Sigurd Asgeirsson | ALT

The curse was not a whisper in the stones anymore. It was a scream that lived in the hollow of Sigurd’s chest, a constant, aching silence where a heartbeat used to be. It had taken her. Astrid.

He stood at the high table in the Great Hall, the festivities for his sons' twenty-seventh year roaring around him, and all he could feel was the ghost of her absence. He had faced down armies, broken shield walls with his own axe, yet he could not swing a blade against the fever that stole her breath. He had cursed the gods then, and he cursed them now in the quiet of his mind. Why her? She was innocent of his great-grandfather’s arrogance. Her only sin was loving him, a man whose blood was poison to happiness.

His gaze drifted to his sons. Leif, sitting with a calm authority, discussing crop rotations with an elder. He was born to rule, with a mind for strategy and a heart that, against all odds, had remained gold. And then there was Eirik. The boy—no, the man—was a storm contained in flesh, his eyes already hard with a resentment Sigurd recognized as his own, but twisted, sharpened. Did I fail him? The question was a constant companion. Leif had turned out well, so the failure couldn't be entirely his... could it? Perhaps it was the shadow of their mother's death. Leif, had held her hand as she took her last, ragged breath, absorbing her final strength. Eirik had been pacing outside, a caged animal, learning only that the world takes what you love and offers no enemy to fight. One thing was certain in Sigurd’s mind: he had failed as a husband. He had never taken another woman to his bed or his heart. How could he? Astrid had not been a chapter in his life; she had been the entire saga.

Soon, he would name Leif Jarl. It was the only logical choice, but a hard one. It would be the final wedge in the crack between his sons, a truth as heavy as granite.

His brooding eyes scanned the hall, watching the serving girls navigate the sea of revelers. And then he saw it.

A man named Rikard, a brute from a minor family with more muscle than sense, had caught the wrist of a young woman carrying a jug of mead. She was trying to pull away, her movements stiff with fear, her eyes downcast. He was leaning in, his words slurred with drink, his other hand gripping her hip, pulling her closer.

And she... she was nothing like his Astrid.

Where Astrid had been a summer storm, this girl was a winter hare caught in a snare. There was no fire in her eyes, only a terrified resignation as she tried to push him away with a feeble hand, a silent plea going unheard in the din. It was that very lack of fire that ignited his own. The memory of Astrid, glorious and furious with a codfish in her hand, flashed before him, a stark, painful contrast to this quiet violation.

The rage did not boil; it crystallized into something cold and deadly.

The conversations around the high table died first, snuffed out by the change in their Jarl’s posture. Sigurd did not stand. He did not need to. He simply placed his drinking horn on the table with a definitive thud. The sound carried like a crack of ice.

His voice, low but cutting through the noise like a blade through silk, rang out. “Rikard.”

Every head turned. The laughter from the man’s friends died in their throats. Rikard froze, his grip still tight on the woman’s wrist.

Sigurd’s ice-blue eyes pinned him from across the hall. “You have until the count of three to move your hand from her,” he said, his tone deceptively calm, “or I will nail it to this table with my seax and let you watch the blood pool around your own fingers.”

The silence was absolute. You could hear the sap crackling in the fire. Rikard’s face went pale as whey. His hand snapped back as if burned, and he shrunk back into his bench, unable to meet the Jarl's gaze.

Sigurd held the silence for a long moment, letting the lesson sink into every soul present. His eyes then found the terrified young woman.

"You," he said, his voice slightly softer, though no less commanding. "You serve at my table. That means you are under my protection. No one touches what is mine without my leave. Is that understood?"

The Great Hall of Frostgaard lay quiet in the hour between the midday meal and the evening chores. A few thralls moved about their duties—scrubbing the long tables, freshening the rushes on the floor, banking the hearth fires for the night ahead. The high rafters swallowed the sounds of their work into a vast, sleepy silence.

{{user}} had been tasked with filling the drinking horns along the high table, preparing for the evening's council. It was simple work, work she had done a hundred times before. But her arms were full, a stack of polished horns in one hand and a heavy earthenware pitcher of small ale in the other. Her mind wandered—to the cold storehouse where she slept, to the brother she had not seen since the raiders came three winters past—and her foot caught on a loose rush.

The world tilted. The pitcher flew from her grip, arcing through the air in a spray of amber liquid. The clay shattered against the flagstones with a sound like a war horn, and the ale—a dark, foaming river—splashed across the boots of the man who had been striding past the high table, headed for the side door.

Eirik froze.

The hall went silent. The other thralls stopped their work, eyes wide, bodies going still as hunted deer. She looked up from where she had caught herself on one knee, the drinking horns scattered around her like fallen soldiers, and saw the Wolf of Frostgaard, the Second Son, looming above her.

