Chapter Twenty-Six
General Varrik’s explained my value four times.
This is three more than I needed and four more than my wrists can tolerate.
The rope around them is rough, wet, and tied behind the chair. Every time I move a finger, the knot bites higher. My hands went numb before the first explanation. They’ve now progressed to burning, which seems unfair. Numb was unpleasant but quiet.
The chair’s unpleasant too.
It has three sound legs and one short one.
Varrik paces in front of me, and each turn of his boots makes me shift enough for the chair to rock.
The back rail digs under my shoulder blades.
My ankles are bound to the front legs. The whole arrangement feels designed by somebody who hated furniture and people equally.
The old weigh house has gaps between half the wall boards. Wind comes through all of them. A brazier burns near Varrik, well beyond reach, while my purple cloak lies across a crate beside it.
He took the warmest thing I own and put it next to the fire.
I dislike him.
“Your father will pay,” Varrik says.
“You said that already.”
His boots stop.
The red cord at his shoulder is the cleanest thing he’s wearing. Snow has melted across his coat, and old mud darkens both boots.
I didn’t know about this general.
Today’s been full of introductions.
“You should listen when your life is being discussed.”
“I’ve been listening. My father pays you, Baldr pressures the treaty courts, and Eirik gives you access to the eastern vein-silver stores. Then you let me go.”
Varrik studies me.
Both his eyes are dark brown. His mouth tightens beneath them.
“You do listen.”
“I’d listen better in my cloak.”
He starts walking again.
Beside the door, the copper-eyed man shifts on a folded blanket. His ruined leg’s braced between two boards. Snowpetal bent his knee the wrong way on the road, and it’s stayed that way despite the wrapping.
Good.
He catches me looking.
I smile.
His hand closes around the knife in his lap.
Varrik notices. “Leave her.”
“She broke my leg.”
“The Sanguir broke your leg.” Varrik waves him off.
“It was hers.”
“Snowpetal belongs to herself,” I say.
The copper-eyed man starts to rise.
His leg stops him.
Ha.
Varrik turns toward me. “The animal escaped because five men forgot their training.”
“She escaped because she’s clever.”
“She left you.”
“She went for help.”
My voice shakes on the last word.
Wonderful.
I’ve spent hours trying to keep it from doing that.
“A rider went east before we reached this house,” Varrik says. “The people I answer to will know what she is.”
My stomach twists.
“She’s a baby.”
“She’s a weapon our grandfathers failed to destroy.”
“She’s not yours.”
“That can be negotiated too.”
The bond runs beneath my ribs, warm and tight.
Eirik’s coming.
At first, he was a thin pull far behind me. Then pain reached through it. Rage followed. Now each breath brings him closer, and all the walls he showed me last night are gone.
He knows I’m cold.
He knows my head hurts where the rogue struck me.
He knows Varrik’s been talking.
The answering fury makes my teeth ache.
I press my back into the chair and breathe until the room stops tipping.
Varrik watches me too closely.
“You expect them.”
“Yup.”
The copper-eyed man laughs.
“Baldr’s wagons are still at Myrkvier,” Varrik says. “The storm delayed every company on the western road.”
“They’re coming.”
“Your confidence is touching.”
“It’s also correct.”
He crouches in front of me.
Varrik’s older than the other rogues. Fine lines cut beside his mouth. One pale scar crosses his chin, and another disappears beneath the collar of his coat.
He smells of snow, smoke, and the bitter root Skorvaer chew when they need to stay awake.
“Dróttin Baldr will come with an offer,” he says. “He has spent centuries keeping the treaty soft enough for humans to love him.”
“Baldr will come with a sword.”
The bond pulls harder.
“Dróttin Eirik will come with terms.”
I look at Varrik’s red cord.
I make a very undignified snort. “Have you met Eirik?”
His jaw tightens. “I serve him.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
The copper-eyed man makes a short sound that may be another laugh.
Varrik rises.
“I requested an audience twice. Your Dróttin refused both.”
“He’s not my Dróttin.”
The words come out before I can catch them.
Eirik reaches through the bond with a hard flash of pain.
Oh.
“Politically,” I add. “He’s not my Dróttin politically.”
Which is true. Politically he’s nothing to me.
It’s the rest of it that’s the problem.
Because he is my Dróttin. Just not the—there’s no word for it Varrik would understand, or that I’d survive saying out loud in this room.
“It’s complicated,” I say. Helpful. “It’s—there’s a version where he is, and it’s not the version you’re thinking of, it doesn’t run through a treaty, that’s the thing, it’s more of a—it’s binding, but not the paperwork kind of binding, it’s the kind that—“
Stop.
