The knock came sharp and eager—twice, like a small fist that couldn't contain itself.
Garon Forkbeard heard the footsteps before the door swung open, and then there was Thomas Forkbeard, eight years old and beaming, collar already askew from the morning's first five minutes of living.
"Big brother!"
"Happy nameday." Garon smiled and reached for the boy's buttons without thinking, fingers working at the collar his brother had already managed to mangle. "Eight years already, is it?"
Thomas grinned and grabbed a fistful of Garon's shirt, twisting it between his fingers the way he always did when he was too pleased to know what to do with himself. "Yes."
"There you both are." Their mother appeared in the doorway behind Thomas, framed by the morning light of the corridor. There was something watchful in her eyes, the same quiet alertness she'd worn for months now—ever since the distance between Garon and their father had stopped being a matter of days and become something harder to measure.
Thomas broke from Garon's hands and flung himself at her.
"Where is Father?" Garon asked, still straightening his cuffs.
"He left his chambers early. "She stroked Thomas's hair without looking away from Garon. "Likely heading out. Take it easy today."
"Mother." He leaned down and pressed a kiss to her cheek. "Where's Yiva?"
He found her chamber himself.
The knock was heavier this time—his knuckles, not the polished courtesy of a visitor but the flat insistence of a brother who already knew she was in there.
"Who's there?"
"It's me. Open up."
"Leave me be."
He pushed the door open anyway.
Yiva Forkbeard stood before her tall mirror, a maid at her back adjusting the fastenings of a new gown—their father's latest gift, judging by the cut of it. She watched Garon in the glass without turning, the way she always watched things she wasn't sure she wanted to face directly.
"Leave us." The maid bowed and slipped out.
" You can't keep doing that, you know," Yiva said, smoothing a strand of golden hair behind her ear. Her eyes hadn't left his reflection.
He said nothing. He extended his hand, and she took it.
They moved through the long corridor together—maids pressing to the walls as they passed, knights dipping their chins in quiet deference. My lords. My lady. The words fell around them like familiar weather.
"I heard Father is meeting with guests tomorrow," Yiva said.
"What guests?"
A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, and she lifted her free hand to cover it. "Oh—you didn't know?" She tilted her head, studying him from the side. "Oops."
He kept his expression still, but she had always been able to read the places where he kept things.
They descended the stairs toward the balcony, and she let the silence stretch a moment before she spoke again—gently, the way she only spoke when she meant it to land.
"Give it up, Garon. You're starting to look desperate. Father is stubborn, and so are you. You're exactly the same, whether you like it or not."
"Look who's talking."
"I mean it."
They stepped out into the morning air. Below in the courtyard, Thomas was already sprinting between the stone pillars, arms spread like a bird that hadn't yet learned it couldn't fly.
"Thomas, careful!" Yiva called.
She released Garon's arm and stepped back, and her voice gentled entirely when she spoke again—no more teasing in it, just something that might have been kindness.
" A piece of advice. He's too busy to notice anything you try to do." She paused. "You know where to find him."
Then she was gone, back through the doors, leaving him alone on the balcony with the gold morning light on the stone and his brother's laughter rising from below.
Beyond Greenwood's western borders, where the city's authority thinned to nothing and the tall reeds owned the lakeshore, the afternoon had gone copper and still.
Dot knelt at the water's edge with his sleeves rolled to the elbows, gripping a makeshift spear—a sturdy branch, sharpened at one end, already dark from two previous failures. He had the patience of a man who'd learned that patience was often the only weapon that didn't cost money. He watched the surface with absolute stillness, waiting for the silver flash of scales moving beneath.
A short distance behind him, Dren sat perched on a flat rock with his boots off and his face turned toward the water, singing softly to himself—some low, wandering melody that drifted out over the lake and seemed to belong to it.
Dot thrust the spear down without warning. The surface erupted in a white spray of cold water. When he lifted the branch, a fat silver fish thrashed at its point, scales catching the dying light like scattered coins.
"Aren't you going to help?"
Dren paused mid-note, appeared to consider the question with genuine philosophical interest, and resumed singing as though it had never been asked.
Night came down fast over the lake. They built a small fire on the pebbled shore and skewered the fish above it, and for a while there was nothing but the crackle of the flames and the scent of roasting skin splitting open over the heat. Dot ate like a man making up for lost time, grease shining on his chin. Dren ate more slowly, his gaze drifting to the dark horizon where the dense canopy of Greenwood rose against the stars like a wall built to keep something in rather than out.
