Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71403 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 286(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71403 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 286(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
Blood-forged. Realm-bound. Survival entwined.
Sebastian’s contingency plan. “Hello, my friend,” I said, pressing my hand to it, and letting it pull. And pull it did. I came through into a world of blue. The cave. Our cave, where Sebastian had pressed my back to the wall and asked me to marry him and burned his handprint into my chest. The chamber stretched further than it should have, further than the mountain that held it, blue in every direction until the edges dissolved. Above and around me the walls carried the whole of Krakenströnd. The dome. The currents sliding over it. The kelp forests. Villages linked by winding shell roads.
I set my jaw. “Show him to me.”
Harpa believed I could win him back. So, I would watch and learn, and then I would plan.
I watched him for six days.
I ate rations either Harpa or Sebastian had left in a bag, and cat-napped only when my body shut down of its own accord. Every second of every day that I was awake, I stood before those walls watching my husband, learning him all over again.
Honestly, he was a magnificent commander. He deployed his warriors across the outer reefs with perfect precision to battle the shifters. No wasted men, no wasted hours, every position chosen for reasons that only became visible three days later when Jokull’s mers came at the exact angle Sebastian had already covered.
He remained in contact with this cave. Not appearing, but connecting with it, soaking in its intel from a distance. I felt him every time he did it, his icy essence dropping the temperature at least ten degrees.
Like me, he didn’t sleep. Never ate unless someone put food in front of him, and then he ate all of it, quickly, without seeming to taste it.
On the fourth day, a soldier failed to hold his position. Forty men died, and Harpa was captured and carried away. I saw her go down. She laughed as she put her back to a reef arm and slew at least ten shifters and mers before others got a net over her shoulders. But even then she was laughing.
They carted her off, and the wall showed me Sebastian, now forty men down, watching his grandmother disappear into the dark.
He didn’t go after her or order it done. He looked at the greenhorn fighter who’d broken formation for two full seconds. Reassigned him to the rear supply lines, where failure would cost less. And turned to the next battle. Because he felt nothing. He simply recalculated.
Saving Harpa was not the objective.
I didn’t worry for her. Much. She was brilliant and resourceful and Jokull didn’t want her dead. Plus, she would figure it out like she’d done with everything else. The real question was, would I figure out my own impossible task? How was I supposed to win over an emotionless robot?
He hunted Jokull without mercy. Village by village, reef by reef, always marching forward. He took the primordial’s forces apart. Mers, shifters, anything that came out of the trench to feed. He never lost a battle. But he did lose plenty of men. And still, he just kept going.
On the fifth day, Gunnar approached him wearing grief like a winter coat, begging him to find another way. “You need your wife. Let me bring her to you.”
Sebastian merely canted his head at the man he’d once called friend. “I’ll hear no more talk of her. Either you are with me, or you are against me. Those against me die.”
I shook my head. This wasn’t my Sebastian. I still had no idea how to reach him.
On the sixth day, he found Jon. They met on a black ridge above the trench, at the ragged edge of everything, where Sebastian’s own dome thinned to a membrane and the abyss opened its mouth below.
Jon was fully shifted, a towering, plated, serrated nightmare of endless hooked limbs. His remaining shifters, still a staggering number, spread out behind him in a wall.
I pressed my hands to my churning stomach as Sebastian walked into the midst of them with Gunnar on his heels. Battle erupted.
I’d witnessed a great deal of violence since coming to this realm, but I had never seen anything like my husband on that ridge. His shadow tentacles came out of him, glowing white—rune-white—and they sliced through shifters like a blade through smoke. He didn’t hurry, didn’t stop, didn’t miss, and in a matter of minutes, he took a hundred shifters apart.
Gunnar fought at his back the way he’d fought at mine. Until he didn’t.
I saw it coming three seconds before it happened. Three whole seconds—enough time to scream, but it did him no good because I was a hundred miles away watching from a glowing wall.
Jon came at Sebastian’s blind side while he was mid-strike. Gunnar was closer, and he didn’t hesitate to stop it. Of course he didn’t. He was the mountain man, and he put himself in front of his king. The shifter’s shadow engulfed him, and Gunnar vanished. Just for a second, but when Jon released him, Gunnar, who had carried me through a burning forest, who had bowed to me in a hallway and called me my queen, was nothing but bone shards.