Chapter 49
Forty-Nine
“Protect her!” Gustief screamed as I fumbled for my sword.
When Darcke got hold of the blade and offered it to me, I took it so fast the sharp edge cut his palm, but I didn’t care as I whirled to the wall of attackers. The heirs and the warriors turned toward the west, where every chief and iron-bound was coming from.
My hands trembled as I got into position. We didn’t even have half the people.
“Guess you didn’t think this through,” I said through my teeth.
“We did,” Darcke replied calmly.
“We didn’t plan on surviving.” The king gave me a sad smile. “We only planned for you to.”
“What about the bond?” I snarled.
Fuck, they were so close now. The footsteps of the Vikings made the ground beneath my feet vibrate, and I could smell the determination on the wind, lusting for my head. My mother took down one of the king’s men, her war-painted face glistening with his blood coating her skin.
“Do you still feel Darcke?” the king asked.
My chest thumped, my blood roaring through me, making my skin cold and clammy.
Because no. No, I didn’t.
I saw the sorrow in his gaze, but it felt like a language I’d forgotten how to speak. Nothing white-hot roiled within me. No fury or pain or lust. There was nothing. An empty sea where the waves had long since died out.
“The shaman knew you’d kill him,” Gustief said, an ember of pity in his tone that could only come from what he saw on my face. “We all saw what you felt for… we all knew you’d do it. Your heart is warm enough. So he tied the bond to his life, and when he went…”
“So did the bond,” Darcke finished.
I was so furiously, ragingly angry with him, but it still felt like a piece of my soul was missing. Like a part of myself had been ripped from me, forever changing who I was.
There was a lot of that going around lately.
“Good,” I hissed, forcing every letter to emphasize my wrath. “Because I don’t want anything more to fucking do with you.”
“Don’t blame him.” The king took a step toward me. “He didn’t want to do this. Not like how it happened.”
The warriors reached the heirs. Viljan roared as a man barreled into him, but thankfully Torden was able to kick him off my former guard.
I paced a narrow, restless path as my friends broke their line.
Rakkel’s mother tried to shove her daughter out of the way, but Rakkel shook her head and the two women stared at each other for a moment before Chief Rafenskol dipped her chin and turned against the other chiefs.
“I need to get over there,” I hissed.
But as I went to start sprinting, Darcke’s arm found its way around my waist again. His touch was too hot—too harsh and too gentle at the same time—and I shoved at his hands, but he only held me closer, forcing me to listen to the heavy breaths leaving him.
“I will cut you if you don’t release me,” I screamed, wrangling my sword to try to angle it behind me.
“I don’t fucking care,” he replied into my ear. “I need you to live.”
Ivren, Viljan, and Geord were pushed backward as they tried to hold back the horde of men and women coming for me, and I saw the moment Ivren’s foot twisted.
“No!” My scream made Viljan spin, and color fled his face when one of the men flew toward the Solsken heir, using his sword as leverage and driving it deep into Ivren’s chest.
“Ivren!” Another scream split the chaos, and Ivren’s mother lurched forward when a look of surprise overtook her son’s face before he fell to his knees and toppled over.
The Solsken chief bared her teeth and sent a dagger flying, lodging it in the man’s neck so that he went down only a step away from the heir he’d struck.
Tears blinded me as Viljan screamed toward the aurora. Geord bent down, his hard face pulling with every emotion as he dragged Ivren’s lifeless body to the side before jumping right back into the fighting.
After that it became mayhem. Nobody knew who to target, so everyone went for everybody, like a pack of starving wolves turning on each other.
I could smell the smugness on my mother’s breath when Adrion’s father went down next and Ivren’s mother was surrounded, still fighting her way to get to her son.
“Let me go,” I snarled to Darcke. “I need to help them.”
“Do not let her go,” the king ordered. “We need her alive.”
“You do not get to decide that.” I twisted my body with everything in me, my eyes set on my mother’s unprotected back. “Let me go!”
“Elvara,” Darcke started.
I threw my head so that the back of it slammed into his nose, and when he stiffened, I sent my elbow into his gut. I waited for my feet to hit the ground, but Darcke’s manic laugh only brushed my ear as his arms cradled me closer.
“You’re going to have to do a lot better than that, heir,” he hissed.