"Slow down. "A quiet laugh softened the words.
Dot eyed what remained on Dren's skewer with the uncomplicated focus of a man whose mind had solved the problem and was simply waiting for his hands to catch up.
"You going to eat that?"
"Here. "Dren held it out. "Take it. I'm full."
Dot snatched it without ceremony. They sat in the silence of the fire for a moment—the good kind of silence, the kind that didn't ask anything of you—and then Dot leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees.
"What's the endgame here? You hardly take jobs from royals. Let alone kings."
Dren turned a stick in the fire, watching the ember at its tip go bright and dim. "We need the money." A pause. "And this is your last job. I promise you that. Eat. Relax."
" Don't tell me to relax. The words came out flat, without heat, which somehow made them more serious. "My last job—for almost a month now? Don't speak to me like we're friends. He looked at Dren across the fire. "We're not. We need each other for the moment. Nothing more. When I'm done here, you owe me. You give me what I want, and I'll be on my way."
Dren nodded once and took a slow, deliberate bite.
They mounted up in the grey cool of early morning, before the day had decided what it wanted to be. Dust rose in soft clouds beneath the horses' hooves as they rode toward the city, and the lake behind them shrank to a silver glint and then to nothing at all.
Greenwood's gates were everything the city's name suggested and nothing like what the name prepared you for. The oak was old and dense and reinforced with iron bands dark with age. Tall towers flanked the entrance on either side, hung with banners the deep green of forest shadow. The guards who stood with their spears crossed were not decorative — there was something in their stillness that belonged to men who had actually used the things.
"State your business, travelers."
Dren leaned low from his saddle and spoke a single phrase into the guard's ear—something quiet enough that Dot caught only the register of it, not the words. Whatever it was, it worked. The guard's eyes went wide in a way that wasn't fear, exactly, but was certainly its close neighbor.
He stepped aside.
"Pass."
The city swallowed them whole.
Dot turned his head constantly as they rode deeper in, unable to stop himself—market stalls overflowing with spices in colors he had no names for, glowing crystals that pulsed with some inner light, and cages full of birds whose feathers flashed jewel-bright in the morning. From behind silk curtains hung with red lanterns, laughter and music spilled into the cobblestoned street.
Somewhere behind a stone wall, a blacksmith's hammer rang against white-hot steel. Children darted laughing through the crowds with the particular freedom of children who believed the world was entirely safe.
They hadn't gone far before a detachment of guards came at a brisk pace and saluted with military precision.
"The Drought and his companion," the captain said. "The king expects you. Follow."
They were led through streets that grew quieter and narrower until they reached a side entrance to the castle—discreet, solid, and unmistakably the door through which things arrived that were not meant to be seen arriving.
Inside, stone corridors glowed with the amber of iron torches that threw long, unsteady shadows. Their guest chamber was generous by any practical measure and a cage by every other: one large bed and a smaller cot against the far wall, heavy drapes drawn over a window whose bars were visible even through the cloth, and a table bearing wine and bread that neither of them touched. The door locked from the outside with a heavy, deliberate click.
Dren tested the lock with one finger.
"A prison with better sheets."
"How long do we wait?"
Dren set his sword across his knees. "I can't say. We were meant to be here yesterday." He paused. "That might have pissed off the fat king."
"Typical."
Hours passed. Dot paced the room until he'd memorized every stone in the floor, then stood at the window watching the city's lights through the bars. Dren sat on the edge of the bed and drew a whetstone along his blade with patient, rhythmic strokes—the sound of it filling the room like a heartbeat or a clock ticking.
When the door finally swung open, the captain who stood in the frame wore armor that had been made to impress rather than to survive.
"The king will see you now."
The grand hallway was wide enough for ten men to walk abreast, and they walked it as two. They were perhaps halfway through when the princess Yiva swept past in the other direction—emerald silks, an entourage of servants and knights, and a laugh that rang bright and entirely without warmth.
Her eyes moved over their road-worn clothes and the campfire smell that still clung to them, and she leaned toward the companion nearest her with the practiced ease of someone who had never once considered that the subject of her amusement might be worth lowering her voice for.
"I wager Father will have their heads."
Laughter rippled through her group.
Dren watched her go. He offered her a small smile—measured, unreadable, the kind of smile that meant something the recipient never quite understood until later.
The throne hall was built for the specific purpose of making people feel small.
