“Father… my birthday is coming soon,” Astrid murmured to the jade pendant. “Are you going to come this year?”Across the yard, a boy her age was pointing at her—Torsten, dressed in silk that had never touched a broom in its life. The children around him burst out laughing at whatever he said, and then they were coming her way, mischief spreading across their faces.Torsten cornered her against the wall. “Give me that.” His hand shot out for the pendant.Astrid twisted away so fast she landed on her backside on the cold stone, both hands clutched over the jade. “This is mine!”“This is mine,” Torsten mimicked, high and whiny, and the other children howled. “You’ve been staring at that trash around your neck for hours. What is it going to do? Your mother got dragged off to be someone’s mistress—I watched them take her. And your father?” He leaned down, grinning. “Calling him irresponsible was me being kind. Being irresponsible would require him to be alive.”“My father is not irresponsi

“Father, be careful!” Astrid’s voice trembled from behind his legs.“Trust me, daughter.”The word left a strange warmth on his tongue. Daughter. He got to call someone that now. It still felt unreal—almost as unreal as the stupidity of the woman across the yard, who had looked at what he was and decided to send men at it.The warriors charged all at once, steel high, axes and spears meant to say this was no longer a warning.The first axe came down where Kaedric had been standing half a heartbeat ago. Two fingers touched the axeman’s neck in passing, and the man folded like wet cloth. A spear thrust at his ribs—Kaedric caught the shaft one-handed, and its owner arrived a moment later, bending over his own weapon with a sound like a dropped bag of grain. Then Kaedric simply walked forward through the rest of them, unhurried, the way a man walks through tall grass, and wherever he passed, steel rang against the stones and hands went numb before their owners understood why.Gunnhild bli

The arena was packed to the sky.Thousands had come to watch ten years of power change hands in one night. Lords in furs. Children on their fathers’ shoulders.And in the maids’ row, one woman whose cheek still burned, praying to any god still listening that one of the other five men would win.Because Liv knew what happened to her if Rothgar took that title tonight. The law of the new lord was absolute. His law—and his wish. And she knew exactly what his wish was.A horn blasted.Six men walked onto the sand. Five wore battle faces. Rothgar wore the grin of a man reading a story he had already finished.Then the iron gates ground open, and the first trial came out screaming.A war-bird the size of a house dropped into the square, wings blotting the torchlight, and its throat convulsed—“DOWN!” someone screamed.A sleet of black quills sprayed across the sand. Two of the six dove for the barriers. A third was too slow and went down with a quill through his thigh, howling.Liv’s whole

The darkness never finished taking her.A voice she had not heard in six years dragged Liv back up through it, and when the dust settled, she was staring at the figure standing between her and her execution.Familiar. So familiar that goosebumps swept her broken body from scalp to heel. The shoulders were wider. The stillness was new. But the shape of him was the shape she had been listening for at the gate for six years.He looked like six years ago. He looked older. She could not see his face yet, and her eyes were already betraying her.He wasn’t dead.Then her mind caught up with her heart and turned it to ice—he was standing in the path of Rothgar’s killing fire. He was going to die. She opened her mouth to scream with strength she did not have——and watched the fire that should have burned him alive gutter out in his bare palm like a candle pinched between two fingers.She was still trying to understand that when the sky came down.The Guardian Covenant Dragon landed in the aren

10The first lord knelt. Then his whole row. Then the row behind it. No decree was read and no order was given—the arithmetic did itself in every head at once: the man on that sand answered to no city, no clan, no king. And he was theirs.In the stands, Liv’s hands rose slowly to her mouth.This was why! Six years, no letter, no word—because something in this world had been strong enough to keep him from her. She had said it to herself on a hundred bitter nights, half-believing it was a story she told herself to survive. She had been right. The bleeding boy from the cottage had spent six years becoming the strongest man alive—and he had spent his first hour of freedom coming back for her.She was crying and smiling at the same time, and had no plans to stop doing either.On the sand, Rothgar turned in a slow circle and saw it all—the kneeling rows, the flattened dragon, the Lawspeaker’s toneless face wearing something dangerously close to a smile. It was over. Every part of it. Which