The Road – Late Afternoon
They smelled Thornhold before they saw it.
Not unpleasantly — woodsmoke and roasting meat and something sweeter underneath, the smell of a city that had decided tonight was worth celebrating. The road grew louder as they walked, the distant sound of drums and strings threading through the trees, growing fuller with every mile until they crested the final hill and the valley opened up below them and the city was right there — black stone walls lit orange from within, torches burning at every parapet, the gates standing open and streaming with people moving in both directions.
Dren stopped at the top of the hill and looked at it.
"Festival," Sylric said, beside him.
"Yeah." Dren watched the flow of people below. Carts, merchants, travelers, families. A river of humanity moving toward the gates.
"They've been planning this for weeks. Half the kingdom will be inside those walls tonight." He was quiet for a moment. "That's useful."
"What's our cover? They won't let strangers through those gates." Sylric said.
"Cover." Dren started down the hill.
"We're grain merchants. Sold our load two days out, looking for lodging and a return contract. Stay close. Don't do anything interesting."
He looked at Dren when he said it.
Dot said nothing. He was looking at the city the way he looked at most things — steady, measuring, giving nothing back.
They went down.
Thornhold Gates – Evening
The gate guards were overwhelmed and knew it. Festival traffic had been running since midday and showed no signs of slowing — they'd long since moved from thorough to functional, waving through anyone who looked unremarkable and saving their attention for actual problems.
Dren was very good at looking unremarkable when he needed to be. He had the weariness of the road down precisely — the slightly hunched shoulders, the flat eyes of a man who wanted a bed and a meal and nothing complicated. The guard asked about cargo. Sold, said Dren. Business? Looking for a return contract, heard there was work. The guard's eyes moved over the group with professional disinterest and found nothing worth stopping.
They were through before the next cart pulled up behind them.
Dren, as usual, rushed into a bar in town, his hood pulled low over his face.
Sylric and the others followed close behind.
They stepped inside and took a seat. The place was nearly empty—only the bartender remained behind the counter.
"Seems it's empty," Dot said aloud.
The bartender chuckled. "Aye, it is."
He asked where they had come from.
Dren, already drinking, answered for them. "We've returned from the east. Just need a place to rest for the night."
The bartender nodded. "Then you're in luck. There are rooms available tonight—most folks are attending the festival."
Yiva leaned forward, curiosity in her eyes. "What festival?"
The man raised a brow. "You must live very far from here."
"Yes," Yiva replied.
Dren casually nudged the hilt of his sword against her back, a silent warning to keep quiet.
The bartender continued, unfazed.
"It's a celebration of the last god's bloodline—Odin's own line, it's said, bestowed upon this land."
He paused, then went on.
"The gods of the realm are dead. But before their end came something new—the last bloodline of Odin. First was King Harald's father. They say he had the strength of a thousand men."
"Yet he was surpassed by his own son—King Harald the Late. A legend in his youth… a warrior who once shattered a mountain troll's skull with a single bare-handed strike."
Yiva's eyes lit up, clearly impressed.
The man sighed, his tone darkening.
"But they met a downfall. An illness took them both—King Harald and his father. No mage, no healer could cure it. A cursed sickness, you could say. Some believe it was Loki's final punishment on Odin's bloodline… bastard that he was."
He folded his arms.
"But here in Thornhold, we still honor them. We pray and celebrate our rulers—the sons of King Harald. Eirik… and his brother, Boldr the Great."
The bartender stopped and glanced at them. "Now then—would you like something to eat?"
"Yes—" Dot began.
But Dren grabbed him and pulled him away. Dropping a coin onto the counter, he said, "Where can we stay?"
The bartender pointed them in the right direction, and without another word, they left.
---
Later, the bartender watches the door close… then quietly reaches for something behind the counter, contacting someone.
The Inn – Night
Second floor, narrow, a window facing the main thoroughfare where the festival noise rose and fell in waves. Drums. Laughter. The smell of food from somewhere below. The city was alive in a way that made their small room feel like the eye of something.
Dren stood at the window with his arms crossed, looking down at the street.