The vaulted ceiling rose into shadow. The columns were carved with twisting vines so detailed they seemed to move in the torchlight. Guards stood in rigid ranks along the walls, spears gleaming, faces arranged in the blank professional stillness of men paid not to react. At the far end, elevated on a dais, sat a throne of dark wood threaded through with living green thorns—and on it, the king.
He was middle-aged and hard, with a forked beard going grey at the edges and an iron circlet on his head that had nothing ceremonial about it. This was a man who had spent his life taking things by force and had the expression to prove it. Beside him, his firstborn son, Garon, watched the two newcomers with studied calculation—a younger version of the same face and the same ambition but not yet the same patience.
Dot glanced at the guards as he and Dren walked the long aisle. He made a count without appearing to. He noted the ones who were genuinely alert and the ones who were merely standing. Their boots rang on the cold stone floor.
They stopped before the dais.
"You were meant to be here yesterday, Dren the Drought."
Dren bowed—unhurried, measured, not quite as deep as convention demanded. "We are deeply sorry, Your Majesty. Something urgent demanded our attention."
The prince's mouth tightened. "You've disrespected my father, the king. Father—he should be imprisoned, and his boy over there."
"We're not related," Dot said.
"Do not speak when the king has not addressed you!"
The king silenced the hall with a single look—not a raised hand, not a raised voice, just the weight of a man who had never in his adult life been accustomed to repetition.
The prince tried again. "Send one of our own men, Father. We have the finest soldiers in the realm—"
"Shut up, boy."
He leaned forward, and the hall leaned with him.
"A billion ," the king said. His voice had dropped to something low and deliberate, the register of a man who had never needed to shout. "For one life. The weapon of Thornhold."
"Weapon?" Dot said.
Dren's smile spread wide and knowing—the smile of a man who had already read the last page of this particular story.
"You want Boldr's head."
Dot turned to look at him. "Boldr what—?"
"The Thorn King's own brother. "Dren kept his eyes on the king as he spoke, his voice calm and informational, as though reciting from a text he'd long since committed to memory.
" They call him the Last Æsir—the one who uprooted a siege tower with his bare hands and shattered enemy shield-walls by charging through them like a storm. Men worship him as a living god."
"The same." Something moved beneath the king's authority—a tremor, carefully contained. His strength is unnatural. Divine blood runs in his veins — the last ember of the old gods burning in a mortal frame. He has broken every army we've sent against Thornhold's walls. "His voice hardened again, the tremor buried. "We will not waste legions on a single beast when a blade in the dark will suffice."
Dot stepped forward slightly, his voice steady but edged with the confusion of a man who needed the logic to close before he could proceed. "If he's just one man, why not poison? "Archers? Why us?"
"Boldr is no ordinary man, surely you've heard about him."
The king held his gaze.
"Arrows glance off him like rain, poison turns to water in his blood. And if our colors are seen near his keep, the ancient pact he holds — the old oaths of the bloodline — may unleash something far worse than defeat."
A pause.
"You are ghosts. You leave no trail."
The hall was very quiet.
Dren stood still for a moment with his hands clasped behind his back, head slightly tilted. Something gleamed in his eyes that might have been amusement or might have been something older and less comfortable.
"O mighty Sweyn Forkbeard," he said. His voice was conversational, almost gentle—which made every word land harder. Scourge of seas, slayer of kings. The man who once charged into battle with an axe, singing, and a beard forked like thunder.
He let that image sit for a moment.
"What curse has befallen thee? Nothing remains but a swollen belly and a wilted spirit. Where is the honor that drove thee to claim thrones by blood and iron? Hast thou traded all that valor for a coward's ease, fearing the very death thou once courted without flinching?"
The guards' hands moved to their weapons. The prince's sneer deepened. Several people in the hall stopped breathing.
The king raised one arm. The hall went utterly still.
"A billion is generous," Dren continued, as though the silence were simply a pause in polite conversation. "Make it five. And a signed writ guaranteeing safe passage from your lands when the work is done. No..." he let the word rest precisely where it needed to rest, "...accidents."
The king regarded him for a long moment—the unhurried consideration of a man weighing something against something else and finding the scale balanced closer than he liked.
He gave a single slow nod.
"Three billion. The writ is yours. He leaned back in his throne. "Bring me proof — his head. Legend holds that he can only be killed by a god-slaying weapon, forged by dwarven hands."
"Has anyone confirmed the dwarves still exist?"
" Not that we know of." The king's gaze drifted to the great sword resting across Dren's back. He studied it for a moment. "Though slaying him will be no small task. The tales claim you are the only man alive who has ever so much as scratched the beast."