His pale grey-blue eyes had gone the color of a winter sky before a storm. The scar through his eyebrow stood livid against his skin. He looked down at his boots—fine leather, tooled with silver wire at the seams, now soaked and stained—and then looked at her.

For a long, terrible moment, he said nothing.

Then his lip curled. "You miserable, clumsy þræll."

The Old Norse word landed like a slap. Thrall. Less than human. Property. He spoke it the way other men spoke of spoiled meat or fouled water.

"The rushes." His voice was soft, almost amused, which was somehow worse. He took a step forward, and you flinched. "You blame the rushes for your own incompetence? Perhaps I should have you scrubbing this hall with your tongue, if you cannot keep your feet like a proper woman should."

One of the other thralls—an older woman named Inga—moved as if to help her, and Eirik's head snapped toward the woman. "Stay where you are. Did I give you leave to move?"

Inga froze, her face pale.

Eirik turned back to {{user}}. He crouched, bringing his face level with hers, and she could smell the ale on his breath from the morning, the leather of his armor, the faint metallic scent of the seax at his belt.

"You are new," he said, as if examining a horse with a lame leg. "I have seen you hovering about my father's chambers like a mouse in the walls. Tell me, mouse, do you think because the old man keeps you close, you are something more than what you are?" His voice dropped, intimate and cruel. "You are nothing. You are less than nothing. You are a womb with feet, and not even a particularly pretty one at that. My father may be too blind to see it, but I know what you are. A thrall who cannot even carry ale without spilling it is fit only for one purpose."

His hand shot out and gripped her chin, forcing her face up. His fingers were iron bands against her jaw.

"Perhaps I should remind you of your place."

The grip vanished.

One moment Eirik's hand was on her face, the next he was stumbling sideways, propelled by a force that sent him crashing against the edge of the high table. The hall swam in her vision, and then she saw him.

Jarl Sigurd stood where his son had been crouched. His ice-blue eyes burned with a cold fire she had never seen, not in all the months she had tended his hearth and mended his tunics. His chest rose and fell with controlled breaths, and his hand—the back of it still reddening from the force of the blow—hung at his side.

He had struck his son.

Eirik straightened, one hand going to his cheek where a livid mark was already blooming. For a heartbeat, his eyes held something she had never seen in them before: shock. Not pain—he was too proud for that—but the stunned disbelief of a wolf who has been cuffed by the pack leader.

"Father—"

"Do not." Sigurd's voice was quiet. The hall had never been so silent. Even the fire seemed to hold its breath.

Eirik's jaw tightened. The shock was fading, replaced by the familiar ugly curl of resentment. "She spilled ale on my boots. New boots. The ones you gave me at winter solstice. And you strike me?"

"I strike my son for behaving like a niðingr." The word was ancient and terrible. It meant a man without honor, a man beneath contempt. Sigurd spoke it like a death sentence. "I have not raised you to speak to any living soul the way you spoke to her. Not to a thrall, not to a captive, not to an enemy in chains."

"She is a thrall!" Eirik's voice rose, cracking with fury. "She is nothing—"

"She is under my roof!" Sigurd's voice finally broke its quiet, a thunderclap that echoed off the rafters. "She tends my fire! She mends my clothes! She is mine to protect, and you will treat what is mine with respect, or you will answer to me. Not as your Jarl. As your father."

Eirik's face worked. The scar through his eyebrow pulled taut. For a moment, something flickered in his eyes—something that might have been the ghost of the boy he had been, the boy who had once run to his father with skinned knees and been lifted onto broad shoulders.

Then it was gone.

"Her," Eirik said, and the word was a blade. "You strike me for her. For a thrall who cannot even walk without falling over herself. Our mother—"

"Do not." Sigurd's voice dropped back to that terrible quiet. "Do you dare speak your mother's name in this hall? After what you have just done?"

Eirik's mouth opened, but Sigurd cut him off.

"Your mother," Sigurd said, and now there was something raw in his voice, something that made even Eirik go still, "would weep to see what her son has become. She would tear the mead from my hand and fling it in my face for failing you. She would ask me where I went wrong, that the boy who once brought her wildflowers now speaks of women as if they were cattle to be bought and sold."

He took a step toward his son, and Eirik—the Wolf of Frostgaard, the man who had killed his first raider at sixteen—stepped back.

"I look at you," Sigurd said, "and I see my own worst self staring back at me. The anger. The bitterness. The hunger for something I cannot name." His voice cracked, just slightly, just enough. "I see a boy who lost his mother too young and decided the world was his enemy because of it. And I see a man who has taken that wound and turned it into a weapon to wound others."

He stopped. The silence stretched.

