The priest kept babbling. “All my life, I’ve waited for a child of the gods to exalt our nation, to conquer the world in the name of the Ice Gods. You are meant to lead us.”
To lead Iseneld into war. To become a plague upon the earth. To thirst for bloodshed and hunger for power, bring the world to its knees. That was what the prophecy said of the god-man.
Aldrik had never been a good person—goodness was arbitrary, and too often used as a kinder label for weakness—but neither had he strove to be a villain.
“I’m not a monster,” Aldrik said. He’d been saying it to the villagers of Vaknavangur since his father brought him there, screaming it at anyone who stared too long at his eyes or called him cursed beneath their breath. But to them, he would always be Lord Lagor’s witch-born, serpent-eyed bastard. A stain on the lord’s reputation.
A foil to Lagor’s trueborn son, the golden-haired, blue-eyed heir. A boy who smiled freely, fought honorably, offered to help anyone who needed it. A gods-damned storybook hero shaped into flesh.
Innocent.
Breakable.
“You will free us,” the warrior priest said. “You will reign supreme.”
The priest needed to be silenced. For some reason, Aldrik could not lift his sword. His mind and body were numb. I’m not a monster.
“Reyker,” Aldrik rasped. “Kill him.”
The boy stood frozen, his sword still raised. “Aldrik? He’s not a threat.”
“Please,” the priest said, dropping his axe at Aldrik’s feet, raising his arms in supplication. “Allow me to serve you, god-man.”
“I cannot listen to this!” Aldrik pressed his hands to his ears. He had killed many men in the eighteen years he’d been alive, would gladly kill many more, but an unarmed priest worshipping him? “Reyker, he’s lying. And he’ll go on telling his lie, and others will listen. I’ll be hunted. Do this for me. You must.”
Reyker’s hands began to shake again. “Are you certain he’s lying?”
No. Aldrik wasn’t certain of anything anymore. “We can’t let him go. He’ll tell people what he saw. The overlords will find out. They’ll come for me. Or Father will send me away. Do you want me to go away?”
Reyker shook his head. “But, Aldrik—”
“You must protect your family. You must protect me. Help me, brother.” Aldrik’s voice cracked on the last word, one he so rarely spoke. He’d never been a good brother—Aldrik had purposely broken Reyker’s toys; pursued every girl of age who the boy held childish fantasies of courting; scolded Reyker, barked at him like a warlord, the way their father had always treated Aldrik—but that word, that label of their bond in blood, was something Reyker treasured. It was attention, validation.
Manipulation.
“Why would you hide, god-man?” the warrior priest asked. “You will be celebrated as our savior. We will announce your existence to all of Isen—”
Reyker’s pupils swelled to black circles, engulfing the blue of his irises. With brutal efficiency no earthly boy possessed, Reyker drove his sword through the priest’s chest.
Aldrik released a breath—a gasp, a sigh—as he watched the priest’s blood spill across the earth. Reyker was weak when it came to those he cared for, and the boy had done for Aldrik what he would not do for himself. Just as Aldrik had predicted.
Until that very moment, Aldrik hadn’t known that his brother was god-touched. No wonder the boy was so nauseatingly noble. It was a thing Aldrik would remember, a thing he could use again.
I will break you, Reyker, Aldrik thought, so no one else can.
The blackness of Reyker’s pupils receded and the boy’s eyes widened in horror, as if his body had acted without his mind’s permission. The priest slumped forward, and Reyker’s sword went with him.
“I am damned,” Reyker said as he pulled his sword free.
Aldrik put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Now you are a man.”
It was Reyker’s first kill. The boy was only nine, years younger than Aldrik had been when he’d taken his first life. Reyker swiped at his eyes and stared silently at the dead priest, all emotion leaching from his face. The boy was as blank and pale as a slab of marble.
He did not speak the entire walk back to the village.
When they returned, late and spattered with blood, their father was waiting. He rushed to his younger son, but Reyker would not answer him, would not even look at him. The boy stared off at some distant point, as if he could see something the rest of them could not. Their father’s fear turned to suspicion. “What did you do, Aldrik?”
Lagor, lord of Vaknavangur, was a man whose presence demanded respect. He was tall and muscular, handsome according to the whispers of the village women. An honest and fair lord, though one you did not want to cross, according to the men. To Aldrik, he’d always felt like a stranger. Indeed, Lagor had been a stranger that day when he appeared in the Haunted Isles—looking wary and not at all like it was his own choice—and took five-year-old Aldrik away from the coven that had raised him since he was born. His mother’s coven. Or so he’d thought.
“What did you do, Father?” Aldrik asked. “Did you lie to me about my mother? Have you been lying to me since I was a boy?”
Katrin ran from the house, wrapping her arms around Reyker. Even at his mother’s pleas, the boy would not wake from his stupor.
“Tell him, Lagor,” Katrin said, looking at her husband, then at Aldrik. She had always been kinder to him than his own father, but she had never quite accepted him. She did not approve of the influence Lagor’s bastard held over her son. “Aldrik deserves to know what he is.”
What. Not who.
Aldrik glared at them, his father and the woman who’d been the closest thing to a mother he’d known after he was taken from the volvur’s island—his family, though they’d never treated him as such. After Katrin ushered Reyker into the cottage, Aldrik turned on Lagor. “Ildja is my mother. I am the child of the serpent goddess.”
He knew it was true as he said it aloud.
Lagor bowed his head. “Ildja came to me after a battle between rival jarls in the Highlands. We must have displeased the goddess because she rained fire down on all of us. Every man fell. I was badly burned, but I stayed on my feet with my sword out, calling her name. When Ildja appeared, I thought I was dead. But she took me to her home and healed me. She kept me there, and we had a brief affair before I returned to Vaknavangur. My time with her felt like a fever dream and I dismissed it. Then she came to me again years later and told me about you. She told me where to find you, so I brought you home.”