I scoffed, bitter as salt on an open wound. Once in my room, the door shut with a sound like a coffin lid closing. The lock clicked. I sat on the edge of the cot, the fur still clutched around me, staring at the dark grain of the wall as silence pressed in—thick, suffocating.
Even if I escaped tonight, I didn’t know where we were. No maps. No guide. Only endless water—and the knowledge that every choice I made now would cost me.
I could feel myself adapting. My fear was already turning into strategy, my rage into silence—because panic wouldn’t save Alaric. Panic wouldn’t save me.
35
Nerina
Ymirskald
Early this morning, Veyrion unlocked my door as the ship creaked and groaned, slicing through ice-thickened waters. No explanation—just the bolt sliding free and one glance that said everything:You wouldn’t be stupid enough to jump.
He was right. One look at the black, ice-laced sea killed any notion of escape. Even I wasn’t reckless enough to hurl myself into water that would seize my lungs before I could recover.
Snow dusted the deck in fine patterns, settling into seams like sugar over a grave. There were no seabirds out here. No brine. No rot. Only the hush of a world untouched by time. The cold here didn’t numb—it claimed. Slow and unrelenting, it sank past skin and muscle, settled into bone until it felt permanent.
Ymirskald.
The name felt heavier here, like it didn’t belong to a place so much as to something older—something sentient.
Veyrion stood beside me at the bow, one hand resting on the rail. Layered in leather and thick cloth, his fur-lined cloak thrown back over one shoulder as though the cold were nothing more than a mild breeze. Meanwhile, I shivered beneath my heavy coat, the chill creeping in despite the layers.
It made him look less like a man visiting home… and more like a creaturemadeof it.
For a moment, he only watched the horizon. Then he spoke, his voice lower than the wind but threaded with something I hadn’t expected. “Home.”
The word almost vanished, but I felt it more than I heard it—like the mountains themselves had spoken through him.
The fjord narrowed ahead—its walls climbing into sheer cliffs. The harbor lay cradled between. Waterfalls hung frozen mid-cascade, glittering like molten silver beneath a pale sun. Beyond them, mountains rose impossibly high—snow-heavy peaks glowing blue against the sky.
As we entered, the water smoothed into dark glass, broken by mirrored shapes of dragon-prowed ships tethered along the docks. Smoke curled from squat wooden buildings, their roofs heavy with snow, the air thick with pine resin, wood-smoke, and roasting meat.
The village climbed the mountainside in tiers: sharp-roofed houses braced against snow, linked by narrow stairways cut straight into rock and ice. High above it all loomed a massive statue—a horned figure with a spear raised toward the sky, its stone skin silvered with frost. Ravens circled the monument, cawing like heralds announcing our arrival to a land that had already decided whether we belonged.
Everything here was built to endure—to outlast winter, to meet it head-on and dare it to come harder.
Ymirskald was beautiful. There was no denying that. But it was a dangerous kind of beauty—the kind that wrapped its claws in velvet and smiled while it watched you bleed.
I understood why he loved it. I understood how easily it could swallow you whole.
Every creak of the ship settling into harbor, was another second slipping away—another step closer to a vow I didn’t want and a future I didn’t trust.
I thought of dinner. Of Veyrion’s voice—knives wrapped in silk. I hated that his words still echoed. I hated more that they fit too neatly into the jagged spaces of doubt I’d tried to ignore.
I wanted to disbelieve him. Stars, I wanted it more than air. But the image wouldn’t leave me—the look on Alaric’s face whenVeyrion boarded the Black Marrow. Like he’d seen a ghost. Like something buried had clawed up from the depths, dripping and grinning, ready to drag him under. And now Veyrion had planted something worse: a picture I couldn’t unsee. Alaric’s hands slick with blood. Jaw set in grim resolve. Eyes flat and cold. A version of him that could have done what Veyrion described—things that would make my mother’s curse not just justified, but merciful.
The image felt wrong. Alaric was cruel when cornered. Ruthless when necessary. But he revered the sea. He bled for it. He would never desecrate it for sport.
And beneath it all was Veyrion’s offer—sitting between us like a drawn blade, gleaming in cold light. Men like him didn’t deal in generosity. Every gift was a chain in disguise. I didn’t trust him—not his words, not his smile, not the strange glint in his eyes when he looked at me like I was something rare and precious. What terrified me wasn’t that he wanted to cage me. It was that he truly believed he was setting me free.
And yet… the hunger for truth still whispered. It told me maybe I could take what I needed from him before the trap snapped shut. Maybe I could stand beside him and not be pulled under. A treacherous part of me wanted to walk into the wolves’ den with the wolf, because predators protected their own.
I was walking into a land where gods once bled and giants still whispered, to be judged by Elders who might know more about me than I did.
A trial without knowing the crime.
Snow kept falling, quiet as ash. It caught in my hair and along the folds of my cloak, melting against my warmth before it could settle. Ymirskald rose around me in white and silver, so beautiful it left an ache behind my ribs.
