right now—”

He pushed in. Not smooth, not perfectly angled, but good. Full. Right.

They both went still. Breathing hard. Adjusting to the feel of each other.

He started to move. Slow at first, finding a rhythm. It wasn’t graceful. His elbow caught the pillow wrong and he had to shift. Her knee bumped his hip. But then he found a better angle, deeper, and she made a sound that seemed to undo something in him.

“Christ.” His forehead dropped to hers. “You feel—”

“I know.”

He moved faster. The careful restraint cracking open into something urgent. Freya wrapped her legs around him, pulling him closer, and he groaned against her neck.

“Not going to last,” he managed. “Freya, I can’t—”

“It’s okay.” She dug her fingers into his shoulders. “Come on.”

He made a broken sound and buried himself deep. She felt him shudder, felt him pulse inside her, and held on until he stilled.

He didn’t move for a long moment. Just breathed against her neck, heavy and spent. She stroked his hair, damp with sweat.

He pushed out a long exhale. “Should’ve— “ he started.

“Mattias.” She tugged his hair until he lifted his head. “It was good.”

“Wasn’t long enough for you, though.”

“We’ll practice.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. Almost a smile. “Yeah?”

“Every night my door’s open.”

He kissed her, soft and slow. Then he rolled onto his back and pulled her against his side, her head on his chest. His heartbeat was still settling, slowing under her ear.

They lay like that while the house settled around them. Wind moved through the coulee. Somewhere downstairs, a door closed softly. Daniel or Edwin, checking locks.

Freya was drifting toward sleep when Mattias spoke, voice low in the darkness.

“Edwin tell you why he came back?”

Her eyes opened.

She knew why Edwin had gone to Stagmouth. Knew about the engineering studies, the gentleman’s lessons, the teacher who’d taken him to her bed. He’d told her all of that, tangled together in this same room.

She knew why he’d gone to Stagmouth. But had assumed he’d always meant to come back. She didn’t get the impression he’d like the city. But he hadn’t asked him why he’d left it.

“No,” she said slowly. “He didn’t.”

Mattias was quiet for a long moment. His hand moved on her shoulder, absent, thoughtful.

“Hm,” he said.

And nothing else.

Chapter 10

The ploughing and harrowing were done. The south field lay in neat dark furrows, ready and waiting for sowing. It was easier work now. Still hard, still long, but not the bone-grinding labour of breaking new ground.

As the weeks had passed, the work had settled into a rhythm that began to feel less and less onerous. It had begun to feel predictable and safe, almost pleasant at times.

They generally broke for lunch in the field now. It had become a ritual that had grown up without anyone deciding on it. Each day, Freya brought out a basket a little after midday. Bread, cheese, cold meat, a jug of well water cut with a splash of spirits. They’d find a patch of shade and sprawl on the grass and eat together, four people and one ugly dog, watching clouds drift across the pale spring sky.

Today Daniel had made her laugh with an old story about a mule and a sergeant. Edwin had pointed out a hawk circling overhead and explained how it used thermals to stay aloft. Mattias had eaten in his usual silence, but when she offered him the last piece of cheese, he passed it back to her, his fingers brushing hers and lingering there.

Freya had gathered the empty basket, brushed off her trousers, and set off back to the house, leaving the men to finish the last rows of the afternoon. She was almost at the house, looking toward the door, empty basket bumping gently at her thigh, when Bela yelped out a single warning bark, loud and sharp, from across the field.

Freya dropped the basket and spun, head whipping around to see the lurching horror coming around the corner of the house at her. She had been a woman, once. But was Dead now. She was dirty and ragged, her clothes hanging off her. She had only one shoe, the toes of her other foot dirty, broken and bent. She was thin, very thin, and tall. Hair a darkly wild, snarled tangle.

Her eyes were wide and rolling in her head, no spark of humanity left, just rage. Rage, pain, fear, and hunger. Her mouth was open, but she made no sound at all, just hop‑shuffle running silently toward Freya with her hands clawing at the air in front of her face.

Freya stumbled backward in horror, never taking her eyes off the Dead woman. Her fingers found the pistol at her hip and she drew. Raised it. Time stretched — thick and slow between the draw and thumbing back the hammer. Twenty yards. Fifteen. Another hour to sight on the chest.

Behind her, shouting. Mattias’s voice, Daniel’s, boots pounding on dirt. Too far. They were a whole world away.

Fifteen yards. Ten. She exhaled. Fired.

The blast punched through the afternoon quiet. The zombie jerked, stumbled. A dark hole opened in its chest, spreading wet and black across the ruined fabric.

It didn’t stop.

Freya scrambled backwards. Her boot caught on something, and she went down hard, landing on her backside, still clutching the pistol. The zombie lurched forward another step. Two.

Then it crumpled.

Freya kept scrambling, pushing herself backward through the dirt with her heels, unable to stop, unable to breathe, unable to think. The pistol shook in her grip. The body lay still, three yards away.

Bela was a bullet of wiry grey fur, running at full gallop toward her, sliding to stand between her and the corpse less than a second later, head down, teeth bared, interposing his body between Freya and the Dead woman.

The world had gone quiet.

Not exactly silent — quiet in that strange way where sound still exists but doesn’t register. Freya sat in the dirt where she’d fallen, legs splayed, heels dug in, pistol limp in her hand. The Dead woman lay a few yards away, collapsed in a heap, one arm still reaching toward her.

Freya didn’t look at the body. She couldn’t.

Instead, her eyes had locked on a single blade of grass by her boot. Green. Bent. A tiny ant crawling up its length, pausing, turning, continuing.

Her breath came in tiny, shallow pulls. There was a drum. Someone was beating a heavy drum somewhere close by.

The thought drifted through her like a leaf on water, slow and distant.

Bela’s growl rumbled through his chest. He stood in front of her, legs braced, head low, teeth bared, snarling at the still form on the ground. His whole body trembled. His ears flicked wildly — toward her, toward the body, toward the field where the men were running.

Freya blinked. The ant reached the tip of the grass blade and hesitated, antennae tasting the air.

The drumbeat grew louder. Faster. Pounding.

