SWNOVELS Song of Sorrows and Fate: Chapter 5
Raven Row—Western Kingdom
I was not myself, but I hid it well. My body woke this morning a traitor. My bleeding spine felt ancient and weary. Like I’d find more joy remaining in bed instead of facing one more damn day where words never came. Where the heat in my heart from seidr was ashen and dry as a scorched field.
Today, though, I was not alone in my disquiet.
The dock swayed with the ebb and flow of the tide. I’d learned long ago to breathe through my mouth this close to the dirty water of the shores of Raven Row. I folded my Sun Prince’s letter for the tenth time, trying to see between every line, deconstructing every word.
Rare for Lumpy to admit he was discomposed, especially to me. We’d always been honest with each other, so I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised he’d confessed his wretched dreams. Still, there was a tone that was the ever-protective Sun Prince.
He’d filled the shoes of brother in my life after Stefan died.
For ten turns, Sol, Tor, and little Aleksi visited more than any of my royals. Even more than my Raven Queen aunt. It was a feat, since Ari disguised his own reservations whenever I returned home to the Row alone by insisting Mira had to visit me.
Ten turns ago, in one night, a royal family of worriers had been dropped in my lap.
I loved them for it. Loved them all, even the stoic glares of my Shadow King. He fretted, but in a different way. Whenever I announced I was returning to the West, a bit of black mist coated his eyes, and I knew.
But Lump and I had a different kind of connection. Bonded through suffering, he knew more than anyone the burdens breaking my spine day by day, but he didn’t know how my body seemed to be weakening with each sunrise.
I hated lying to Lump, hated keeping truths from him. Trouble was the deeper I dug into fears, the more unease unraveled inside me until I could hardly catch a breath. But if he knew, he’d sail across the Fate’s Ocean, drag me—swearing and kicking—all the way into a longship, and drag me back to the North.
Besides, how did I go about telling him the fears growing more potent in my bones with each bloody moon? Oh, by the way, my overprotective brother figure, I think our world is about to collapse. Give your precious little son an extra-long kiss now before it’s all over.
Gods. I shuddered at the thought.
I swiped at my lashes. When did I become such a spluttering, teary mess?
When Stefan died, that’s bleeding when. Stefan, my brother, the man who’d been disguised for gods-knew how long. Annon Vektäre was his true name. The captain of my dead father.
His mere existence was part of my countless unanswered questions. My endless simmer of unease and fear. If my father’s captain was concealed from me, what else was hidden in plain sight? What was the purpose of it? How did I avoid it?
There was the truth—I wanted to avoid the pull toward some other dreadful, cruel path of fate.
Now that I’d opened my whole damn heart to my royals, I had a great deal to lose. With the death of my brother, I knew exactly what that loss felt like. I’d rather step into the Otherworld myself before experiencing such suffocating pain again.
I read the last words of Sol’s missive again, the burn of tears in my eyes.
I don’t know what to think, little bird. Since this damn moon showed in the sky, the dreams never leave. Night after night I see it: Tor dying in my arms. It’s dark, and I’m dressed for battle, and the dream always ends the same—at his final breath. I don’t know what to do. I can’t face this world without him, Cal . . .
The horizon was swallowing the sun, and in its place, a crimson moon was beginning to rise.
It appeared nearly two weeks earlier. Soon enough, Ettan ships arrived at the shore. Sol and Tor and Aleksi remained in the dregs of Raven Row until they were convinced the Shadow Bastard hadn’t come to snatch me up.
Shadow Bastard. That name didn’t fit. Ten turns and I still hadn’t settled on a name for Davorin, my father’s battle lord. The tormentor and abuser of my Raven Queen. The man who wanted to personally wipe out my bloodline for eternity.
I brushed a thumb over Sol’s letter. He felt this fear deeply. Truth be told, I hated dreams like this. I had them of my own, and there was a deep foreboding that followed each one, like they weren’t simple dreams.
I wouldn’t let my Sun Prince lose the life he’d suffered for, the life he’d fought to win.
“It’s not going to happen, Lump,” I whispered to the sea breeze. “It’s not. I swear to you.”
I’d find the words to protect him. To fail when it came to Sol Ferus wouldn’t be an option for me.
The trouble was, I hadn’t been able to write a damn tale in months. Quill to parchment, and nothing came. The only hint my seidr still existed was the hum in my veins, and the dreams that set me on fire every night. Those same kind of dreams that plagued Sol, only mine made little sense.
They weren’t of the future. They were of past things. Bloody things, where throats were slit and suffering was had. There was something shifting inside me, like my heart—my soul—anticipated something life-altering, something frightfully wondrous and new.
With all that wonderment came the fear, heady enough I found contentment staying close to my ratty tenement. I was rarely willing to leave it for long, as though one wrong move would land me back in the cruel games of the Norns.
The tricky games of fate I’d been avoiding all my life. Games that would end in pain and death, and I wasn’t willing to risk another damn life.
“Cal, storm’s coming.” Cuyler nudged my arm and lowered to a crouch beside me.
Cuyler was the heir to the Court of Blood in the Southern Isles but had devoted the last ten turns of his existence to protecting Riot Ode’s lost heir. He was kind and entertaining. Not in a stupid way where folk laughed because of idiocy, Cuyler was genuinely enjoyable.
He’d give his life for me. But that didn’t sit right, so I often told him he could only die for me if he beat me to it. I told him I’d be leaping in front of arrows for him much the same.
He dragged his knife along the grains of damp sand. “Ready to go home?”
Home. To an empty tenement. The patience and endurance of Cuyler and his men was admirable. Whenever I returned to Raven Row after visiting other kingdoms, they lived in tight quarters in rotted tenements well beneath the glamor and spacious cottages in the Court of Blood.
They never complained. At least not to my face.
In truth, my small tenement had felt less and less like home and more a place of empty reminders of laughter that once filled the walls when Stef and I would play face cards until the early morning, or when we’d read strange fairy tales of the sea folk in the lands below the surf.
Those stopped being enjoyable when I met some of those damn sea folk.
Their ships were horrid and they were hardly polite.
“Ready?” Cuyler pressed again. He stood and held out a hand.
“No,” I said as I stood. I didn’t bother wiping the mud off my trousers, more would always come. “I don’t feel like going home quite yet.”
“Where do you want to go?”
I hugged my middle. “I want to see my brother. I have a fate tale to write, and he’s going to tell me how to get the words back.”