The morning after Blotnatt didn't feel like a morning at all.
It felt like waking inside a held breath.
Astrid blinked against the filtered sun that came through the birch trees, her body still resting on the sheepskin, the smell of sweat, ash, and sex lingering in her skin like a borrowed language. Her thighs were sticky, but she did not move. Elise was behind her, one leg draped over her hip, one hand buried in Astrid's curls as if sleep had found them mid-caress.
No one spoke.
All around them, the plateau was scattered with sleeping bodies — spooned, stretched, curled. Some with arms entwined, others spread openly, shameless in their exhaustion.
Astrid watched a bead of dew drip from a fern and land on Elise's collarbone.
She wanted to lick it off.
But more than that — she wanted to belong.
Not just to Elise. But to this. To the way the village breathed.
By mid-morning, the sauna fires had been rekindled.
Ida stood at the mouth of the cedar hut, nude again, holding out warm birch towels to anyone waking.
Astrid rose slowly, Elise behind her, both stretching like animals coming out of winter. Their bodies didn't ache. They sang. Her knees were scraped. Her lips were swollen. There were fingernail crescents across her back.
And yet—she smiled.
"Come," Elise murmured at her ear, lips brushing skin, "we rinse it all off, but nothing leaves us."
The steam in the sauna was thick with lavender oil and citrus bark.
Astrid sat between Elise and Leif, their knees all touching lightly in the heat. Across from them, a woman Astrid hadn't met — tall, lean, eyes like smoked glass — was gently washing Mattis's wife's thighs with a sponge.
There was no urgency. No greed. Only rhythm.
A kind of reverence that made Astrid's belly flutter again.
Leif leaned over.
"I saw you," he said simply, his voice a breath in her ear. "Last night. I didn't want to interrupt."
"You wouldn't have," she replied before she knew she was speaking.
He smiled, slow and unreadable. "Next time, maybe let me hold your hands down."
Astrid's thighs pressed together involuntarily.
Elise turned and kissed her on the cheek — but not possessively. More like... agreement.
Or permission.
Outside the sauna, Ida brought them cloudberries and sour cream in a wooden bowl. They ate with their fingers, licking juice from one another's knuckles.
"You've crossed," Ida said softly, dabbing Astrid's lips with her thumb.
"Crossed what?"
"The threshold. Now you don't just live in the village. You are the village."
Astrid swallowed hard. "Is that good?"
Ida grinned. "That depends what you do with it."
By afternoon, the lake called them again.
This time, not for ritual. Just for breath. For cool.
Astrid dove in alone, her body slicing into the water, clean and unashamed.
When she surfaced, Kari was already treading beside her.
"You slept with Elise," she said with youthful bluntness.
"Yes."
"She's not anyone's. But she'll make you think she is. That's her power."
Astrid felt a chill in her ribs that wasn't from the water.
"She didn't say—"
"She never says. She shows. And when she shows, you start to forget the others."
Astrid floated on her back, letting the fjord hold her.
"Should I be afraid?"
Kari shrugged. "Only if you think love means possession."
That evening, Astrid walked alone back to the cottage.
The air smelled of peat and seaweed, and her body still carried Elise's scent in the crease of her neck, the inside of her thighs. She lit a single candle and opened the window, letting the fjord's breath enter her room like a lover.
Then she lay on her bed, legs still damp, hair braided with cedar smoke, and she wrote in her notebook for the first time in days:
"I was never taught to worship the body. Only to silence it.But last night, I learned the language of skin.And this morning, I did not apologize for how I moaned."
A knock at the door.
Soft.
Then again, firmer.
She stood, half-nude in her cotton robe.
Opened it.
Elise.
Eyes storm-dark. Lips parted.
No words.
Just entry.
And as the door shut behind them, Astrid knew:
She was no longer asking.
She was answering.