"Boldr will be at the capital alone," he said. "The speech, the ceremony — he doesn't like the crowds. That's when we move." He turned from the window. "We wait. We learn the layout. We find where he sleeps." He looked at each of them in turn. "Tonight we stay low."
"You seem to know much about him," Dot said.
"I have my sources,"Dren said with a cold laugh.
"Staying low," Sylric said from the wall,"
"That's correct."
A pause. "Fine."
Dot was sitting on the edge of the bed, forearms on his knees, looking at the floor. He hadn't said much since they entered the city — the thinkers look, the one that meant he was running something over and over in his head without resolving it.
Dren noticed. Didn't push.
"Where's Yiva?" Dot asked.
"Ehh that's why it's been quiet". Dren says
Everyone looked at the space where she'd been standing. The door to the small adjoining room was open. The room was empty.
Thornhold Streets – Same Time
She hadn't planned to leave. She'd been standing in the doorway of the adjoining room listening to Dren talk about staying low and something in the street below the window had caught her eye — a figure moving through the festival crowd with a particular walk, a particular set of the shoulders, the way someone carries themselves when they think no one is watching who knows what to look for.
She had a feeling she knows the person.
She was down the stairs and out the inn door before she'd made a conscious decision to move. The festival crowd swallowed her immediately — bodies and noise and the smell of spiced wine and torch smoke, people moving in every direction with the easy momentum of celebration. She kept her eyes on the figure ahead, tracking the familiar shape through the gaps.
He — she thought it was a he — moved quickly, threading through the crowd without looking back. She followed. Down one street, left at a crossing, into a narrower lane that ran alongside the back of a row of merchants' buildings, away from the main festival thoroughfare.
The figure stopped.
Turned.
Yiva's breath caught.
Before she could process what she was seeing, a hand came from the wall beside her — fast, precise — and covered her mouth, pulling her back into the shadow of a doorway. Her back hit stone. She grabbed for the wrist and found it immovable.
"Quiet." A voice in her ear. Low. Serious.
"Guards. Find her."
She froze. Footsteps on the cobblestones — unhurried, official, the sound of men on patrol rather than pursuit. They passed the lane entrance without slowing..
The hand dropped from her mouth.
She spun. The figure from the crowd stood in front of her, hood back now, face visible in the thin light from the street.
She looked at the face for a long moment, something moving through her chest that she didn't have a name for yet.
She knew this person. She wasn't supposed to.
"We need to talk Princess," the figure said quietly. "Not here. Come."
The Inn – Same Time
Dot found the empty room. Came back out. Looked at Dren.
"She's gone."
Dren's jaw tightened. He looked at the window — the festival noise rose from below, ten thousand people moving through the streets of a city neither of them knew. He breathed out slowly through his nose.
"Find her," he said. "Quietly. Don't draw attention."
Dot was already moving.
Thornhold Streets – Night
The festival had fully taken over by the time Dot came out of the inn. Torches everywhere, music from three different directions at once, the smell of meat and sweetbread from the stalls lining the main thoroughfare. He moved through it with his head slightly down and his eyes moving, scanning for Yiva's face in a crowd that had no shortage of faces.
He turned down a side street. Checked two alleys. Doubled back.
A hand grabbed his arm.
He turned, ready — and found a girl, maybe sixteen, bright-eyed, flushed from dancing, wearing flowers in her hair and an expression of absolute determination.
"Dance with me," she said.
"I'm looking for someone—"
"Everyone's looking for someone." She was already pulling him toward the square. "Come on, just one—"
"I really can't—"
The crowd closed around them before he finished the sentence. A wall of celebrating bodies, moving to the drums, impossible to move against without causing a scene. The girl spun into the circle and pulled him with her and he found himself in the middle of a festival dance with no graceful exit and a city to search.
He managed to get far from the girl distracting her while he kept looking for Yiva over people's shoulders.
The Inn – The Confrontation
Dren stood at the window. The street below moved and celebrated and gave him nothing useful.
Sylric was still at the wall. He'd been watching Dren for the last several minutes with the expression he wore when he'd decided something and was choosing the moment to say it.
"Hidenhiem," Sylric said.
