2. Fell

2

Fell

I WAS MY FATHER'S SON.

He had taught me to fight. He had taught me the meaning of honor. That you bled for the things that mattered. Your homeland. Your people. A worthless and feeble king. I inhaled. The king whose lavish palace I now stood inside—who reaped the benefit of my protection in exchange for... nothing.

My father had been satisfied with the arrangement. Balor the Butcher did not question the act of fighting, bleeding, dying for a distant king. The honor of it all had been enough for him.

No more.

It was not enough for me.

There was no honor in being someone's whipping dog.

I was my father's son. I had learned everything from him, including from his mistakes, and I refused to accept nothing as payment for blood anymore. It was time the Borderlands were viewed as something more than the edge of nowhere, uncivilized country fit for only the dregs of humanity.

"Are you sure you want to do this? Any wife you get from this place will be dead by winter's end," Arkin muttered for my ears alone as we entered the chamber, his keen gaze flitting about the opulent space.

"You don't know that," I countered.

"That she will be weak and soft as pudding? Aye, I do know that. She's from here." He motioned around us with a disgusted flick of his fingers. "If she doesn't perish on the crossing from saddle fatigue or when we ford the river or in the first snow squall, I'll eat my shield." Arkin looked at me incredulously. "Come now, Dryhten. I saw those princesses sitting up there and so did you. You need a sword maiden for a wife. A strong woman to give you sons. Someone who can ride your cock all night and then ride a mount all day." The older man smirked. He lacked delicacy, but he had served alongside my father as his vassal and was now, in turn, mine. A border lord in his own right, of a smaller holding west of my keep, he was bred in savagery, making him precisely the manner of warrior you wanted with you in battle. I sighed. Perhaps, though, he was not the best man at my side in ventures of diplomacy.

"Enough," I quietly commanded.

The king and his retinue were only a few feet away, and I had no wish for them to overhear us speaking of cocks. Now was not the time for further debate. Arkin had aired his misgivings plenty on the ride south, but I had already decided. The princesses might not appear the heartiest of women, but this was the way it had to be. Penterra was under threat on multiple fronts. Yes, we had enemies, but that was not the only threat. Our people were starving. Famine and disease were rampant in the north, south—everywhere. Circumstances were dire and not improving under King Hamlin. I required a seat at the table to stop these toad-faced bastards from fucking things up even more—and marriage to a Penterran princess would grant me that.

A footman gestured for us to take a seat on any of the flimsy-looking furniture. Every surface was littered with tasseled pillows of silk and velvet and brocade. Fine paintings covered the walls. A fire crackled in a hearth large enough for multiple persons to fit inside. Did it even get cold enough in the south to necessitate such a thing? My top lip curled faintly as I lowered myself onto a bench. My stronghold was comfortable but nowhere near this opulent.

Wine was offered. It wasn't ale, but I took a long, savoring sip, watching over the rim of my jeweled goblet as the king took a seat. The lord regent had more influence than expected. I noted at once the king's gaze continually sought him out before speaking, after speaking, and even when not speaking at all.

"Your proposition is of interest, Lord Dryhten," King Hamlin said carefully, the purple of his tunic so brilliant and pristine it made the eyes water.

The lord regent remained standing, his lean form positioned to the right of the king, one hand gripping the back of his chair. I wondered if the king realized how controlling the posture appeared, as though he were merely a puppet with the man behind him pulling the strings.

I directed my gaze at the lord regent. "I believe I have earned significant recompense."

"A princess of the Penterran throne, though?" The lord regent smiled as though I were a child asking for the impossible and was yet too naive to know it. "You overreach yourself, my lord."

The king nodded almost regretfully.

"Do I?" I leaned back against pillows so soft and luxurious that my body did not know quite how to react to such comfort. I'd spent nearly a month riding hard and bedding down on the unforgiving ground to arrive here so that we would be back home before the first snow. There was nothing worse than being caught in a snow squall out in the open.

I'd meant to come sooner, but a fierce contingent of invaders from the north had occupied me for the past many months, and I was not the kind of man to send an envoy to collect a bride for me. Arkin had offered to go in my stead, but it seemed the kind of thing I should do myself, no matter the inconvenience. I had no desire to put it off another year. This business needed getting done.

A servant refilled the goblets all around and offered fruit. Such fruit was a luxury in the cold climate of the north. I selected a cluster of fresh grapes. Arkin followed suit, helping himself to a pear and biting down noisily on the juicy fruit, looking around at all the people gathered with blinking eyes as juice dribbled onto his graying beard.

"No one discounts that you have served the kingdom most admirably." The lord regent's tone turned ingratiating, and it took everything in me not to cut him down. My fingers curled into a fist that itched to lash out and connect with his smug face. It wasn't the way, though. Not here. In my life, in my world, violence was the answer to most problems. Here the answer was talk. Lies. Currying favor.

I'd just arrived and I couldn't wait to get back home.

The lord regent feigned politeness, said the right words, but the sincerity was not there. His smile did not meet his eyes. I was not accustomed to anything less than deference, and this man's smug face needled my skin.

