PROLOGUE
Two hours I’ve been at this dinner, and I’ve spent most of them working out how much of a war it’d start if I just got up and walked out.
Not much of one. I could survive it. Baldr couldn’t—he’d be cleaning up the mess for a year and he’d make sure I heard about every day of it—so I stay in the damn chair.
Gods, I hate these.
The human lord on my left has spent the evening trying to turn his fear into respect. He keeps smiling. His face hurts. I know because every time his mouth pulls tighter, irritation slips through the fear and hits the inside of my mask.
Across from him, a Skorvaer woman wants his trade road and wishes his wife would choke on a fish bone. The wife knows about the trade road. She also knows about the woman. The two of them have been passing the salt with great courtesy.
Three seats down, a young prince is drunk enough to believe nobody can tell. He’s raised his cup to the treaty six times. He means it less with each one.
The mask lowers all of them to a bearable roar. Fear, want, resentment, false warmth. Fifty-odd people pushing one thing into their faces while carrying another underneath. They smile. They bow. They call this peace.
Baldr enjoys it.
He’s at the head of the long table listening to an old human king explain grain tariffs. Actually listening. The king knows it too. His nerves settle every time Baldr asks a question, and by the third one the man’s forgotten he spent the first course afraid of being eaten.
Baldr catches a servant by the elbow when she stumbles behind his chair. He steadies the wine with his other hand, says one quiet thing I don’t hear, and sends her away laughing.
Real laughter.
Damn him.
He glances down the table and finds me watching. Same face. Same pale-green left eye. The rest of him has spent our entire lives proving how little that means.
He lifts his cup.
I don’t lift mine.
His amusement reaches me from thirty feet away, easy and clean. He drinks anyway.
The doors open before I can decide whether throwing my cup at him would improve the evening.
Conversation stops. People recover quickly and pretend it didn’t.
She chose white.
That’s the first thing I notice, which annoys me. The second is that she looks at Baldr before she looks at me.
She pauses inside the doors with a pale cloak folded over one arm and white linen skimming the floor. Curiosity comes from the humans. Recognition from the Skorvaer. Three people know she once belonged to my court. Two of them know she once belonged in my bed.
She lets them look.
The old performance is still good. A little nerves in her fingers. A breath held too high. Relief warming her face when Baldr stands to greet her.
Her satisfaction is the only honest part.
There you are.
Baldr comes around the table. He doesn’t look at me. I can feel how badly he wants to.
“You came.” He takes the cloak from her arm.
“You invited me.”
Her voice hasn’t changed. Soft, low, with enough roughness in it to make every sentence sound honest. I used to enjoy that voice. Then I learned what she did with it.
Her eyes find mine over Baldr’s shoulder.
No nerves now.
She wanted me here for this.
Lovely.
Baldr gestures to the open seat beside him. It wasn’t open when dinner began. Somebody planned this and failed to mention it to me, which narrows the list of possible offenders to my brother.
She passes Baldr on the way to the chair and puts two fingers against the inside of his wrist.
His trust in me thins.
Only a little. He probably doesn’t notice. Baldr’s used to strength moving through touch, not emotion disappearing beneath it. His shoulders ease. Whatever he was about to think of me loses its edge.
My cup stops halfway to my mouth.
She keeps her fingers there.
I’ve fed from people who asked me to. I’ve taken grief from a mother who couldn’t sleep and terror from a soldier who needed one clear night. I know the exact change in a person when an emotion leaves.
Baldr didn’t ask.
She sits. Her thumb strokes once across his pulse, and another small piece of what he feels for me goes quiet.
“Take your hand off him.”
Nobody at the table moves. The musicians near the west wall continue for three confused notes before the strings stop.
Baldr looks down at her fingers. What she took from him begins to come back.
She withdraws her hand and folds both of hers in her lap. “Good evening, Eirik.”
“Was it unclear?”
“Your meaning is rarely unclear.” Her gaze drops to the cup in front of her. “Your reasons tend to be.”
The human lord beside me leans away. Sensible man. He’s finally done one useful thing all night.
Baldr sets her cloak across the back of her chair. “We’re not doing this here.”
“I’m sitting.” She turns her open face up to him. “He objected to my hand.”
Baldr’s annoyance catches, then softens when she touches his forearm.
There.
She takes it while he’s looking at me.
She takes what my brother feels for me and leaves distrust in its place, one careful mouthful at a time. She’s learned patience since she left Myrkvier. Learned how little she can steal without anybody seeing the absence.