Eirik hits the bond with a flash that means exactly what my own brain is already screaming. Stop talking.
I do not stop talking.
“—and it does sort of make him mine, technically, or me his, I’ve honestly haven’t been clear which way it runs, both, I think, it runs both, which is the kind of thing you’d need so much more context to even begin to—“
Varrik’s hand cracks across my face.
The chair tips onto its short leg. Heat floods up one cheek before I’ve finished the word. My ears ring on a single thin note.
Varrik picks up a narrow vein-silver bar from the crate beside my cloak. Myrkvier’s tree seal is pressed into one end. The mark’s been struck through with a chisel.
Eight bars of vein-silver can’t walk.
Apparently they can be carried.
“He controls the mines,” Varrik says. “He controls the roads. Human kingdoms sleep behind Skorvaer metal and call the trade peace.”
He turns the bar in his hand.
“The treaty requires our people to remain inside Nástrond. It puts your kind in our halls to count us, then makes us sell you the weapons that keep us here.”
“I didn’t write it.”
“You live well beneath it.”
Well, yeah. He has me there.
My room in Sólvik’s warm. Asta sleeps next door. My family’s grain crosses the border under treaty seals, and Baldr’s people greet the wagons instead of attacking them.
Varrik’s red cord belongs to men stationed on a road they’re forbidden to cross in force.
He’s still the man who had me dragged through the forest.
I pull against the rope. It doesn’t give.
“You could’ve asked me to carry a message.”
“A message can be ignored.”
“Then ask better.”
Varrik sets the bar down hard enough to crack the crate lid.
“The people I answer to are finished asking. Eirik opens the eastern stores and closes the human routes, or we break the cage through him.”
The copper-eyed man looks at Varrik.
He wasn’t meant to say that much.
Varrik sees it too.
He picks up my cloak and throws it over my knees.
“Keep her breathing.”
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“To prepare for your rescue.”
“You should prepare quickly.”
He reaches the door.
The first scream comes from outside.
It ends halfway through.
Varrik draws his sword.
Men move beyond the wall gaps. Boots strike packed snow. One of them calls toward the trees.
Nobody answers.
The bond pulls tight enough to bow me forward.
Heat runs through my chest.
Close.
Eirik’s close.
A body hits the outer wall.
The boards shake against my back.
The copper-eyed man gets up too fast and drops to one knee. His knife skids beneath the crate.
Varrik points into the yard. “Four to the north. Two behind the stores. Find them.”
“Them?” the injured man asks.
Steel rings outside.
One strike.
A wet sound.
Then a man flies through the doorway.
He lands on his back between Varrik and the brazier. His chest’s open from shoulder to ribs. Steam rises from the blood.
Baldr steps over him.
His sword’s red.
The amber eye burns so brightly that gold reaches the skin around it. Blood streaks one side of his face. His coat hangs open where a blade cut through the fastening, and his left hand grips the throat of the man trying to stab him from behind.
The man’s arm weakens.
His knees hit the floor.
Baldr takes the strength until the knife drops.
Then he turns and drives his sword through the man’s chest.
“Baldr.”
His face finds me.
The warmth I know is there. So is the man who taught children to hold a bow and caught me before I hit the ground.
Today he has blood in his hair.
“Sól.”
The copper-eyed rogue lunges from beside the crate.
Baldr pulls his sword free.
Purple light fills the doorway.
Eirik catches the rogue by the back of his coat and throws him across the room.
He hits the stone base of the weigh scale. His head bends farther than it should.
Eirik walks in.
The silver mask burns across every rune. Blood covers both his hands. More runs down one sleeve, though the bond tells me the cut beneath it’s shallow.
I know the man from the snow.
I know the man who lay awake while I slept in his bed.
But this is the man from the stories too.
All of them have the same purple eye.
“Hi,” I attempt to wiggle my fingers through the bindings.
His gaze reaches the blood at my temple.
The bond opens wide.
For one horrible breath, I get the moment my terror first reached him. The road pulling him toward a place where I might already be dead.
I can’t breathe around it.
Neither can he.
Varrik moves between us.
“My Dróttin.”
Eirik looks at the red cord.
Then the face above it.
“Varrik.”
“You remember.”
“I remember refusing you.”
Two of Varrik’s men rush in from the yard, at Eirik’s back.
He turns.
The first gets a knife through the throat.
Eirik releases the handle and catches the second man’s wrist. The rogue tries to wrench free. Purple light flashes over the mask, and his face goes slack.
Every part of him stops fighting at once.
Eirik takes the sword from his hand and opens his stomach with it.
The man folds.
Eirik leaves him there.
Baldr’s already gone back into the yard.