Cara was weaving, not like she had done anything else the past couple of weeks. The air in their little living room, where she and her aunt had spent their days, was stuffy. The looms cracked, her aunt’s spinning wheel continued its quiet shrieking protest.

For Cara it was hell on earth, day after day doing nothing but this mundane job of pulling strings through more strings. Not that things would have been better elsewhere, as far as she knew weaving was one of the better jobs around, but still Cara would have rather done pretty much anything else besides letting her father marry her away.

The man had been obsessed by the notion she should look for someone to care for her, fat chance for that happening.

She couldn’t wait for the storm to pass, while she would most likely spend the remaining days of winter weaving no storm meant she was free to leave the house at times.

What the two idiots might be doing now? Alaric would most likely be stuck in a very similar situation as she was, making tools with his dad. Erik on the other hand could be doing something like hunting a bear with an axe or a wolf with a pointy rock. The boy had no idea on how to prepare for something, but at least he would be getting out of the house.

She sighed and rubbed her neck, sitting all day was bad for you, she just knew it. At the end of today she would most likely need to check on the sheep to see if they were still alive, food was not an issue for them but the water might be frozen again.

The trip from one building to the other was less than a minute, yet usually made her day. Even though the storm raging for the past weeks had made it less enjoyable.

Her aunt, Claudette, sneezed the noise made Cara lose the thread, another highlight of the day.

As she got needle and thread back into her hands she thought about one of the adventures the three of them had lived through together, the first thing that came to mind was the horrible encounter with the millers dog, she had still nightmares about it at times. Then she thought of the time Erik had bet against Alaric about some bug fight, Alaric had bet a new bow for Erik while Erik had to swear he would teach Cara and Alaric how to hunt.

After Erik’s bug had died the three of them had set out into the forest each of them equipped with a practice bow.

The first day had been pretty fun, Erik had tried his best to teach the two of them but he was a very bad teacher and to be fair, Alaric was most likely one of the worst students of all time.

The two of them were mostly arguing about things while Cara was more or less teaching herself how to shoot with the bow.

Alaric managed to hit a large bucket from ten meters away at the third day, which was when a completely pissed off Erik decided it was time to teach them how to actually hunt.

They spent the next two days traveling deeper and deeper into the mountains, at which point Alaric had a mental breakdown when Erik told him they had to save their last real food for the return and start eating whatever they could find. Looking back at things he should have said it like that instead of throwing a dead mouse at Alaric while shouting “Food incoming!”

Alaric caught it with his mouth, expecting a berry.

The worst part was that in his shock he swallowed the whole thing, it was a small mouse, probably a baby mouse that had been separated from the mother.

Cara had tripped and fallen into a small river while laughing hysterically, Alaric had tried to throw up but kept swallowing the mouse whenever he felt the fur in his throat in fear.

Erik tried to calm him by explaining how the mouse would have eaten probably nothing but the milk from her mother so there was very little chance of food poisoning.

Just thinking about it had her silently shake with laughter, that had also been the day Alaric became a vegetarian.

It turned out hunting for wild carrots was more in the range of abilities for their beloved leader, it also gave Cara the time to actually learn how to hunt from Erik, who still was a horrible teacher but a lot better than when he had been screaming at Alaric for nearly shooting at him while Erik was standing to his left.

With some luck they soon managed to kill a rabbit, which was when Alaric first discovered his inability to keep meat down. A fact that earned him a consolidation carrot from Erik.

She wondered whether they would be able to go on adventures after she had finally turned sixteen and would be considered a woman. People were already talking, the village was small and Alaric would most likely have to marry the miller's daughter as soon as she turned sixteen, the families had fought a feud for about three generations and a lot of people had gotten hurt.

Erik, well he would be a bad match for about any girl in the village, not that there were many. As the new family it would take the Jotunns about two generations before they were accepted into the village, assuming some poor girl chose to besmirch their families name and wed him despite his integration into the community.

Crossingrivers was a terrible place to live, Cara knew she would leave the village as soon as she could. Life in the city might not be as calm but there people would not start a blood feud over who ate the last cherry at the cherry festival.