Chapter One

I'm no stranger to the concept that Norway, in March, is cold. Especially when one is up a mountain. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I am not usually an idiot.

Present instance notwithstanding: I'm currently up a Norwegian mountain during a storm. And while I was prepared for ‘cold', this has taken my expectations and dipped them in a vat of liquid nitrogen.

In my defence, the weather forecast was adamant that it would not drop below minus seven degrees. A reasonable temperature even I, a soft-bellied writer accustomed to too much tea and too many blankets, can manage. But my nostril hairs are frozen, a phenomenon I've never experienced in mild-mannered England, so I think it's safe to say the forecast was wrong.

All this because I have writer's block.

All thisbecause I thought that experiencing the cold in a real and visceral way might finally give me the nudge I needed to finish that book I've supposedly been starting for the past six months.

I drag myself back down the path, out of the teeth of the wind. My fingers are numb and stinging snow is throwing itself from the sky. Why hell is associated with fire when it's clearly already frozen over is beyond me.

I can't feel my toes.

In the end, that's my downfall. My boots were bought especially for this expedition and they're very fancy, but when my toe gets caught in a hole, they don't stop my ankle from turning with a sickening pop of pain. And they do not stop me plunging face-first into a snowdrift.

I don't scream. Maybe I should have done, but all that leaves my mouth is a guttural grunt that comes from my core. And then, as I turn my face to the side in an attempt to find oxygen, a moan.

That hurt.

That hurt.

I roll onto my side and shiver. My ankle throbs and the snow turns into a blizzard. It would take an unsettlingly short amount of time for it to bury me.

Well, no time for despair. I've not come this far to give up at the first sign of defeat. With a huff of effort, I unclip my rucksack and wiggle free, attempting to stand. Sharp pain shoots through my leg and I crumple.

Deep breaths.

Truth be told, I really, really don't want to die. Maybe I should've just stuck with Scotland. Or listened to my brother Thomas and not gone at all, trusting time to give me the motivation and inspiration I need.

"You're too young to be having a midlife crisis, Lucy," he told me over Friday fish and chips. "That's what these kinds of trips are. What do you think is going to happen? You're going to have some sort of religious experience and write a book on a slab of rock like Moses and the Ten Commandments?"

Comparing myself to a Biblical figure was a reach, but I had believed that coming here, fulfilling a wish of a lifetime, would unlock something.

Not, of course, that my wish of a lifetime involves freezing to death and having my body buried in a snowstorm. Before I left, I probably should have researched how long it takes to develop frostbite, and at which stage you have to amputate.

I sit up and take stock. Visibility is bad and only going to get worse, with the clouds casting everything in gloom and the blizzard obscuring almost everything but a few feet in front of me. First thing's first: address the temperature situation.

Inside the snow. Igloos exist for a reason, right? I scrape at the drifts around me, digging out handfuls of snow and sucking in lungfuls of snow-laced air.

If I ever make it back home, I'll never leave Thomas again. I'll give up writing and go back to working in pensions. Donate to charity. Actually eat the recommended daily amounts of fruit and veg. Anything, so long as I make it out alive.

* * *

Darkness falls fast here. Even below the Arctic Circle, daylight hours are precious and few, and it doesn't take me long to run out of them. The moment artificial dusk turns into real night, I lose track of time. I know the storm is still raging because it's about the only thing my senses are still telling me.

And cold. I've never been this cold before. It bypasses pain into something worse. My coat crunches when I move, and I move often to make sure I still have all my limbs. The only dubious positive is that the pain of my ankle has dulled into a distant throb. My skin feels tight, and my lungs ache from the subzero air quality.

Fun fact: corpses line the path up Everest, and current climbers use them as way markers. I can't remember where I learnt that gem, but my brain chooses this moment to present it to me.

Eventually, my belated survival instincts kick in, and I fumble in my bag for my torch. My fingers are almost too numb to switch it on, but the bright light is a relief, if temporarily blinding.

Maybe, if I'm lucky, aliens will see my light and abduct me, and I'll live out the rest of my days on a snazzy spaceship. What's a little probing between friends anyway, right?

Something flashes through the snow ahead of me. It looks like . . . another light?

It can't be. My eyes are playing tricks on me. With shaking hands, I cover the head of my torch and wait, the centre of my vision partially blinded from the brightness of my torch against the snow.

