Chapter 1
Chapter
One
The cave was blessedly quiet.
Only the soft crackle of the hearth broke the silence, firelight licking the carved runes along the walls, their faint glow shifting like lazy lightning bugs in the dim. Gunnar liked it that way—peaceful, predictable, and absolutely devoid of his brothers.
He ran the edge of his knife along a length of rowan wood, shaving curls that caught the firelight.
The scent—sharp and clean, like winter air—rose around him.
Rowan was a tree of protection, or so the humans said.
Gunnar mostly liked how it cut beneath his hands, smooth and true, but he supposed there was poetry in a troll crafting charms from a tree meant to ward off monsters.
He’d carved thirteen this winter alone. His mother would call that avoidance therapy. He called it productive, not that he did much with his carvings.
Gunnar wiped the blade on a rag and held the charm up to the firelight. A rough little troll face stared back at him—horns crooked, mouth set in a permanent scowl. “Accurate,” he muttered, setting it aside with the others.
That was when the frost began to creep across the walls.
“By the stones, not again,” he grumbled, dropping his knife.
The temperature plummeted. Flames hissed. A swirl of icy mist coalesced by the entrance, and before Gunnar could so much as swear properly, his mother swept into the cave in a storm of snow and drama—followed by her hissing cat, Ketty.
The damned beast hated him and all his brothers, though maybe because they’d tormented the cat when they were in their terrible teen centuries. But the cat gave as good as she got, really. Gunnar had the scars to prove it.
“Out,” he growled, pointing toward the cave mouth. “No cats. I’ve just cleaned the furs.”
Ketty’s eyes glowed like twin embers as she ignored him completely, leaping onto his workbench and swatting one of his rowan charms onto the floor with deliberate spite.
“Perfect,” he muttered. “Another one for the firewood pile.”
The cat yawned, entirely unrepentant, and began to lick her paw with regal disdain.
Gryla, Queen of the Trolls, devourer of disobedient children, and eternal thorn in his side, looked infuriatingly regal in her frost-rimmed cloak.
Her hair shimmered like spun silver, her horns polished to a mirror sheen, and her expression carried the particular smugness of someone about to ruin his evening.
“Gunnar,” she said, sighing as though simply speaking his name was exhausting. “Still single, I see.”
He exhaled sharply through his nose. “And yet, somehow, the world continues to spin.”
She ignored the jab, gliding toward the fire with exaggerated grace.
Frost clung to her footprints until the heat hissed it away.
“Your brothers are all out doing something with their lives. Ketill’s found a mate.
Stenrik is cooking for tourists. And Njal is learning the old ways of healing.
While you—” she waved a hand at the cluttered cave, “—are making knickknacks.”
“They’re charms,” he corrected. “Functional art. Protection, if you must know. Rowan keeps away bad luck.”
“Functional loneliness,” she countered.
Gunnar pinched the bridge of his nose. “Mother.”
“Don’t ‘Mother’ me, boy. You’ve hidden yourself away here for decades. It’s unnatural. Trolls are meant for purpose—for passion!”
“I thought we were supposed to scare children and terrorize the villages,” he replied dryly.
She narrowed her gaze at him. “We haven’t done that for at least a century.”
“Because no one believes in us anymore.”
She grunted. “No one is scared of us anymore.” Then she waved her hand as if tossing away uncomfortable thoughts. “No matter! Trolls have always been known as passionate beings. Your father, for example.”
“Oh, stones. Not my father. Please spare me the oversharing about your sex life. I’m surrounded by it,” he groaned. “Besides, I have passion.” He gestured to his workbench. “Look at this grain pattern.”
Her dramatic groan rattled the delicate statues on the shelves. “You are impossible.”
“That’s what all the best sons are.”
Ketty leapt from the bench and wound around Gryla’s legs, tail flicking smugly. “At least someone appreciates me,” the queen murmured, scratching the cat’s chin.
“She’s using you,” Gunnar said darkly. “The moment you turn your back, she’ll shred your cloak.”
“Ketty is a delight,” Gryla said sweetly.
“She’s a menace,” Gunnar countered.
“Family resemblance, then.”
Gunnar muttered a curse that made the runes flicker in protest.