Boots hit the ground behind her. Hard. Fast. Three sets, thundering across the field.

She didn’t turn. Didn’t look. Didn’t hear the shouting.

Her vision tunneled, the world shrinking to a patch of earth the size of her palm.

Then hands grabbed her.

Strong hands. Rough hands. Hands that shook.

Mattias hauled her upright so fast the world tilted. She swayed, blinking at him, trying to understand why his face looked so strange — pale, wild‑eyed, mouth tight terror.

He was panting hard, chest heaving, sweat streaking the dust on his skin. Daniel and Edwin were behind him, bent over, hands on their knees, gasping for breath, eyes darting between Freya and the corpse.

Bela circled them, unsure whether Mattias was helping or hurting her.

Mattias grabbed Freya’s shoulders.

“Did she touch you?” he shouted. “Did she touch you, Freya? Did she—”

“Freya.” His voice softened. “Freya, look at me.”

She tried. Her eyes kept drifting back to the ground.

Grass. Dirt. Ant.

“Freya.” His grip tightened. “Come with me now. To the house. Come on. This way.”

One step. Two. Another. And they were on the wooden porch. Bright sunshine. Smooth wood. House. Edwin and Daniel standing below on the grass of the yard. Backs toward her, guns drawn, scanning.

“Strip now, Freya. Quickly. Take your clothes off.”

The word didn’t make sense. They floated past her like smoke.

She blinked at him. “What?”

“Strip.” His voice cracked. “Now.”

Freya stared at Mattias, confusion slowly blooming into anger. Why was he shouting? Why was he shaking? Why was he telling her to take her clothes off?

Somehow, she did. Hat, shirt, pants, kicked off over her boots. She stood, naked and shaking. Mattias turned her face this way and that, lifted her hair from her neck. He took her hands and peered between her fingers. He dropped to his knees in front of her, hands running over her arms, her sides, her legs, frantic, searching for something she didn’t understand.

Freya swayed, the world tilting again. The drumbeat thundered on in her ears.

Distantly, she realized there was no drum. Just her own pounding heart.

Mattias’s hands froze on her waist. His head bowed. His breath shuddered.

“Please,” he whispered. “Please, God. Please.”

Freya looked down at him — at her husband, on his knees on the porch, shaking, terrified — and finally, finally, the world began to come back into focus.

The corpse. The gun. The bark. The sprint. The fall. The shot.

And Mattias’s fear.

Her own fear.

Daniel and Edwin, with guns drawn, forming a protective perimeter.

The world returned all at once, sharp and bright and unbearable.

Freya’s breath whooshed into her lungs with a sharp gasp. Her knees buckled. Mattias caught her before she fell.

“Clean.” Mattias’s voice cracked on the word. “She’s clean.”

Daniel was already moving. He was up the stairs and opening the door as Mattias led her stumbling into the house. To the parlour and into the armchair, pulling her into his own lap as he sank into the chair. He held her against his chest, one hand cradling her head, and she felt him shaking. Mattias. Shaking.

Freya started to cry.

Great heaving sobs that tore out of her chest and wouldn’t stop. She cried into Mattias’s shoulder while he held her and Daniel wrapped a throw around her.

When the sobs finally slowed to hiccups, Daniel rose to his feet and went to the door, nodding at Edwin where he still stood, facing out, gun still trained on the Dead woman on the ground.

“Edwin,” Mattias said, voice steady now, officer’s voice. “Light the signal.”

Edwin nodded and moved away from the door. Yellow smoke would soon be rising into the sky.

Chapter 11

Her hands still shook. She sat now, on the sofa between Daniel and Mattias holding a cup of tea with generous amounts of sugar and whiskey in it. Daniel had brought her wrapper from upstairs and she still had the blanket tucked around her.

Edwin sat in the armchair across from them, pulled close and angled toward her. Bela lay at the threshold, worry evident on his homely, whiskered face.

She gulped half the tea down and stared at the cup. Mattias laid a hand on her knee.

“That was close.” He said. “Terrifying, even. But you did all the right things.” Freya shook her head. The tea sloshed in the cup.

“You kept your wits about you,” he continued, as if she hadn’t moved. “You drew and fired. And it was a good shot, right when it really mattered.” He leaned in slightly, enough that she felt the weight of his attention. “You did everything right, Freya.”

“But I was so scared.” Her voice cracked on the last word. Dammit. She was not going to cry again. “I fell apart. I couldn’t even think. After you came running, I just stared at the ground. I didn’t understand what you were saying to me.”

Daniel’s hand brushed her shoulder, a quiet reassurance. Edwin shifted forward in his chair. “But that was after,” he told her. “After you’d already acted to make yourself safe. You did it right.”

She looked at Bela, lying on the floor by the door. He’d been the one to alert them – with a single urgent bark, then racing across the coulee to stand against the Dead woman coming for Freya.

“Is it true?” Freya asked. Her voice came out steadier than she expected. “What they say. That the Dead are usually women. That women are more susceptible to zombie fever.”

Silence.

Mattias glanced at Edwin. A question in the look.

Edwin didn’t warm up to it the way he usually did, didn’t settle into the comfortable rhythm of explanation he fell into when discussing engineering or chemistry. He just shook his head.

“If you’re bit, you’re dead,” he said evenly. “Man or woman it makes no difference. The fever takes everyone the same.”

“Then why…” Freya trailed off. She’d seen the woman’s face. The ruined dress. The long hair matted with dirt and worse.

“Women fight harder against the disease.” Edwin’s voice was quiet. “They last longer after the symptoms take set in. A man gets infected and the fever burns so hot it sometimes kills him before the madness truly takes hold.” He paused. “A woman, the fever isn’t so hot. She can last longer. Weeks, even, after she’s Dead.”

Freya’s stomach turned. “Weeks.”

“Both men and women die if they’re bit. Women just…” Edwin spread his hands. “They can walk around Dead a lot longer before they finally lay down.”

Freya stared at the table. The grain of the wood blurred.

That hadn’t been a thing in the coulee – it had been a person. Someone’s daughter. Someone’s sister. Somewhere, there were probably four husbands frantic over the loss of their wife. Dead from the moment the fever took her, but her body too stubborn to stop. Walking and starving, fevered and freezing for weeks until Freya shot her.