Dot stared at Dren. He thought he knew this man—knew him in the way you knew anyone you'd bled alongside and slept rough beside and trusted with your back for a dozen dangerous weeks. He was beginning to understand that what he'd known was the outline of a shape whose interior remained entirely dark.
Dren only smiled.
Then he turned, and the guards parted before him like water before a prow.
The moment the doors closed behind them, the king turned to the hooded figure standing in the shadow at his left—the one who had been there all along, unintroduced, and unremarked upon, the way a man becomes unremarkable when he has been in a room long enough.
"When they return," the king said. His voice had dropped to barely above a whisper. "Kill them."
"Yes, my lord." The advisor's eyes lingered on the doorway where Dot's retreating form had last been visible, with the slow, measuring attention of a man cataloguing something he intended to retrieve later.
Outside the castle, the cool night air settled between them like a third party to their arrangement.
Dot exhaled slowly, looking up at the stars above Greenwood's rooftops. "Five billion quibes." He shook his head. "That's more than kingdoms cost."
" The rich pay dearly when they're frightened," Dren said. He moved toward the wagon without hurrying. "They pay more when they're lying."
"You think they'll turn on us?"
"They always do. The question is only when." He paused with one hand on the wagon's cover. "Which is why I brought us a little insurance — and left the king a generous note should he fail to honor his end."
He pulled back the cover.
Inside the wagon, bound at the wrists and blindfolded, a young woman twisted against her ropes. The emerald silks were rumpled now, the composure entirely gone, the laughter from the hallway replaced with something considerably less arch.
"Let me go! " The princess's voice was tight with fury. " Help! You bastards—you think you can get away with this? My father will see your heads on pikes!"
Dot stared.
"Seriously?!"
"You talk a great deal, Princess." Dren closed the cover firmly.
Her voice continued regardless, muffled but undimmed.
In her chambers, the queen was weeping on the stone floor. Her ladies stood around her in helpless attendance, hands extended and withdrawn, uncertain what comfort looked like in a moment this specific.
The king burst in and found this tableau waiting for him.
"What is this?!"
The guard who stepped forward was already stammering before he finished the question. "Sire—they took the princess." "They left this."
He held out a folded note. The king snatched it and read.
The handwriting was clean and unhurried.
Hey fat king—if you want your daughter back, keep your end of the deal.
The king stood very still for a moment. Of the various ruthless calculations he had made over a lifetime of ruthless calculation, none of them had ever touched this particular corner of himself—the unguarded place where his daughter lived, the one bright thing in an otherwise thoroughly defended heart.
His face changed.
When the guard spoke again—quietly, nearly apologetically, something about how the princess had dismissed him from her door herself, how he hadn't wanted to leave, how she'd insisted—the king drew his dagger and drove it home in a motion as reflexive as breathing.
The man collapsed without finishing his sentence.
Later, the king sat alone on his throne in the emptied hall. The torches burned low. His closest men stood back far enough to exist in the periphery, close enough to be useful.
"Bring him."
A hooded figure entered from the shadows at the hall's far end. He moved with the particular quality of ease that belongs to men who have long since stopped being afraid of anything—not performance, not bravado, just the settled stillness of a man who has been through the worst of things and emerged having made his peace with them. A katana rested at his hip. His face was mapped in old scars.
"Bring me his head," the king said. "In return, command of my second legion is yours."
The prince leaned forward from his position at the dais's edge. "Father—why send him now? Are you even certain he can kill the Drought? If so, why not use him to kill Boldr directly?"
""Speak again and I'll beat you up myself, boy."
The prince went silent.
The king turned back to the hooded man. "The drought was always meant to wear Boldr down before we struck. With the princess taken, the plan changes. We move faster now."
The hooded man's smile was a thin and private thing. It did not reach his eyes, and it did not appear to want to.
"You are too generous, my king. "His voice was quiet, accustomed to the confidence of a man who never needed to project. "Consider it already done. A pause. "I have been looking forward to seeing my old friend Dren."
Outside the castle walls, as the last light bled from the edges of the sky, a cloaked figure slipped away from the eastern gate—alone, unannounced, moving quickly.
The prince pulled his hood low and set his jaw against the cold and against the particular humiliation of being dismissed in front of witnesses. He would not wait for his father's plans to grind forward on their own grinding timeline. He would not sit in that hall playing the obedient son while his sister was out there in the dark with men who were capable of anything.
He would find her himself.
He would earn what was owed to him.
And he would be damned to any order that stood in his way.
— To Be Continued —