My Viking Son’s Two Fathers

Chapter 11

The familiar rasp of whetstone against steel has always steadied my nerves.

In the armory's dim light, surrounded by the honest scent of oil and iron, I find the rhythm that has carried me through a decade of battles.

The blade gleams with each pass, sharp enough to split a falling hair, sharp enough to open a throat before its owner draws breath to scream.

I will need it sharp for whatever comes next.

The rustle of silk reaches me before the cloying perfume does—roses and something sweeter beneath. My hands continue their work, though every muscle in my body has gone rigid with awareness.

"The pig-girl cleans up well, I must admit."

Astrid's voice is honey poured over broken glass. She circles into my peripheral vision, her golden hair immaculate. She moves with theatrical grace, trailing her fingers along sword racks and shield rims.

"Though I suppose rutting with kings does elevate one's circumstances,"

She continues, stopping to examine a throwing axe with feigned interest. "From stable girl to royal concubine in a single decade. Your mother would be so proud, if she were not already dead from the shame of birthing you."

I continue sharpening. The stone rasps. The steel sings.

"Nothing to say?"

Astrid's laugh is light, musical, utterly false.

"How unlike you. I remember a girl who used to weep when I pulled her hair, who begged for scraps from my table. Has the shield-maiden lost her tongue along with her virtue?"

"I have nothing to say to you that would not result in your death," I reply, my voice flat. "And I am told killing queens carries consequences."

"How pragmatic."

She moves closer, close enough that I smell the roses and decay beneath.

"Your disappearance ten years ago was like a wedding present, you know. You had vanished like smoke, and I was convinced that you had frozen to death somewhere in the wilderness."

The whetstone pauses. Resumes.

"But no," Astrid continues, her voice dropping to something intimate and deadly. "You pulled through. Not only survived, but gave birth to three bastards of your own."

She leans close, her breath warm against my ear.

"Those boys will never sit on any throne, pig-girl. I will see to that personally. You will never know peace in any hall I command, never close your eyes without wondering if this is the night I finally finish what I started."

My hand moves toward my blade before I can stop it.

Astrid laughs with genuine delight, stepping back with the grace of a dancer avoiding a clumsy partner. "Strike me. Please. Your precious boys would be motherless within the hour, alone in a court that answers to me."

The rage that floods through me is cold and absolute, a killing fury that I contain only through years of brutal discipline. My fingers ache with the need to close around her throat.

"Watch what they eat, Hild," Astrid whispers, savoring each word. "I know how to make deaths look like accidents."

She sweeps from the armory in a rustle of silk and satisfied cruelty, leaving her threat hanging like poison in the air.

***

Throughout the day, I watch from careful distances as the twins seek out their sons.

Ragnar finds Bjorn in the training yard, where my eldest has been working through sword forms with the grim determination he brings to everything.

I see Ragnar observe for several minutes, his ice-blue eyes tracking each movement, cataloging each flaw, before he steps forward and adjusts Bjorn's grip without preamble.

"Your elbow drops on the backswing," he says, repositioning the boy's arm with impersonal precision. "It leaves your ribs exposed. An enemy would gut you before you completed the stroke."

Bjorn's spine stiffens, but he does not pull away. "Thank you, my lord."

The coldness in that address is deliberate, a wall of ice erected between child and father. Ragnar does not acknowledge it, does not demand warmth or affection.

He simply demonstrates the correct form again, waits for Bjorn to mirror it, and offers a curt nod when the execution improves.

"Again," he commands.

They work in tense silence for nearly an hour—the king and the son who refuses to call him father. Nothing is resolved.

But I watch something fragile begin to take root in the space between them, watered by shared understanding of steel and stance and the language of violence that both speak fluently.

Leif's approach to Erik is characteristically different.

I hear them before I see them—Erik's delighted shriek and Leif's booming laugh echoing across the courtyard.

When I find a vantage point, I see them racing between the outbuildings, Leif's long legs deliberately shortened to give my copper-haired son a fighting chance.

Erik surges ahead at the last moment, crossing their improvised finish line with arms raised in triumph.

"Beaten by a child half my size!" Leif collapses dramatically onto a hay bale, clutching his chest. "The shame of it! I shall never recover!"

"You let me win," Erik accuses, but he is grinning, his whole face alight with joy I have not seen since we received word of the konungs' approach.

"Let you?" Leif sits up, affecting wounded dignity. "I would never. You are simply faster than you know."

He reaches for one of the gold arm-rings stacked at his wrist, sliding it free and holding it out. "A prize for the victor. Every great warrior should have gold to show for his conquests."

Erik takes it with reverent hands. The band is far too large for his small arm—it slides to his elbow when he tries to wear it at his wrist—but he clutches it with fierce pride.

"I will grow into it," he promises.

Leif's laugh carries genuine tenderness, something I did not expect and do not know how to feel about. "I know you will," he says, ruffling Erik's copper curls. "You are my son."

My chest tightens with emotions I cannot untangle. Joy that my sons are finding fathers who might teach them, protect them, give them futures I could never provide alone.

Fear that they are being drawn away from me, claimed by men whose world is vast and dangerous.

And beneath it all, a treacherous awareness of the men themselves, Ragnar's quiet intensity, Leif's blazing warmth, that I refuse to examine too closely.

***

That night, making my protective rounds, I notice a new servant carrying trays toward the kitchens.

She is young, perhaps eighteen, with furtive eyes that dart away when they meet mine. Her face is unfamiliar—not among the staff I have come to know over nine years.

I find Solveig in her chambers, her bruised face healing but her expression still shadowed by what she endured on my behalf.

"The new girl," I say without preamble. "Dark hair, nervous manner, working in the kitchens. Who is she?"

Solveig's expression darkens immediately. "Transferred three days ago from the queen's household. To assist with journey preparations, or so the steward was told."

Astrid's creature. Positioned among those who prepare food.

The threat was not empty posturing. It was strategy already in motion.

I return to my chambers, sit with my back against the door, my blade across my knees.

I do not sleep.