Larksong Grotto Ankärr

Keeping composure was no simple task, she fought back her own grit in favor of calm. But once in a while, a snippet of emotion would leak through and she'd be straining alongside him until at last she could leech nothing more from the laceration but clear tears.
“Alright! Alright it’s done!” But something in him had disentwined. He lay, slumped on the ground while Ayovi fights for control of her own breaths. She clears the mess from the snow and returns with water, dribbling its ice into reels of gaping flesh.
She had done everything she was supposed to do— learned the traditions of women, practiced herbs, kept the warlords at bay, listened to her elders on every rule and action… and for what? To find herself alone in the wild, tending to the half-dead man who’d threatened her only hours earlier?
“Do not act as though you don’t deserve this,” she whispers to the northman, who now appears fully subdued beneath lidded eyes. “I doubt this folly will even be a lesson. You’re not ever going to change, are you?”
There’s a little satisfaction in mocking without repercussion, with no one to curb a slanderous mouth.
“Look at you— at the mercy of a woman,” she smiles to imagine what he might think of that as she packs the last gash with the rest of his salve.