Page 15

15

FATE

W e exit Baldur’s home and find ourselves back in the vale. This time, however, we’re not headed down towards the little river in the tight valley, but up towards the towering cliffs that rise sharply behind the house.

As we ascend a steep path, I see it’s been well cared for, with tight-fitted white granite stones that form a staircase. Heading up the eastern face of the cliff, we come to a spot that’s been built up like a retaining wall, holding in a deep pool of steaming water that issues right out of the rock.

The path ends and Baldur shucks his boots, stripping his leather pants away to hang them up beneath an ornately carved awning of white birchwood. I’m already naked, so I just straddle the stone wall of the steaming pool and head in.

Sinking down to find the water is just right.

Pale blue and slightly milky, thanks to the natural minerals in the volcanic hot springs, the steaming water hides my nakedness now as I find a perfectly placed shelf underneath the surface to sit my ass.

It leaves me able to fold my arms on the rock wall, gazing out over the ravine to where I can see the sunset lowering down in the western sky. It’s haunting and beautiful, perfect, as Baldur steps in to settle beside me.

He doesn’t sit too close, as I feel a sudden urge in him to reach out and touch me. He smoothes it calmly back, keeping his inner drake well away from mate-tasting me.

Until we can get to know each other better.

“I suppose we shouldn’t hold back so hard. If it’s already a done deal that we’ll be mates.” I glance at him. His dark blue eyes are unfathomable as he watches me, and I get nothing now from his inner drake.

Though I can still feel it burning deep inside him.

“It’s not a done deal, not by a long shot,” he says mysteriously now as he watches me.

And I already know what he’s talking about.

“Your sister saw a vision of us being together, but we get to choose our fate.” I regard him, feeling strangely elated about having such a calm conversation about all this in such a beautiful place.

Feeling safe with the man sitting beside me, though I don’t know him at all yet.

“You have questions about me,” Baldur says now as he nods. “I get it. I would have a lot more questions, too, if I hadn’t been watching your rise and fall as Hog Skjaldm?r of our people all these years. Curious about the one who would come to me.”

“You’ve been watching me?” I frown now.

“Not spying on you psychically, no. I do not have that ability.” He chuckles, though his dark blue eyes are piercing in the lowering light. “Just following the clan hubbub and hearsay concerning you for several years now. Whether you like it or not, Rikyava Andersen, you are a very public figure in our Lineage… and a unique persona, if I may say so.”

“Unique, how?” I have to ask, as I watch him now, curious.

“A highborn royal drakaina, rising like a meteor in her power, so young.” His blue eyes pierce me, seeing things unknown. “Parents gone, immediate family gone, adopted by the King and by one of the strongest High Matriarchs the Black Dragon Knights have seen in years… though they aren’t the True Knights, not at all.”

“You’re aware of the True and False Knights?” I ask now, blinking in surprise.

“I am.” He nods, calm as he continues. “Chosen as Maryse’s successor, you were ostracized after your sister’s coup on the palace. Living in exile, you shine like a star for the Red Letter Hotel Paris now, instead of for your King or the Knights, one of the best Guard Captains the Hotel has ever had. You put up a vicious battle against your Royal Dragon friends’ enemy, Hunter, when they needed you.” Baldur’s gaze pierces me to the quick. “You’re loyal to the end to your friends, against certain death. Now you are similarly loyal to your King and people, and to your drakes, against a fate worse than death.”

“You make it sound so easy.” I chuckle, though I’m alert as I listen.

“You make it look easy,” Baldur says, “when it’s most assuredly not.”

“No, it’s not.” I sigh now, as I’m reminded of everything we’re up against, and how impossible it all seems. Looking down at my hands, I sluice them through the milky water. “I don’t mean to drag you into this. If you don’t want to be a part of it… I understand.”

“I was here for it all before you were even born,” Baldur says now, and something in his tone makes me look up. Though he watches me, a haunted look has taken him; I can’t even begin to fathom his thoughts as he stares into me, beyond me, then regathers himself.

He’s not a Bloodwalker, but it’s a look Bloodwalkers get when they gaze beyond the Veil. It’s a there/not there look that Baldur’s had, like he has some ability to gaze into the Void of Ancestors and see what’s there.

I wonder now, with all his training and history as a shaman, if he can’t.

“My story goes way back.” He refocuses on me, and I realize he’s going to give me his full tale. “Over a thousand years ago, when I was just a youngling and my parents died in battle, my sister Hekla took over my care. You must understand that she was already a mature Bloodwalker by then, complete in her tremendous power. Though she was a Bloodwalker like the ancients, her power was unique; she took no drakes into a harem, but bound both sides of her dualistic magic into stability by the sigildric arts, with tattoos all over her body.”