Anybody except me.
I could tell him.
She is feeding from you.
Baldr would believe me. Whatever sits broken between us, he knows what I can sense. He’d remove her hand. He’d deal with her fairly, because Baldr deals with everyone fairly, including people who don’t deserve the effort.
She looks at me while her fingers rest on his skin.
Triumph flashes beneath every wall she has.
She believes I’ll let her do this because speaking would expose that I still care what happens to him. She believes she knows me that well.
“Eirik.” Baldr puts enough warning into my name to start a fight without technically starting one. “Sit down.”
I’m on my feet.
She smiles.
I set my cup on the table. It lands inside the woven ring in the cloth. Not a drop spills.
Then I go to her.
Baldr moves between us. He’s always been fast. I’ve always known where he’ll move.
I catch her wrist the instant it clears his arm.
Her fear breaks loose.
I take it.
Anger follows, hot and old, then the satisfaction she carried into the hall.
I take those too. Her want comes next—all of it fixed on rank, power, the place beside a Dróttin she decided should’ve been hers.
Beneath that sits the tenderness she once had for me and the hatred she built when it failed to buy what she wanted.
I take everything together.
She tries to close her emotional walls. I pull those open and empty what they hide. Every joy. Every grief. The small mean pleasures. The private shame. I keep going until she has no emotion left to give me.
Her eyes stay open.
Her mouth goes slack. She looks at Baldr and gives no sign that his face means anything to her. Her free hand hangs at her side. She’s awake. She can see us. Nothing she sees reaches her.
People recoil from an absence only I can sense.
Baldr says my name again.
I close my other hand beneath her jaw and pull.
Skin tears. Cartilage breaks. Her throat comes away hot in my fingers, and white cloth turns red.
She drops before the first person screams.
Baldr catches her. Blood runs over his hands and down his wrists as he lowers her to the floor. He presses one palm against the ruin in her neck. There’s no point. He knows. He does it anyway.
The room tears itself apart. Chairs strike stone. Human guards pull steel. Half the Skorvaer stand, unsure whether they’re meant to protect Baldr from me or me from the humans. Somebody knocks over the musicians’ bench. A woman near the doors keeps screaming. Another scream rises louder.
The mask burns against my face. Every fear in the hall slams into it at once. Rage joins it. Horror. Grief. People who spent the evening lying about peace are honest at last.
Baldr looks up from the floor.
His left eye is the same pale green as mine. His right burns gold.
He doesn’t ask why.
Perhaps he already thinks he knows.
One small person in the far corner doesn’t scream.
She’s crouched beside an overturned chair, tucked between the wall and a human man’s legs. Nine, perhaps. Blonde curls have come loose from whatever pins held them for dinner. Both hands cover her mouth.
Another child has hold of her. Same age, a little taller, a blonde braid half shaken loose—both hands clamped around the small one’s arm, holding her there. That one’s afraid. Ordinary afraid, the same as everyone else in the hall.
The small one isn’t.
Tears run over her fingers.
She’s looking at me.
…What.
Everyone else in this room sees blood on my hand and has reached the obvious conclusion. The child sees the same thing. Her little chest jerks with another sob.
The mask catches the room.
It doesn’t catch her.
That sob reaches me cleanly, past the silver and the runes, into a place nobody else’s emotions can enter.
I still feel her when the guard blocks her from sight.
I feel her when the human man pulls her against his leg.
I feel every frightened breath, and under the fear is grief meant for the person who did the killing.
I know exactly what’s happened.
I know what it hasn’t done.
Nothing in her answers me. She doesn’t know me. She isn’t reaching for me. Those tears belonged to her before this new reach opened inside me.
Only my side has changed.
Good.
She’s a child.
The man beside her sees me looking and draws her behind him. His fear cuts through the mask. He thinks I’m deciding whether to kill her too.
The easiest way to end this has occurred to both of us.
I don’t kill children.
There. A reason.
I lock every response in me behind the walls that hide me from my own kin. I give the new reach nothing it can use. No word. No touch. She can have a life that never includes me.
Baldr rises from the floor with blood on his hands.
I turn away before he can speak.
Nobody tries to stop me. Steel remains raised. The hall makes room.
At the doors, I look back once.
The court’s formed a wall around the child. She’s found a gap between two shoulders and is still watching me, tears bright on her face.
Glacial blue eyes.