Page 28 of The Last Valkyrie (Vikingrune Academy #4)

Chapter 28

Ravinica

TEARS DRIPPED DOWN my cheeks, falling onto Damon’s corpse. I was back in the harsh reality of Midgard, of my smoldering village of Selby, with my mates standing in a circle around my kneeling form.

The cries of the town had subdued. The fires had been put out, leaving only a smoky layer of ashen death in its wake. My brother’s body was cold as I closed his fear-stricken eyes a final time.

A great sob rolled through me, sputtering out in a heave. I hugged Damon to my chest, trying to hold him close, before setting him down. The ragged hole in his chest showed me that Odin was right—I was foolish for even trying to bring him to Valhalla to save.

Hands fell on my shoulder, soft and encouraging. My wings were gone, vanishing after my stint through the gateway portal I accessed with my mind.

“Ravinica?” Grim asked. “Are you with us, love?”

I nodded glumly, looking over my shoulder at him before standing. He wrapped me in a huge hug, protecting me with his size, and I noticed blood dripping from his arm where he had been sliced by a dark elf.

“You’re wounded,” I said.

“Nothing compared to your wounds, little sneak. I am so sorry.” Patting my head, he rested my cheek against his chest while I cried softly, my body shaking.

It was only then, looking out through blurry eyes, that I recognized the devastation outside my family’s longhouse.

Thane Canute stood stoically over the dead body of Gothi Sigmund like a statue, showing a ripple of anger on his flat face.

In another corner not far off, Hallan lay in a pile of his own guts, looked after by no one.

My entire family had been decimated over a single dinner.

Stepfather, dead.

Younger brother, dead.

Older brother, run off with the dark elves.

Mother, kidnapped.

Kidnapped by the man I once called a tutor and foster father.

My entire world, everything I had known before Vikingrune Academy, was crumbling before my eyes. I couldn’t fight back against the weight of sadness and helplessness that washed over me. It was too great a burden, too overwhelming.

All I could do was look to my mates to try and maintain some semblance of sanity. With my chin trembling, I took in their handsome faces, dirtied and bloodied from battle.

No one would leave this night unscathed. Death had come close to Arne with his sister, close to Magnus with Kelvar’s near-murder, close to Sven with his brother.

Now it had come for me, in all its twisted, macabre glory.

How did we not see it? How were we so unprepared? I didn’t even know what to think of Swordbaron Korvan and what he had become—what he had been all along. How did a shapeshifting dragonkin dark elf even get into Midgard? I vaguely wondered. The wards have only fallen recently, letting in portals from other realms, and yet he was watching me for decades !

The answer came a moment later, another punch to my chest.

He was here all along. He didn’t arrive . . .

He never left.

Korvan must have been a holdover from the Taldan Wars, or the ilk of some nefarious Dokkalfar—from my paternal bloodline dating back a thousand years to Elayina’s sister, Syndriel, and the dragonkin Azerot the Wrathseeker. His own Dokkalfar ancestors must have eluded capture and managed to make lives in Midgard, plotting their revenge, biding their time while stealing the skin from other folk.

Turned out I wasn’t the last dragonkin after all.

If all of that was true, then Korvan—or whoever he truly was—had to be even more powerful and ancient than I realized. A true threat to our survival. Someone who could destroy Vikingrune and Midgard as a whole if we didn’t stop him.

He had my mother captive, and the gods only knew what he would be doing to her.

I cursed myself for being weak and cowardly. For not being able to stop him. For allowing Grim to pull me back, even if I knew he was right, deep in my heart, and that it would have only led to my death or some sort of mindshaped control over me.

We had been looking for a boogeyman this entire time: Who controlled the draug, who led the jotnar to our doorstep, who partnered with the Dokkalfar and showed them into the Isle?

Now we had found our man.

“V-Vini?” a voice chirped, scared and lonely.

I spun away from Grim, the familiarity of the voice making me jolt.

Anna stood on the edge of the clearing, tears running tracks down her muddy face. Her golden hair was grungy, blackened by soot and ash.

My old childhood friend held an empty bucket in her hand, and the irony of it brought new tears to my eyes. There had been a time, shortly before I left for Vikingrune, when Anna and I had gone to draw water together from a well. We had joked, teased, and laughed as we skipped our way back home, talking about men in her life and what I would do once I was accepted to the academy.

A simpler time, though I considered it a hellscape back then.

Now she held the same bucket. But it hadn’t been used to quench her family’s thirst. It had undoubtedly been used to help put out a fire—perhaps one that razed her family’s longhouse to the ground.

And it’s all my fault for bringing the destruction here, following me like a specter on a ghost trail. No matter where I went, I couldn’t escape devastation and death.

“Anna,” I croaked, rushing to her.

We embraced fiercely, and she sobbed in my arms, breaking. She seemed so small and frail now. She always had been a slight woman, yet I had become muscular and stalwart in my time away, while she had seemed to waste away.

“I’m so, so sorry,” I told her, taking her to arm’s length.

“What’s . . . what’s happening, Vini? What’s going to happen?”

I brushed tears from her eyes with my thumb. “I’m afraid I don’t know, hun. I just . . . don’t know.”

