Page 250 of The Sun He Buried

“Politically,” I add. “He’s not my Dróttin politically.”

Which is true. Politically he’s nothing to me.

It’s the rest of it that’s the problem.

Because he is my Dróttin. Just not the—there’s no word for it Varrik would understand, or that I’d survive saying out loud in this room.

“It’s complicated,” I say. Helpful. “It’s—there’s a version where he is, and it’s not the version you’re thinking of, it doesn’t run through a treaty, that’s the thing, it’s more of a—it’s binding, but not the paperwork kind of binding, it’s the kind that—“

Stop.

Eirik hits the bond with a flash that means exactly what my own brain is already screaming. Stop talking.

I do not stop talking.

“—and it does sort of make him mine, technically, or me his, I’ve honestly haven’t been clear which way it runs, both, I think, it runs both, which is the kind of thing you’d need so much more context to even begin to—“

Varrik’s hand cracks across my face.

The chair tips onto its short leg. Heat floods up one cheek before I’ve finished the word. My ears ring on a single thin note.

Varrik picks up a narrow vein-silver bar from the crate beside my cloak. Myrkviðr’s tree seal is pressed into one end. The mark’s been struck through with a chisel.

Eight bars of vein-silver can’t walk.

Apparently they can be carried.

“He controls the mines,” Varrik says. “He controls the roads. Human kingdoms sleep behind Skorvær metal and call the trade peace.”

He turns the bar in his hand.

“The treaty requires our people to remain inside Náströnd. It puts your kind in our halls to count us, then makes us sell you the weapons that keep us here.”

“I didn’t write it.”

“You live well beneath it.”

Well, yeah. He has me there.

My room in Sólvik’s warm. Asta sleeps next door. My family’s grain crosses the border under treaty seals, and Baldr’s people greet the wagons instead of attacking them.

Varrik’s red cord belongs to men stationed on a road they’re forbidden to cross in force.

He’s still the man who had me dragged through the forest.

I pull against the rope. It doesn’t give.

“You could’ve asked me to carry a message.”

“A message can be ignored.”

“Then ask better.”

Varrik sets the bar down hard enough to crack the crate lid.

“The people I answer to are finished asking. Eirik opens the eastern stores and closes the human routes, or we break the cage through him.”

The copper-eyed man looks at Varrik.