Dren didn't turn from the window. "Not now."
to
"Yes now." Sylric pushed off the wall. The chains coiled once around his forearm — slow, deliberate, the unconscious movement of someone whose hands betray what their face won't. "We're in Thornhold. I just have this feeling that you don't really plan on fighting Boldr."
"What makes you say that". Dren chuckles
He paused. "What actually happened in Hidenhiem. What exactly is Dot?. What do you know that you haven't said."
Dren was quiet for a moment. Then he turned from the window.
"You want to talk about what I know." Something in his voice had shifted — quieter, more deliberate. "Alright. Let's do that." He held Sylric's gaze steadily. "I know about One of the Allthings Councilman Verath. I know you went to his chambers six months ago and got close enough to put a blade to his throat before they pulled you off." He let that sit. "I know The Allthing sentenced you to death and handed you this job as the alternative. Kill the boy — sentence disappears. Come back empty-handed—"
"They take my head," Sylric said. Flat.
Calm. "Yes."
"So we both have things we're carrying."
Dren's voice didn't harden. It stayed level — the voice of someone who isn't using information as a weapon, just laying it on the table. "I'm not holding it over you. I'm telling you because you asked for honesty and this is part of it." He paused. "I believe Autuss lock is still alive now going by the name Red man I believe he wants the boy.
"Redman," Sylric says
"Autus lock has been dead for a long time now."
"There's still little We know about him but what's certain he wants the boy as part of his plan". Dren says.
He's a vessel ." He looked at Sylric directly. "He's the target. There's a difference."
Sylric stood very still.
Then he walked to the door. Stopped with his hand on the frame. He didn't look back.
"I went after Verath," he said quietly, "because he signed the order to burn Saltmere." A pause, thin as a blade. "My village. Kael's village." Another pause. "I failed. My only regret is I didn't end him he survived." He opened the door. "I'll be back."
"Stick to the plan," Dren said.
He left.
Dren stood alone in the room and looked at the window and didn't move for a long moment.
Then the door came in..
Not knocked — in, off its hinges, and the two women who came through it were already moving before it hit the floor. Dren had his sword half-drawn when the first one hit him — low, fast, inside his guard before the blade cleared the scabbard, the movement of someone who had drilled for exactly this exact reach and angle. He pivoted, took the hit wrong, got his back to the wall.
The second was already there.
They were extraordinary. He registered that even as he fought them — the coordination between them seamless and practiced, each movement feeding into the other's, no wasted motion, no hesitation. Boldr's wives. He'd heard they were trained. He hadn't heard they were this trained.
He was good. He'd been good for thirty years. But they had planned for him and he hadn't planned for them, and the room was small, and there were two of them, and he was already tired from the road.
The blow to the back of his skull came from a third direction he hadn't accounted for.
The floor came up.
The Main Square – Same Time
The drums stopped.
The festival crowd in the main square went quiet as the platform at the far end lit up with torches — a wide wooden stage set up for the evening's ceremony, banners of Thornhold hanging from poles on either side. Officials. Guards. The ceremony of a kingdom celebrating its victory.
Dot had finally extracted himself from the dance and was moving along the edge of the square, still scanning for Yiva, when the silence fell and the crowd's attention shifted to the stage and he stopped because there was nowhere to move without pushing through ten bodies.
A herald stepped forward and began.
The words washed over him at first — the accomplishments of the Thorn King and his brother Boldr the great, the enemies defeated, the alliances secured, the long war finally tipping toward an end He also wishes the king good health, because of his illness, the prince the heir is at this event drinking like a fool with ladies around him. The crowd listened with the particular attention of people who have been afraid for a long time and are being told they don't have to be anymore.
Then the herald's voice shifted. Became more formal. A special guest, he said. A gesture of the kingdom's reach. An offering of leverage in the ongoing negotiations with Greenwood.
A figure in a hood walked onto the stage from the left.
Behind him, on a rope, wrists bound — Yiva.
She walked with her chin up and her jaw set and her eyes moving across the crowd with the expression of someone cataloguing exits. Even now. Even like this.
