Vastervik: Chapter 4

The shelter was a shallow cave, an overhang of dark rock with driftwood stacked along the back wall and a fire pit ringed with stones that had been blackened by years of use. The fire was already burning. Casper must have laid it out before his swim.

Casper pulled the tunic over his head as he walked. It fell to mid-thigh, the undyed linen settling against his damp skin, clinging at the small of his back where the seawater hadn’t fully dried. He crouched by the fire and laid the stringer of saithe on a flat rock beside the pit.

Two shapes resolved themselves from behind the woodpile.

Toby’s hand shot out and grabbed the rock wall. The dogs were enormous, grey-coated, long-legged, with narrow skulls and yellow eyes that fixed on him with the focused interest of predators assessing whether something was food. They were wolfhounds. Irish, or some Vasterviksk variant, taller at the shoulder than any dog Toby had encountered outside of a period drama. The larger one had a scarred muzzle. The smaller one had its lips pulled back over teeth that could have managed to crack through a human femur without difficulty.

“Sit,” Casper said, without looking up from the fish.

Both dogs sat. Their eyes didn’t leave Toby.

Casper glanced over his shoulder. “They won’t touch you.”

“Right.”

“Unless I tell them to.”

Toby pressed his back against the rock. The larger dog’s tail swept the ground once, twice, stirring up ash from the fire pit. Its head came level with Casper’s chest when he stood, and it pushed its scarred muzzle into his palm with a low, rumbling sound.

“This is Fenrir,” Casper said, scratching behind the dog’s ear. “And the pretty one is Sól.”

Sól watched Toby without blinking. Her coat was lighter than Fenrir’s, silver at the tips, and her legs were long enough that she could have looked Toby in the eye standing on her hind legs.

Casper produced a short knife from somewhere in the woodpile and began gutting the saithe with quick cuts. He worked cross-legged by the fire, the fish splayed open on the flat rock, his bare feet tucked beneath him. The dogs ranged around him, one on each side, settling into the gravel with their chins on their paws. Sentinels. Toby thought of what Guðmundur had said on the first day, about the island watching over its consort. The spirits of the place and the people who lived on it. He hadn’t mentioned the dogs. He probably hadn’t thought he needed to.

Toby lowered himself onto a rock near the fire. Not too near. Fenrir’s ear rotated toward him.

“How long have you had them?” he asked.

Casper threaded one of the gutted fish onto a thin iron spit and balanced it across the fire stones. “Since they were pups. The Ri breeds them at Nordhavn.” He reached for the second fish. “Fenrir bit the Ri’s falconer last winter. Drew blood. So they sent him here to me.”

“And you kept him.”

“He was protecting me. The falconer came into my room without knocking.” Casper’s knife opened the belly of the second saithe in one clean stroke. “Fenrir was right.”

Toby watched the first fish begin to spit and curl over the heat. The smell was immediate, clean, the flesh turning from translucent to white where the fire licked at it. Casper produced a small leather pouch from the same woodpile, loosened the drawstring, and pinched salt between his fingers, scattering it across the fish in a motion so practised it looked ceremonial. Salt. Fire. Fish. Nothing else.

He tried again. “Do you come here every day?”

“Most days.” Casper adjusted the spit. His hair was drying in the heat, lifting from his temples, catching the firelight in pale threads. “When the sea is calm enough to swim.”

“And when it isn’t?”

“Then I don’t swim.” He looked at Toby with the faintest crease at the corner of his mouth. “I’m sacred. Not stupid.”

The fire popped. Sparks drifted upward and vanished against the rock ceiling. Toby’s hands were beginning to thaw, the numbness replaced by a prickling heat that made his fingertips itch. His left boot was still leaking. He could feel the cold water pooling around his toes, a small, persistent misery that he was choosing to ignore in favour of sitting four feet from a male omega who smelled like the sea and was cooking him dinner.

Casper didn’t speak again for a while. He turned the fish, checked the flesh with the tip of his knife, added another pinch of salt. The silence sat between them without strain. Toby filled silences professionally. He’d built a career on his ability to talk through any gap in conversation until the other party agreed to whatever he was selling. He had nothing to fill this one with. Casper wasn’t waiting for him to speak. Casper wasn’t waiting for anything. He was cooking fish by a fire in a cave on a cliff in the North Sea, and the dogs were calm and the silence was his.

Toby sat in it. His shoulders dropped an inch. Then another.

Casper lifted the first fish off the spit and set it on a flat piece of slate that served as a plate. He held it out.

“Here.”

Toby took it. The slate was hot against his palms. The fish lay on it whole, split open, the flesh steaming white and flaking where the salt had crisped the skin. He looked at it. He looked at Casper.

“How do I—”

Casper picked up his own fish by the tail, pinched a strip of flesh between his thumb and forefinger, and pulled it free of the bone. He held it up, demonstrating, then put it in his mouth.