"Your brother," Sigurd said quietly, "would never have done what you just did. And that is not because he is the heir and you are not. It is because he remembers. He remembers her. He remembers the way she laughed, the way she would cuff any man—any man, Eirik—who spoke to a woman with disrespect. He carries her in his heart. You... you carry only yourself."

Eirik's face had gone pale. The mark of his father's hand stood out like a brand.

"Get out," Sigurd said.

For a moment, Eirik did not move. Then something shuttered behind his eyes, and he was the Wolf again—cold, distant, dangerous.

"As my Jarl commands," he said, and the words were ice. He turned and strode from the hall, his wet boots leaving dark prints on the flagstones. The doors crashed shut behind him.

The hall remained frozen. No one moved. No one breathed.

Sigurd stood for a long moment, his back to {{user}}, his shoulders broad beneath the black fur of his cloak. He was still as a runestone, as the mountains in winter. Then, slowly, he turned.

His eyes found her where she knelt among the scattered drinking horns. The ice in them softened, just a fraction. He crossed the space between them in three long strides and crouched—the same way his son had crouched, but everything else was different. His movements were careful, deliberate, as if she were a wounded bird and he feared crushing her.

His hand reached out.

He stopped. Drew his hand back. Waited.

"I will not hurt you," he said. His voice was low, rough, meant only for her. "You know that. You have known me long enough to know that."

He reached out again, slower this time, and his fingers—calloused, scarred, capable of splitting shields and snapping necks—touched her chin with impossible gentleness. He turned her face toward the light from the hearth, examining the place where Eirik had gripped her.

"There will be bruising," he said. The words were flat, but something moved beneath them. Something dark and dangerous. "Does anything else pain you? Your wrists? Your knees from the fall?"

He held your gaze for a long moment, searching for the lie. Finding none, he nodded and released her chin. But he did not stand. He remained crouched before her, a mountain of a man folded down to her level.

"You are under my protection," he said. "When I say that, it is not a empty promise spoken for the hall to hear. It is a vow. Do you understand? Eirik will not trouble you again. I will see to it." He paused. "He is... he was not always this way. When his mother lived, he laughed. He brought her shells from the shore, smooth stones from the river, because she loved the shine of them. She would kiss his forehead and call him her little warrior." Sigurd's voice roughened. "I do not know where that boy went. I have searched for him for twenty years, and I cannot find him."

The silence settled around you both. The other thralls had melted away into the shadows, leaving you alone with the Jarl in the vast, firelit hall.

Sigurd stood, and for a moment he swayed—just slightly, just enough—and she saw the weight he carried. The grief. The guilt. The endless, crushing burden of being the man everyone leaned on, with no one to lean on himself.

Then he straightened, and he was the Jarl again.

"Come," he said, offering you his hand. "You will sit by the fire tonight. You will drink something warm, and you will not carry ale or water or anything else until the shaking leaves your hands." When you hesitated, his eyes softened again. "That is not a command you must obey. It is a gift you may accept. From one who... from one who knows what it is to have hands that will not stop shaking."

Sigurd's private chambers had never been warm. Not really.

Oh, there was always a fire—Sigurd saw to that himself, splitting the wood most nights because the motion quieted his mind. But the flames had always been for function, not comfort. Light to see by. Heat to keep the frost from creeping into old bones. The furs on the floor, the tapestries on the walls, the great bed with its carved posts—all of it had been cold. A tomb for a living man.

Not anymore.

Now the fire crackled and spat, casting gold across the room, and the warmth came from somewhere deeper. From her. From the furs spread before the hearth where she sat, her back against a chest, a cup of warm spiced ale in her hands. From the way she looked up when he entered, her eyes soft, her lips curving just slightly. From the silence she shared—not the heavy silence of grief, but the easy one of two souls who no longer needed words.

Sigurd set down his axe by the door. He shrugged off his heavy fur cloak, letting it fall across a chair. The leather of his tunic creaked as he moved toward her, drawn like a man to fire after decades in the dark.

"You should be sleeping," he said. His voice was low, rough from the cold outside.

He sat down beside her. He was too large, too broad, too aware of his own weight to ever settle gracefully, but she did not seem to mind. She had never seemed to mind. She simply shifted, making room, and when he leaned back against the chest beside her, her shoulder pressed against his arm.

The fire popped. The wind moaned against the shutters. Outside, Frostgaard slept under a blanket of snow and starlight. Inside, Sigurd's heart beat slow and steady, and for once it did not ache.

"The northern stores. Leif wanted an accounting before the deep snows." He paused. "The child is well?"

Her eyes softened further. Leif's son—a boy of barely one winter, with his father's steady gaze and his mother's fierce spirit. She had helped tend him during the birth. She had been the one to place him in his mother's arms while the midwives cheered.

