Chapter 5
Lux
Two days after I’d nearly killed Sif and Mista and Axel in a three on one practice fight, and the Gods begged me to destroy the vampire women, I stood beside the throne of Vylheim with a weapon strapped to my thigh like I was King Drakkar’s bodyguard.
Drak had insisted I sit on the throne and rest, but I wasn’t ready to act as queen—or his wife—so I remained on my feet with my head held high to greet the visitors for Supplication Day.
A line of men and women, children even, stood waiting to approach the throne with their concerns. It was tradition. On the first day of spring, weeks after the Polar Nocturne ended, the people of Vylheim traveled to Mara’s Keep to kneel before the king and present their requests.
When I was just a village girl in Skaldir, I believed the Day of Supplication was an honest and welcoming invitation from the leaders of our world.
After uncovering the truth of the royal court in Mara’s Keep, the one run by a blood council of vampires, I knew this day was used to find witches or subjects harboring weapons.
This was the day for vampires to sniff out those they considered their enemies. Witches would always be first on the list, since our gifts came from the Gods that hated vampires. Anyone willing to shed blood, and waste even a drop of what the vampires wanted to drink, was second on that list.
I lifted my eyes and tried to smile at the woman who limped toward the throne. My face felt hollow even though this was the first Day of Supplication not run by the Blood Council. King Drakkar ran this one, with me alongside him.
Still, the purpose was the same: to dig for information.
Except this time, it was about Silver and her army.
I needed to get information about what was happening in Vylheim without leaving the castle and risking her coming after me before I was ready to face a full army.
In all of that, though, I insisted we do the best we could to fulfill the people’s requests.
No doubt those requests would be for food and shelter against the freeze and the unpredictable storms that’d only grown worse since The Polar Nocturne’s end.
“My king,” the woman said when she dipped into a bow. Her joints creaked as she bent to the cold floor. On her knees, she looked up at Drak, silver hair framing the soft wrinkles of her face. She opened her mouth, but nothing more came out.
Drak leaned forward as the woman forced out a breath, her gaze flickering to me and then back to him.
When she opened her mouth again, the result was the same: silence.
This woman was afraid, as were most of the people once they stood in the king’s presence.
Now that they understood he wasn’t human.
But Mara and all of Vylheim had mostly taken well to this news.
The reveal of vampires allowed many who still believed in the Gods to have hope.
Hope for magic. Hope for divine intervention.
Hope for change despite the fact that their king was an undead monster, because his actions hadn’t aligned with that these past few weeks.
He remained loyal to them, and had even pulled back the executioners, reassigning the last masked men and women who hadn’t defected to Silver’s army to the role of the king’s guard.
He allowed my people to have weapons again, which let them defend themselves, and of course, he canceled The Age of Exploration, which would have sent many people to their deaths in the sea beyond Vylheim.
Drak exchanged a look with me before addressing her. “Go on, tell us what you need.”
Gingerly, she touched her lips. Her fingers shook as they dropped to the symbol sewn into her cloak.
I’d seen it before: the lightning bolt that the people of Torsholt added to their clothing in honor of Thor, the God of Thunder and Odin’s son.
It was a silent act of defiance in a world that once hushed any talk of the Gods.
Her mouth moved, speaking in whispers. I knew the quiet prayers on her lips, even if I couldn’t hear them. I’d whispered to the Gods myself, before they infiltrated my skull and spoke directly into my head.
Now, though, the Gods were quiet. Whenever Drak was nearby, they spoke sparingly in case he could hear them through my thoughts.
At least that was what I assumed, but assuming anything about the Gods was stupid.
Not even witches could predict their actions.
Only the best seers, like my mother, caught glimpses of Odin’s true intentions.
“Speak up, I cannot hear you,” Drak said.
The woman’s fingers closed around her cloak, fisting the fabric tightly at her throat.
I gripped Drak’s shoulder and forced him to sit back against his gaudy throne.
“She’s getting to it,” I said, as I frowned down at him.
He tilted his head and stared up at me with a furrow in his brow.
My voice dropped so that only the king could hear.
