The Runaway They Mocked Is The Protector Of Midgard

9

The Lawspeaker stepped between the two men.

“The challenge is lawful. The sand is open.” Then Vargr turned to Rothgar, and though his voice never changed, every word landed like a verdict. “And before it begins—this arena has heard your confession, Lord Rothgar. Whatever the sand decides tonight, the law does not forget what it hears.”

Rothgar barely heard him. Years of scheming for this seat, and he had burned it all down in one unguarded hour. Fine. FINE. If the lordship was already ash, then he had one purpose left in this world, and it was standing in front of him wearing his dead brother’s face.

He reached for everything.

The runes climbed past his elbows, past his shoulders, up his neck—more than he had ever dared draw at once. Veins stood out like ropes. Blood beaded at his hairline and ran with the sweat. The sand around his boots began to smoke.

“ARRGHHH!”

Fire and rune-light detonated together—a blast that dwarfed everything he had shown against the war-bird, everything he had shown against five champions. It swallowed Kaedric whole. Flame and dust climbed higher than the arena walls, and the front rows screamed and scrambled back from the heat.

For a long moment, there was only smoke where a man had been.

In the stands, Liv stopped breathing.

This was her fault. If she had not stood, he would not have challenged. If anything was left of him in that smoke, his blood was on her hands—six years of waiting, ten seconds of having him back, and she had gotten him killed. The what-ifs came like a flood she could not swim out of.

Around her, the arena was already mourning. “Fool came back for nothing,” someone muttered. “He could have taken the child and lived a quiet life somewhere. Six years of hiding, just to die here.”

A small hand slipped into hers.

“Father is very powerful,” Astrid whispered, and she was smiling.

The smoke rolled, thinned—

—and Kaedric walked out of it.

Untouched. Unhurried. Not so much as a scorch mark on his shoulders. He looked like a man returning from a short, boring walk.

The arena lost its mind.

“Father!” Astrid cheered, her small voice drowned by three thousand others.

Liv’s heart started again. She stared at her daughter. “How did you know?” she whispered. “How did you know he would be all right?”

“He already beat everybody at home.” Astrid shrugged, matter-of-fact, as if reporting the weather. “Aunt Gunnhild too. She was sleeping in the yard when we left.”

Liv blinked. Then her eyes caught her daughter’s hands, still raised from demonstrating—and the blisters on the small palms. Old ones, burst and hardened. She seized them. “Astrid. What happened here?”

“Aunt Gunnhild makes me sweep the yard. All of it. Every day.”

Every coin. Every insult swallowed. Every wage sent home for Astrid’s food, Astrid’s clothes, Astrid’s safety—and her daughter had been sweeping courtyards on burst blisters the whole time.

“We will talk about it later, my love,” Liv said gently, and inside her chest, something old and patient caught fire.

Down on the sand, Kaedric was walking toward his uncle, who stood swaying in the ruin of his greatest attack, still waiting to wake up from all of this.

The slap arrived like a thunderclap.

“That is for my fiancee's mouth,” Kaedric said.

Rothgar reeled, caught himself, and the second slap turned his head the other way.

“Her cheek.”

A fist sank into his ribs—measured, precise—and the Lord-of-Askheim-for-one-hour folded around it with all the air leaving him at once.

“Her ribs.”

Kaedric was not raging. He was not even hurried. He was reading her injuries off Liv’s  body and returning them one at a time, like a man settling a ledger, and the whole arena understood that the fight had ended before it began—this was an audit.

Rothgar spat blood into the sand, and through the ringing in his skull, one thought clawed its way up: he could not win this. Not with power. His eyes rolled sideways—and found the dragon.

He bit his thumb, dragged the blood across the covenant crest on his gauntlet, and screamed with the full authority of the clan seat he had murdered his way into:

“GUARDIAN! BURN THEM! The woman and her whelp—BURN THE STANDS!”

Three thousand heads turned to the dragon.

The dragon did not move. It regarded Rothgar the way one regards a street performer whose act has gone on too long.

“I INVOKE THE COVENANT!” Rothgar tore the gauntlet half off, smearing blood across the crest. “By the bond of the clan, OBEY ME!”

The Guardian rose.

Relief broke across Rothgar’s face like sunrise. A mistake, that was all it had been, some flaw in the first summons—

The dragon walked past him.

Past his outstretched, bleeding hand. Across the whole span of the arena. And it lowered itself at Kaedric’s feet, flattening its great head against the sand like a hound waiting to be told it had done well.

The whispers started in the oldest rows first, where the grey lords sat, and moved outward like flame through dry grass. Only two authorities in existence could turn a Guardian from its own covenant. The clan leader was standing right there, bleeding on his crest. Which left only—

“The Protector,” someone breathed. “The Protector of Midgard.”