The king walked toward where tall white gates towered all the way up to the sky, the air around them speckled with what looked like large snowflakes drifting up and down, playing with each other.
“The souls of fylgja,” I whispered as I got my feet to start moving again.
“What did you say?” Darcke asked.
“Fylgja.” I gestured to the white specks. “Those are spirits that take the bodies of animals to protect us when we need them. At least so our stories say.”
Darcke looked at me strangely. “I can’t see anything.”
I pointed again, my stomach clenching. “They’re right there.”
“There’s nothing there,” Darcke replied. “Only air.”
“Only the ones who will pass through the doors can see them,” the king said. “Like a spell, they show you a different reflection only youcan interpret.”
“Don’t accuse the gods of spells,” the shaman said, far too sharply for someone speaking to their monarch.
But the king didn’t turn, his steps as purposeful as they’d been before.
“He’s so proud of his charms,” Darcke snarled into my ear. “Doesn’t want to share them even with his beloved gods.”
My hand twitched, wishing to reach for the noose I couldn’t see around his neck. When Darcke’s eyes followed, I pressed my lips together not to speak my vow that the shaman’s work would soon fade like the mist that shrouded this pathway.
A tension layered across the group, and my pulse thrummed faster for every step I took closer to those towering doors.
There was an anticipation in the strange air. As Ivren moved closer to Geord, Rakkel also falling in line behind them while Vero waited for me, it hung heavier.
Ivren turned his head over his shoulder when we were perhaps twenty feet away from the gates. “Be ready,” he mouthed, and I felt as if my body might lift from the ground when Vero’s hand brushed mine.
The king halted, spinning around until he faced us.
“The gods will call you one by one into those halls. If you’re offered their grace, you walk out with a rune that will power your section at the Hird and, when you ascend your parents’ thrones, your people.” Gustief adjusted his robe. “If not, safe travels to the next realm.” He turned my way, and I wasn’t sure why I felt like he was addressing me when he added, “Perhaps we’ll meet again in another life.”
A soft voice broke in from behind me. “Hopefully not for a very long time,king.”
My heart went to stone in my chest when I spun to face my mother.
Forty-Seven
“What are you doing here?” I asked as she pulled herself up from the water.
She wasn’t alone. Ivren’s mother followed. Then Adrion’s father. Rakkel’s mother. Warriors I’d never seen but who must be their iron-bound, for how they hovered behind their chiefs.
Seindra Sweengard gave me a smile. “You didn’t think I’d leave the fate of our people—the fate of mychildren—in your hands?”
An eerie silence stretched out across the path, and I felt Darcke’s heart pound along our tether, but something was holding him back—that leash that no one could see but that was definitely there, tightening.
“What is this?” Vero asked, her head whipping back and forth from the king, who remained standing leisurely by the shaman, to his men, who stood frozen behind us.
“I believe some would call it a coup,” my mother replied.
In the next moment the chiefs’ iron-bound moved.
Two came up before me, and I reacted instinctively, stepping in front of Torden and Darcke with my sword lifted, forcing them to a stop.
Borje and two others of the king’s warriors were being drivenbackward, several men using their axes to keep them away from the rest of us. The king and the shaman had three men protecting them, their shoulders locking against each other as they held the line.
“Move aside, Elvara,” my mother demanded when two more iron-bound came up before me.
