Iron Seas 03 - Riveted

than anything. I’d have gone back long ago, if not for Källa.” Now she was desperate to know how and why di Fiore’s men had trolls. “I want to go back now.”
    David looked away from her, toward the roaring falls. “There are no males at all?”
    “No.”
    “What about the boy children?”
    “There are fewer than you might believe. Many of us are abandoned children from the New World or England. The old stories of seducing men were true. The first women thought they’d been blessed by the gods to bear only girls. That wasn’t true. Bearing a girl was a blessing—not because of the girl, but because the mother didn’t have to make such a terrible choice. Many of the women who bore male children stayed away rather than abandon him. So in the more recent generations, it’s understood that if a woman chooses to lie with a man, to make certain he is a good man who will raise the boy well…but not many of those women ever return, anyway.”
    She paused. That was part of the reason why her mother had been so angry when Hildegard left. Not just because she’d been unfaithful, though that had hurt; the terror that she wouldn’t come back was even greater. And when Hildegard had come back, her mother clung to the reason of infidelity to keep her anger alive…and the fear of being hurt so deeply again.
    Annika loved Hildegard, and understood what had driven her. Her twin sister, Inga, had left; no one knew what had become of her. Their mother had recently died. She’d been desperate for a child, and in Hanna’s family line they’d always borne children of their blood. But Annika also understood her mother’s anger. Hildegard had put her through hell then refused to apologize for causing that pain, believing that any apology would suggest she’d also been sorry for having Källa.
    It wasn’t the same.
    Annika was sorry, so sorry that she’d put her village in danger. She wasn’t sorry that stupidity had led her here, to be with David now.
    She glanced up at his profile. “Your mother must have thought your father was a good man.”
    “He was. And she wouldn’t have left him—but later he told me that she’d missed her home, too…and that he’d always been afraid that she would leave us.” He looked away from the waterfall, offered a bleak smile. “Perhaps he should have let her go. She wouldn’t have been there when the mountain came down.”
    But she wouldn’t have been there to save David, either. “If Inga stayed, it’s because she wanted to.”
    He closed his eye, nodded. “It was difficult for him, knowing she might leave. Not knowing where to find her if she did.”
    “But if she left, she wouldn’t want to be found.” When he looked at her, the pain in his gaze made her rush to reassure him, “Obviously that wasn’t the choice she made. He ought to have trusted in that instead of fearing it.”
    That bleak smile again. “That’s not easy.”
    “I suppose not.”
    She couldn’t imagine never seeing David again, and she’d only known him a week. But she was more aware of her own vulnerability now, too—how easily those fears could hurt, the desperate need to avoid any pain.
    A distant bark. She glanced in that direction, her hand falling to the spanner at her belt. “Should we go back inside?”
    Because she didn’t want to see him hurt, either.
    David seemed to have drawn into himself. Annika quietly watched him as she put potatoes on the furnace to roast, as he pulled a leather-bound notebook and a bottle of ink from Goltzius’s pack. He rolled blankets out into a pallet on the floor, sat with his back against the hull and his legs extended. Like her, he was in his shirtsleeves and trousers; it was too warm inside the troll for anything else. He still wore his boots, however, while she’d removed her stockings and hung them up to dry. She busied herself for a while, laying out the rest of their wet clothes, checking the gauges, poking at the potatoes. Finally she joined him on the pallet, sinking down beside him with her legs crossed.
    “What is that?” She could have answered her own question: a poor excuse to sit close.
    He didn’t look up. “My journal was in the lifeboat. So I’m using Goltzius’s specimen book instead.”
    Curious, she glanced at the page. He’d already filled it—and he wrote incredibly fast. “What language is that?”
    “French.”
    “No, it’s not.”
    A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “It’s shorthand.”
    “Do