“The Dead are dead, they just haven’t laid down yet.” Mattias said, reading her face. “Putting one down isn’t killing. It’s mercy.”

“Doesn’t feel like mercy.”

“No.” Mattias’s voice was heavy. “It never does.”

Freya went to bed alone.

The house was dark and still, the coulee outside silent. She lay in the big bed in the wife’s room, covers pulled tightly around her. Exhaustion tugged at her bones, but her mind refused to settle.

Every time she closed her eyes she saw the Dead woman’s face. Heard Bela’s urgent bark. Heard her men shouting her name. Heard the drum of her own heart pounding in her head.

She opened her eyes again. The ceiling was only a darker shade of black.

The house creaked as it cooled. A soft step overhead told her someone was in the cupola. She listened a moment longer and recognized Edwin’s tread. He was on watch.

Bela sighed outside her door, a low doggy wufff. He wasn’t sleeping. She could tell by the way he shifted now and then, by the faint scrape of his claws on the floorboards. Awake because she was awake or because of reasons of his own she couldn’t guess. Bela was inscrutable at the best of times.

She closed her eyes again. Opened them. Nothing changed.

A floorboard creaked in the hallway.

She didn’t sit up, but she turned her head toward the sound. The door eased open a few inches. No lamp. No candle. Just a darker shape in the dark.

“Freya.”

Mattias’s voice, low enough not to wake anyone else. Or maybe low because anything louder would break something in him.

She pushed herself up on her elbows. “I’m awake.”

He stepped inside, nudging Bela gently with his foot. Mattias came to the side of the bed and sat down on the edge, close enough that she felt the mattress dip, close enough that she could sense the warmth of him, but he didn’t touch her.

For a moment he didn’t speak. She could hear his breathing, steady but not quite calm.

“I shouldn’t have shouted,” he said finally.

Freya swallowed. “You were scared.”

“I was scared. Bad.” The word came out without hesitation. “I’ve lost people before, I didn’t want to see you added to the list.”

In the dark, she could just make out the line of his shoulders, the tension still held there.

“I thought—” He stopped. Tried again. “I thought I wouldn’t reach you in time.”

Freya’s throat tightened.

He let out a slow breath. “And I didn’t. You took care of yourself, there.”

Silence settled between them, but it wasn’t empty. It was full of everything he wasn’t saying, everything she didn’t know how to say back.

Mattias didn’t move to leave. He didn’t move closer either. He just stayed, a quiet shape in the dark, keeping watch beside her bed the way Edwin kept watch in the cupola.

Freya lay back against the pillows, her heartbeat finally slowing.

“Thank you,” she said.

Mattias nodded once. She felt it more than saw it.

He stayed until her breathing evened out, and her eyes drifted closed.

Only then did he stand and slip out, leaving the door cracked just enough for Bela to keep his vigil.

---

Morning dawned pale and cold, wisps of clouds scudded across the sky and fog shrouded the edges of the coulee. They waited on the porch. Freya sat wrapped in a blanket, boots planted on the boards, hands hidden in the wool. The sun might burn through enough to warm the rail, but not her bones. Bela lay six feet away, stretched long, head up, watching the coulee with wary attention.

Mattias stood at the porch post, one shoulder against it, arms folded. Daniel sat on the step below Freya, elbows on his knees. Edwin paced back and forth across the yard, then stopped, listening.

The sound reached them before the riders came in sight, the clatter of tack, men calling to each other as they funneled down the narrow neck of the coulee. More noise than last time. More formality. Prewitt wasn’t taking chances today.

Freya pulled the blanket tighter. The wool rasped against her cheek.

The patrol came into view: eight men, rifles slung, gear stowed, horses blowing from the quick pace. Prewitt led, the medic riding just behind him, two laydown men and their gear bringing up the rear of the group.

They slowed at the yard. Prewitt raised a hand.

“Good day, Stirlings. He said formally. “Sergeant Prewitt, with Sweep and Laydown Team responding to your Deadfall Signal.”

Mattias straightened off the post. “Prewitt.”

Prewitt inclined his head “Sir.” He kept his seat.

Mattias gave a short nod. “You’re welcome in.”

Only then did Prewitt swing down from the saddle. The medic dismounted behind him, boots hitting the ground with a thud. The two Laydown men and sweep riders stayed mounted, waiting for orders.

Prewitt stepped forward, stopping at the edge of the porch steps. “I’ll need your account.”

Mattias didn’t look back at Freya. “Half-past two. One Dead. Female. Came in by the road, through the neck. Engaged at close range. No wounded. No contact. No other sign.”

Prewitt’s gaze swept the porch, Freya in her blanket, Mattias’ rangy hound on alert, Daniel and Edwin flanking her like a wall. His jaw clicked.

Edwin stepped off the porch. “I’ll take your sweep,” he said turning away from the house. Prewitt nodded gestured with his head indicating the mounted men. The sweep riders advanced, fanning out to either side while the laydown men headed directly for the body, out of view, around the corner of the house. After a nod at Mattias, Prewitt and the medic followed on foot.

They came back ten minutes later, all three carrying the same knowledge in their faces.

Prewitt stopped at the foot of the steps. “The shot was taken from very close range.” A beat. “Medic needs to confirm the shooter’s clean.”

Mattias didn’t blink. “The shooter was not touched.”

The medic stopped at the bottom step. He looked up at Mattias. “The range was inside the contamination risk, sir. I’ll need to see the shooter.” His hands were steady, but he winced when he said it, eyes darting to Freya’s blanket wrapped figure on the porch.”

Mattias shifted. Just enough to put himself between them.

“No.”

The medic blinked. “Sir. Protocol—”

“I know the protocol.” Mattias’s voice stayed low, even. “She’s clean.”

Prewitt stepped in, not crowding, but close enough to make the air tighten. “Mattias. The shot was taken from less than six yards. Keene needs to see her.”

Mattias didn’t look at him. “I checked her. Thoroughly.”

