The field screams. From the inner rampart I watch Erik hold the line by will alone.
He moves like inevitability—there, gone, there again—turning chaos into order with a command or a blade-flick. When the left lists, he is wind in that sail. When the right wavers, he is iron underfoot.
“Stay behind the stones,” Gunnar told me at dawn. “If you breathe where the jarl can see you, he survives longer.”
Another wave breaks on our shields. Wood shudders. Bone cracks. A boy who laughed last night is swallowed by the churn. My gift pulses like a bruise.
We hold. Barely. Holding isn’t winning. Bjorn’s ravens snap behind a line hungry for a gap time always promises. That gap is me. Use yourself, the vision whispers. Be seen, and the trap will spring.
Erik glances up, as if the tether between us tugs his chin. His expression is stripped: don’t. I tilt my head: watch me.
I slip.
The stair guards are greener than moss. “My lady—”
“I need water for the wounded.” Truth-adjacent. Two skins, blood on my skirts—other men’s—and they step aside.
The keep’s belly is stone and dark. I know it like breath. A hidden gate waits where a cart wouldn’t fit but a fox would. The bar is heavy; my shoulder remembers Sigrid’s knife and pushes harder. The gate yawns. Beyond it, teeth.
I steal a horse like it owes me. No saddle. Who has time for leather when the future leans on your throat? I grip the mane and kick the day open.
Cold air slaps. Smoke claws. The field parts like the sea, and I ride into the channel.
“ASTRID!” someone bellows from the wall. Not Erik.
Good. The point is to be seen.
I canter, all panic in appearance, not in fact. Hair loose, a flag. I become every story men like Bjorn tell about women: impulsive, soft where it matters. I skim the edge of his line, close enough that archers lift, then lower, startled by a prize that comes walking.
He sees me at once—of course he does. His one true skill: finding what he wants and calling it fate.
“There!” he shouts from horseback, smile carved wrong. “Take her!”
A knot of riders peels off, hungry. They thunder toward me as one beast. I turn my mare so they can catch me easier, heart rolling like a trapped thing, and laugh because fear and joy are twins.
They seize me. I don’t fight. Not yet. Iron hands at my arms and waist. Hot rot breath at my ear. “Got you,” one pants.
“Congratulations,” I say, sweet as poison. I bite my tongue until copper slicks my teeth. “You’ve caught a bell.”
Erik’s roar tears the distance—a sound to skin a god. Heads lift. Men who fear nothing flinch.
Now.
I wrench so they swing me toward the dead ground where the hill dips. Thin scrub. Innocent earth. Behind it, exactly where Gunnar promised: our reserve, crouched and waiting.
The trap’s jaws close.
Wolves rise from grass. The hidden line rushes the pursuers like nightfall. Arrows hiss; horses scream. Panic breaks the men holding me. I drop, hit dirt, roll under hooves, come up in blood.
The tide tilts. You can feel it: a lever thrown in the world’s throat. Our men howl. The Danes falter.
“Seer!” someone yelps behind me. “Pull back—”
A hand finds my braid, jerks. I jab an elbow, feel cartilage give, spit red, reach my mare.
The world lurches.
A body slams me sideways. The ground knocks the breath from me. Weight pins my thighs. Bjorn’s stink—salt, old mead, old cruelty—falls like a cloak.
“Stupid whore,” he breathes, almost tender. He wrenches me up like I weigh nothing. Steel kisses my throat. “Did you think I wouldn’t gut you the moment I got my hands on you?”
His blade presses; heat breaks and runs. Pain is clean and bright. I hold his eyes—the lovely blue I once mistook for summer. “I thought,” I say, blood-sweet, “you’d be slower.”
He angles me toward the ridge where Erik scythes through men. “Watch your savage die knowing he failed you.”
“Let me guess,” I murmur, steady because pride is a spine even when the rest shakes. “You’ll make me watch twice so I learn.”
“You’ll learn everything I teach you.”
“Unlikely.” I smile with red teeth. “I’m not the bait, Bjorn.”
He digs the blade, hungry eyes following a drop. “No?”
“I’m the signal.”
Behind us, earth erupts.
Gunnar’s men pour from the scrub on the far side, answering the bell I rang with my body. Doors slam around Bjorn’s army; there is no back, only more of us. Horses shy. Someone drops a spear. Someone runs.
Erik is coming.
I feel him like weather. He takes three men between us like inconveniences, sets a fourth down with a wrist twist that rips a scream. “Astrid!” he hammers my name into the air. “Astrid—”
“Come,” Bjorn hisses into my hair, dragging me tighter so steel bites deeper. “Come closer, Bloodwolf. Come die for a whore.”
Erik halts so hard dirt skids. His sword lowers a fraction—nothing to anyone but me, who sees everything about him now: the calculations sparking, the ways he’ll kill a man with words if the blade won’t reach.
“Let her go,” he says. Flat as an altar stone. “Now.”
“She dies if you come closer!”
Erik doesn’t move. He does nothing the world can see. Inside his ribs something tries to break loose. I hear it. His jaw is a line carved by people who have run out of ways to beg.
Men hit our lines and fall. Gunnar’s yell rakes the chaos. The day flips like a coin and lands our side up—and none of it matters because Bjorn’s blade has learned my pulse.
My gift rips open.
I have seen this moment: the angle of his wrist, the hitch in Erik’s breath, the sun’s stab off a shield shard, the wind in Erik’s hair.
But not what happens next.
Kindness? Warning? Freedom?
The future is a locked door. The key hurts to hold. I press my tongue to the cut to remember I live inside this body, I command it.
“Easy,” I tell myself, not him. “Easy.”
“Don’t,” Erik says—one word torn from somewhere that bleeds.
I meet his gaze across ten feet of blood-wet ground. I see the man who held me when I broke, and the monster he let the world believe. I see wire-tight strategy and love like a stubborn dog that keeps coming home.
Bjorn jerks me tighter. “Choose, Bloodwolf.”
Erik freezes. Obeys. Furious, brilliant stillness.
The world goes needle-sharp: breath, blade, the small shift of tendons under Bjorn’s knife-hand as his balance moves. My gift shows me no end, no mercy.
That, for once, is the gods’ problem—not mine.
This moment belongs to me. No vision will save me. No man will either. The ending is unwritten because I am meant to write it.
I taste iron and decide to live.