Gryla paced, the hem of her cloak whispering across stone. “I worry for you, my dear boy.”
He arched a brow. “I thought you worried about everything.”
“I do,” she admitted cheerfully, “but especially about my ungrateful, romantically useless sons who are turning into hermits. Do you want to end up like Uncle Eirik? Turned to stone mid-sulk?”
“I wouldn’t call that a sulk. He was meditating. For the patience to deal with you.”
“He was pouting,” she corrected, then lifted her chin and clapped her hands. A swirl of pale blue light flared in the air, coalescing into a hovering image—a woman wrapped in a red coat, a bag slung over her shoulder, cheeks flushed from the cold. Her hair glinted auburn in the illusion’s glow.
“This one,” Gryla declared. “She has potential.”
Gunnar squinted. “You’re conjuring strangers into my cave now?”
“She is a human artist,” Gryla said, proud as a cat presenting a dead bird. “She makes art sculptures with natural things or something like that. Very spiritual. She’ll appreciate your gloomy aesthetic.”
“Fantastic,” Gunnar muttered. “Another human who’ll scream when she sees tusks.”
“Oh, don’t be dramatic.” Gryla waved the image away in a puff of snowflakes. “You have a nice face under all that brooding. And she’s lonely too. I can sense it.”
“Because you’re stalking her aura?”
“Because I’m a mother,” Gryla said sweetly. “Mothers know these things.”
Ketty chose that moment to yowl, the sound echoing off the stone like a war cry. Gunnar winced. “And mothers apparently bring their familiars to do reconnaissance.”
“Ketty likes her,” Gryla said brightly.
“She also liked the goat carcass last week. Your point?”
“Temper, temper,” Gryla teased, smoothing the cat’s fur. “Honestly, you get more like your father every century.”
Gunnar leaned back in his chair, glaring up at the ceiling. “Mother, I do not need your matchmaking. Or your meddling. Or your magical illusions—or your damned cat—in my workspace.”
“But you need companionship,” she said softly. For just a moment, beneath the ice and sass, there was warmth and real concern. It almost made him feel guilty.
Almost.
“I’m content,” he lied.
“You’re bored.”
“I’m peaceful.”
“You’re talking to wooden toys.”
“They listen better than you do.”
Her laugh echoed, bright and unrepentant. “Fine, pretend all you like. But the heart does not thrive alone, Gunnar. Even stone cracks without warmth.”
She turned toward the mouth of the cave, her magic gathering again. Frost swirled around her feet, wind rising. Ketty leapt to her shoulder, tail curling smugly around Gryla’s neck like a fur collar.
“Mother—” he began, but too late.
“Oh, one last thing,” she said over her shoulder, eyes twinkling. “Try not to scare this one away. She’s traveling nearby. You’ll know when the storm hits.”
“What storm?”
Her grin was wicked and fond all at once. “The one I’m sending. You can thank me later.”
The temperature plunged, wind howled, and in a blink, Gryla and her infernal cat were gone—leaving a snowdrift on his newly swept floor and an ominous pressure in the air.
Gunnar glared at the ceiling, muttering every ancient troll curse he knew. “Perfect. Just perfect.”
He picked up the half-carved rowan charm again, but his knife slipped, nicking his thumb. The blood welled bright against his green skin.
“Stupid,” he muttered, sticking the thumb in his mouth. The taste of iron reminded him he wasn’t made of stone—not yet, anyway.
Outside, thunder rumbled low and distant. The wind had already begun to shift, bringing the scent of snow and ozone.
He sighed, setting the charm aside.
“I am not falling for a human,” he told the empty cave.
The fire crackled in answer, unconvinced.
If anyone ever wrote her obituary, Wren Taylor really hoped it wouldn’t start with: She died doing something stupid in Iceland.
Because this—this right here—was definitely one of her stupider ideas.
Snow crunched beneath her boots as she trudged deeper into the rock-studded ravine at the base of the Iceland mountains that loomed over the village where she’d settled for a few months.
Wind bit through her red coat and straight to the bones of her optimism.
Her pack, full of sculpting tools and questionable life choices, dug into her shoulder and thumped against her hip.