Keene’s mouth tightened. He’d been silent until now, but the silence had weight. “Sir,” he said, and it wasn’t habit, it was the old chain of command speaking. “I still need to see for myself.”

Mattias tipped his head a fraction. “Private Keene, you will not be taking my wife inside my house and putting your hands to her. If she’d been contaminated, I would have shot her myself.”

Freya swallowed. The blanket felt too heavy.

Keene exhaled once, steadying himself. He knew that tone. He’d heard it in places where men didn’t walk away.

Before he could speak, Prewitt cut in. “Keene,” he said, eyes still on Mattias, “put in your report that former Officer M. Goss conducted a thorough field assessment and declared the shooter clean.”

A beat. A long one.

He nodded once. “Yes, Sergeant.”

Mattias didn’t move. But the air around him eased, just slightly.

Prewitt nodded. “We’ll finish the sweep. Laydown crew will dispose of the remains. We’ll be on our way after that.”

---

Out of view past the corner of the house, the Laydown team moved the body downwind and built their fire. Burn ring, accelerant, canvas—quick, practiced motions. When the ashes cooled, they packed them into a metal box and took them away to bury away from the Stirling homestead.

By the time Prewitt and his men had ridden out, the sun was past its height and a west wind had blown in. Freya finally stopped imagining she could taste oily smoke on the back of her tongue.

She didn’t feel inclined to move from the porch. Her men didn’t feel inclined to leave her.

Daniel took out his pipe and packed it. Edwin struck a match on the rail. Mattias lit his on his boot heel, the flare brief in the dimming light.

Freya watched the three of them smoke, their shoulders easing by degrees. She breathed in the sweet, fragrant curl of it.

Daniel glanced over. “You want a draw?”

She hesitated, then held out her hand.

He passed the pipe to her. She took a slow pull, coughed once. None of them reacted. She tried again, steadier.

The porch settled into a quiet that wasn’t so heavy anymore. Shared air. Shared relief. Shared exhaustion.

“I am,” she said at last, “not enjoying Corporal Prewitt’s visits.”

Daniel snorted. “Want me to take a shot at his hat next time he rides in?”

Her mouth twitched. “Tempting.”

Mattias didn’t look over, but his jaw eased. “Leave his hat alone. He’s doing his job.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“No,” Mattias said. “It doesn’t.”

She took one more draw before handing the pipe back. Her hands didn’t shake anymore.

“Mattias.”

He looked at her.

“Would you really have shot me?”

The silence stretched.

“Yes.”

The word landed like a stone.

Freya swallowed. “If I’d been bitten, scratched or…contaminated… you would have—”

“I would never leave you with that.” Mattias’s voice was quiet. “I would never let you suffer the turning. The fever. The madness. I would never let you become one of those things.” His jaw tightened. “No matter what it cost me, if it pulled my own heart right out of my chest, I would have put you down clean, rather than see that happen to you.”

Her eyes burned. “That’s—” Her voice cracked. “That’s oddly touching. In a way.”

Mattias looked away. His throat worked.

Daniel let out a breath. “Christ, Mattias.”

“It’s true,” Edwin said softly. “It’s the truth of this world. It’s a mercy. Mercy is the kindest thing you can give someone who’s Dead.”

Freya looked at him. “Would you have?”

Edwin held her gaze.

His voice was steady, but his eyes held the darkness of memory. “I would never let that happen to my wife, Freya. Not to any woman. Not ever again.”

The words landed heavy.

Not ever again.

Chapter 12

Freya had been sitting on the edge of the coulee with the wind in her hair and the whole badlands falling away beneath her for the better part of an hour. She’d set out gathering herbs for beer. That had been true. The yarrow and sage and mint in her lap were real enough. But mostly she needed the air, to put space and distance between herself and the memory of yesterday.

Every time she blinked she saw the woman’s face. The blue dress. The way the her body had crumpled and fallen .

Bela had come with her, ambling ahead of her, sniffing here and there as she wandered. Now he sat six feet away, serenely scanning the horizon, his big ugly head moving slowly from side to side, nose twitching gently.

She put a leaf in her mouth. Bitter. Dry. Prairie. Even her own spit tasted like dust and grass and the copper tang of—

She spat the leaf out and wiped her mouth.

At the sound of boots on stone, Freya’s hand went quickly to the pistol on her hip before she recognized Edwin’s tread. He lowered himself beside her and let his boots hang over the drop.

They sat like that for a while, the wind tugging at their clothes, the coulee yawning below.

“What are you doing?” Edwin asked. His voice was careful and soft.

Freya held up a leaf. “Tasting herbs. I’m going to brew beer this week.”

“Ah.” Edwin’s mouth twitched. “That’s good. Please don’t let me interrupt.”

She went back to her tasting. He sat quiet beside her. Down the slope, Daniel hammered at the granary roof. The sound carried all the way up the coulee, hollow and thudding.

Freya picked up another herb. Put it down. Picked it up again.

“I keep seeing her face,” she said.

Edwin didn’t answer. Just waited.

“Before I—” She stopped. Breathed. “She was wearing a blue dress. Did you see it?”

“I did, yes.”

“And I shot her.”

“Yes.”

“I know I had to. I know that.” Her fingers tightened in her lap. “But I keep seeing it. The dress.”

She breathed out, slow and uneven. “You’ve seen things like this before, haven’t you,” she asked. “With the army. Away South.”

Quietly. “Yes.”

“Tell me one of your stories, Edwin.”

He picked up a stem from her lap. Turned it thoughtfully between his fingers. “Alright. What kind of story?”

“A dark one.”

“Freya.”

“I’m serious. I’m not asking for comfort.” Her voice was quiet. “I just… I need to know I’m not the only one who feels like this. Like something’s gone dark and hollow inside me and I don’t know what it means.” She swallowed. “I don’t feel like I’m me right now. Share something with me. Something real. I need to come back.”

He looked away.

“You think you want that,” he said. “You don’t. You don’t want mine.”

“I do.” She didn’t blink.

Edwin didn’t look at her right away. He watched the coulee instead, the way the light caught on the rocks and layers. When he finally spoke, it was quiet.

“You want to know why I came back from Stagmouth.”