“Are you so impatient that you cannot even give the woman a moment?”
The cocky curve of his lips fell. I’d struck a nerve with the truth. Now that I had revealed all my secrets, I vowed to speak the truth often and bluntly. It was a gift for him, really, since he’d vowed the same for me and had kept to that promise since I met him.
Turning my attention to the woman, I nodded. “It’s safe to speak of the Gods here.”
Drak snapped his neck to the side, and I felt his icy gaze needling me. There was nothing he hated more than Odin. I squeezed his shoulder, my fingernails digging into his flesh.
The woman’s dark eyes widened, but her tight hold on the cloak released.
“How did you know?” he breathed.
“She looked at me,” I said. And there was an unsaid understanding that we were both witches. Though witches were out of hiding now, at least some of them, not every witch trusted executioners would stop hunting them and cutting off their heads.
“It isn’t about the Gods,” she finally spoke. The quiver in her voice told me she was one of those who still feared the executioners. And why wouldn’t she? A lifetime of masked men and women patrolling every village left everyone on edge, not just witches. “They killed my niece.”
“They?” I asked. The woman’s eyes shifted to Drak, and I understood immediately. “Vampires.”
“Not those loyal to me,” Drak said.
“You don’t control all of them.” I tightened my grip on him again.
“Careful,” he said beneath his breath. He twisted to look up at me with the crook of his mouth having returned. “I take pleasure in you grabbing me like that.”
Shaking my head, I opened my mouth to bite back at him, but a feathery voice interrupted me.
“They’re warriors.” The woman barely spoke above a whisper. “Acting like executioners against witches.”
“I told you,” Drak said. “It’s Silver’s army.”
I finally let go of him and stepped closer to the woman. “Your niece was a witch too?”
She nodded. “The warriors dragged her out of her house.” Her voice was mousy.
“They threw her into the street and fed on her in front of everyone. People ran back into their houses, but not me. I tried to hit him with my walking stick, and he didn’t kill me.
He said he’d had his fill and that he would come back for me unless I delivered this message. ”
Drak was on the edge of his seat again. “What message?” he asked.
Reaching out a hand, I offered to help her up, but she did not take it.
Instead, she fixed her eyes on Drak and lifted her voice.
“That the witches will not only be killed. They’ll be tortured, each bone broken and their skin burned before they’re bled dry, unless you give up your throne and… ” her eyes slid to me. “Her.”
Drak shot to his feet. His shadow stretched over her, backlit by the glowing flames in the candelabra hanging behind his throne.
“That’s never happening.” He spoke through his teeth, defiant and impatient, as if she were the one come to steal away his throne right in front of him. “They can fucking try.”
I stepped between them and stabbed him in the chest with my finger.
“Stop.” I kept my voice low. The people here were his subjects.
They respected him, even though he had once done horrible things.
He wasn’t the Blood Council. He hadn’t built the fucked up system that hunted witches and beheaded anyone who defied the royal council’s rules.
Even if the people of Vylheim didn’t know all the details, they knew enough to follow King Drakkar.
They knew he’d fed on humans, but that he’d become a vampire to overthrow the council.
Even if it was for his own selfish revenge, it served all of us well.
I searched his ice-blue eyes, letting the chilling anger in them wash over me until they softened.
“I know you have an obsession with power, and anything threatening to take that from you enrages—”
He seized my wrist before I could prod him again and tugged me toward him. “Fuck the throne. I’m not giving you up.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand why you say things like that.”
“The truth is, I don’t understand it either. But I’ve told you before, you are my fascination.”
I didn’t want to fall into the endless abyss of this conversation again. Drak swore his need to be with me was honest, but it’d never made enough sense.
Fire crackled between us. That was all this obsession was: desire. He’d said he liked how I valued life and saw more for myself than what the law bound me to, but I believed he was just amused by how I handled fear.
Spinning away from him, I knelt and helped the woman to her feet. “I’m so sorry for your loss. The king will address your concerns.”
She nodded, eyes still full and round like a child’s, though without the innocence. “His army will fight back?”