One
For seven nights our ships had been quiet.
No song of old times, no whisper of our people’s secrets, not even a distant thud of iron or echo of war vibrated through the timber. It was dusk when the fleet fell silent, and by the gray of morning the magic in my veins had waned.
Sitting in my favorite spot, atop the slick onyx cliffs overlooking the Northern Sea, I pressed my palm against the rune for strength that was carved into the skin above my heart. Each day it had faded. By now, it was merely a faint outline on my skin—a shallow scar where the oath made by my father to Odin had once been etched into my flesh.
Footsteps crunched against stone, and the silence I would never get used to pressed down like a shield, suffocating the pained sound that wished to leave me, before it could weave up my throat. I slashed my hands through the cool water, distorting my guard’s face when it appeared over my shoulder, erasing his hard blue eyes and the coiled muscle in his jaw as if that would stop the words he would speak.
Viljan’s brown braids clattered against his salt-stained leathers like rain on a calm surface when he came to a halt, and cold clawedits way down my back, then seeped across my skin until my entire body vibrated.
I couldn’t stand it.
“Both dead?” I demanded.
My question sounded as empty as I felt, and I spread my hands across the cold stone, for the first time noticing the wetness seeping through my trousers where my knees pressed into the cliffs.
“Yes.” Viljan hovered the customary five feet away as he shook his head so fiercely that drops from the river splattered onto my face. “I’m sorry, Elvara. Your father was found first.” He took a deep breath. “Your brother was a little ways away. There was an axe in his back.”
A nod was all I could offer. The aching lump in my throat silenced me like the ships floating in the harbor to our right.
“Your father… They’d stabbed through his rune with his own sword.” Viljan twisted his hands, the anger rolling off him as harsh and unforgiving as the stone biting into my bones. “They knew they couldn’t overpower them both without taking away our strength.”
Bile burned the back of my mouth as I remembered my father placing his hand over the rune on my chest—the one that was identical to his own, exactly like everyone else’s in our village—while kissing my temple. It was our personal goodbye, our see-you-after-the-wind-has-filled-our-sails, our the-world-is-vast-but-you’re-always-with-me, our I’ll-always-return.
“They know how our magic works,” I said, hoarsely.
When Viljan averted his gaze, urgency rumbled in the air like thunder. The past week I’d tried to convince myself that it was a whim of the Wyrd—that the divine powers that had made my father’s people the strongest Vikings in our realm would return when he did.
My hand flew to my chest again when a dull ache radiated from the dead rune. Only the faint beat of my own heart thudded there—not the pulsating power I’d known my entire life, the onemy father had been gifted by the gods because of his courage and bravery and honor.
“They knew that if they killed him, we wouldn’t be a threat anymore,” I continued, staring unseeing over the ghostly fleet of ships. “What if they find our village? What if they come here?”
Viljan still wouldn’t look at me.
I drew a trembling breath. On King Gustief’s orders we’d been expanding our territories wide and far, and more brutally than usual over the past warm seasons.
With divine strength running through our veins, no army could hold us, and no sea was too vast to tame. But with my father in Valhalla, my people had no magic. The rune carved over my heart made us stronger, faster, and more agile than the people we’d conquered only if the one who’d earned it from the gods breathed northern air.
Without it, we had no advantage.
“Does anyone else know?” I asked sharply. “Where did you find them?”
“No.” My guard’s throat bobbed. “They hadn’t made it far. They were still in Oenskan.”
“Good.” I cleared my throat. “We need to keep it that way. If any of the other chieftains find out…”
“I know,” Viljan said. “I have already sent every guard we could spare to patrol our borders. No enemy and no Viking shall enter.”
I pressed my palms against the stone until sharp edges cut into my skin.
That we were left both without a chief and without magic was dangerous not only because of the foreign nations who had started to retaliate against our own islands but because of the other Viking clans. If they found out, a new chief would seize our land tomorrow. Those with my father’s blood would be executed, and our people would become thralls—servants and slaves—under the new chieftain’s rule.
The king would claim the gods had forsaken my father—thatour lineage was cursed to end so another could begin. In our world, blood alone didn’t grant the right to rule, and a chief’s children could climb his seat only if the gods approved it. That’s why Lika and my father had been traveling. Divine tethers frayed with age, and the weight of our kingdom was shifting onto the shoulders of the next generation of Vikings. The burden of bleeding for a new rune that would ensure the magic of our people fell to the eldest children of each of the five chieftains—the heirs.
Now that person was me.
My reflection fractured as a fish disturbed the surface. When the water calmed again, the pine green in my eyes shone like the pale sun behind my back, and something inside me broke so savagely that it felt like treachery that Skagerik didn’t shudder to a halt beneath my boots. But I refused to blink—refused to set free the tears that threatened to spill over—and as the seconds passed, the crimson-haired ghost in the water shed my likeness, the ripples peeling away any childish innocence I had left.