“This is fine,” she muttered to herself, adjusting her hat for the twentieth time. “Totally fine. Perfect day for creative inspiration and possible frostbite.”
She crouched to inspect a chunk of black volcanic rock half-buried in snow. It gleamed faintly, almost as if lit from within. Wren brushed the frost away and grinned.
“You, my friend, are Steve 4.0.”
Steve 1.0 had cracked on the flight over. Steve 2.0 rolled off her worktable in Reykjavik. Steve 3.0 had a tragic encounter with a hot spring.
“You’ll last, right?” She asked the rock. “You look sturdy. Reliable. Emotionally grounded.”
The rock, like most men and minerals in her life, said nothing.
Wren tucked it into her bag and looked around.
Her rented cabin was somewhere back down the narrow trail—a cozy, timber-framed hideaway with a corrugated iron exterior she’d found online.
Her nearest neighbors, Andrea and her two kids, had stopped by earlier in the week with cocoa, cookies, and stories about “the Christmas troll.”
Wren had assumed it was a local myth.
Then she met Ketill, Andrea’s husband? Mate? She wasn’t really sure what to call him.
He’d appeared one afternoon while she was sketching the cliffs behind her cabin—massive, quiet, and decidedly not human. His green skin had caught the winter light like polished stone. His eyes were kind but old, the kind of old that hummed with mountain air and secrets.
Most people might have screamed. Wren hadn’t. Something about him felt familiar. Comforting. Like recognizing a melody from a dream.
But something deep inside her whispered he wasn’t the one she was looking for. She wasn’t sure what that meant—only that the feeling left her restless, as if the wind itself was pushing her toward something more.
Maybe that was why she couldn’t stay inside, even when she should have. Iceland tugged at her bones. Always had.
Even as a kid in the foster system, she’d been obsessed with maps of the north—fjords, glaciers, volcanoes. She’d drawn them over and over in her sketchbooks like someone sketching memories, not fantasies. Her art professors used to joke she’d been a Viking in a past life.
She’d never told them about the dreams. The ones with glowing runes and voices in the wind calling her name. Now, in the middle of the Icelandic wilderness, the snow itself seemed to whisper to her—softly, insistently.
Wren.
She froze, pulse quickening, then shook her head. “Nope,” she said quickly. “Absolutely not. That’s wind. Totally normal, non-haunted, not-at-all-personalized wind.”
Still, the air shimmered faintly where sunlight filtered through the clouds. The snow glittered—not the way snow normally did, but as if it held light of its own.
Her breath fogged in front of her. “If this turns into a horror movie, I want everyone to know I called it.”
She took another cautious step, eyes scanning the ridge. The hush was deep here, layered—like the land was listening.
“Yule trolls,” she murmured, shaking her head.
The locals had warned her about them, about how the old magic still lived in the valleys this time of year.
Andrea’s kids, Lily and Kevin, had insisted they’d met one, that Ketill was one, but now he was just their father or something like that.
Wren had laughed, promising to leave out cookies just in case.
Now, surrounded by shifting shadows and whispering wind, that promise didn’t seem so funny.
She adjusted her pack strap and started back toward the cabin, the sound of her boots crunching over snow somehow too loud in the silence.
A memory tugged at her. Ketill’s deep voice rumbling like distant thunder when he’d introduced himself.
“Be careful in the mountains,” he’d said.
“They whisper things you might not want to hear.”
He’d smiled faintly then, tusks catching the light. A terrifying smile, by most standards. But not to her.
The wind whispered again, her name riding on the breeze.
She swallowed hard. “I hear you,” she said under her breath. “But unless you’re offering central heating, hot chocolate with booze, and a toasty fire, I’m not interested.”
She adjusted her gloves and stepped forward—straight onto a patch of ice.
Her foot shot out from under her. The world tilted. Her pack swung around like a wrecking ball, and she landed flat on her back in a drift of powdery snow.
For a moment, she lay there—half-buried, stunned, and cold enough to reconsider her life’s choices.
“Okay, universe,” she groaned, staring up at the gray sky. “I get it. You’re dramatic.”
The wind sighed through the trees, and for just a heartbeat, Wren could have sworn it sounded like laughter.