For three days, Rask has tried to lose the human trailing a bergsr?’s goats across the mountain.
The man who first appeared neat and bright-eyed, his light-blue tunic still whole and his rucksack full, is now wary, exhausted, and filthy from the worst ground on the ridge.
Moonlight finds him stepping out from behind an old pine into the tall summer grass, as mulish as Rask’s naughtiest goat and far less presentable.
A hard storm is coming, and Rask tells the little man to leave—this peak is no place for him.
The stranger still does not turn back. Between a mountain king steeped in Scandinavian folklore and a ragged mortal who has already come too far, an intimacy neither of them planned begins to take shape on the slopes they share.
