Page 35

Over his shoulder, I gaped at the people taking positions, snatching shields, arming their strong, lithe bodies for a damn war.

A woman stepped into view; the corner of her mouth was tilted in a knowing smirk. Silver braids wrapped around her head in a crown. She was dressed in a simple woolen gown with satchels strapped over her shoulders and pig-skin pouches tethered to her belt.

Runes were inked across her long fingers, and bone chips draped around her neck. Old-world seer attire.

Two more women came to her side; one was half a head shorter with a touch of sea blue to her hair, another with stern braids down the center of her skull, but all three had the same eerily pale eyes, like a frost storm.

“F-F-Forbi? Oviss? Danna?”

The taller of the three women stepped forward. She paused at Silas, and nearly caused him to stumble backward when she patted the spot over his heart. He shoved her hand away and shuddered.

Turns of solitude, no doubt touch from others burdened him. Well, touch other than mine.

After a few breaths, she ignored him and cupped my cheeks. “This is the part where she rises.”

Damn the hells. Where were the cracks in their faces? The wiry hairs from their moles? Where were the hunches to their spines? These women were fierce, formidable, and looked mere turns older than me.

Danna beamed and took my face next. “This is the part where captives are free.”

I recoiled against Silas’s side when the women strode past us and set out rune stones, chanting spell casts for protection and strength. Rave warriors spread out like a beautiful pestilence. From alleyways, rooftops, from the stone parapet walls, warriors bloomed and marked positions. As far as I could see, all along the shore, warriors stood at the ready.

Bleeding. Gods. We had an army.

“Blades ready!” Olaf roared, one fist raised near the shore. Every Rave lifted their swords the same as Olaf. At the aleman’s cry, every warrior near the water’s edge shouted a battle cry I’d long forgotten, one of old words. One shouted under loyalty for the father robbed from me.

Berjast enda.Until the end.

In a furious wave across the line of warriors, sword points rammed into the pebbled sand.

A slow burn, like embers catching flame, began in my fingers. The heat of it scorched and ravaged my veins, spreading like molten ore through my gut, my limbs, until it reached my chest. I burned with a new sort of power.

“Shield, Princess.” Olaf looked to me.

Silas dipped his covered face alongside my cheek. “Sing with me, Little Rose.”

I pressed a hand to my heart, the skin warm to the touch. I did not have my quill, nor my ink, but I had the words. I could write them. I dropped to the mud and used my finger to carve a simple lyric, a few words. Each symbol brought music to my head, the sweet, gentle voice in the shadows.

My body trembled with the flow of heated seidr in my veins. Soon enough I’d be spewing magic from my pores if I did not release it soon. I had the words written, and had no way to burn them.

Sing with me.

I closed my eyes when his voice bloomed from my heart to my mind. A thought connected with my own. I leaned over the mud-carved words—a simple command to shield, to ignite the true power of the first kingdom.

What it would unravel, I didn’t know, but the rightness of it burrowed deep in my belly like churning waves.

My palms burned, they ached. I slammed both palms over the muddy symbols. Heat crackled beneath. Brilliant, burning orange ignited along the divots of my symbols, flaring for a few breaths before smoldering and taking the symbols away.

The low, somber voice heightened in my mind, my heart. As though his sound seeped into my skin, there was something about the tune that ignited a strength I’d never truly embraced. My voice joined in, and I felt as though I’d fallen back into a basin of warm water. Sound muffled but for the song in my heart.

It lasted for a mere moment, but when the song ended, something dreadful happened within me.

When I looked back at my Whisper, heat from my blood pooled in my belly, dripping even lower until I clenched my thighs tightly. Gods, no. Absolutely, unequivocally, no. What had I told my Raven Queen? The bleeding instant one of those lust-crazed royals leapt into bed, damn wars began.

I would rather go the rest of my life without risking the necks of everyone I loved simply because my masked phantom all at once looked like a morsel, one I wanted to taste over every surface of my tongue.

The words, the connection, something had awakened a fire in my body, and I could not control it.

If the pulse to his jaw, the rapid rise and fall of his chest, were any clue—he felt the same. I reeled through every reason touching him would be a disastrous decision until the shock of need and desire faded.