“She bound her power with tattoos? With no mates?” My lips fall open and I let them.

Amazed yet again by our Icelandic blue drakaina.

“You have to understand, our bloodline has always been masters of the sigildric arts,” Baldur says now as he watches me, direct. “We are what is known as Sigilwrights in our Icelandic culture, and Hekla was a master of the craft. I was not a Bloodwalker like her, only a Blood Sage, but I learned at her feet all my life. From her, I became a shaman of our people, able to use my sigildric arts for a specific purpose—to see partway into the Void and change what I saw there. I couldn’t communicate with the Ancestors like she could, but I could use my power to heal people, change fates, and undo timelines that had been cursed… providing better ones for those I healed.”

My eyebrows rise. “I’ve never even heard of such a talent among our people as being able to change a person’s fate.”

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s not easy.” Baldur’s lips quirk as humor touches his eyes now. “Still. I learned from a master in all things Veil and Void. She noticed that strange talent in me, that I could alter a person’s fate by my special ability. I have since honed it all my life.”

“Making tinctures?” I smile at him, teasing.

“Art.” His gaze drills into me. “For a thousand years, I have honed my ability to make sigildric art, Rikyava, which can reach through the Veil into the Void, and change someone’s fate. I’ve given my everything to do this, sacrificing a life I might have had as a warrior or a palace healer for my King, both of which I had a vast talent for. But Hekla was firm about my fate when she raised me. She saw into the weft and weave of worlds, beyond the Veil, watching where my auric dragon came and went. She knew I would meet you in a thousand timelines and a thousand timelines more. That no matter how I might change my destiny, it would always come back to you: the Hog Skjaldm?r with a heart of gold, but with the blackest stain upon her bloodline. Even with all my vast ability, mine was an inescapable fate. And so Hekla counseled me to make the most of it, and to be ready to help you when you at last arrived.”

“So everything you’ve done in your life has been to prepare for meeting me?” My eyebrows practically shoot up off my face now.

“Not everything, no.” He chuckles as that sexy smile quirks his lips again and his blue eyes sparkle. “For two hundred years or so, I railed against what she was telling me, perfecting my sigildric art only to change my fate, over and over. Yet whenever I asked Hekla to scry into my future, always, she saw you. Whether I was a healer at the palace or a Captain of the Guard, or a nobody caught in battle the night your sister led her coup and died, always, we met. Always, I became your drake, one way or another. Through every lifetime that ever was and ever will be. It’s my fate.”

“Why don’t you hate me?” I breathe now, stunned by his admission and barely able to wrap my head around it.

“How could I?” His gaze softens as he looks me over, that wisp of smile touching his lips again. “At some point, when you realize your life has a destiny… you either embrace that destiny, or end it. I tried to kill myself in those early years, a few times. It never took. When my sister told me what a great purpose you and I would have together, to bring down the Black Dragon in glory or die trying… how could I not already love the ballsy, brave, incredible drakaina I knew I would meet, who would take on this task? The dream of any Blood Dragon, to go out fighting in such a blaze of glory as that…”

“So when you saw me at Mikkel and L?rke’s club that night, you knew,” I say now, fully aware of how bizarre all this is.

Though strangely, it feels sane.

“I didn’t.” Humor sparks in his eyes and he smiles again. “I had never seen you before. We had never crossed paths, and I never went to the palace while you were there to find out who you were. I was content to know that I would recognize you when I saw you, but I didn’t know what you would look like. And I had no idea we would have our first meeting that night at The Vault, when one glance from you speared me to my core… and gave me the most powerful magic I’ve dealt with yet. I painted it high into The Vault’s dome all night long.”

“My power gave you something that night?” I blink now.

“Deeply.” He holds my gaze, intent. “One look from you, and everything inside me lit up like I had never felt. Like pure, molten gold pouring through my veins, everything inside my Blood Magic leapt to you when we made eye contact that night.”

“I don’t recall your eyes being this color they are right now, that night… and you didn’t have any tattoos, either,” I say now, curious about the difference.

“I hide my tattoos with my magic when I am out and about, for they are sacred to me. As for my eyes… I felt them change when I mate-tasted you, and you, me. They changed to a fiery feel I haven’t had in ages, thanks to the connection we shared that night. I wanted to search for you, to follow you that night and claim you as mine… but I knew from Hekla that you had to come to me. And that night… you didn’t.”

“You must have felt awful.” I frown, trying to imagine feeling that way about someone, then knowing it wasn’t going to happen.

“But I did know it was going to happen.” That wisp of a smile haunts him again, lovely and intense. “I’ve always known. It was only a matter of time.”

“And then we’d become life-mates.” I say, frowning even more now than I was before.

