Sky in the Deep (Sky and Sea, #1)

by Adrienne Young

I pulled her hand toward me to secure the straps of her shield onto her arm by memory. We’d been fighting mates for the last five years and I knew every piece of her armor as well as she knew every badly mended bone in my body.

pulled my sword from my scabbard with my right hand and caught the axe with my left. “Vegr yfir fjor.” She settled her arm all the way into her shield, lifting it up over her head in an arc to stretch her shoulder before she repeated it back to me. “Vegr yfir fjor.” Honor above life.

I didn’t remember as much of my mother as Iri had. We lived most of our lives with only our father, but I didn’t like Inge touching him. I didn’t like the tenderness between them. Inge acting like Iri’s mother was an insult, but Iri acting like Inge’s son was blasphemy.

And I knew that though he’d never say it, some part of him held me responsible for Iri’s death. Because I was. I was his fighting mate and that made him my responsibility. It was my job to keep him alive. I should have given my life before his could be taken. The guilt haunted the shadows of my every dream. He was there, in every nightmare. I’d gone into the fighting season, ready to avenge my brother. But Sigr was waiting for me in Aurvanger, ready to pour out his wrath upon me. And now I was being punished for my weakness. I had failed. I knew that the moment Iri went over the edge.

“That’s munstrǫnd fjotra. Sál fjotra is a bond between souls.” I stared at her. “This kind of bond is formed when a soul is broken. It’s formed through pain, loss, and heartbreak. They’re bound by something deeper than we can see. And that made Iri family.”

“This is not the same.” I glowered at him. “I want to go home.” “I know. But you will never be the same. You will never be the same person you were.” He paused. “You are seeing the truth. I see you thinking it, every day.” “What truth?” “That they’re like us.”

“What are you thinking now?” The weight of it fell from my head, down into the rest of my body. The words were small but they were true. “I’m thinking that I wish you’d died that day.”

“Why did you do it?” I asked. “Why did you save Iri’s life?” He sat up straighter, letting the silence between us stretch out and pull like the thoughts in my mind, trying to find a place to land. “Because we were dying. Because it was the end. And at the end, life becomes precious.”

“Does it hurt?” He leaned closer. My stomach dropped, pulling my heart down with it, and the pulse in my veins beat unevenly. He was too close to me. I stood, the bench scraping on the stone beneath us. He looked up at me, and I tried to find something to say. But there was too much. It was all buried too deep. I couldn’t reach it. “Everything hurts,” I whispered.

I sat down on the cot, curling up on my side and tried to stay quiet as I wept. But the thing writhing inside me was too angry to be calmed. It was too hurt to be hushed. It was a living, breathing thing and it was trying to swallow me whole. And maybe it would. I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore and only the sound of the fire remained.

Iri was a traitor. But we were bound together in a way that even I didn’t understand. And the worst part had been realizing that there was maybe nothing he could do to change that. I wanted to forget him, but maybe I never would. I wanted to let him go, but I might never be able to.

I had never been so vulnerable. So full of fear. And I had never hated myself until that moment. I remembered the light reflecting off the snow. The sound of my quick breath in the silence. Thinking that if I died, I wouldn’t reach Sólbjǫrg. Then, the all-consuming shame of being afraid to die for the very first time in my life. I could see the reds and oranges and yellows of the battlefield. The heat and the sting of pain. The burn of a war cry in my throat. I could see myself, alive. Strong. I blinked. And there was only the white and cold and quiet of that forest. There was only loneliness. There was only the very barest part of me, waiting for the end to come. It crept toward me in the dark. It came for me. And when it overtook me, my last thought was I don’t want to die.

Their lives would go on when I left. I would fade like a bruise or a memory.

I stood at the threshold of the thought. The thought of Fiske that had been buried alive in the back of my mind. I looked over the edge of it, peering down into the darkness. It called to me. It screamed my name. And I jumped.

I knew Mýra as well as I knew myself. I knew the way she held every broken piece of her heart in place, refusing to fall apart. And she was left to face it alone, because I was selfish. I’d left her in Aurvanger. Just like I’d left Iri. Whether or not she would forgive me, I’d never forgive myself.

“You think this is the end?” He looked at his hands. “The end of what?” “The end of everything. The Riki. The Aska.” The words hung in the air over us, burning in the fire. “Is that what you think?” “No. I think you’ll convince them.” The stillness of the night turned to something fragile, threatening to break. Because I wasn’t sure. “How do you know?” He smiled at the corner of his mouth. “Because you have fire in your blood.”

“You don’t really want to know why.” His hand slid down my arm to the knife and he took it, reaching behind him to tuck it into his belt. “And right now, it doesn’t matter.” He was right. I wasn’t ready to hear him say it. I wasn’t even ready to let myself think it. I didn’t have the room in my thoughts for trying to figure out what it meant and all that it would bring. Because we could all be dead in the next few days.

His hands slid from around me, hovering over the scar encircling my neck that was still healing from the collar. He leaned away from me and the hardness carved its way back onto his face. I took hold of his armor vest, pulling him back to me. But the guard was going back up over him, one thought at a time. “I don’t belong to you.” I repeated the words I said to him the night he pulled the stitches from my arm. This time, to lift the weight that pressed down onto him and silence whatever words were whispering in his mind. And because a small part of me still wanted them to be true. “Yes, you do.” He pulled the hair back out of my face so he could look at me. “Like I belong to you.”

I didn’t want to know how many there were when I stepped onto the battlefield. I wanted to fight the way I always had. Without thinking about odds.

“If you go back to Hylli, I want to come with you.” I twisted the corner of the blanket in my hands. “What about your family?” “I’ll go where you go.” This time, the words were unyielding. I nodded, trying to suck in a breath past the tears coming up in my throat. I didn’t want to cry. I reached for him and he came down onto his knees in front of me, between my legs, and he let out a long breath as he leaned into me. I held his weight, holding him tightly. “I didn’t want to ask you,” I said in a cracked whisper. He set his head onto my shoulder. “You didn’t have to ask me.”