With every visit, the future Vetle had always known became less certain.
Aslak came over our mountain seven times, and I was a different man every time he left.
I had lived all eighteen years of my life on the same mountain farm with my father. I knew the animals, the weather, every path over the pass, and more or less what was supposed to happen to me next. I would marry a local girl. I would work. I would have children. One day the farm would be mine.
Then five of the king's men came through on their way east, and one of them was Aslak.
He was twenty, heading toward his first real war and the land he had been promised afterward. I showed him the way across the mountain. That should have been the end of it.
Instead, he came back. And then he came back again.
Aslak went from a stranger passing through to a man I waited for without wanting to admit I was waiting.
I went from being told what my future held to deciding the future for myself.
