I spend the next day on my knees behind the stables, retching into the snow until nothing comes but bile. It’s been weeks since that one night.
My body purges itself in violent waves—heaving, convulsing, expelling whatever poison Astrid's mushrooms left in my blood.
Between bouts, I press my forehead against the frozen ground and gasp for air that tastes of hay and horse dung and my own sour sickness.
I tell myself it is only the mushrooms working their way out of my system. I tell myself the trembling will stop once my body is clean again. I tell myself many things.
Then the horns sound.
The clear, bright call echoes across the household, announcing what everyone has been preparing for: Astrid's betrothal feast.
The formal celebration that will determine which prince claims my half-sister as his bride—and elevates our father's standing among the jarls.
I drag myself upright, wiping my mouth with the back of my trembling hand. My legs shake beneath me as I retreat to the shadows of the yard, finding a place behind the water barrels where no one will notice another servant.
Not that anyone would notice me regardless.
My father stands at the great hall's entrance in his finest furs, silver chains gleaming against the dark pelts. Beside him, Eira preens in silk and amber, her hand resting possessively on Astrid's shoulder.
My stepmother's face glows with triumph—her golden daughter, dressed in silver and white, about to catch a prince.
Then the konung's sons stride through the gates, and my world tilts on its axis. Ragnar comes first. Black-haired, ice-eyed, his cloak pinned with silver wolves that catch the pale winter sun.
He moves like a man who has never doubted his place in any room, each step deliberate, his gaze sweeping the assembled household with cold assessment.
Behind him, Leif blazes copper and gold. Wild-maned and laughing, he claps my father on the shoulder like an old friend, his voice carrying across the yard in a boom of good humor.
Gold arm-rings flash at his wrists. His grin splits his bearded face with a dangerous charm.
Those faces... Those hands... Those voices.
The realization crashes through me like the cold water that woke me yesterday morning. Not drunk old warriors. Not grandfather men with wandering hands.
Gods. The gods I saw in my drugged madness.
The konung's own sons—here to choose a bride from among my father's daughters while I hide in the shadows carrying the evidence of what they did to me.
Memory returns in fragments sharp enough to draw blood.
Snow against my bare back, so cold it burned. Their weight pinning me between them, one behind and one before, hands everywhere at once. The stretch and burn and impossible pleasure I had attributed to divine madness.
Thor and Loki were masks my fevered mind painted over flesh and bone.
I gave my innocence to princes, surrendered my virtue to the most powerful men in the North. And the truth beneath those fever-dreams is worse than any nightmare.
The truth is the ruin.
I press my spine against the stable wall, fighting the urge to retch again though my stomach has nothing left to give.
I watch Ragnar's cold profile as he exchanges formal words with my father, watch Leif's burning grin as he bows over Astrid's hand with exaggerated gallantry.
Astrid's face glows with desperate hope. She thinks herself on the verge of becoming a princess. She has no idea that these same princes took her hated half-sister in the snow mere nights ago.
And neither do they, I realize.
They were drunk on mead and victory. I was drugged and stumbling. In the darkness and chaos, they likely never saw my face clearly enough to remember.
But I remember them. I will remember them until I die.
The sickness that will not fade. The tenderness that deepens rather than heals. The exhaustion that drags at my limbs no matter how much I sleep.
My courses are late.
I have ignored it, refused to count the days, told myself that stress and hunger and the aftermath of poison could explain the absence. But my body has been whispering what my mind refused to hear.
Now, watching Ragnar and Leif stride toward the feasting hall like the princes they are, I can no longer pretend.
My palm presses low on my belly, and I know. I already know.
There is life growing inside me.
Life planted by two men who do not remember my face. Who will choose my sister as their bride. Who stands now in my father's hall accepting congratulations.
While I hide behind water barrels with my hand over my womb.
And then a second devastating realization struck my mind.
If Eira learns of this, she will have me drowned in the fjord before I can speak a word. She would never allow such a scandal to threaten Astrid's prospects.
And if my father discovers the fathers are the konung's own sons, the very princes courting his legitimate daughter, he will not merely kill me. He will make an example of me.
He will destroy any evidence that his bastard ever existed, including whatever grows in my belly.
There is no mercy waiting for me here. There never was.
I watch Ragnar and Leif disappear into the feasting hall, swallowed by warmth and torchlight and a world I will never be permitted to enter. Music swells behind the closing doors. Laughter rises.
The celebration of everything I am not continues without the slightest awareness of the girl pressed against the stable wall with her hand over her belly and her heart turning to ice.
There is only one path left.
Tonight, when the hall sleeps drunk on mead and celebration, I will steal a boat from the harbor.
I will take a blade, what little food I can carry, and the last shreds of my pride. I will vanish into the winter sea before dawn breaks, before anyone thinks to look for the bastard girl who shovels pig dung.
The North is wide and wild and merciless. But it cannot be more merciless than staying.
I am already dead if I remain.
I might as well choose the manner of my vanishing. I might as well give my child a chance, however small, however desperate.
The feast roars on inside the golden hall. I slip away into the gathering dark, and no one notices me go.