So much of Baldur’s tale rings true, confirmed by what I’m feeling around him right now and by Aesa’s Truthstone going ballistic upon my chest, shining with a blazing light that we should be life-mates. Something else inside me, however, feels conflicted.

As if all the free will in my life was ripped away, some part of me wants to rebel from this fate that Baldur’s sister saw for my life, over and over. But something else feels soothed as I look at him, feeling how all this is so very right. What I don’t know is what his power can do.

And what it might give us, to fight the Black Dragon.

“It’s not a sure thing that we become life-mates.” Baldur sobers now as his gaze digs into mine. “Hekla saw it was our fate to meet, in every version of my life. What she did not see was whether we would for certain become bonded as one. Only that if we do, we have a chance at bringing down the Black Dragon. And if we don’t… the world will meet its end. Forever.”

“The world…?” Shock wallops me right in the gut at what Baldur’s saying. “Are you insinuating that if you and I don’t bond… that the Black Dragon will kill the entire world?”

“Every tree, leaf, and flower,” he says. “Hekla scried into the future ten thousand times, and ten thousand times more, concerning the Black Dragon. For she was part of the True Knights, central to their measures to prevent the Black Dragon’s future rise, if they could. In every timeline, she saw an unavoidable fate; that someone you knew personally would resurrect the Dragon of All Souls. The young Hog Skjaldm?r Bloodwalker of this era would battle it with all her drakes at her side, but she would lose if I was not among them. The earth would fall to the demon… and not just all Blood Dragons, but all souls everywhere. It would be the end.”

I breathe hard now as I take it all in, overwhelmed as a sudden panic grips my heart. Both my inner dragons gnash their teeth inside my chest, as I understand that we’re not just up against the fate of all Blood Dragondom if the Black Dragon’s terrible power is fully unleashed.

But the fate of the entire world, like the Archangels feared—inescapable.

“And if we do bond?” I ask him now, breathless, like I’ve just been sucker-punched.

“Fortune is not guaranteed.” Baldur’s voice is quiet as he watches me. “But if we do bond, if I become one of your drakes and fight at your side against the Black Dragon… we have a chance. In just seven out of ten th ousand Bloodwalkings that Hekla undertook to learn about our fate and the Black Dragon, she saw our success.”

“Seven out of ten thousand ?!” I whisper now, horrified as I stare at him. “That’s like a… less than a point-one chance of success!”

“It is.” He nods as he watches me. “Why do you think I spent my last eight hundred years doing everything I could to hone the skills I know from Hekla’s scrying that would most increase our chance of success? Those are terrible odds, Rikyava. It was why Hekla taught me the sigildric arts so intently, to make me a master of them. She went to Riksfold alone because she saw a chance of increasing our odds if she could prevent the deaths that some small, ferocious drakaina was about to commit upon the battlefield; it’s why she bound me against my will from going with her. Because even a less than point-one chance of success against the Black Dragon, small as it may seem… is a chance we have to take.”

“Because if we don’t, it devours the entire world into its endless night.” I breathe now, for the first time in my life, truly terrified about what we’re up against.

As both my inner dragons gnash their teeth and wail deep inside me, I see Baldur feel it. He reaches out through the water—taking up my hand and clasping it.

“I have been waiting for you my entire life,” Baldur says now as he watches me, intense. “I have been channeling all my Blood Sage passion into my art for ages—and now my sigildric art is the best, anywhere, able to not just heal but also to change a dragon’s fate. I have been harnessing my magic this entire time, waiting for the right one to come; waiting for you. I can feel how strong your other drakes are already: one is blistering rage for you, one is renegade wrath. One is darkest of the dark, as compared to your brightest of the bright, a balance of opposites all must possess. I am none of these things: I am pure power, contained. I will unleash my power for you, drakaina, and become a part of your harem… all you have to do is ask.”

“Do I dare ask?” I say now, as I ponder the immensity of this decision .

“Dare,” he says as he stares me down hard. “Use me, take me; bond me and join my abilities to your Bloodbond and your flesh. I may not be a perfect drake, but I have what you need, Rikyava. And if my thousand years of life are to have any meaning at all, I would that they be this: to be instrumental for you in banishing this terror of the ancients to its true death, at last. If not… what else have I lived for? And what might my purpose now be?”

I see it, as we come to it at last. I see the terrible, empty look that takes Baldur’s visage as he faces his true fate: that his life may not have any meaning at all if I reject him.

It’s far more pressure than I’ve ever had about whether to bond a drake. Now, it’s not just someone’s heart, or their goodness, or their humanity on the line if I refuse to do this. It’s their very life’s purpose, the purpose of their soul, that will shrivel up and die if I reject Baldur as my mate.

I swallow hard as I stare into his eyes and feel his terrified hope.

That I might take him as a mate.

Or that I might seal his darkest fate.