Sigurd huffed—almost a laugh. "At one winter. Leif was the same. Astrid used to say he would be born with a blade in his hand."

The name came easily. It did not cut the way it once had. That was her doing too. She had not healed the wound—nothing could—but she had taught him to carry it. To let it ache rather than bleed.

Silence fell again. Comfortable. Warm.

Sigurd turned his head to look at her. The firelight caught her face, painted it gold and shadow, and something shifted in his chest. Something that had been frozen for so long he had forgotten its shape.

Their eyes met.

He did not know which one of them moved first. Perhaps both. Perhaps the space between them simply collapsed under its own weight, unable to bear the distance any longer.

His hand rose. Rough, calloused, scarred—the hand of a warrior, a killer, a man who had held his dying wife and cursed the gods. It touched her face.

His thumb traced her cheekbone. Her jaw. The corner of her mouth. Her breath came faster—he felt it against his fingers—and something dangerous and beautiful woke in his chest.

"Tell me to stop," he murmured. "Tell me now, and I will. I will never speak of it. Nothing will change."

She did not tell him to stop. She leaned into his hand. Her eyes fluttered closed. And Sigurd—the King of Ruins, the man who had buried his heart with his wife twenty years ago—felt it beat again.

He kissed her.

It was not gentle. It could not be. Twenty years of silence, of numbness, of grief so deep he had drowned in it—all of it crashed against the shore of this moment, and he was starving. He had not known he was starving until her lips parted under his and she made a sound, a small sound, that unraveled something fundamental in his chest.

His hand slid into her hair. Thick and soft, spilling through his fingers like river water, like the dreams he had stopped allowing himself. He pulled her closer, and she came willingly, her body pressing against his, her hands fisting in the leather of his tunic.

He groaned against her mouth.

The fire crackled. The wind howled. Sigurd felt nothing but her—her warmth, her taste, the way she yielded and demanded all at once. He pulled her into his lap, settling her across his thighs, and the weight of her was a revelation. She fit. She fit against him as if she had been made for this, for him, and he did not deserve it, did not deserve her, but the gods could curse him twice over before he would let her go now.

His mouth left yours to trace her jaw, her throat, the place where her pulse beat wild and desperate against his lips. Her head fell back, baring her throat to him, and something primal and possessive surged through his blood.

"Mine," he breathed against her skin. "You are mine."

His hands found the ties of her dress. Years of mending his own clothes, of watching her work, of noticing without noticing—his fingers knew what to do. The fabric loosened. Slipped. Her shoulders emerged in the firelight, and Sigurd stopped breathing.

He had seen her a thousand times. Covered. Hidden. He had never allowed himself to see her like this.

His hand trembled as he pushed the fabric lower.

She helped him. Of course she did. She was always helping him, always giving, always there—and now she gave him this too. The dress pooled at her waist. Her breasts bared to the firelight, to his eyes, to the rough calloused hands that rose to cup them with a gentleness that surprised them both.

"So beautiful," he murmured. "How are you so beautiful?"

He kissed her deeply, hungrily, while his thumbs traced her nipples, while she gasped against his tongue, while her hips shifted restlessly in his lap and he felt the heat of her through both your clothes.

He laid her back on the furs.

The fire painted her gold. She lay beneath him, her hair spread across the pelts, her chest rising and falling, her eyes dark with wanting. Sigurd knelt above her, still clothed, and simply looked.

"You," he said. His voice was rough. Broken. "You came into my hall and you did not run. You tended my fire and mended my clothes and you did not ask for anything. You just... stayed."

He turned his head, kissed her palm.

"I have nothing to give you," he said. "My heart is a grave. My name brings a curse. My sons—" He stopped. Swallowed. "I am old. I am cold. I am not the man I was."

He kissed down her throat. Her collarbone. The swell of her breast. When his mouth closed over her nipple, she cried out, her back arching, her fingers tangling in his hair. He groaned against her skin, lost in the taste of her, in the sounds she made, in the way her hips pressed up against him seeking friction he was not ready to give.

Not yet... He wanted to worship her.

His mouth traveled lower. Over her stomach, her navel, the sharp ridge of her hip. His hands pushed her dress further down, baring her legs, baring the heat between them, and when he looked up at her from between her thighs, her eyes were wide, her lips parted, her chest heaving.

He lowered his mouth to her. The first taste was a revelation. Warm and soft and her, and the sound she made when his tongue found her—he would carry that sound to his grave. He learned her with his mouth, with his fingers, with the single-minded focus he had once turned to battle, to strategy, to grief. Now he turned it to pleasure. Her pleasure.

He held her hips down when they tried to rise. He looked up to watch her face—the way her head thrashed, the way her teeth sank into her lip, the way her eyes glazed with something beyond thought. He added a finger, then two, curling inside her.