It wasn’t really a question. But he waited anyway, giving her room to close the subject. She didn’t.

“I never cared for soldiering,” he said. “Not really. But it was what Gosses do. It’s our family vocation. There wasn’t really anything else for me.”

He paused.

“I liked the engineering. The sapping. The work where things made sense. You build something. You take something apart. You understand the pieces.” A faint, tired breath. “The rest of it. The orders. The blood. The way the army grinds you down until you can’t tell the difference between duty and habit. I didn’t have much use for that.”

He shifted his weight, boots scraping stone.

“So when I was offered the chance to take lessons in Stagmouth, I went. I would have owed the tuition if I’d stayed, but…” He chose his words carefully. “I didn’t intend to come back. Not if I’m honest. There wasn’t much reason to stay in Carbon. Between me and my brothers, well. We had no marriage prospects. No sister to trade. No means to pay a bride price. I wasn’t needed to help my brothers secure a marriage that was never going to happen anyway.”

The wind gusted. Freya pulled her coat tighter but didn’t interrupt.

“I was the poor boy from the frontier,” he said. “You have to understand that. Second class. The other students were… polite. Friendly, even. But I was never one of them. Never invited to homes, or included in the right conversations. I was tolerated. Appreciated, even, for my skill. But not…” He searched for the word. “Not equal.”

He picked up another stem of yarrow and twisted that one too.

“The day we graduated, there was drinking. A lot of drinking, in a lot of establishments. We’d made it through. Even me, the poor frontier boy, got invited along for the festivities.” His mouth twisted. “Late in the afternoon, one of the wealthier students invited me to his home. A man named Ashe. Wealthy family, well connected. We’d never been close, but he’d always been decent enough. That night he was friendly. ‘Come meet my wife,’ he said.”

He let out a breath through his nose. Not quite a laugh. He glanced at her then, just a flick of his eyes.

“Do you want me to keep going?” he asked. “I don’t mind if you don’t. You can leave this story untold if you’d rather.”

She shook her head.

“But if you’re asking me to open that door, Freya, then you’d better be ready for what’s on the other side.”

He looked back at the coulee.

“When we got to his house, it was late. Dark. The lamps were lit but the place felt…” Edwin paused. “Empty. Wrong. I didn’t notice it at first. I was drunk. Happy. Proud of myself for graduating, proud of being invited somewhere by someone important like Ashe.”

Freya’s skin prickled.

“It didn’t fit together. Small things, really. No flowers in the hall. No mirror by the door.” He was speaking slowly now, each word placed with care, like he was walking through the memory room by room. “No brothers’ coats on the rack. Just… a man’s house. A bachelor’s house.”

“I asked about servants. He said he’d given them the night off.” Edwin’s fingers tightened, crushing the yarrow stem until it oozed a green and bitter scent. “We had a drink. Shared a pipe. I kept waiting for the wife to appear. She didn’t.”

“I wanted to be proper. After a while, I asked to pay my respects to the lady of the house.” His jaw worked once. “Ashe smiled at me. Said, ‘Alright. But you mustn’t tell anyone.’”

Freya stared at Edwin’s face. His tone was flat and even. His words smooth, neutral. But the hair was standing up on her arms and her breath was tight in her throat.

“He took me to a door at the back of the house. I thought perhaps his wife was an invalid, with apartments on the ground-floor for her convenience. It happens, in wealthy families. A wife too frail to manage stairs, too delicate for company.” Edwin’s voice had gone thin and distant. Reciting. “The door opened onto stairs. Going down.”

Sweat broke over Freya’s back, cold, at the same time as her cheeks felt hot and numb.

“I knew something was wrong. But I was drunk, and curious, and Ashe was already halfway down the stairs, holding up a lamp, beckoning me to follow.”

“The cellar was large. Stone walls, stone floor, no windows. Cold, even in the heat of the day. And at the far end…” Edwin stopped. His throat worked. “There was a bed.”

“A woman was chained to it.”

“She was Dead.” Edwin turned to her then, and his eyes were hollow. Haunted. “He had a Dead woman chained naked in his cellar. There was a leather hood over her head. Leather mitts on her hands. The chains were bolted to the wall, short enough that she couldn’t tear off the hood.” His voice cracked. He forced it steady. “She was making sounds. Twitching. Straining hungrily toward our flesh. No words… the Dead can’t speak. Just sounds.”

Freya swallowed convulsively, tasting bile rising in her throat. “Edwin,” she whispered. It barely came out.

“The smell hit me then. Fever sweat. The smell a body gives off when it’s burning from the Fever, burning itself out from the inside.”

“Ashe walked right up to her. ‘My wife,’ he said. ‘She’s quite fresh. Would you like to have a go?’”

“Oh god.”

“I don’t remember deciding to hit him.” Edwin’s voice was flat. “One moment I was standing there, and the next I was on top of him. On the floor. My fist in his face.”

“He tried to fight back. At first. He was bigger than me, heavier. But I was… I wasn’t thinking anymore. I wasn’t anything anymore. Just fists and rage.”

“I hit him until he stopped struggling. Then I hit him some more.” Edwin’s voice was toneless. “His nose went first. Then something went soft in his cheek. I felt it give way under my knuckles. He was making sounds too, by the end. Wet, gurgling sounds. Like her.”

The wind picked up. Cold now. Carrying dust.

“When I finally stopped, my hands were… I couldn’t feel them. Couldn’t feel anything. I stood up and he was just lying there. Twitching. Bleeding from his face, from his ears. His eyes were open but there was nothing behind them.”

He rubbed a hand over his face, as if the memory still clung.

“After that… everything blurred,” he said. “People came. The law came. They took one look at the scene and hauled Ashe out. He didn’t die right away. It took a day or two for that.”

He shook his head once, a small, bitter gesture. “I close my eyes sometimes, Freya, and I still see her, still smell the fever burning its way through her. I still hear the desperate way she struggled, trying to reach me. I wish to God I’d done the decent thing and given her grace first, instead of beating Ashe to death while she waited.”

He shrugged. Continued.

