The fog had returned.
Thick, glacial, quiet as breath. It lay across the fjord like a lover's shawl, hiding everything but the pulse of water and the song of slow footsteps.
Astrid followed Ase up the ridge path, her boots muddy, hair tied loose, thighs still tingling from Ingvild's hands the night before.
Ase walked ahead, unhurried, holding a woven basket full of ripe cloudberries and an old flask of something she hadn't named yet. Her back was straight, white braid swaying between her shoulder blades, and though Astrid had guessed her to be well into her sixties, there was nothing fragile about her. She moved like a woman who'd long ago stopped worrying about being watched — and had started watching back.
They didn't speak.
Ase didn't need to.
The trees did it for her — tall spruce and birch bending into one another like dancers, their trunks scarred with initials and old pagan runes. Birds called once, then went quiet. The air shifted.
"Here," Ase said softly.
They stopped before a narrow clearing.
It wasn't a grove — it was a stage.
Sunlight broke through the canopy in dappled gold. At the center, a natural dip in the earth, like a bowl. Moss. Fern. Old stones. It felt untouched.
"Sit," Ase said, gesturing to a low wooden bench barely visible in the green.
Astrid obeyed.
Ase poured the contents of the flask into two tiny wooden cups — the kind carved with lips. It smelled like cedar and fennel and something deeper. She passed one to Astrid and held hers without drinking.
"You want to understand Løvlund," Ase said. "But you haven't learned how to see yet."
Astrid raised her eyebrows. "I see more than most."
Ase shook her head gently.
"You taste. You touch. You feel. That's not the same. This—" she gestured to the clearing, "—this is a place where we learn to watch. Without claiming. Without hunger."
Ase pointed to a hollow between two trees.
"Soon they'll come."
They came.
First, a girl — no more than twenty — with honeyed skin and wide hips, walking barefoot with a boy behind her. He was lean, wild-eyed, already erect. She wore nothing but a woolen shawl draped over one shoulder.
They didn't see Astrid or Ase.
They didn't need to.
They knew they were being watched — and they moved with that knowledge, not shy, not showing off, just being.
The girl lay back on the moss. The boy knelt between her legs. They kissed, long and open-mouthed, until her moans melted into the earth like rainwater.
Astrid watched, unmoving, unsure where the heat in her chest ended and the ache between her thighs began.
Beside her, Ase exhaled.
"This is how we remember the gods," she said.
More came.
A couple in their forties, hands stained with blueberry juice, taking each other slowly against a tree.
A man alone, kneeling in the moss, his cock in his hand and his eyes locked on the ones making love across the grove.
Two women — one dark-haired and fierce, the other soft-bellied with a dimpled smile — lying together with their legs tangled, one face buried between the other's thighs, their moans like a chant.
Each encounter unfolded unhurried, unannounced.
And Astrid watched.
Watched until her heartbeat matched the rhythm of breath and moss and skin.
She didn't touch herself.
She didn't need to.
Ase placed a single hand on Astrid's shoulder and whispered:
"You're learning. Watching without wanting to take — that's the highest form of desire."
Later, they walked home in silence.
But something inside Astrid had shifted.
She didn't crave touch that night.
She craved memory.
She wanted to hold the image of the girl's open thighs, the older woman's soft laughter as she came, the man's silent reverence as he watched.
Desire, here, was not about taking.
It was about being allowed to witness.
And in that witnessing — Astrid realized — she felt more alive than she ever had beneath any man's body in London.