The Patriarch's Hand

The dead patriarch's bastard son. The exile. The feral boy Hrokkr threw into the punishment pens when we were children, before shipping him off to the border garrisons to die in the mud.

He did not die.

He is twenty-eight now, broader across the shoulders than the boy I remember, his frame built of thick bone and dense muscle under a wolfskin-lined brigandine. Black hair falls in damp, matted locks around a jawline that looks chiseled from granite. A pale, jagged scar cuts from the base of his right ear down into the collar of his leather tunic.

He does not look like a claimant arriving to negotiate. He looks like an executioner at the end of a long shift.

He is coated in blood. It glistens on the iron studs of his brigandine, smears his broad forearms, and drips steadily from the knuckles of his bare right hand.

In his left hand, he carries something by the wrist.

He tosses it forward onto the floor.

It lands with a wet thud two inches from Torvald's face.

It is a severed human arm, hacked through below the elbow. The thick, liver-spotted fingers are locked in rigor mortis around a four-inch piece of solid cast brass—the master key-token that opens every primary gate in Hrafnsker.

Hrokkr's hand.

Torvald makes a strangled sound in his throat and presses his face against the slime of the floor.

Vargun does not look down. He takes one stride forward, his heavy iron boot descending directly onto Torvald's neck.

A sharp, dry crack echoes off the copper vats. Torvald's body twitches once and goes limp.

Vargun does not pause. He steps over the corpse and stops four paces from my station, his dark, unblinking eyes fixing on mine through the steam.

The cellar air is thick with roasted grain, hot copper, and fresh arterial blood.

"You are late with the evening run, Thjora," Vargun says.

His voice is a low, abrasive rasp that rubs against the base of my skull. Deep. Raspy. Utterly steady.

I do not lower the spanner.

"The boil takes eighty minutes," I answer, meeting his gaze. "Your father's enforcers broke my door and interrupted the sparge."

Vargun glances down at the blood dripping from the head of my wrench, then at the two dead men on the flagstones. A razor-thin line pulls at the corner of his mouth.

"Good," he says softly. "I would hate to find you had turned soft while I was in the north."

He takes another slow step. He stops two feet away. The heat from his body cuts through the steam, carrying the sharp reek of blood, pine resin, and cold rain.

He looks at my face, then his eyes drop to the pulse beating against the hollow of my collarbone.

"Fjalar is hanging from the gatehouse gallows," Vargun says. "His captains are dead in the courtyard. Hrafnsker belongs to me."

"And the brewhouse?" I ask, my grip tightening on the tarred twine of the spanner.

Vargun moves his right hand. He does not reach for the wrench. His blood-crusted fingers slide past the copper tool and cup the curve of my jaw, his thumb pressing firmly into the soft notch beneath my chin. He tilts my face upward until I am staring directly into the black centers of his eyes.

His grip is solid stone. Not a tremor in his hand.

"The brewhouse," Vargun murmurs, his thumb tracing the bone of my jawline, leaving a cold smear of his father's blood on my skin, "and every single thing inside it."

My lungs lock. My pulse hammers against his thumb.

The succession war in the upper yard is finished.

My personal survival has just begun.

·  ·  ·

I do not pull away violently. In this room, sudden movements invite a broken neck. I pull back just enough to test his resistance. His fingers do not give an inch. The pressure under my jaw deepens, his thumb anchoring me in place.

"Take your hand off me, Vargun."

"No."

A single syllable. Heavy. Unyielding.

"I have twelve minutes left on the secondary kettle," I tell him, keeping my voice flat. "If the temperature climbs another three degrees, the wort scorches. If the wort scorches, the lower wards will rip the security grates out of the walls before midnight."

His dark eyes narrow, tracking the movement of my lips. He does not release me immediately. He holds my chin for four slow heartbeats, letting me feel the rough calluses on his palm and the drying tack of blood that seals our skin together.

Then he drops his hand.

He does not step back. He stands in my space, his broad chest rising and falling in slow, measured rhythms.

"Finish the kettle," he says.

I turn back to the copper manifold without another word. My palms are slick inside the split-leather gloves, but I do not wipe them. I grip the brass wheel on the cold-water feed, spin it three-quarters of a turn, and watch the needle on the fourth gauge settle back into the safe zone at two hundred and twelve degrees.

Behind me, the sound of iron boots shifting on stone echoes off the granite arches.

Vargun nudges Hrokkr's severed arm with the toe of his boot, sending it sliding into the corner beside the spent-grain chute. The heavy brass master key-token clinks against the rock floor.

"Kolb tried to make a run for the east gate," Vargun says, his tone conversational, stripped of all human warmth. "He thought Fjalar had secured the armory. An archer put an iron bolt through his knee."