But then I see it again. Another flash. My eyelashes are frozen, brushing against my cheeks as I attempt to blink away the last of the spots from my vision.

It flashes again.

Someone is out there.

I wave my torch, sending out the only bit of Morse Code I know: SOS.

Short, short, short. Long, long, long. Short, short, short. Repeat, repeat. My breath spirals in the light. With the driving snow catching in the beam, it's difficult to make anything out, but I keep going. Keep going.

Time passes in fits and starts. I've stopped believing in rescue entirely when a figure looms through the dark, illuminated by my loosely held torch. He could be some kind of Norse god sent from above, broad-shouldered and massive. He blocks out the snow as he crouches beside me.

"Er du skadet?" he asks, words clipped and utterly unintelligible. His voice is urgent, and I know I need to reply, but I'm too busy trying to absorb if this is real. My breath catches. I'm so cold. He shifts, crouching in front of me, and my torchlight highlights blonde hair sticking below his hat. A ski-mask conceals his features. "Are you hurt?" The words are slow, like he's not sure if I'll understand, but I want to weep in relief at the sound of English.

"My ankle," I croak. My voice is scratchy and thready, sounding exactly like I haven't used it in hours while my body temperature drops. In contrast, this man doesn't seem to be suffering any ill-effects from the cold, despite being out on the mountains during a literal snowstorm. Maybe he's made of stone. Wearing heating pads under his clothes. Made a deal with the devil.

"Okay." He tugs his ski mask down so I can see his face, which is . . . nice, actually. Sharp and hard, all harsh lines and soft curves juxtaposing each other. Long eyelashes over sharp eyes, cheekbones you could see from Mars leading to a soft mouth. His lips move, and I realise he's speaking to me.

Get it together, Lucy.

"I'm Oskar Aagard," he says, probably for the second time, slowing his words like he thinks English might not be my first language. "I'm here to help you. Can you walk?"

I shake my head. "I don't think so."

"Okay," he says again. "I have a cabin very close by. Let me take you there out of the cold."

There is no world in which I say no to this request, but it's still very nice that he asks the way he does. Like I could politely choose to freeze to death out here instead.

"Yes," I say. "Please."

"We'll leave your bag and I'll come back for it later."

Irrational fear grips me, aided and abetted by the blizzarding snow. "You'll never find it."

"It'll be okay." He glances pointedly at a huge outcropping of rock above me. "Come on. We need to go."

I jam my torch into my pocket with clumsy fingers and scrabble clear of my makeshift shelter. The wind slices through me despite my coat, and I shiver so hard I think I cause my major organs physical damage. Pain spirals through my body the moment I put my bad leg against the ground.

Yeah, walking is definitely out.

The man catches my wrist before I faceplant. "Let me carry you," he says, which I guess must be his way of asking for permission because a second later he's hoisted me over his shoulders in a fireman's carry. One hand is tight around my thigh and his other hand is holding my wrist, lightly keeping me in place. My head lolls uselessly down his upper arm.

This is . . . undignified. Also kind of impressive, because he sets off walking like carrying me—a full-grown, not enormously light—woman is nothing.

If I look down, I'm also at the perfect angle to notice his butt. And once I see it, I can't quite look away.

Pretty sure this is what shock victims do. They fixate on things that really don't matter in the scheme of things. Unimportant things, like the fact this guy must do squats, instead of the important things: my body temperature is dangerously low.

The ground shifts under my nose as the man makes his way down the path, more surefooted than I would be even without the encumbrance of an entire human on my back. He moves a little as though he expects the world to shift around him, like he's somehow in control of his surroundings. Considering nature is ambivalent at best and vengeful at worst, I think that's an erroneous conclusion to come to, but it certainly seems to be working for him.

We arrive well before I expect, maybe only five minutes after we set off. I raise my head to see a wooden cabin with light filtering through one snow-stuck window. It's sudden enough I half wonder if we've stepped through a portal into another world. One that's safe and promises warmth.

The man opens the door and ducks inside, shutting us inside. The promised heat hits me in the face like a brick wrapped in a pillow, smothering in its intensity. He bends, putting me carefully back on my feet, and I stare around in amazement.