I hated him at that moment. I hated that he called me heir. I hated that I couldn’t feel anything from him. I hated that I couldn’t tell if he was protecting me because he wanted me to be safe or because he needed to.
“Oh, I will.” Crimson tinted my vision when I started spinning, making myself deadweight in his arms before tensing and pushing away from him with my legs. But he was too fucking strong.
As I took a breath to do it again, something creaked behind us.
I went entirely still as the gates towering over us opened an inch. The brightest light I’d ever seen spilled onto the ground, and the warmth from it was like a midday sun dancing over my skin.
“What do you see?” the king asked.
“Nothing.” I tried to tear my eyes away, but it was impossible.
Whatever was in that light was pulling me in, so alluring it pained me to blink—to look away for a single moment. The scent wrapping around me was spellbinding, making memories I hadn’t thought of in years flash before my eyes, and showing me new images of moments I’d never forget.
Lika and I playing by the river when we were children—him forcing me to bend the knee to him like I’d have to when he became chief.
My father making me sit in on Lika’s lessons. My father asking my opinions when we had our village meetings, always allowing me to take the time to think before I spoke.
Darcke and I during our bonding, the way he looked at me when he held me while Njord spun around us, blessing our bond.
There wasn’t only respect in his eyes as Njord conjured a crown of water over my head, but something softer, something vulnerable that he allowed to cross his face only because my eyes were closed.
Longing. It was desperate, irresistible longing.
Not for a romantic partner but for a queen—for someone to heal his people.
I ground my teeth as I tried to shove the images away.
“The gods are calling you.” The king’s voice sounded far away. “You need to go.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” I wasn’t sure if it was only in my head that my voice was so weak, but Darcke’s grip on me changed, one hand coming up to cup my face.
“Her eyes are white,” he said.
I blinked. The light brightened Darcke’s face, and when I pushed away from him this time, he let me.
I missed him even though he was standing right before me. But there was something about his posture, his proud shoulders slumping and his face devoid of the furious creases it usually held, that made that feeling of loneliness surge within me.
“Go, Elvara!” King Gustief ordered.
Slowly, I faced him, just as the other warriors reached us. Only a few steps away, the last of King Gustief’s men were trying to protect us, but blood made the pathway slick, and the guard fell before I had the time to draw air into my lungs.
The sounds of the battle were still muted. And when I took a step toward the king and a woman with pale hair rounded the royal warriors, I found myself farther away, heading toward the door.
“I don’t want to,” I said, but even my voice betrayed me, the words feeling more like a lie than any fictions I’d told before.
“You need to go, child.” Gustief nodded to someone. “You need to make her.”
Time stalled when Darcke dragged me backward.
A warrior fell to the ground where I’d just stood, his face full of rage even in death.
A woman—my mother—smiled as she ran past us.
With a crack that echoed in my blood, she struck the king, her blade lodging in his chest and taking the light from his eyes.
“No!” The word flew from my lips as Darcke groaned in pain.
When I turned my head over my shoulder, the hilt of the dagger buried in his shoulder brushed my cheek, and he flinched before ripping it out, sending a hot copper spray across my skin.
His face came an inch from my own, and I didn’t have time to react before he crashed his lips against mine. As he pulled back, that lethal smirk fought itself into place across his features while he said, “I’m so fucking sad that I won’t be there to see you rule.”
Then he threw me backward, and everything became white.
The mist filled my lungs. My mind. My body. Everything.
I walked blindly through it, but my steps had never been more assured. The gods’ presence was everywhere, their voices beating against my ears and my limbs and my nerves.
I felt weightless, like I was floating through a sea, and when the mist cleared, I gasped.
The highest ceiling I’d ever seen was arched over me, built of thousands upon thousands of gilded shields, each one echoing its owner’s bravery—battles fought and won and lost.
To my sides, rafters reached toward the ceiling, each made up of the blades and axes and spears of the same men and women the shields whispered of.
The floor my feet barely touched was crimson, the blood from every lineage of Vikings painting it, sharing their stories of lost times and of the men and women who came before.
My breaths came out as white clouds as I walked toward a table made from white rowan, where a wave of ethereal light rolled back and forth.
Don’t look.
Darcke’s voice rang in my mind. And while anger hissed beneath my skin, making my teeth chatter, I turned my face to the floor, listening to generations of Vikings telling me their stories as I approached the gods.
Bow.