“Only in public, though. Your father isn’t rending his coat and weeping in the streets, but among family, he doesn’t have a fake smile pasted on, for the sake of his sons. He’s not making a hearty show of having moved on. He’s in a sad place right now and he’s not pretending otherwise. He’s letting you and your brothers see that normal human emotion doesn’t make a man weak”

Their eyes caught and her voice trailed away. The wind blew a single tendril of hair across one eye. Kennet reached and brushed it back.

“What was I saying?” she said.

“Not pretending you don’t feel a certain way?”

“Right.”

“When I’m with you, I feel really good.”

“Because you are good.”

“Then the herdsman declared Hildur was the murderer and he produced the golden ring as evidence,” Astrid said, reading from the Fiskares’ worn book of Scandinavian folk tales:

Then Hildur revealed to all that she was indeed the Queen of the Elves, but had been banished from her homeland by a curse. She could only return once a year at the cost of a man’s life.

By breaking down the barrier between the human world and the elvish world, and by surviving the trial, the herdsman also broke the cycle of murder. Hildur was freed; after telling her story, she vanished, never to be seen again. The herdsman stayed on at the farm, and eventually inherited it for his own, and lived happily ever after.

“Everyone gets away with murder in fairy tales,” Minor said.

“True,” Kennet said, “but at least the hero got the farm.”

“It makes a nice change from getting the princess,” Astrid said.

The cake was devoured to crumbs. Marta and Emil had come up to the attic for a slice and a couple stories, but then said goodnight. Astrid, in pajamas, sat propped against stacked pillows, Trudy on one side, Kirsten on the other. Little lay cross-ways at their feet. Nalle lounged on the rug. Minor sat on the window sill, smoking. Kennet was everywhere between and completely in love.

The book passed around, everyone taking a turn with a favorite. Nail Broth. The Old Woman and the Fish. The Christmas Wasps. The Princess on the Glass Mountain. Old Nick and the Peddler.

Kennet was caught between wanting time to fossilize the evening in amber so they could stay here forever, and wanting everyone to just leave, leave, leave him alone with Astrid.

And then all at once, they did. Every one of his siblings said goodnight and left Kennet. Alone. In a bedroom. With a woman. In her pajamas.

This was lecherous.

And delicious.

Shaking all over, he took the book of Byron poems off her bedside table and put it in her lap. “Read mine again.”

Trying to be a gentleman, he sat on the floor and laid his head on the mattress by her outstretched legs.