There's no electricity, but oil lamps sit on two opposite ends of a table, and there's a stove glowing with heat (an fire, an impossibility I'd thought in these conditions), a small kitchenette, and a bed in the corner with a mattress and duvet.

There's even a door leading to what I can only assume is a bathroom.

I gape. I think I gasp. There's the distinct possibility I whisper "what the hell" under my breath, because considering seconds ago we were in the wilderness, this is the very last place I would have expected to come across.

"It's a hunting cabin," the man says, leading me to one of the wooden chairs beside the table and kneeling in front of me. "How's your ankle?"

"Um." The sudden rush of heat has made it throb more powerfully, but I have vague memories of when I broke my arm when I was fifteen, and I'm pretty sure this isn't on the same level. "I think it's just sprained."

"Can I have a look?" He's meticulously polite, like we met at our local pub instead of on a snow-swept mountain ridge. "I don't have a brace, but I have bandages I can bind it with."

I nod, and as he's taking off my boot, I frown at the top of his head. "Who are you?"

"I told you, my name is Oskar."

"No I mean—" I hiss a breath as he eases the boot off my foot, one hand firm on my calf. "What are you doing out here?"

"I could ask you the same question." His eyes are sharp and hard, and they remind me, a little, of my first impression of Norway—proud, fiercely beautiful, and remote. All his face looks a bit like that, like it could have been carved from ice. Except his mouth, which is unaccountably soft, lips just full enough to tip his face from being harsh to ruggedly lovely.

Even so, he looks like he would be more at home pillaging Northern English islands (hello, Lindisfarne) than here, in relative comfort beside a fire.

"I'm a writer," I say, shifting uncomfortably as he takes my heel in his hand and turns my ankle first one way then the other. "This is research."

"Almost dying is research?"

"Almost dying wasn't exactly part of the plan." I glare at him, but he's too focused on what he's doing to notice. He has big hands, rough palms but elegant fingers. There's bruising and swelling across my ankle joint, but as he rolls my foot slowly—it hurts, but not blindingly so—he nods to himself.

"It's not broken," he says. "You must have gotten lucky." He doesn't say that he thinks I'm an idiot for going out there in the first place, but I know he's thinking it. And yeah, he's right. There was stupidity involved, and I was an active participant.

I shiver again and he frowns, rising to his feet. "Take off your coat," he says as he opens a cupboard on the wall, pulling out a selection of blankets. Some are tartan, some look unbearably soft, and all look warm. While he lays some out for me, I struggle with my coat, my numb fingers refusing to function the way they should. Although I know logically that the cabin isn't blazing hot, my body is acting as though I've dived head first into the sun.

He watches me struggle for an embarrassingly long time before knocking my hands away and unzipping my coat with brisk efficiency. He tugs it off my arms and gives my fleece underneath a once-over. I guess it passes whatever internal criteria he has, because he leads me to the fire, heavily supporting me. I sit in the chair he's set out, and he wraps blankets over my shoulders.

Warmth. The heat is too much, but I can't stop shivering. My fingers are still numb.

He crosses the room to the kitchenette and opens a cupboard, selecting something from inside and bringing it back to me. A chocolate bar. "Eat that," he tells me. "It's good for shock."

Well, my butt-watching from earlier definitely suggests I'm in shock. I accept the bar as he crouches in front of me, looking at me intently.

"What's your name?" he asks.

"Lucy Sage."

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-nine."

"And what do you do for a living?"

"Um, I write books." I don't know why, but even after a few years of doing this full time, it's still weird to say. Enormously egotistical. Writers are the greats. Terry Pratchett was a writer. Jane Austen, Agatha Christie—they're authors. For me to put myself alongside them in people's minds is ridiculous.

But it is what I do.

Well, what I supposedly do. What I should be doing.

Oskar reaches out and touches my hand, pressing his painfully hot fingers against my clammy skin for a few seconds, then nods. "You don't have hypothermia," he says, and when I frown, he adds, "Symptoms of hypothermia include confusion, red or grey skin, slurring your words, clumsiness and shallow breathing. I think there are more, but you're not displaying any of them. By some miracle, I think you're just cold." With quick steps, he heads to the door. "I'm going to get your bag before it's buried," he announces, putting his hat and head torch back on. "I won't be long. Make sure you eat that chocolate."

Then he opens the door, steps outside, and I'm alone.