Chapter 12
Twelve
“Want to do it together?” Rakkel asked.
I nodded. We were about the same height, and while she had more muscle, I wasn’t skin and bones yet. Thankfully, for my entire life until this week, I’d eaten well, and although I hadn’t expected to be the heir, I’d trained almost every day with Viljan.
Even though I didn’t trust Rakkel, she’d warned me last night, and that warning might have been the difference between me standing here today and my dead body lying on the bottom of the sea.
A suffocating hush fell over the ship when everyone started pairing up. Guner, Darcke, and several other warriors walked around, securing wrists together with thick leather bands.
Viljan was still blocked by another group of Guner’s men, although they were struggling to keep him back, so I made a motion toward Rakkel. He stilled for a second, and from how Rakkel shuffled a step backward, he must have offered her one of his famed glares.
My eyes shot to the sunny sky when Viljan spun to Rakkel’s guard and dragged the man to his side by the seam of his tunic. The Rafenskol guard flashed his teeth at Viljan before shaking off his arm, but he did remain by his side.
“Your guard isn’t the most polite, is he?” Rakkel laughed quietly. “Stefen looks friendlier than he is, so that man of yours needs to watch it unless he wants an axe to cleave his chest.”
I had no doubt Viljan could take the dark-haired guard with the thick stubble, who was almost a head shorter than he was, even if he was thick with corded muscle, but I wasn’t about to paint a target on the man I planned to be the new chief of our village.
So instead of offering her a quip back—hopefully her guard had the good sense not to rile up mine too much—I forced a chuckle.
Rakkel’s paling cheeks were the only warning before a tall figure cast us in shadow.
“Wrists,” Darcke demanded with that snide twist of his lips.
My weak smile melted off my face as I stuck out my hand his way. When Rakkel did the same, Darcke took a short piece of rope from his belt, but as the cool hide touched our skin, Guner shouted, “No heirs together.”
A vein on Darcke’s neck bulged as he turned to the king’s second and sighed as if we all were a great inconvenience to him. “Then who?”
If he wasn’t such a bastard, I would have grinned at the defiance and disrespect in his tone. Guner heard it, too, because his cheeks turned the color of dried blood as he stormed over. His face darkened further when Rakkel, Ivren, Adrion, Ottoh, and I all lifted our chins as he halted before us.
Ivren and Adrion had also been in the process of getting their wrists joined.
Only Ottoh hadn’t paired up with an heir but with someone who looked vaguely similar to him, the woman’s long blond hair the exact shade of Ottoh’s own and her eyes the same green color and filled with the same fierceness.
“No family either,” Guner snapped at Ottoh. “Your sister could just as well be an heir.”
So this was the sister. The grin she offered me had me take a step toward her.
“But she’s not an heir,” Ottoh said. “She will be only if I go to Valhalla.”
“Are you questioning me?” Guner’s spit landed on Ottoh’s face as he stalked into his space. To his credit, the heir only straightened, although his fingers were white from flexing them.
“No,” Ottoh replied heatedly. “But—”
Ivren stepped forward, and the tyga rune’s power wove into his words. His tone became smooth, soft and demanding at the same time. Inviting.
I wasn’t the only one who moved closer to the heir because of it.
“We haven’t chosen our seconds yet,” Ivren said. “I don’t think it’s wise pairing up with any of the karls before that.” He placed a hand on Guner’s shoulder. “You know many of them will try to have our heads. Doesn’t seem fair we should have another disadvantage.”
It was quiet for a second before Guner threw his head back and cackled. “You know the king’s men wield all runes.” He tapped his leather-clad heart, where King Gustief’s runes were carved into his skin. “Your mother’s tyga won’t impact my mind.”
Fury hit the air like lightning, and when crawling tension stretched out over the ship, causing raging whispers to beat over the ocean, I held my breath.
“Heirs,” Guner spat, “are critical if our people are to live on. Heirs provide our people with the runes we need for magic—for us to remain strong so we may stretch our borders and quell the enemies we’ve made in this world.
” He stared Ivren up and down. “There is a reason we allow anyone to become an heir if we see fit. There is a reason heirs die and bloodlines change. Sure, we do hope that our chiefs will train their children to take up their mantle. But your little show just now”—I winced as Guner struck Ivren so hard his brow split and blood splattered onto the king’s second before he spun to address his taunt to the karls—“doesn’t give me much confidence that the Solsken family will be needed in the next generation. ”
When Ivren lifted his hand to his forehead, Ottoh stepped forward again, rage twisting his face. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
But as the Briggen heir’s hands balled, his sister wrapped her fingers around his upper arm and pulled him back.
