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I was wrong about it all. She refused to see through her own fears.

The shadowed horizon in the distant seas seemed to loom closer, a constant reminder foreign shores had survived wars and battles. Long ago, it should’ve been our turn to face our fate, but we remained locked in nothingness.

Yet, something was coming. A panic, a tension, grew relentless in my chest. It had become a constant weight and burden that these quiet lands would not remain.

With the bloody moon overhead, his darkness was here, returned to cause havoc and pain. Gods, was it too late? Had we waited too long to find the bond lost so long ago? By my sides, my hands tightened into fists.

He was coming, but I had not endured everything to watch him take her away.

“I won’t!” I pointed a finger at the shadows in the corner. They never responded. With an arrogant smirk, I pulled away from the corner and returned to the window. “I won’t watch it. I won’t.”

Perhaps she’d resist when I destroyed her false sense of solace. I didn’t care. Not anymore. She wouldn’t have a choice. Waiting. Wanting. Watching. I was finished with it all. I could not take another moment of the darkness flowing like a slow drip through my blood. It was time for freedom.

Let me be your darkness, but let me be yours. Anywhere she went, I now planned to go. Damn the Norns. Damn fate. I would not go another turn, not another damn moment waiting, wanting, and watching.

Do you know what it’s like, Little Rose?

There was no time to wait. Not anymore. The truth was in the sky—we were about to watch our world burn.

Chapter2

The First Knight

South Fjord—Kingdom of Etta

The hairon the back of my neck lifted, but I made no mention of it, merely sat a bit straighter on my horse. I’d fought long enough not to be reckless and brush it away, but I wasn’t about to sound an alarm for shadows.

Folk tunes from young voices added a touch of levity to the fjord’s empty shores. I glanced over my shoulder, grinning.

Aesir tried to sing a higher tune alongside Princess Laila. The gods hadn’t blessed my boy with musical talent like Herja’s daughter, and his maturing voice cracked in a disastrous sort of screech, like a dying pheasant.

Mattis had joined on the patrol and kicked at my boy’s boot, laughing, while Stieg mocked him, to see the tips of my son’s ears turn pink.

“Horrid,” Laila said, ruffling Aesir’s pale hair. An official archer in the Ettan army like her mother, Laila was one of the few who could taunt my boy without him lashing out. Kari thought it was due to Aesir’s glassy eyes whenever he looked upon the princess.

Boyish dreams. He’d only turned thirteen, and Laila was already set to vow with Njord, a young warrior with a talent for flinging knives.

The son of an aleman and a princess would be vowed before the frosts. This was the Etta I’d always wanted, one where we were people first, and titles came second. Except when it came to bleeding Ari. Bastard was a damn king again, and after all these turns, he still took great pleasure in reminding me.

I carried his latest missive in the inner folds of my tunic. We’d stopped the patrol for post retrieval at the docks near the old quarries. Mattis and Stieg had a laugh at my expense when they saw the seal of the royals in the fae isles.

Saga had promised she’d have one made. I’d always thought we’d be the grandest of friends, but there she was, siding with her damn husband and allowing him to make horridly regal seals.

A clock toll ago, I’d been plotting to woo the aggravating Southern king in grand tales of my heroics to bring Ari down a notch or two, but the prickle of unease on my neck had chased away all bright thoughts.

Now, I was left with sharper attention and a heaviness in my gut.

I laughed a great deal, but I’d been born into the household of a First Knight. Respect for instincts and the blade had been whittled into the marrow of my bones from my earliest moments.

As we rode, I kept checking the tricky burn towers arranged every hundred paces along the shoreline. The other kingdoms had the same. Took us the better part of four turns to get the warning flare right. Niklas about keeled over from the countless revisions to his potent elixir, but we’d tested the signal until we knew it was sound.

With the kingdoms separated as they were, we needed to devise a way to get word swiftly to one another if that battle lord bastard ever returned.

Once lit, the torches on the tower burned in blue flames. Through Niklas’s elixirs set to trigger at the burn, the flame traveled along our towers, the seas, then would light the towers in the East with red flames, and the South with green. The West would burn black on a single torch nearest Calista’s tenement building.

The Mad King of the West had never responded to our outreach after the battles of the isles. Truth be told, we didn’t think much of the royals in Calista’s tattered kingdom, other than her.

If the king of the broken West wanted to live apart, we’d see our feral little storyteller was warned separate from him.