“Ashe’s family had money. Influence. Friends in every office that mattered. And the people who’d helped him, or ignored him, they weren’t about to let some frontier nobody drag their filth into daylight. They made it clear I wasn’t safe. Not in Stagmouth. Not anywhere near it. I packed what I had and got out before sunrise.”

Freya sat entirely still. Her stomach roiled, her palms were sweaty and she thought she might cry and vomit both.

When he finally spoke, his voice was low, roughened.

“So,” he said, “now you know. All of it. You want to go wash your hands? Take a bath? Would you like to pretend you never touched me?”

He tossed the broken stem over the edge of the coulee.

“Most people would,” he added quietly. “Once they know what I’ve seen. What I’ve done.”

Freya watched his profile. The fine bones of his face. His elegant fingers. She thought about chains bolted to a cellar wall. The desperate, mindless hunger of the Dead woman straining toward living flesh. Edwin, proud and happy and drunk, thrown into horror. Anger, rage and regret were bitter in her mouth.

She reached out, gently, and touched his hand.

“Edwin,” she said softly, “I don’t feel clean either. I don’t know if that will ever wear off. But I don’t want to sit alone in my darkness wondering what kind of person I am now.”

She turned his hand over. Laced her fingers through his.

“What you saw, in Stagmouth, that’s an awfulness I can scarcely comprehend. I wish I could make it so it never happened, so that you never had to witness it. I can’t. But I won’t turn away from you because of it. I won’t let you lie awake in the dark holding it by yourself either. I won’t.”

“So get up. Take my stupid hand. Let’s go home and see what Daniel’s been doing to the roof. And don’t ever think I don’t have the courage to stand against your darkness or mine.”

Chapter 13

The house had been quiet for hours. Spring had finally begun to hold sway. Even the nights were just cool now, not bitter cold. Even so, her bare arms prickled with chill as she leaned against the windowframe, watching the full moon climb over the coulee.

Silver light spilled across the floorboards. It touched the tips of her toes where she stood, bare feet cold against the wood. Her hair hung loose, brushing cool against her shoulders. She’d let it down earlier, thinking the air might soothe her restlessness, but it only made her more aware of herself. The weight of her hair. The thin cotton of her nightshift against bare skin. The memory of Edwin’s fingers entwined in hers as they’d walked down the road this afternoon. He’d been in her thoughts all evening. She’d been thinking about the story he’d told her. About the way his voice had gone quiet and thin, as if he were walking through a place he’d never wanted to return to. Thinking of the way he’d looked at her when he finished; as though he expected her to step back, to flinch, to leave him alone with the memory.

Now, with the moon rising and the house silent, her thoughts leaned toward him. A wanting that wasn’t about fear or darkness. Perfectly natural to want to be close. Intimate. To take comfort in each other. And she wanted to. Simply wanted. Wanted him. Wanted the steadiness of him, the thought behind his words, his trust in her. Wanting a husband. Well, that’s a wife’s prerogative, too, isn’t it?

Her body felt oddly alive to her. Not unfamiliar, but heightened. Aware. The cool air on her arms made her shiver, and the shiver traveled deeper than the skin. Her shift brushed lightly against her legs as she moved, and the soft friction made her lean into it. Her feet curled against the cold floorboards, and even that sensation felt sharp – as though even her feet wanted to feel alive and awake.

She slipped out of her room.

The hallway was dim. The floor cold beneath her bare feet, each step a soft whisper of skin on wood. Her hair slid forward as she walked, curling around her collarbone. She held her arms close to herself as she made her way down the hallway.

Edwin’s door was slightly ajar. A thin line of lamplight spilled across the floor.

She pushed gently against the door and slipped inside.

Edwin stood at the window, braced on his forearms, the moonlight outlining him in silver. His boots were off, his feet bare on the floor. His suspenders hung loose around his hips, and his undershirt clung to him in the soft lamplight — the fabric stretched across the lines of his back and the narrow taper of his waist.

Unguarded, alone with his thoughts, not expecting to be seen.

Freya leaned back against the door, and the latch clicked softly into place.

Edwin’s shoulders lifted with a breath. He didn’t turn right away. But his voice, when it came, was warm and sincere.

“I hoped you’d come.”

He pushed away from the window. When he turned, the lamplight caught him first before the moonlight did. Hie was outlined in pale gold, brushing over the lines of his chest beneath his thin undershirt, the loose fall of his suspenders, the dark hair tousled from his hands. Then the moonlight took him, silvering the edges, outlining the lean shape of his body.

His eyes swept over her in a single, unguarded pass. From her loose hair to the thin cotton of her nightshift where it skimmed her body. Not crude or greedy. Just drinking her in the way he’d been drinking in the moon.

Freya’s skin dimpled in the cool air. Her nipples pressed tight against the fabric of her shift. She took a small step forward without meaning to. Edwin’s chest rose on a slow inhale. He didn’t look away.

“Freya,” he said, and her name sounded different in his mouth. Lower, rougher, threaded with heat and desire

She stopped in front of him, close enough to feel the warmth radiating off his body, close enough to see the faint twitch of his fingers where they hung at his sides.

He didn’t reach for her. Only waited, needing her to choose the moment.

She lifted her hands and touched his arms, just above the elbows.

His eyes closed. That was all it took. He folded into her with hunger and fierce relief mixed together.

His arms wrapped around her, strong and warm, drawing her against him. She lifted her face and kissed him. Soft at first, then with growing urgency of her own.

A sound escaped him. Low. Involuntary. Relief and wanting tangled together.

He shivered and his hands tightened at her waist, drawing her close. The warmth of his body was unmistakable even through clothes. She had a sudden sharp awareness of him, of the nearness of him, of the hard length of his cock pressing against her belly, and of the way her own body answered without hesitation.

She slid a hand down, and cupped him through the fabric of his trousers.

He inhaled sharply, eyes closing.

“Tell me how it feels,” she whispered.

He shuddered and pressed her palm harder against himself, holding her hand there. “I’ve been like this for hours. Imagining you here, like this.” His breath came faster. “Your hand on me feels…” He broke off, hips pushing forward. “So good, Freya. I want you so badly I can’t think about anything else.”