As did that of the young bastard watching me from where he stood across the room, his brown eyes bright and alive with loathing, his mouth an unforgiving slash of lips within his beard.

We had not been introduced, but he wore the regalia of an officer... and a scowl. He did nothing to disguise his aversion toward me, and I could almost respect that. I would take that any day over the fake smiles and empty praise the lord regent was sending my way. I supposed I should appreciate his lack of artifice. I lifted a mocking eyebrow at him, enjoying the ruddy flush of his features.

"Most admirably?" I echoed mildly, wondering if I was the only one who heard the patronizing ring to that.

The king's smile wobbled a bit. He'd heard it.

The lord regent's gaze narrowed slightly. "We do appreciate all your efforts," he answered rather forcefully, willing me to... what? Believe him? Feel flattered?

"Oh? Well. That is a relief," I replied with exaggerated enthusiasm, popping a grape into my mouth and chewing with casual slowness. "I shudder to think how you would view me if I did anything less than hold the northern border time and time again."

I let my words hang in the air. Not a threat. Precisely. But something they could turn over in their minds... as I was certain they would.

Arkin was the first to finally speak, unsurprisingly. He led with his sword into every fray, even when the battle was one waged with words. "Indeed. If not for our defenses, three thousand warriors from Veturland would have successfully invaded last spring. Another king would be sitting where you are right now." My vassal gestured—his thick fingers shining with the juice from his pear—to where King Hamlin sat. Trust Arkin to cut to the heart of it.

The lord regent's smile vanished, the lines of his narrow face drawing tighter. His eyes glittered, but he could not deny the charge, because it was true.

"And if that weren't enough," Arkin went on to say, "there are the raiders in the Crags. Those bastards can fight." This he said with a heavy exhale, shaking his head at the thought of them. He looked to me for confirmation.

"Good fighters," I confirmed with a single nod, sweeping a disgusted glance over the guardsmen in the room. They would not survive a confrontation with them.

The raiders occupying the Crags didn't number in the thousands, but they were a bloodthirsty lot. Highly skilled and ruthless and impossible to track. I knew. I had tried, and I was the best tracker in the Borderlands. My father had made sure of that. It was baffling. They were as elusive as smoke.

The king cleared his throat. "Our gratitude to you"—his gaze flicked to Arkin—"and all the border lords cannot be properly expressed."

"Perhaps it should be demonstrated, then," I suggested evenly with a lift of my eyebrow.

The king looked uneasily between his adviser and me, aware that he'd walked himself back into the matter at hand.

Silence fell.

I placed another grape in my mouth, rolling it over my tongue as I waited for the king to speak, taking pleasure in his obvious discomfort.

He knew why I was here. Everyone knew. I had not minced my words. One of his daughters would be mine. He could not afford to lose my fealty and still hold this realm together.

I crushed the grape between my tongue and the roof of my mouth. Chewing, I reached for another—and stopped.

My skin snapped with sudden awareness. The fine hairs on my arms vibrated. I scanned the chamber, quickly searching faces and reading nothing in those expressions, no hint of alertness, no hint of danger—and I was an expert at ferreting out threats. It was what I did. How I had survived for this long. My skin pulled and tugged with an awareness that I could not explain.

It was as though someone had entered the chamber and joined us, and yet no door had opened. No one had stepped inside. I stared at the same people as before. Except I felt a new gaze upon me. The scrutiny of someone I could not see. Could only sense. Feel. Taste.

Compelled by an invisible string, I stood from the bench and moved through the room. Walking the perimeter of the well-appointed chamber, I skirted furniture, my fingers grazing the back of a brocade-upholstered chair, the massive desk situated in front of a stained-glass window, a tapestry-covered wall, seeking, searching the space that suddenly crackled with heat and the energy of an impending storm.

The others exchanged glances, no doubt wondering at my strange behavior.

"My lord?" the lord regent asked, a hint of annoyance in his tone. "Is anything amiss?"

I ignored him. Angling my head, I listened, the whoosh of a heartbeat in my ears, thumping out a rhythm faster than my own.

I stopped before a painting of the final battle of the Threshing. The Hormung had taken place a century ago. My father's grandfather had been there. He had led our armies to victory that day, turning the tide in the war against dragons. The casualties in that battle were innumerable on both sides, but the dragons' losses were far greater. Devastating. After the Hormung, the end was just a matter of time. The few remaining dragons that had not been slain were hunted down. The stragglers were systematically rooted out, rounded up, and eliminated. No dragon to be seen again... except once. One time. An extraordinary, singular occurrence eighty years after the Hormung.

I continued to stare at the painting—into that night sky lit by dragon fire, countless winged creatures twisting and writhing in death spins over the armies of men, the dark, jagged outline of the Crags a looming shadow in the background. It was a remarkable work of art, in dark blues and fiery hues of red, gold, and orange.

