The Runaway They Mocked Is The Protector Of Midgard

8

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 arena with a crash that split the sand and threw half the front rows off their seats, silver scales burning back the torchlight, wings spread wide enough to shade the maids’ row. Liv’s thoughts stumbled over each other. The Guardian? Even she, a daughter of the clan, could not summon the Guardian. Only the clan leader could—was her father here? Had her family actually come for her?

Then something climbed down from the dragon’s back, and every thought in her head went silent.

Astrid.

Her daughter. On the back of the clan’s Guardian. Hundreds of miles from where she was supposed to be.

The arena erupted—pure roaring confusion. Every soul in Askheim knew the old truth: the Guardian bowed to the clan leader and no one else alive. And it was crouched behind this hooded stranger like a hound waiting to be told good boy.

Rothgar watched it happen in real time—every eye in the arena, every gasp, every scream that belonged to his coronation, turning away from him. Toward her. Toward them.

“Who dares interrupt a lawful execution?!”

The man did not answer him. Did not even turn.

He walked to Liv instead.

She was still on her knees where the begging had left her, blood drying at her mouth, and as he came close her hand rose on its own—trembling, hovering—as if touching him might be the thing that finally woke her up.

“Kaedric?”

She whispered it the way you test a word in a language you’ve been forbidden to speak. Six years since she had let his name out of her mouth without someone laughing at her for it.

His hand closed around hers, tight and warm and real.

“I’m here.”

He knelt beside her, and up close she could see what the arena could not: he was trembling. Not with fear. His eyes had gone over the blood on her mouth, the handprint, the way her body folded around her ribs—and the rage coming off him was shaking his own hands. The man who had caught fire like a falling leaf could not keep his fingers still at the sight of her face.

“I’m here,” he said again, quieter, and it was not clear which one of them he was saying it to.

He unclasped his cloak and wrapped it around her shoulders, gently, like she was something rescued from a fire. Liv held very still inside it. If she blinked, all of this might disappear.

From beside the dragon, Astrid watched her father and her mother together, and joy ran through her like light. She had imagined this picture her whole life. She had drawn it, over and over, always with a blank space where his face should be. The real thing was better than every drawing.

She looked around the arena, nearly bouncing. All of these people who had hurt her mother—they were about to find out who her father was!

Her eyes found the man her mother had once said was her father’s uncle. Astrid tilted her head. He looked like he was about to cry.

“Astrid.” Kaedric’s voice carried without rising. “Come and stay with your mother. Do not leave her side, no matter what happens next.”

Astrid ran to her. And Liv, hearing her daughter’s name in Kaedric’s mouth for the first time in her life—spoken like he had been saying it for years, like it belonged to him too—broke all over again.

The only reason Rothgar had held back this long was arithmetic. A man who arrived on a Guardian’s back was no ordinary man. A visiting lord, perhaps, from one of the great cities, come to honor his coronation. A power he could not afford to insult on the first night of his reign. So he had swallowed his fury and waited.

Then the man reached up and pulled back his hood.

The maids screamed first. Then the servants’ rows. Then the lords, rising out of their seats one by one as the name tore across the arena faster than the dragon had.

Rothgar was the last to understand—because he stood there waiting for the illusion to melt and show him someone else. Anyone else. There was no possible world in which—

Then he started to laugh.

“What manner of joke is this?” he roared, wiping his eye. “My runaway nephew—six years a coward—crawls back on the night of my crowning… to die beside his woman?”

The arena took his laughter up like a chorus. And the ones who didn’t know were educated in real time, gossip hissing along the benches: That’s the nephew. The one whose parents died mysteriously. Got his fiancée pregnant and vanished for six years. THAT one.

Kaedric let all of it wash past him like weather. The jeering, the gossip, his uncle’s laughter—background noise.

He turned to the Lawspeaker instead.

“Is the challenge for the lordship still open?” He nodded once toward Liv. “The last challenger was silenced. She was never defeated by law.”

The whole arena heard it. The laughter died mid-breath.

Something moved across Vargr’s toneless face—the closest thing to delight it had ever been caught wearing. “The challenge concluded without lawful yield or lawful death,” he said. “By the old law… the sand remains open. Any soul.”

Kaedric turned to his uncle before the arena could even gasp.

“Then I challenge you, Rothgar Ashbane, for the lordship of Askheim.” His voice stayed flat as still water. “I want witnesses. So that what happens to you next cannot be called murder.”

Rothgar’s composure detonated.

“Challenge me? CHALLENGE ME?” He was moving before he knew it, runes flaring up both arms, six years of buried fury and one ruined coronation all erupting at once. “You ungrateful little ghost—I erased everything you came from! I put your father in the ground! I put your MOTHER in the ground! And I will put you in it slower than BOTH—”

The arena stopped breathing.

One heartbeat too late, Rothgar heard what his own mouth had just confessed in front of three thousand witnesses and the Keeper of the Law himself.

In the silence, Vargr the Lawspeaker turned his head very, very slowly.

Kaedric’s pupils changed—sliding, thin and golden, into the vertical slits of a dragon.

“Thank you, Uncle,” he said quietly. “I will take that as your acceptance.”