She pressed her green ear against the smooth wall of her nest and held her breath. Her father’s baritone reverberated through the layers of plaster and fine, hand-hewn wood that separated her bedroom from her parents’ suite.
“...coddle her, Dagur!”
She flinched away from the skin-warmed plaster. Astrid’s stomach knotted as tightly as the braid that kept her long raven hair out of her face. That tone haunted her, waking and sleeping. Her mother’s voice was like a knife. The cuts it left took a long time to heal, and just when they did, the blade came out again.
The worst was when Astrid knew her mother was right to be angry.
Shehadmessed up. She deserved to be the one taking the cuts, not her father. But his baritone rumbled through the wall all the same.
“Has it ever occurred to you that she’s achild?Children ought to be coddled now and then!”
“She’s not a child,” her mother snapped. “She’s a princess of the Orclind and future matriarch of the Seagrim Clan. Good gods, I’d already killed a man by her age!”
“And look how you turned out!”
Her mother’s snarl sent a chill down Astrid’s spine. “I led this territory through a century of war!”
Her father never raised his voice. He didn’t need to. Instead, he said things with such a calm, effortless clarity that the truth of it carried a devastating impact.
“You led this territoryintowar,” he replied, “and I pray every day that our daughter has more mercy in her heart than you. The gods gifted her some softness and I thank them for it.”
“Mercy? She’ll be lucky to live long enough tolead,let alone be merciful!”
“It was a few tears, Sigrid,” her father shot back. “She’sseven.She got overwhelmed. You put a child in front of nearly a million people and told her to perform a rite that would be hard for an adult to remember. What did you expect?”
“I expected her to do her duty. That’s all I ever expect of her, and yet somehow she continues to fail.” There was a desperate edge in her voice when she continued, “How will she survive the court if she can’t even light a fire, my mate? If she shows this much weakness?—”
There was a pause. Astrid squeezed her eyes shut and bit her lip, willing the tears to stay locked inside.
She hadn’t meant to mess it up. All she’d done for a week was practice the rite, and she’d been so, so looking forward to the first night of Burden’s Moon. She’d never been allowed to attend the Moonrise festival before. It’d been everything she dreamed of: a sea of jubilant orcs gathered around hundreds of bonfires, fireworks bursting in the sky, the scents of smoke and rich food blending with snow in the air…
But when she climbed the steps with her mother and that unimaginably large sprawl of people went silent, Astrid couldn’t do it. She didn’t know why. The words just wouldn’t come. With every second that passed, the worse it got.
When her mother looked down at her with that familiar disapproving glare, she’d shut down entirely. Her chance to light the flame vanished the moment the first tear escaped.
She didn’t see her father sprint up the steps, but she’d been so glad when he swooped her up into his arms and shielded her from the murmuring crowd. His rumbling purr soothed her panicked sobs and the touch of his kohl-darkened hands to her elaborately styled hair was a balm to her dashed hopes.
But comfort was always fleeting. Astrid knew there’d be a reckoning when they returned to the palace. Her mother hadn’t even looked at her the entire ride home. That was always a bad sign.
When even the staff wouldn’t meet her gaze as they helped prepare her for bed, she knew it was very bad indeed.
Softer voices filtered through the wall — her mother’s and her father’s, gentled by some understanding she couldn’t grasp. Astrid couldn’t hear what they spoke of now, only that peculiar tone. It was something like sadness, and that was worse than anger.
She turned away from the wall.
I need to do better,she thought, dragging her comforter up to her nose to muffle the sobs she couldn’t quite stop.Why couldn’t I just say the words? I know them. Papa taught me. Why was I so scared?
Her father had assured her that stage fright was perfectly normal, but in her heart she knew it wasn’t the crowd that had scared her.
It was her mother, and that shamed her.
She wasn’t sure how long it took, but eventually her tears stopped flowing. Astrid stared at the silver-embroidered roof of her nest with dry, itchy eyes. Exhaustion made her small limbs heavy, but sleep refused to come.
That meant she was still awake when the door to her bedroom opened. From beyond the heavy curtains of her nest, her father whispered, “My star, are you sleeping?”
Her heart squeezed so hard, it nearly knocked the wind out of her.
Astrid sat up and scrambled toward the entrance of the nest. Pushing the curtains aside, she answered, “Papa?”