“Like that.”

Toby pinched. The flesh was hot enough to sting. It came away from the spine in a clean strip, the salt crystals rough against his fingertips, and he put it in his mouth and the taste was so immediate and so simple that it bypassed everything. It tasted of salt and smoke and the sea. It tasted of the fire it had been cooked over and the water it had been pulled from. There was nothing between the fish and his tongue. No plate, no garnish, no reduction, no foam, no chef’s interpretation.

Casper watched him chew. The firelight moved across his face, picking out the scatter of freckles, the pale line of his jaw.

“Fancy city man.” The Vasterviksk vowels stretched the words into something musical. “How is fish?”

“Better than anything I’ve eaten in London in months.”

“Months?”

“There’s a place in Mayfair. Sushi omakase. Five hundred pounds a head.”

Casper’s hand stopped halfway to his fish. His eyes went wide, the pale blue darkening at the centre. “Five hundred pounds.”

“Per person.”

“For fish.”

“For raw fish, technically.”

Casper stared at him. The fire cracked between them. Sól lifted her head from her paws, looked at both of them, and put it back down.

“Five hundred pounds is more than most families on Skalavik earn in a year.” Casper was running the number against a scale of value that bore no resemblance to the one Toby operated on. “Is it magic fish? Does it grant wishes?”

“No. It’s just very fresh. And someone with a very sharp knife cuts it into small pieces and arranges it on a plate really nicely.”

Casper looked down at the saithe in his hands, caught just over an hour ago on the rocks below them, and then back at Toby. The laugh came out bright, startling Fenrir’s ear upright. He covered his mouth with the back of his wrist, still holding the fish, his shoulders shaking.

“Five hundred pounds,” he said again, muffled against his wrist. “For what I just gave you for free.”

Toby wanted to hear it again. The laugh, the way it cracked the omega’s composure, the way it made Casper look like what he was underneath the ceremonial stillness: a nineteen-year-old boy who found something genuinely, helplessly funny. So he kept going.

“You see those two?” He pointed at Fenrir and Sól. “My mother has a Pomeranian. Do you know what a Pomeranian is?”

Casper shook his head.

“It’s a dog. Sort of. It weighs about two kilos. It’s roughly the size of Fenrir’s head. Furious at everything. Shakes with rage if you look at it. She paid five thousand pounds for it.”

Casper’s mouth opened.

Toby pulled his mobile from his pocket. Dead, no signal, but the photos still loaded. He scrolled until he found the picture Edmund’s wife had taken at Christmas. Mignon sat on a velvet cushion on his mother’s lap, her eyes bulging with outrage, a red ribbon around her neck that she was clearly plotting to destroy.

He turned the screen toward Casper. The omega leaned in, close enough that Toby caught a fresh wave of his scent, and his eyes crinkled at the corners, the pale blue nearly disappearing.

“Oh,” he said softly. “Oh, she’s so angry.”

“Permanently.”

“But so small.” He reached out and touched the screen with one fingertip, tracing the outline of Mignon’s furious face. “Five thousand pounds. For this tiny creature.”

“She bit the Archbishop of Canterbury at a garden party.”

Casper pressed his lips together. His eyes were bright. “Good for her.”

Toby pocketed the mobile and pulled at the cuff of his shirt where it extended past his Barbour sleeve. “And this. Egyptian cotton. Two hundred and forty pounds.”

Casper looked at the shirt. He reached across and rubbed the fabric between his finger and thumb, the way Toby had watched his mother test fabric at Harrods. His fingers were cool against the inside of Toby’s wrist. It was a contact so brief and so incidental that it shouldn’t have registered at all. But it did.

Casper let go.

“It’s soft,” he allowed.

“It’s the finest weave you can—”

“I prefer naked.” Casper ran his palm down his own forearm, fingers trailing along the pale skin below the pushed-up sleeve of his tunic. His skin looked faintly pink where the fire was warming it. “Nothing between me and the air. No scratching, no pulling. Just this.”

He looked up at Toby. The fire between them had burned down to a low, steady heat. The dogs lay still. The wind had dropped outside the shelter, or the rock walls had cut it, and the only sounds were the crackle of embers and the distant, rhythmic pull of the sea against the sand below.

Toby reached out and ran one finger down Casper’s forearm.

The skin was cool and impossibly smooth, untouched by sun damage or labour or the ordinary abrasions of a life lived in friction with the world. He felt the fine hair rise beneath his fingertip. He felt the goosebumps follow in a trail behind his touch, stippling the pale skin from wrist to elbow.

Casper didn’t pull away. He sat very still, his fish forgotten in his other hand, his eyes on Toby’s finger where it traced the inside of his arm. His lips parted around a breath.

The fire popped. Fenrir’s tail swept the gravel. The sea pulled at the sand below the cliff.

Neither of them moved.