I could not look away from the carnage. I had never seen a depiction of that day. I'd only heard the stories and accounts of the Hormung. On Sigur Day, the anniversary of that momentous occasion, we feasted and raised our glasses and celebrated. The old warriors shared the stories passed down to them from their forefathers: heroic tales of adventure, of good defeating evil, and we lapped it up. Including me. Especially me. I felt a part of that lore, connected to the distant past more than others because of my unlucky (or lucky?) beginnings.

I was three years old when my father rescued me. At least that was the best estimation of my age. I could never know for certain. What was certain? Twenty-three years ago, Balor the Butcher led a raiding party into the snow-swathed Crags, far into the cavernous deep. That was where he found me, underneath the mountain's thick skin, a hapless, naked toddler shrinking at the feet of a monstrous beast, waiting to be its next meal.

It had been eighty years then. Eight decades since a dragon was last sighted. Everyone thought them gone. Dead. Eradicated. Extinct. But there I was... in the den of a dragon. The last one. An anomaly. An outlier. Like a cockroach, the thing had holed up, buried deep in the bowels of a mountain, only surfacing under the cloak of night to hunt, to claim and devour what food it could find—in that instance, me.

Dragons lived for centuries, and that one, my captor, would likely have lived longer if not for Balor the Butcher. I owed the Border King my life. Not only had he saved me and killed the sole remaining dragon, but he had also taken me in and raised me as his son.

For others, this was merely a painting.

For me, it was more.

I understood what it represented. It breathed violence, pain, desperation. Loss and triumph. The triumph of humankind over the demon dragon, over those fiendish creatures who had taken so much and would have continued to take. Continued to destroy. Just as that one—my dragon—had taken my true parents and destroyed the family I would never know. My dragon. As fucked as that was, I would always think of that dragon as mine. The dragon that had stolen me and would have killed me.

And beyond all that, buried within the canvas's vibrant strokes of ochre and tempera, something else throbbed and breathed... and called to me. A... ghost of something. Something that prickled and tightened my skin to the point of anguish.

Something beyond the striking artwork and my fascination with the story it told.

I narrowed my eyes, peering harder, deeper into the scene, which was as visceral as a bleeding wound. Whatever I felt, whatever I sensed in this room originated here, in this painting.

I stared at it, illogically, impossibly convinced that it stared back at me.

My hands curled at my sides, fingers digging into the flesh of my palms. The chamber grew stifling. My breath steamed from my lips and nose.

"My lord?" The voice came from my left. The king stood beside me. I had not heard his approach, so intent was I on hunting whatever was affecting me.

I inhaled. Exhaled. It did no good. I was still too warm. My chest still too tight.

"Impressive," I murmured, unable to tear my gaze away from the scene, even though I knew I should have fully given my attention to the man beside me.

"I am told it is a remarkable depiction."

He was told through the annals. Not through the collective memory of his family.

No member of the royal family had been there a hundred years ago to pass down the tale of his exploits in that final, grisly battle. The armies from the south were not led by the king of Penterra. Not then. Not now.

The Hormung—the Threshing, for that matter—had largely been fought by the armies of the north. In the north. Dragons had crushed their bones to dust, burned their flesh to ash. The blood of warriors from the Borderlands had soaked the battlefields. Warriors like my great-grandfather. A hundred years ago, he led the armies of the north in the Hormung. No warrior had done more than he to eliminate the dragon plague from our land.

He had been a fourth son. Three brothers and countless cousins had fallen before him. Before he took up the mantle of Lord of the Borderlands. Before he formed an alliance with Fenrir, the sire of all wolves, and secured the allegiance of every wolf in the land to aid in the hunt for dragons.

That was the past, but it was not forgotten. Not in the north. And not now as I stared expectantly at the king, patience a thin, fraying thread in my hands. The Borderlands was done waiting for its due.

I was done.

He sighed, and there was resignation in the sound. "Well. I do have daughters."

The implication was very satisfying. Daughters. Plural. Multiple. The admission was a surrender. I had known he would eventually reach this decision. He had no other choice. He needed me too much not to capitulate. At least that was what I had been telling myself ever since I left home.

I smiled slightly, turning back to gaze straight into that painted hellscape, unable to tear my eyes away from it even with my goal so close at hand. "Indeed. You do."

"Your Majesty!" the lord regent blustered from somewhere behind us. "You cannot mean to say—"

"I have several daughters," King Hamlin clarified in a stern voice, no doubt meant to quell the lord regent's protests. It was the first time since my arrival that he had resembled a king. "Perhaps I can spare one for such a worthy man as Lord Dryhten."

Heat radiated from the painting. It was as though the fire flashing through the sky were real and had come to life to reach out and scald me.

I had won.

I'd accomplished exactly what I'd set out to do. Or very nearly.

I would have one of this man's daughters. A princess of the realm as my wife. In my bed. Maybe her belly would soon swell with my child. Which meant my voice would be heard in the decisions made in the ruling of this kingdom. At last. I felt my father then, reaching to me from the grave, proud, pleased. Finally, the Borderlands would get what they were owed.

The king's hand settled on my shoulder. "Come now, my lord. We have a great deal to discuss."