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In the next breath, a clank of metal dropped onto the deck of the ship beside Valen’s boot. Thorvald’s coin . . . had simply appeared.
Valen eyed the coin with a bit of trepidation.
“Ten turns, earth king.” Harald’s voice was rough, a low timbre riddled in an unspoken threat. “The mantle of the lord of the Ever is untouchable for ten turns according to our laws.” His red eyes dropped to the coin.
The mantle?
“It’s a mark of the king,” I muttered.
“You . . . you d-defeated their k-king,” Eryka said through her sobs as if her snippets of wisdom couldn’t be helped.
“The coin marks the lord of their kingdom,” I said softly, lifting my eyes to Valen. “I suppose that makes you—”
“Ten turns,” Harald spat again. “And the title can be challenged. It can be taken back.”
Valen’s jaw tightened. He scooped the coin from the deck and held it between his fingers. The black of his eyes deepened in a searing glare aimed at Harald. The stunned crew aboard the ship said nothing, merely watched Valen with a strange, bewildered awe.
A muscle pulsed in Valen’s jaw when he stretched one hand over the roll of the waves. The currents deepened to rough swells. White foam gathered and the water began to whirl around, knocking the ship in a wild pitch.
“All gods.” Herja cried out, clinging to Hagen as the warship was tossed about.
Harald hissed commands to his crew in a language I didn’t understand. I stared in disbelief as jagged, sopping peaks of black stone sea floor carved through the surface. A monstrous barrier began to divide the two ships, the two realms.
“I did not need to slaughter your brother to prove we always held more power than the sea.” Valen shouted over the rage of the new wall of sea peaks slicing through the ocean. “Consider this my first order. The sea fae shall remain where they belong. Crushed and locked in their cold, dark depths. Should you step foot on land, we will kill you.”
Before the rocky wall hid Thorvald’s ship entirely, Harald offered Valen a final, hateful glance and held up all ten of his long, knobby fingers. A silent threat. A new feud. A new enemy.
Only once the waves calmed and the threat of Harald’s vengeance was safely tucked away for a future worry did we rush to Eryka.
Elise was already holding a cloth to the girl’s face. When Gunnar tried to reach for the fae she jerked away.
“No,” she whispered. “Please, don’t look at me.”
Gunnar showed a new pain in his eyes. “Eryka—”
“I’m ruined.”
“Gods.” Ari shook his head and muttered low enough only Malin and I could hear. “The Court of Stars in the South is notoriously vain. Eryka’s humility is truly an anomaly, but she was raised to be the image of perfection. Seems some lessons never leave.”
Disquieting pity took hold in my chest. I grimaced. I didn’t care for Eryka, she was an irrelevant passenger to me. At least I’d thought as much. But anger, aimed at her folk in the South for causing her to think a bleeding scar would render her worthless, simmered in my blood.
Ignoring her pleas for him to turn away, Gunnar took hold of Eryka’s face, careful around her wound and pulled her mouth firmly to his.
Valen and Sol chuckled. Ari smirked and offered a slow applause.
Gunnar kissed Eryka like she was his last chance to gather breath. When he pulled away, she gaped at him with bright eyes, the protests for him to leave dead on her tongue.
“Woman, if you do not know by now that I would follow you anywhere, then I have failed in the worst way,” he whispered against her lips. “You’ve earned your first battle scar, and I will look at it every damn day with a bit of awe for its beauty.”
He kissed her again. The whole of the ship shook off the unnerving confrontation on the sea, each member of the Ferus family and Hagen insisting they’d been the influence on teaching Gunnar Strom his sweet words.
As the ship sailed back toward Klockglas, I glanced once over my shoulder. The ominous wall was a mark of this battle.
No doubt, it would be a mark of battles still left to fight.
“What shall I call him now?” Ari leaned over the rail, not looking anywhere but the sea as he began one of his rants. “King of earthandsea? Gods, his head will get so big. The king who sacrificed his life to a curse to clear a path for us to rescue, not just anyone, but children. Children, Nightrender. That’s heroic enough to get poems and sagas carved into bleeding stone.
“Now he has won some mark of a sea king. I’m sure Niklas will want to study it out, but I’m taking it as Valen has a bit of power that the sea folk will want. I could do without more enemies, but alas, here we are. Are you ready, Nightrender?” Ari finished in a short breath.