I wouldn’t lie to her. She didn’t need to know the gritty details of everything transpiring on the Isle. I wished I could have given her some solace, some recognition that I had things in hand. But I was just as lost as she was.

“Who are these men?” she asked me, motioning with her chin over my shoulder.

I gave her a sad smile, though it didn’t reach my eyes. “I took your advice, Anna. I found me some men worth fighting for. Men who fight for me .”

Sniffling, Anna nodded and gave me an equally sad smile.

“Your family?” I asked. “How do they fare?”

“We’re all alive. Most the villagers are. Klein took a sword in the neck and died protecting his daughter and grandson. Old curmudgeon went out the way he wanted, in battle. Another family was crushed when their burning longhouse fell on them in their sleep. Better than dying from fire, I think.”

My heart was so damned heavy, I didn’t know if it would ever fully repair. This was too much grief for me to handle, and I’d never been good at handling it anyway.

“Screw my family, Vini, what in Hel is going on with yours?!” Anna’s gaze drifted over to my stepfather’s corpse, thankfully facing down in the mud atop his pile of entrails. “Your stepfather . . .”

I sighed heavily. “Can’t say he didn’t have it coming.”

She gulped loudly, nodding at my macabre jest. “Damon and Eirik fought against you ! I saw it! And your poor mother. Oh gods!”

As she began to cry anew, I cradled her head in my chest and hummed a low sound, trying to quiet her hysterics. “I know, love. I know.”

“What c-can I do to help?”

I pulled her out again, examining her filthy face and crestfallen eyes. “You can live, Anna. Please, live, and I’ll return.”

“There!”

The voice shocked me, coming from Sven.

I wheeled, seeing him pointing at the sea—

Where a ship with an unfurled yellow sail crested around the side of the peninsula and drifted toward the fjord that would lead out of Selby . . .

. . . And back to the Isle.

The dark elves must be on that ship!

“Fuck!” Grim bellowed, a guilty look on his face.

“Love, what is it?” I asked, squeezing Anna’s hand one more time before running over to him.

Grim frowned. “When Sven and I waited for his father to arrive on the Isle, I noticed the Yellow Wraith missing from the dock. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, and forgot about it.”

Corym said, “Must be how Gresh’kellen and the others got here, ahead of us so they could lie in wait.”

I rubbed my palm over Grim’s tense shoulder. “It’s not your fault, Grim. None of us recognized it missing when we left the Isle. Our thoughts were elsewhere.”

Magnus grunted. “The entire time, Sigmund was a means to an end. No one could have suspected that, bear.”

He was right. The murderer of my half-brother was right, and this was no one’s fault. Who could have seen Gothi Sigmund running hook, line, and sinker into a trap such as this? Even the wise chieftain of Vikingrune Academy had been blinded by his own motives and desires, needing to speak with my mother about his murderous oath.

I couldn’t forget that had Korvan not abruptly slit his throat, the Gothi had been a few minutes away from possibly trying to slit my throat.

In some twisted way, does the Swordbaron think he did me . . . a favor? Ridding the world of Sigmund, and the threat of the dragonslayer?

More thoughts swarmed through me at a rapid pace—everything I had learned from Kelvar the Whisperer’s abilities, his mindshaping—or “shadowing” Magnus’ mind so he wouldn’t recall his past until Kelvar took the cloak of amnesia away.

Korvan must have shadowed Ma’s mind in the same way. Because the look on her face when she saw his dark skin, his red eyes—that was a horrified expression of seeing a killer for the first time.

Ma had only known Korvan the human.

She was introduced to Korvan the dragonkin tonight.

“Now that Korvan’s secret is out, we have to warn everyone else,” I said. “We need to return to the academy.”

It felt it in my bones—the need to get back swiftly so no more terror could befall people I loved. Dagny, Randi, and so many others I cared about were still there, oblivious to what had happened here.

Thane Canute walked up to us. “I can work the Red Wraith and get it sailing. I’m not leaving without the Gothi’s body.”

I nodded firmly to him. “Then let’s be quick about it, sir.”

Despite our differences, and the glowers he had thrown my way from his single beady eye, we were in agreement now.

“Hel awaits us on the Isle,” Canute said ominously. He tossed his chin over his shoulder. “What of your father’s body?”

My nostrils instinctively flared. I was ready to tell him to let Hallan rot where he was . . . but other villagers from the outskirts of our group started to creep toward us, and one scared man said, “We will bury him properly, Ravinica.”

Oh, so it’s Ravinica now? Not half-blood or bog-bred cunt?

That particular man, Ivan, who had been the boisterous, shameful man I mistakenly had sex with years ago, now looked ready to collapse in sheer exhaustion and fear.

“Thank you, Ivan,” I said with a firm nod.

He wasn’t worth the bother. None of these scared villagers were. They had only been living a bigoted, hateful life because they had been taught to see things that way. Though Vikingrune Academy had opened my eyes, what one of my mates said previously rang true now more than ever:

I can’t save everyone.

I stared out at the sea, my face turning grim and severe against the pale moonlight.

But I can save the ones worth saving.

“Let’s get moving,” I ordered.

Everyone listened.