He swallowed. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come. I was afraid you might choose one of my brothers instead of me tonight. Worried that when you had time to think about what I did in Stagmouth, you wouldn’t want me anymore. That you’d be afraid of me. Or disgusted.”

But you’re here. Freya… that …I want to touch you. I want my hands on your skin. I want to kiss you. I want to tell you every secret about me. I want to tell you everything I’ve ever known. I want to be inside you. That’s what my body keeps demanding. To feel you around me. Wet and tight and hot. I want to see your face when I touch you. I want to hear the sounds you make. I want to know you want me too.”

She lifted her hand to his cheek, thumb brushing the warm skin beneath his eye. His mouth moved, searching for more words to explain, but she smiled, quick and unexpectedly bright, almost innocent.

“Really?”

Edwin let out a startled, helpless laugh.

“Yes. Here I am pouring my heart out and you think I might be joking. Yes, Freya, that’s really the way it feels.”

“Sounds like it might be uncomfortable.”

Edwin shifted his hips, pushing his cock harder into her hand, grinding there with a low sound in his throat.

She stroked him through the fabric, slow and deliberate, watching his face. “You told me the truth today. About what happened in Stagmouth. But you’re wrong to think I’d be disgusted. Or that I wouldn’t want you.”

“There’s ugliness in the world, to be sure. But us. Being close like this. Telling the truth to each other. That’s the antidote. That’s the comfort.”

“I’m here to give you comfort,” she murmured, then stepped back to look into his face.

His expression deepened and warmed in a way that made her feel deeper and warmer.

“And I need your comfort, Edwin. I need you.”

“Say that again?” he whispered.

“I need you.”

His eyes closed. When they opened again, they were dark with want and relief, and the pain behind them had faded some.

He exhaled, a soft, shaky sound, and his hands moved to the hem of his undershirt. He pulled it over his head, the fabric whispering against his skin. Lamplight caught the lines of him — the long, lean muscles, his fine-boned strength, his pale skin and dark hair.

Freya reached out, her fingers tracing the warm skin of his chest, the steady rise and fall of his breath. She guided him toward his bed. He went slowly, but willingly, as though every step was something to savor on the way to the bed. They moved together, hands and mouths and soft, breathless laughter, sharing warmth and closeness and relief.

When the backs of his knees hit the mattress, he sat, looking up at her.

His hands went to the buttons of his trousers, fumbling slightly. She watched as he undid them, lifted his hips to push them down and kick them aside.

She pulled her shift over her head and let it fall. Stood before him completely bare.

His eyes traveled over her – breasts, belly, the dark hair between her thighs, and his cock jerked visibly against his stomach.

She stepped forward. He held out his hands and she took them, let him steady her as she climbed onto the narrow bed, one knee on either side of his thighs.

She knelt over him, close enough that the head of his cock brushed against her. He made a choked sound.

She reached down between them, wrapped her fingers around him. He was hot and hard and already slick at the tip. She positioned him, then sank down slowly.

Edwin’s eyes squeezed shut and his hands locked on her hips, holding her still.

“How did you know to—” He began.

“Shh.” She leaned down, lips against his ear. “I was educated too, you know.”

She rose up, squeezing tight all the way, then sank back down his length as far as she could take him.

“And I have two older, married sisters,” she whispered. “Very helpful.”

She did it again, rolling her hips forward and up, then down.

“Oh god,” he breathed. “Freya…”

She put a finger to his lips. “No talking now, Edwin. Just comfort me.”

She rode him harder, chasing the pressure building low in her belly. Ground down on him, working herself against the base of his cock, using him for her own pleasure.

Edwin started to move beneath her, small thrusts up to meet her downward motion. His grip tightened. Then his hands locked on her hips and he bucked up into her, hard and frantic, all restraint abandoned. He drove into her with desperate intensity, each thrust pushing her higher, completely undone.

She clung to his shoulders, taking everything he gave, meeting each wild thrust. The pleasure built impossibly higher, tighter, until she gave herself over to it.

It crashed over her. Her body clenched around him, pulsing. She cried out. Edwin groaned as she gripped him tight.

He thrust twice more, frantic and deep, then went rigid beneath her. His cock pulsed inside her as he came, spilling hot. His arms wrapped around her, crushing her against his chest as he shuddered.

They stayed locked together, trembling, as the pleasure ebbed. His arms were still wrapped around her, his face buried against her neck. She could feel his pulse hammering in his neck, and the shudders still running through him.

Edwin’s hands moved slowly up her back, gentler now, soothing. One hand slid into her hair, the other traced her spine. “Stay,” he whispered against her throat. “Please stay.”

She tightened her arms around him in answer.

Eventually the cooling sweat and the night air made them both shiver. Edwin shifted carefully, lifting her off him. They separated with a soft sound that made them both laugh.

He laid her down on the narrow bed and followed immediately, pulling the quilts up over them both.

Freya curled into his side, head on his shoulder. His arm came around her and for a while they just lay there, breathing together, letting the warmth build under the quilts.

His fingers found a strand of her hair, rubbing it between thumb and forefinger.

“Marmalade,” he murmured.

“Gold and orange, brown and yellow, all stirred together.” He wound the strand around his finger, then let it spring free. “An exact match.”

She smiled against his chest. “You’ll have to show me someday.”

“I will.”

They lay quiet for a bit. She was almost drifting off when he spoke again.

“I’ve met your sister, you know,” Edwin said quietly.

Freya felt a sharp pang. “Jane?”

Edwin nodded. “The very same.”

Her bold, fearless, gorgeous sister who lived aboard the Kingfisher with her riverboat family. Freya hadn’t seen her since freeze-up last winter. The Kingfisher hadn’t been in Carbon since, well, not since Edwin came back to town.

She turned to look at him, suddenly wary.

“Oh god. She didn’t…”

Edwin’s eyebrows rose. “Put me in a dress and face paint and make me be nice to her paying passengers?”

Freya studied him critically in the dim light. “Well…with the right dress and a close shave…”

Edwin laughed. “No. She had me working eighteen hours a day on her boilers. Shoveling coal, fixing, repairing and maintaining that massive boat all the way to Hart Creek.”

