She Sat Alone at the Wedding Feast — Until a Giant Viking Said, “Act Like You’re With Me”

Chapter 3

She did not sleep that night.

The words replayed in her mind like a song she could not stop humming, each repetition carving new questions into the rock of her certainty. *Evidence can be arranged. The fall of Bjorn Leost was remarkably convenient for certain people.*

When dawn crept through the shutters of her small cottage, pale and tentative, she rose from her bed. She had not undressed. She had not even tried.

She walked to the wooden chest in the corner—the only possession she had refused to sell, even when hunger gnawed at her stomach and the creditors knocked at her door. It was old, carved with the same knotwork patterns that decorated the stones on the hill, and it smelled of lavender and age and memory.

She lifted the lid.

Inside, wrapped in moth-eaten wool, lay the things her grandmother had left her. Dried herbs bundled with twine. A mortar and pestle worn smooth by decades of use. A small leather pouch tied with a drawstring.

She had not opened this chest since her uncle’s execution. She had been too afraid. Too defeated. Too convinced that the past was dead and she had no right to claim it.

But this morning, her hands moved without permission.

She lifted the leather pouch. She pulled the drawstring. She upended the contents into her palm.

A fragment of bone.

Small—no larger than her thumb—and carved with runes so ancient and weathered that most of them were illegible. Her grandmother had given it to her when she was twelve years old, on the day she had first started teaching Freya the healing arts.

*”This is a protection rune,”* her grandmother had said, pressing the bone into her small hands. Her eyes had been serious, weighted with knowledge Freya had been too young to understand. *”Carry it always. It will remind you that you belong to a line of women who survived everything the world threw at them. Fire. Flood. Betrayal. Death. We endure, Freya. We endure.”*

She had not understood then. Had not understood the weight of those words, the prophecy hidden in them. She had tucked the bone into her pouch and forgotten about it, as children forget the gifts that do not immediately entertain them.

Now she held it in her palm, and she felt the carvings press against her skin like a whisper from beyond the grave.

*We endure.*

She closed her fingers around the bone. A sob caught in her throat—not of grief, but of *recognition*. Her grandmother had known. Somehow, impossibly, she had known what was coming. She had left Freya a key, a weapon, a reminder that she was not alone.

She tucked the bone fragment into her cloak. She splashed water on her face. She braided her hair with shaking hands. And she walked to the smithy where Rolf was staying.

He opened the door before she knocked.

“I was wondering when you would come.”

“I need to know everything,” she said. “No more shadows. No more half-truths. Everything.”

He studied her for a long moment. Then he stepped aside.