"Is he alive?" I ask, adjusting the sparge line lever.

"He is bleeding in the outer guardhouse. He will not be hauling grain sacks for a month."

"Then you will haul them yourself."

The brewhouse goes dead silent.

I do not look over my shoulder. I keep my attention locked on the glass sight tube, watching the amber-brown liquid clarify as the heavy proteins precipitate out of the boil in thick, ragged flakes.

"Watch your tongue, little brewer," Vargun murmurs.

The words are quiet, but they carry the weight of an iron blade.

"Do you want this compound to stand?" I ask, throwing the lever that diverts the boiling run-off through the copper cooling coils. "Or do you want to spend your first forty-eight hours as lord of Hrafnsker slaughtering half the east block because they are chewing through their own veins in withdrawal?"

He moves without a sound.

One second he is by the doorway; the next, his towering frame blocks the orange glow of the firebox beside me. The smell of wet wool, iron, and crushed pine needles envelops my station.

He leans down, his mouth barely an inch from the curve of my ear.

"You believe you are untouchable," he says.

"I know what I am worth."

"That makes you dangerous, Thjora." His hot breath washes over my temple, smelling faintly of dried chicory root and metallic ash. "A dangerous woman in my house is an obstacle."

"Then slit my throat and see how long your garrison lasts when the morning doses fail."

A low rumble vibrates in his chest—a dry, raspy sound that holds no amusement.

"The inmates would tear the lower levels apart," he admits, his voice dropping into a dark, intimate rasp against my cheek. "And then I would have to butcher every last one of them myself. It would waste valuable time."

He reaches past my shoulder.

His heavy, blood-caked forearm brushes the side of my rib cage as his fingers close around the brass emergency shutoff valve above my head. He does not turn it. He simply rests his weight against the iron pipe, trapping me between the scorching heat of the copper kettle and the solid wall of his chest.

"I did not come back to Hrafnsker for these rotting stone walls, Thjora," he whispers.

My throat tightens. "You came for your father's throne."

"I came for what he took from me." His knuckles tighten around the valve, the brass fitting groaning under his strength. "He kept you locked in this cellar like a prized falcon. Brewing his stabilizers. Keeping his monsters obedient."

"I kept myself alive."

"You did," he says, and for a fraction of a second, the lethal edge in his tone shifts into something thicker, darker, and infinitely more dangerous than raw violence. "You were always the sharpest rat in his trap."

He steps back, releasing me from his shadow.

I draw a slow, measured breath through my nose, refusing to let him see the rise and fall of my shoulders.

The counter-flow chiller rattles as the boiling wort rushes through the interior tubes. The deep, bittersweet aroma of fresh Maltar rolls through the cellar, rich and potent, masking the sharp reek of blood and scorched cloth on the floor.

Twenty-four gallons of pure, high-grade stabilizer.

Enough to keep sixty men rational for four days, or double that number if I dilute the run with roasted barley tea.

I take a seasoned oak bung and hammer it into the first cask with three heavy, rhythmic strikes of my wooden mallet.

"Take your dead," I say, gesturing with the mallet toward the two bodies on the flagstones. "Clear my floor. I need to wash down the copper plates before the residual sugars caramelize on the coils."

Vargun looks at the corpses, then back to me.

He does not call his soldiers down from the courtyard. Instead, he bends at the waist, grabs Torvald's leather belt with one massive hand, and heaves the two-hundred-pound body off the ground with terrifying ease. He drags the dead enforcer across the flagstones toward the doorway, leaving a broad trail of dark red gore behind him.

At the threshold, he stops and turns.

He stands in the arched frame, Torvald's limp boots trailing in his grip, his dark eyes burning into mine with an intensity that makes the stone walls feel dangerously thin.

"Bolt the secondary hatch tonight," Vargun says.

"Why? Are there more of Fjalar's men hiding in the tunnels?"

"No," Vargun answers, a cold, predatory smile touching his scarred lips. "Because I command the gates now. And I have not decided what hour I will return."

He steps back into the darkness of the corridor, dragging the corpse up the stone stairs.

The heavy oak door swings half-shut behind him.

I stand alone in the rising steam.

My fingers find the tarred grip of the spanner, the cold copper grounding my senses against the hard pounding of my pulse.

I walk to the dark corner by the grain chute, bend down over the dead patriarch's severed arm, and pry the heavy brass key-token from the stiffened fingers.

The metal is cold, heavy, and smeared with black grease.

I slide the key into the deep pocket of my leather apron.

Vargun believes he owns the fortress.

He will learn who controls the poison.