Chapter 14

It was late in May and the homestead had settled into a rhythm that felt almost like breathing. Heavy, laboured breathing, to be sure. But the frantic, backbreaking labour of planting was done. Now it was the steady work of watering, weeding, mending fences, and checking seedlings for frostbite in the early mornings. The goats had kidded, leaving the yard full of wobbling legs and soft bleats. There was fresh milk every day, and Freya had learned to make a soft, tangy cheese that Edwin claimed was “indecently good on bread.”

The days were long. The work was constant. But the edge of desperation had eased.

In the evenings now, when the sun dipped low and the prairie turned gold, Freya walked to the edge of the coulee, sat down in what had become her usual spot. She sat still and silent, gazing at the southern horizon. Tonight, she had her arms around her knees, breathing the scent of prairie grass, and watching the empty distance with longing.

Bela had taken to joining her. He took his job of providing companionship seriously. He sat like a sentinel, gazing impassively along with her. Possibly, he sat a little closer now, almost, but not quite, within arm’s reach. It was equally possible that he sat no closer at all, and his shaggy hair had just grown longer.

Freya couldn’t have said when the ritual had started exactly. Only that it had become necessary.

She heard Daniel’s footsteps before she saw him. He didn’t walk heavy, but she knew his footfalls now, able to distinguish his easy, rolling stride from his brothers.

He lowered himself beside her with a soft grunt, stretching his legs out in front of him, joining her in her nightly ritual of staring off to the south.

After a moment, he said, “Does Mattias know?”

Freya blinked. “Know what?”

Daniel tipped his chin toward Bela, staring down the endless prairie with serene indifference.

“That you’re subverting his dog.”

Freya snorted. “Subverting?”

“Look at him.” Daniel gestured broadly. “He’s practically fawning on you.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You call that fawning?”

“For Bela?” Daniel said. “Yes. Yes I do.”

Bela, as if offended by the accusation, lifted his head higher and blinked slowly at the horizon.

Daniel plucked a blade of grass, stuck the end between his teeth, and chewed thoughtfully. He watched her for a long moment.

Then, quietly, he said, “You’re waiting for something, Freya. What is it?”

Freya’s throat tightened.

She hadn’t meant for anyone to notice. Or maybe she had. Maybe she’d wanted someone to ask.

She drew her knees closer, resting her chin on them. “It’s… nearly June.”

Daniel waited.

“And June means the quarterly dividend,” she said. “My family should send supplies. Letters. Money. Things from home.” She swallowed. “It’s how Stirlings take care of each other.”

Daniel nodded, still listening.

“And the Kingfisher should be making her first run north about now. Jane will be aboard, and she makes a long stop in Carbon on the first run of the season. She might visit.” Her voice softened. “I haven’t seen her since before winter.”

She didn’t say the rest. She didn’t have to.

Freya had grown up in town surrounded by her large, wealthy family. She had sisters, which was a rarity, a gift, and she missed them. She missed her whole family. She missed her life in Carbon. She was hoping for news. She was hoping for proof that she hadn’t been forgotten. She was hoping for poof that she was loved, remembered, and a source of pride for herfamily.

She stared at the horizon, voice barely above a whisper. “Everyone in Carbon must know we had a zombie by now. And still… no one’s come. Not even to check.”

Daniel didn’t interrupt.

“I’m not ashamed!” Freya said quickly. “There’s nothing for me to be ashamed of. That night… at the Spring Festival. I don’t regret it. I don’t regret the marriage. I’d do it all again.” She drew a shaky breath. “I just… I know was sent out here to learn hard lessons. To toughen up. And I’ve tried. I’ve worked so hard. I just want—”

Her voice broke.

Daniel reached for her hand.

He lifted it gently, turning it palm up, and pressed his mouth to her fingers, then to the new calluses she’d earned, the ones she hadn’t had when she first arrived. He brushed a strand of hair from her cheek, tucking it behind her ear with a touch that made her eyes sting.

“It has been a hard season,” he said quietly. “Hard in ways that change people.” His thumb moved slowly over her knuckles. “Most folks don’t stand up to that. But you did. You’re still standing.”

Freya shook her head, but he kept going.

“I’m proud of you,” he said. “Edwin’s proud of you. Mattias is proud of you. And your family — of course they’ll be proud.”

He leaned in, voice low. “I love you.”

Her breath caught.

“You know your mother, your fathers, your sisters — your whole family — of course they love you too. How could they not? They’ve known you longer. They’ve had more time to come to love you.”

Daniel glanced at Bela. “Hell, even Bela loves you.”

Bela turned his head, looked at her, and with glacial dignity, inched, ever so slightly, closer.

Freya laughed, wiping her eyes. “I’ll take that as agreement.”

Daniel stood, brushing off his trousers, then offered her his hand. She took it, letting him pull her to her feet.

“I’m certain they’re coming,” he said. “And very soon.”

She gestured helplessly at the empty southern horizon. “How can you know that?”

Daniel didn’t answer. Instead, he turned her gently by the shoulders — not south, but east.

“Because I make that, over there…” He pointed.

“…to be about a dozen people, horses, and a wagon approaching from the east.”

Freya’s breath stopped in her chest.

“You’ve been looking south, for the direct route, but they’ve come around east. It’s the longer but easier route. Now that the ice is gone the river’s in flood, that’s the fastest way to get here. They didn’t forget you, Freya. They came as soon as they possibly could.”

Freya dashed sparkles of happiness from her eyes with the back of her hand, trying to count the number of riders and wagons and horses in the distance.

He squeezed her hand. “I’ll watch here until I know how many folks are coming to us for certain. I’ll come down just as soon as I know and make sure Mattias and Edwin make themselves presentable.”

“Maybe I’ll even brush Bela.” He made to smooth the wiry hair on Bela’s ribs, then reconsidered and drew his hand back. He settled for admonishing Bela instead. “You are not to growl at the Stirling Mother when she gets here.”

Freya threw her arms around Daniel’s neck, kissed his cheek noisily, and took off running down the slope toward the house, heart pounding, breath catching, joy rising like a tide.

---

END OF SPRING

---

Don’t be sad. You know what comes after Spring, don’t you? That’s right, Summer!

The end..