“It’s not worth it,” she hissed, her cheeks burning as if she’d been struck as well. “You’ll be fine. We’ll be fine.”
“Or we won’t,” Ivren whispered to me as he wiped at the blood covering his face as best he could. “Something or someone must have really pissed Guner off to put our bloodlines at risk like this. We could end up with five new heirs.”
We weren’t the only ones who’d come to that realization. The fury in the air shifted into determination. So many pairs of eyes burned across my skin, but I kept my own on Viljan when he turned the color of bleached bone.
Rakkel took a shuddering breath beside me, and when I let out my own, Ivren’s fingers danced over my palm, thrumming a steady rhythm that calmed my heart. I leaned into him as Adrion shook his head and Ottoh dragged his sister behind him. As if that would help her.
“You.” Guner waved for a skinny boy with bright red hair, but much lighter than my own, like the color of the sun right as it peeked over the horizon at dawn. “You’re with the Briggen heir.”
Ottoh stared into the damp planks of the ship, but he said nothing as he stepped up beside the boy, who looked as if he might faint right there and then as a guard tied their wrists together.
Ivren’s fingers laced with mine for a second, and I pretended not to hear his breath stutter before he squeezed my hand. “Be careful. Don’t trust anyone. Lika wouldn’t have.”
Darcke’s eyes flew to mine, sending a surge of cold across my skin, when I gripped Ivren so fiercely I was surprised my brother’s best friend didn’t yelp. The warrior couldn’t have heard him. Still, I didn’t like what simmered in his dark eyes.
I tried to shake off the feeling as I turned my head over my shoulder and gave Ivren a weak smile. He offered me one back as Guner assigned him and Adrion each a massive man—both the same height as Ivren, but with so much muscle they were nearly twice his width.
Adrion had to tilt his head back to meet the eyes of the dark-haired one he was assigned to, but though he was almost three times the heir’s size, the man’s tattooed shoulders hunched, and he tried to lean as far from Adrion as he could when Adrion hissed something I couldn’t make out.
Ivren bounced his brows my way when Darcke tied his wrist with the other man’s. Elbowing the male, he mouthed, “I can take him.”
I rolled my eyes at the same time as the golden-haired man who was now stuck with my friend.
Then it was Rakkel’s turn. She was paired up with the girl I’d spotted last night—the one with purplish hair.
The girl’s eyes were almost as dark as Darcke’s, and I pushed some of my hair over my shoulder when she openly studied me, not an ounce of wariness tightening her features.
Rakkel didn’t look impressed, her movement skittish as a warrior tied them together, and she shot Stefen, her guard, a worried glance.
When Guner turned my way, I’d already evaluated the girls who were left unpaired.
There were only four of them, two about my own size who seemed friendly enough.
One girl was smaller, her skin so pale it was almost translucent, and I couldn’t gather much about her because she kept her face averted, her arms around her body.
The final girl was tall with freckles covering not only her entire face, but also her tanned shoulders. Her hair was dark red like mine, but her eyes were gray. When my gaze drifted past her, she smiled, and it felt like the first real smile I’d seen since I came here, apart from Ivren’s.
Guner took his time staring at the crowd facing us.
I remained relaxed—not only because I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing my nose still ached, and that beneath the calm I was ready should he try to strike me again, but also because I wouldn’t mind being paired up with any of the girls.
The king’s second turned to me once more, and when tension tightened his features, I smiled. His brows lifted. Only for a second, but enough for me to know that had been a mistake.
Guner’s face betrayed nothing, though, as he ordered, “Havskold, come here.”
I waited for one of the girls to step forward, so when Kilia, one of the silver-haired twins Ivren had warned me about last night, stalked over, his brother grinning menacingly behind him, unease twisted my gut.
If Viljan had been pale before, it was nothing compared to his complexion now. When my guard turned from the twin to me, it was as if the sun’s rays didn’t reach him, as if they danced over a ghost. Ivren’s smile melted off his face, but the man he was tied to stopped him from coming to my side.
Rakkel was also pulled away by her partner, her eyes wide, and the girl with the magenta strands became very interested in the sea creatures carved into the wooden railing of the ship instead of me.