The groan came from directly over the hearth a low, drawn-out creak, like a man exhaling his last breath.
Erik’s hands were already counting before the sound finished: estimating load, measuring angles, mapping the invisible path weight took through a structure built by people who understood ships better than roofs.
Ten days since the tide, and apparently construction instinct had outpaced his grip on the language.
The beam was failing.
He’d noticed it three days ago.
A sag in the roofline where the main crossbeam met the northern support post.
The kind of thing a farmer might ignore until the first heavy snow brought the whole mess down on his family’s heads.
The kind of thing that made Erik’s palms itch.
He sat up.
The longhouse was stirring around him thralls banking the fire, a woman grinding grain in the corner, the low murmur of Norse he still couldn’t follow when it moved fast.
No one else had heard what he’d heard.
No one else was looking up.
Erik pulled on his boots and stood.
His legs held.
Ten days was long enough that walking no longer felt like a favor his body was doing him.
He found Lagertha near the main door, speaking with someone who smelled like fish and seawater.
She saw Erik approaching and dismissed the fisherman with a nod that was neither warm nor cold, just efficient.
“The beam,” Erik said.
He pointed up.
“The one over the hearth. It’s cracked.”
She followed his finger.
Her expression didn’t change.
“It has been that way since autumn.”
“It won’t last another storm.”
“You can see that.” Not a question.
“I can see how things break.” He held her stare.
She studied him for three breaths.
“You want to fix it.”
“I want wood. An axe. A day.”
“And if you are wrong?”
“Then I wasted a day.” He met her eyes.
“If I’m right and no one fixes it, you lose the roof.”
Lagertha’s mouth twitched.
Not quite a smile.
She turned and called something in Norse sharp, imperative.
A thrall appeared with an axe and pointed Erik toward a stack of seasoned timber behind the longhouse.
“You will stay where I can see you,” Lagertha said.
“You will not leave until it is finished or I tell you to stop.”
Erik nodded.
He took the axe.
The wood was oak.
Good dense heartwood, the kind that didn’t split clean but held its shape under weight.
Erik ran his palm over the grain and started measuring in his head not with numbers, because there was no tape measure and no pencil, but with his hands and his eyes and the thirty-seven roof failures he’d seen on job sites in another life.
He needed two angled supports.
A crossbeam to redistribute the load.
Pegs, not nails, because this world didn’t waste iron on carpentry.
The first cut was easy.
The axe bit clean and true, and the stroke felt like the first honest thing his body had done since the tide.
The second cut was harder the angle was specific, thirty degrees off vertical, and he had to eyeball it twice before the blade touched wood.
By the third cut his shoulders were burning and his hands were remembering calluses they didn’t have yet.
A shadow fell across the timber.
Erik glanced up.
A boy fourteen, maybe younger, thin in the way thralls were thin stood three feet away, watching.
His eyes tracked the angle of Erik’s cuts with the focus of someone solving a puzzle.
“You’re making a brace,” the boy said.
His Norse was slower than the adults’, easier to parse.
Erik grunted.
He lacked the words for counterweight and load-bearing joints, and even if he’d had them, they’d mean nothing here.
The boy crouched beside the wood.
“Why that angle?”
Because thirty degrees lets the force transfer down through the post instead of shearing sideways into the wall.
Because I watched a scaffold collapse in Minneapolis and the failure point was a brace angled at forty-five degrees instead of thirty and I will never, ever forget what happens when the math is wrong.
“It holds better,” Erik said.
The boy nodded.
He picked up a scrap of bark and a piece of charcoal and started sketching quick, furtive strokes that mapped the brace’s shape onto the bark’s surface.
Erik pretended not to notice.
By midday the supports were cut.
Erik carried them inside one at a time, aware of eyes following him from every corner of the hall.
Lagertha was sitting near the hearth, spinning wool with mechanical patience, hands working without her eyes.
Ragnar was not there.
Erik did not let himself wonder where the earl had gone or whether his absence meant Erik had already failed some test he hadn’t known he was taking.
The sagging beam hung directly over the fire.
Erik set the first support against the northern post, angled inward, and wedged the base against the floor with a stone.
The second support went up on the opposite side, mirroring the first.
The crossbeam slotted between them friction-fit, no pegs yet, just wood against wood and the hope that his hands remembered what his brain couldn’t articulate.
He stepped back.
The beam sagged.
The weight hadn’t vanished.
But the load ran different now distributed, split, carried by three pieces of wood instead of one.
Erik picked up a wooden mallet and drove the first peg home.
Then the second.
Then the third.
Above him, the roof went silent.
Erik’s hands were shaking.
He set the mallet down, wiped his palms on his trousers.
The fire crackled.
Behind him, a woman sang something low and rhythmic in a language he couldn’t parse and no one spoke.
She stood.
Crossed to the brace, ran her fingers along the joint where the crossbeam met the support, and pushed.
Hard.
The structure didn’t move.
“Ragnar,” she called.
Erik hadn’t heard the door open.
He turned.
Ragnar stood in the threshold, silhouetted against the grey daylight, snow on his shoulders and something unreadable in his face.
He crossed the hall in four strides and stopped in front of the brace.
His hand went to the crossbeam.
He pressed his weight against it not testing it as Lagertha had, but pressing into it the way a shipwright tests a mast before trusting it with sail and wind and his life.
It held.
Ragnar’s gaze found Erik.
Blue eyes lingering one beat past necessary.
Measuring something Erik couldn’t name.
“You will stay,” Ragnar said.
Two words.
A verdict delivered in the same tone he might have used to say the sun had risen.
Erik’s throat was dry.
He dipped his chin once.
Ragnar’s hand left the brace.
He turned and walked toward the back of the hall, already speaking to someone else in rapid Norse, the subject changed, the moment over.
Lagertha watched him go, then turned to Erik.
“You work,” she said.
Not a question.
Not praise.
Just the terms of the contract, spoken aloud so they would both remember.
“You eat. You sleep under this roof.” She paused.
“And if it falls, you will not wake up to see the morning.”
Erik almost smiled.
“Understood.”
She returned to her spinning.
The hall resumed its rhythm around him voices, footsteps, the smell of fish stew beginning to simmer over the fire.
No one glanced at the brace.
No one acknowledged Erik.
But the quality of the dismissal had changed.
He was no longer driftwood.
He was the man who had fixed the roof.
Erik sat down near the fire and let his hands stop shaking.
Outside, the north wind was rising.
He could hear it testing the walls, pressing against the thatch, searching for weakness as wind always did.
The beam didn’t creak.
Across the hall, the thrall boy was still crouched in the corner, charcoal and bark in his hands, sketching the brace from memory.
Erik watched him draw and said nothing.
The boy raised his head once, met Erik’s eyes, and bent back to his work.
The drawing would survive longer than either of them knew.
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