The hooded figure stopped at the center of the stage. Reached up. Pulled the hood back.
Mage Vespers.
The crowd murmured. Dot stood very still in the middle of it.
Vespers looked out at the crowd for a moment. Then he looked down at the rope in his hand.
she dropped it.
Yiva's hands were free — had been free, Dot realised, looking at the way she was holding her wrists. The binding had been cut already, held in place by her own hands, the performance of captivity rather than the thing itself.
Vespers stepped back. Turned to the officials on the stage. Said something quiet that Dot couldn't hear from the crowd.
Whatever it was, it wasn't what they'd expected. The nearest official's expression shifted from ceremony to confusion to something approaching alarm.
Dot started pushing through the crowd toward the stage.
Castle Hall – Same Time
Dren came back to consciousness being dragged.
His wrists were bound behind him. His sword was gone. His head felt like it had been used as a bell. He got his feet under him and managed something approaching walking between the two women who held his arms, which was better than being carried and not as good as not being here at all.
They brought him through a side entrance of a building that was clearly not the capital hall — older, more private, the kind of place that doesn't appear on the maps visitors are shown. Into a large room, high-ceilinged, lit by braziers. Long table. Food. The smell of wine and roasted meat.
At the head of the table sat Boldr.
He was exactly what the stories said and also nothing like them. Large — genuinely large, the kind of large that comes from a lifetime of being built for it rather than cultivated. Middle-aged, broad-faced, the look of a man who had seen a great deal and decided to enjoy what remained. Girls moved around him with wine and food. He was eating with complete focus and satisfaction, the way a man eats when he has won something.
He looked up when they brought Dren in.
His eyes moved over Dren's face. Recognition crossed his expression — something complicated in it, layered, the look of a man seeing something he'd thought about from a distance for a long time.
He smiled. Wide. Genuine.
"Long time no see," Boldr said, and tore another piece from the bone in his hand. "Sit him down. Carefully." He waved at the women holding Dren. "He's a guest. Uncomfortable guest, but still."
They pushed Dren into a chair. He sat. Looked at Boldr across the table.
"You look older," Boldr said pleasantly.
"You look Stupid," Dren said.
Boldr laughed — a real laugh, large like everything else about him. "Fair." He set the bone down and picked up his wine. "I heard you were coming. Heard what you were here to do." He tilted his head. "Old King Forkbeard really thinks you can kill me."
"Someone thinks so."
"Someone's wrong." He said it without heat. Just fact. "But I don't want to kill you either, Dren. We've always been too useful to each other for that." He swirled his wine. "So. Here we are. What do we do with this?"
Dren looked at him steadily. He'd been looking at the room since he sat down — the exits, the guards, the positions of the women, the distance to Boldr. And behind Boldr, slightly to the left, standing with a wine jug and her eyes cast down and her weight on her back foot in the specific way of someone ready to move—
Ysmay.
She hadn't looked at him yet. She was looking at the floor with the patience of someone who had been waiting for a signal and was waiting still.
Dren looked back at Samson. Something in his expression shifted — just slightly. The calculation completing itself behind his eyes, the pieces falling into the positions they'd been moving toward since Chapter 3, since a whispered conversation in a tavern that nobody else had heard.
"How about," Dren said, "we make a deal."
Boldr raised an eyebrow. Interested. Amused. "I'm listening—"
The wine jug hit the table. Ysmay's hand came around from behind Boldr with a knife — smooth, unhurried, the movement of someone who had been standing in exactly this position for exactly this moment for three weeks — and the blade settled against the side of Boldr's throat with a precision that said she had done this before and knew what she was doing.
The girls scattered. The guards at the walls moved — and stopped, because Ysmay's other hand had produced a second blade from somewhere and its angle made the calculation very simple.
Boldr sat very still. Looked down at the knife at his throat. Looked up at Dren.
A long pause.
Then he laughed again — quieter this time, the laugh of a man who has just been outplayed and is deciding how he feels about it.
"A deal," he said. "Right. Yes." He set his wine down carefully. "Let's talk about a deal."
Dren leaned back in his chair, wrists still bound behind him, and let the silence work.
To be continued.