I brushed my fingers over the black flames of the man’s warrior-mark, feeling the slight ridges of the inked skin above his eye. The near-matching scar on my wrist tingled. There were secrets behind these markings. This man, with his prismatic soul, was full of secrets, and I wanted to unravel them.
“Try not to die while I’m gone.”
The village was abuzz over the corpses.
Rather than go home, I went straight to the harbor and stood on the cliffs beside other villagers, studying the commotion. Father and Madoc paced the shore, shouting at each other. Sons of Stone—my brothers among them—dragged the half-eaten bodies into a pile, tossing them atop the ship’s wreckage.
“Westlanders,” someone near me mumbled. “Giants with hair like straw, eyes like water. The beasts of the Frozen Sun.”
I remembered sitting cross-legged between my brothers, listening raptly as Mother told this tale: Long ago, pieces of the sun broke free, landing in half-frozen seas. The sulfurous rocks spat fire and belched smoke. The leviathans dwelling there—the only creatures that could survive in realms of fire and ice—birthed monsters deceptively covered in human skin.
Beasts.
“Bollocks,” I said. The warrior I’d saved was strange, but he was a mortal, not a monster.
An old man pointed at the corpses. “Their warrior-marks prove it, flaunting the serpent scales beneath their skin.”
A tattoo proved nothing. Besides, my warrior’s mark was fire, not scales.
I wanted to hear what the Sons of Stone were saying about the dead men, so I grabbed a jug of whiskey from the great hall’s kitchens and lugged it down to the harbor, winding my way through the tired warriors, refilling their flasks. “A drink to usher the dead,” I called.
“To the otherworlds with you,” each man replied, raising his flask and taking a swig. An old superstition, meant to remind any lingering spirits that they must move on.
Our village priest had come to examine the bodies. I caught him scowling at me, and I wondered if he saw through my guise of tradition. My brothers certainly did. Garreth pursed his lips, and Rhys tilted his head—silently asking where I’d been last night—but neither of them tried to stop me. Meanwhile, the Sons of Stone circulated the same rumors as the villagers: these men were frost giants from the Frozen Sun.
My skirts billowed in the breeze as I shuffled toward my father and uncle. The wind carried their voices across the sand. “Another clan of mercenaries looking to settle on our island,” Madoc was saying. “As if we don’t have enough barbarians already. The Kelpies wedding their horses, the Ravenous eating their own dead. The bloody Bog Men, those mud-wearing, serpent-loving savages.”
I thought back to books I’d read in Father’s library about the history of Glasnith. It was said that the mercenary clans weren’t descended from Lord Llewlin and the first men of Glasnith, as clans like ours were. Their ancestors had been dispossessed barbarians from the Auk Isles who had settled in southern Glasnith, taken Glasnithian wives and lands. They had their own clans, their own cultures. Most mercenaries believed in the Immortal Scriptures and the True Gods, as we did, but it was their own barbarian gods that they worshiped and prayed to.
Madoc never missed a chance to complain about the mercenaries.
Father sighed, weary of this argument. “The mercenaries keep us free. No one wants to cross them. Without their backing, the clans of Glasnith could be influenced to disband and appoint a High King. Do you want to bow to some rich, foppish nobleman? We’re meant to rule ourselves, as Lord Llewlin before us, as the True Gods intended. Look what happened the last time some fool got it into his head to declare himself king.”
The Great Betrayer—a god who came down to Glasnith wearing a mortal’s skin and tried to take our country from us before he was defeated. We’d burned his name from the pages of our history, but we all knew what he’d done, how he’d nearly destroyed our island.
“I bow to no one,” Madoc said.
“Then we’d best hope all the frost giants want is women and land.” Father nudged one of the bodies, an ox of a man, with his boot. “Especially if they’re as fierce as stories portray.”
When all the bodies had been gathered, the priest took a torch and set the heap of corpses and timber aflame. I watched the dead men burn, thick smoke curling into the bright sky. There were no songs, no prayers—a lack of respect that meant these men were regarded more like animals than enemies.
My sickly warrior would join his dead brethren if I couldn’t heal him.
I abandoned the pyre and hurried back up the path through the village.
Stony Harbor crouched on the edge of the Shattered Sea. Shaped like a crescent moon, it was bordered to the north and west by the sea’s gray waters and to the south and east by the towering trees of the Tangled Forest. The rolling hills were dappled with modest cottages. I stopped at one, letting myself in without knocking.
Tables dominated the parlor, cluttered by vials, bowls, and herbs. Ishleen stood chopping roots at one of the tables, light-brown curls falling into her face. Though she wasn’t god-gifted as I was, her mother, Olwen, the village midwife, had taught her well. Ishleen had a talent for potions—she knew precisely what concoctions could cure any variety of ailments.
“Lira,” she called. “Have you come to gossip? I hear my uncle Fergus soiled himself when he saw all those dead frost giants washed up on the shore.”
As soon as I saw her mother was out, and we were alone, I wasted no time. “Ishleen, I need a potion and your discretion. No one can know of this.”
“Hmm. Rescuing helpless wild animals again?” she asked, teasing me over my childhood fascination for aiding wounded creatures. “Let me guess. Fox? Hawk?”
“A young wolf,” I said quickly. I thought of the warrior, snarling at me, his eyes blue as a wolf pup’s. “Sick with lung-fever.”
Ishleen stopped chopping and gave me a worried look. “You must be cautious. Even young wolves can kill.”
“He won’t hurt me.” Did I actually believe this? So he’d cut my bindings and shoved me off a boat five years ago—could such a thing be called an act of kindness? I’d felt the man’s soul. There was darkness in it as well as light, guilt as well as innocence. “But I’ve my knife, if he tries,” I added.
“And your fist, it seems.” She gestured at my swelling hand.
“Will you help me or not?”
I knew she would, otherwise I wouldn’t have come. Ishleen stared at me, deliberating, and then she nodded. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Lira.”
“I do,” I insisted, even though I didn’t.