If she had told her parents about what nearly happened, would they have looked down on her? Could she have lessened what was about to occur?
The guards drag her back to the Jarl as she fights tooth and nail.
“A sword to my heart!” Guy gasps in mock surprise. “That you would try to leave me like this.” He points to the railing surrounding the pier. “Bend her over.”
The goons force a screaming Aura over the wood and hold her down. Her attempts to scratch, kick, and bite fail.
“Relax, we will disembark soon.”
Her heart pounds, and she screams as loudly as her lungs can carry her voice. “Let me go!”
Guy snaps his fingers, and a guard gags her with a scrap of cloth.
“You need to remain quiet for this. I can’t have the King finding you.” He holds her hips from behind. Both hands glide down her legs, lifting the hem of her dress.
Hot tears flood her face. No one was coming to save her this time. She would have had a savior if Calder had not forsaken her in the gardens.
Her dress is tugged to her knees when a frozen great axe slams into the chest of the guard on her right.
One of the guards restraining her unsheathes his sword, pulling her closer to his chest. The dead man lies bloody and frozen.
Her stomach flutters as she finds the Iss Drengr covered in the blood and carnage of Guy’s guards. His monstrous right hand clutches the head of a dying soldier. Ice crystals creep over the guard’s forehead. An ear-piercing scream echoes off the pier as the frost engulfs the soldier’s head and limbs.
“I seem to have found the source of my missing guards from a week ago.” Guy pulls Aura to his side as he draws a sword and grips her arm. She removes the gag and kicks him in the shin. She darts away from his grasp, only to be restrained again.
“Apologies, Princess,” he sneers, “I have been offered my country’s weight in gold if I deliver you safely to myQueen.”
“Fuck off!”
A bloody head thunks off of Guy’s back as every guard lies frozen, mangled, or both.
“I should have put you down winters ago.” Calder’s growl reverberates across the deck. The bulging muscles in his arms ripple as he tears his axe out of the headless man as if lifting a stick.
“You could never get that close to me.” Guy wags his finger with a laugh.
Aura’s breath fogs around her face, and she shivers. Ice coats the ground and stills the water, lapping at the dock.
“Aura, to the Longhouse!” Calder passively commands as he descends on the other Jarl.
Instead, she clutches a discarded sword and joins him.
“There is just something I must know, Jarl Calder?” Guy steps backward onto the icy dock. “Why betray your mother? Or Skalor?”
“Do you really believe in the bullshit she spouts?”
Guy looks taken aback. “She is our Queen. Why would she lie to us?”
“She manipulates weak men into doing her bidding.”
“Surely your issue is only with Queen Lavinia and not little ole me?” Guy smiles widely in a last-ditch attempt to save his skin.
Guy’s scream curdles Aura’s blood as frost envelopes his legs up to his waist. Calder does not shift at the wails of agony of the enemy. If anything, he looks stoically at peace.
“You forfeited your life when you set your sight on the Princess.”
Guy wildly swings his sword through his blubbering tears. Calder punches him in the chest so hard that she thought his hand would sink through his ribcage.
He gasps for air, but Calder is nothing if not relentless. He strikes him again and again until blood bursts from his mouth, and only then does he grip his face.
