The Runaway They Mocked Is The Protector Of Midgard

3

The aura had barely erupted before Kaedric felt small arms flinch against him.

He killed it instantly. The pressure vanished from the courtyard as if it had never existed—the guards at the far wall would spend the rest of their lives wondering what had just pressed the breath out of them.

Kaedric took Astrid’s chin gently and wiped his thumb across her cheek. Under the grime, there it was. His mother’s eyes. The stubborn line of his father’s brow. The faces of his dead, looking back at him out of a starving child. The dirt had blinded him earlier—nothing else could have.

This girl really was his daughter.

Something without a name flooded through him, and his hands—hands that had crushed a Frost Giant invasion that morning—came a breath away from trembling. He pulled her against his chest and held on.

“Father is back,” he said into her hair.

Her small fists locked into his cloak, gripping like even if he chose to vanish right now, he would have to take her with him.

“Well, well. Learning to seduce men already? At least wait until you’re older, you little wretch.”

Gunnhild had arrived at the gate, silk hissing, the guard who fetched her trailing behind. Then the strange man raised his head slightly, and the venom in her voice performed a miracle of sweetness mid-sentence. “You must be here for the clan banquet, my lord. Pay her no mind—she’s just a wicked little thing born to some very wicked servants.” Her voice had so much silk in it that a stranger might have missed that she was saying anything cruel at all. “I only say it so you won’t be fooled by her act.”

Kaedric let out a chuckle far colder than the weather.

He rose, keeping Astrid’s hand in his, and unclasped his cloak.

“Say it once more,” he said quietly. “How exactly is my daughter a servant’s wicked child?”

“Daughter?” Gunnhild scoffed. “That thing has no—”

The cloak came away. She saw his face clearly for the first time, and the word died. “…Kaedric?”

Then she laughed. Loud, delighted, from the belly.

“Forgive me—forgive me, it’s just—what is a dead man doing at our gate in a lord’s cloak?” She wiped her eye. “Or wait. Don’t tell me. Six years, and you still never learned it was your own uncle who butchered your parents?”

His uncle.

The words went into him like a blade finding the gap in armor. Kaedric’s face darkened.

“My uncle would never have done that.” In every memory he owned, the man had been kindness itself. The uncle who never once arrived at their door with empty hands. The uncle who had taught him to hold his first sword. The uncle who had wept loudest of all at the funeral pyres.

Gunnhild shook her head in mock pity, and when she spoke, it was in the warm, patient tone of a woman explaining something to a slow child—each word chosen to be rubbed in, not understood.

“He did, coward. And it shouldn’t even surprise you—your family has a proud history of never guarding against its own. First my father took the clan seat from your father, right under his nose. Then your dear, gentle uncle slaughtered your parents and ripped that same seat from mine.” Her smile sharpened. “And now—here is the part you’ll enjoy—that same uncle is taking the mother of your ‘daughter’ for himself.” She hung the word daughter in the air exactly the way Kaedric had said it, and laughed at her own performance.

“Where is my fiancée.” Kaedric’s voice dropped low—low enough that Astrid, pressed against his leg, would hear nothing more than winter wind.

“Poor thing.” Gunnhild clicked her tongue. “Wherever you’ve been hiding all these years, you’ve forgotten what you were before you left. You were never in a position to ask questions here. You never will be.” She turned to go, then paused, generous. “A free piece of advice—worry about saving yourself first.” Her eyes slid down to Astrid, and the message in them was plain: you cannot even save this one.

She strode back toward the inner house.

Kaedric let her go. He didn’t move, didn’t call after her. There was no hurry at all. As of this moment, no one on this estate was going anywhere.

He turned back to his daughter. She hadn’t taken her eyes off him once—watching him the way you watch something that might not be there when you blink.

“Father,” she said, just testing the word in her mouth.

He crouched to her level. “I never asked your name.”

“Astrid.”

She had barely finished saying it when fear rushed back into her eyes, fixed on something behind him. Kaedric followed her gaze.

Gunnhild was returning across the yard—and this time she had brought the household’s elite warriors, two dozen of them, steel already drawn. Her voice carried the whole way.

“Take him alive! Do you have any idea what the clan leader will give to have this man kneeling at his feet? Our branch will feast on this for a generation!”

Kaedric had always assumed people grew wiser as they aged. Gunnhild was disproving it for him in real time.

He guided Astrid gently behind his legs, one hand resting on her head.

As the warriors advanced, a whisper left his lips.

“Wrong answer, Gunnhild.”