1
CASSIAN
The nets bite against my palms as I pull them free of the ice, strands stiff with salt and frozen spray. The wind claws at my shoulders, dragging my hair across my face, but I keep my head bent and work the knots loose. This kind of labor settles me. Simple. Predictable. A man can spend hours on rope and knots and not think about much else, and I prefer it that way. The sea doesn’t lie. It doesn’t betray. It doesn’t bind me in blood oaths I never wanted to remember.
But tonight the nets don’t give me peace. The pull is there again, under my ribs, a faint pulse that doesn’t belong to me. I grit my teeth against it, muscles tightening as if I can smother it with sheer will. The shard—the Crimson Seal—beats like a second heart, faint but steady. Darius has awakened it. I don’t need to be told. I can feel him.
The bear inside me stirs, restless, low growl vibrating through my chest. My breath frosts in the air, and I force my hands steady as I coil the ropes. “No,” I mutter, voice rough against the cold. “Not now. Not ever again.”
The wind doesn’t care what I say. The Seal doesn’t either. It just keeps pulsing.
Behind me, snow crunches under boots. My head tilts slightly, nostrils flaring. The scent is familiar before the voice confirms it.
“You work those nets like you’re trying to strangle the sea itself,” comes the low voice of old Arvid, the fisherman who claims these waters long before I came. He lumbers closer, bundled in sealskin, beard thick with ice. “What’s she done to you now, Cassian?”
I don’t lift my gaze. “The sea does nothing but take. Best to keep ahead of it.”
Arvid chuckles, rough and weathered. “Spoken like a man who thinks he owes her a debt.”
I don’t answer. He’s not wrong.
Arvid leans against the broken post near me, groaning as his knees crack. He watches me work with those pale, faded eyes of his, the eyes of someone who has stared too long into horizons where men vanish and never return. “You hear it again, don’t you?” he says after a beat.
I glance at him then, sharp and narrow. He doesn’t flinch. He never does.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say flatly.
“Aye, you do,” he replies with a little smile, one that shows he’s not mocking me, only naming the truth. “The way you go stiff, the way your eyes look past me like they’re following some drum only you can hear. Same as when the storms roll in, only worse.”
I snarl softly, more at myself than him, and snap the net tight. “Storms, blood oaths, it’s all the same. I’ve no use for either.”
Arvid scratches his beard, sighing. “Men can tell themselves many things to sleep at night. But when something calls you from the marrow, boy, you don’t ignore it forever. Costs too much.”
“I’ve paid my cost,” I growl. The words are iron in my throat.
Arvid doesn’t press. He never does. He only grunts, pushes off the post, and limps back toward the path that winds along the ridge. “Seal that net before morning. We’ll need the fish if this weather worsens.”
I grunt in return, my only answer.
When his footsteps fade, I breathe harder than I should. My hands are steady, but inside, the bear thrashes. It remembers what I refuse to. Blood on snow. Screams. My own hands breaking more than I meant to. I slam the memory down, force it back into the dark.
The Seal doesn’t let me. It pulses again, sharper now, as though Darius himself reached across the miles to tug at me.
“Enough,” I snarl and shove my hand into my coat. The shard is hot against my chest, burning through fabric and flesh, each beat louder than the last. I rip it free, the crimson crystal glowing faintly against the night.
The sight of it twists my gut. Brotherhood. Oaths. Tragedy. I remember each face, each vow sworn with blood dripping into the earth, and then I remember how it ended. Roman’s treachery. My rage. The ruin I left behind.
The bear growls, urging me toward it, urging me to answer. My hand shakes.
With a curse, I storm toward the shack at the cliff’s edge, slam the door wide, and march to the rough-hewn table. I yank open the drawer and throw the shard inside. The glow stains the wood red for a moment before I slam the drawer shut. My breath heaves, chest rising and falling, the weight of silence pressing in.
“That’s where you’ll stay,” I rasp, speaking to the Seal, to Darius, to the ghost of who I used to be. “The North is my punishment. My penance. I don’t leave. Not again.”
The words echo too loud in the empty shack.
The wind howls outside, rattling the boards. The bear inside me prowls, restless, pacing against my ribs. It doesn’t agree with me, but I don’t care. I won’t answer the call. Not for Darius. Not for anyone.
I pour water into a cup, lift it to my lips, and stare at the frost that crawls across the window. The Arctic night stretches forever, stars sharp as blades, silence deep as a grave.
