My features reforged into something new. Something harder. Something sharper. Something my father had sown into my blood every day of my life, but that I’d never expected to pulse with life.
Instead of an eldest daughter, a warrior looked back at me. A Viking chieftain. Anheir.
My heart beat rapidly, fighting to escape my rib cage, until it finally slowed, hammering a steady rhythm against my chest, and our people’s commandments intertwined in a seamless melody in my mind.
Duty. Honor. Legacy.
When I released a harsh breath, the air came out as a white cloud, and I adjusted the leather band across my forehead, ensuring my rust-colored hair was fastened properly, falling straight down my back, before forcing my stiff legs to straighten. As I rose, Viljan took a step back, maintaining the distance my parents had enforced.
Tears blinded me when my father’s voice echoed in my mind.
We all have a legacy to carry. Yours is to trade your hand for our survival. As my eldest daughter, you do not bring a man to your bed—you bring a shield for your people to our hearth.
Viljan’s duty had been to protect me until that moment, even if he had to guard me with the edge of his own blade between us. My father believed that a heart warmed by affection was a shield softened—hence why Viljan never came closer than five feet.
“What do you want to do?” Viljan asked in his hoarse voice.
Pushing back my shoulders, I squinted against the sun’s rays flickering over our small village, painting the mountains behind it in yellow and orange, bouncing off the snow-covered tops. My lungs filled with chill northern air, the taste of salt and pine and ash coating my tongue until my chest heaved with the breath of an entire people.
While I was still an eldest daughter, I had a new wyrd now.
“I will do what my father would have. Fight for our people,” I replied.
A flicker of pride filled his blue eyes. “Your mother asked me to talk you out of it.”
I exhaled through my nose. My mother rarely agreed with anything I wished to do. I didn’t doubt she’d find a way to pick faults with this plan as well. But in the days I’d sat here by the water, I’d realized there was no other option.
“She doesn’t think I’ll survive.”
It wasn’t a question, but Viljan’s silence was answer enough.
“The boat is ready?” I asked, blinking away any final wetness from my eyes.
“Whenever you are,” he replied quietly, his face angling to the black stone beneath our boots.
A sense of cold settled into my bones, then buried itself deeper, becoming one with my soul. Viljan knew as well as I did that it was unlikely either of us would return home. “Is my mother by the longhouse?”
“Yes. She’s with your siblings.”
Good. That was good. Silva and Hera would be all right. Mymother might not be kind, but she was strong, and she’d take care of them if I proved her right. She’d find a way to flee—perhaps hide out in one of the nations we’d still not managed to anchor beneath our banners.
“Don’t,” Viljan ordered. “Don’t think like that. We’ll figure this out.”
My lips shook when I forced them to curl. “You’re coming with me?”
Viljan waved a leather bag that I guessed was stuffed with clothing and weapons. “Your father assigned me to protect you until my dying breath—until my body is but blackened ash trickling across the Northern Sea. Where you go, I go.”
It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep the pressure in my chest at bay when Viljan slid my sword and shield across the stone, his eyes moving pointedly to the steel when I didn’t move fast enough. I cleared my throat as I traced the rune on the hilt before strapping the decorated blade to my back. Viljan gestured to my forehead, and one side of my mouth lifted as I placed a stray crimson braid behind my ear.
“I’m glad you’re coming,” I said as we started walking back to the village. “I’ll need you.”
Iwouldneed his axe to survive the king’s Hird—the war academy Lika and my father had been traveling to. There, the chiefs’ heirs and their iron-bound—the men and women bonded to each heir with a divine tether of blood—were fostered in combat, law, and loyalty, and the gods gifted us our runes if they found us worthy.
I touched the hilt of my sword again, my stomach turning. The Hird was nicknamed Fenrir’s Pit, after the gods’ bonded beast, for the ruthlessness with which the heirs and their inner circles were trained to further our iron grip on the world.
And I was going into it magicless.
The cliffs gave way to grass. I swept my hands over the yellow-and-green blades as they caressed my leather-clad legs, savoring the view of thick thatched roofs and familiar gray stone housesspreading out before me. As my boots bit into the gravel my siblings and I had helped the village lay to ease the transport of goods from the harbor, all noises I’d known in my twenty-two years in this village were absent.
