If Frank wasn’t going to help Hrokr hide from his grandfather, then Hrokr was going to take matters into his own hands.
“And?” the kelpie said.
“Brodie, Brodie, Brodie…” Hrokr pinched the bridge of his nose. “Revenge, you handsome numpty.”
“Brodie?” The kelpie’s face twisted up in confusion. “Ye’re th’ numpty, elf.”
Hrokr looked up at the sky and sighed again. This kelpie was as thick as a Scottish castle wall. “Do you want your bridle back or not, Kylo?”
The kelpie dipped the toe of his boot into the lake. “I wanna drag that nettle-faced cragwanker under an’ watch her gasp in th’ deepest of the dark places. That’ll get me mah bridle back.”
“Yes, yes. Whatever.” Hrokr would let the kelpie believe what he wanted as long as he stayed motivated. He slapped the kelpie’s non-wounded shoulder. “Skylar, my new friend, we have work! There’s someone I want you to find….”
II.
Alfheim Regional Hospital, Alfheim, Minnesota….
His wife had promised their child to the World Raven.
Dagrun had needed to get free of St. Martin’s magic. She’d had to placate a trickster. The elves needed to learn the truth about whose magic they were dealing with. The world was on the cusp of a new Ragnarok.
Arne understood why. Reasons and whys connected up in spectacular clarity in his mind.
He rubbed his notched ear. His wife had promised their child to a trickster.
He’d already known a Ragnarok approached. The world had its cycles. The new information Dagrun brought home was the intensity of the coming storm.
Most Ragnaroks hit like hurricanes. Some were category twos. Other, category fives. Involvement of World Spirits meant they were staring down the barrel of an extinction event.
And his wife had traded their unborn babe for help saving the world.
Arne stood at the window and rubbed his sore shoulder—the scuffle with Titania had left him with a twinge he’d need to massage out tonight, something he shouldn’t have to do, with his magic. And as King.
His centuries were clearly catching up with him.
Dagrun flipped through a city file her office manager had brought over. His wife would continue serving the mundanes through the coming storm, and through giving birth if the healers would let her.
She tapped the paper. “The grant money came through.”
She and Magnus had been working on establishing farm-to-table distribution from the neighboring tribal lands into the Farmer’s Market and restaurants of Alfheim. They could have easily funded the entire project themselves, but securing federal-level grant money helped legitimize the project in the eyes of the wary local Tribal Councils.
Arne nodded. “Good.”
Dagrun’s head tilted to the side. She, like Arne, only partially glamoured while in her private hospital room. Most everyone who came in and out of the room understood that they were magicals, and knew to keep that information to themselves.
She’d been at his side for centuries, standing with him as the town grew, managing their interactions with the mundanes’ rising technology, and running diplomacy with her father in Iceland. She was the backbone of Alfheim, not him.
A thousand years ago, his mother had stepped between Fenrir and her people. She saved the mundanes even as that Ragnarok caused cataclysmic damage to the elves and their gods.
This time, there were more mundanes to worry about, and more gods.
“The children will be all right,” Dagrun said. “No matter what Raven wants.” She closed her folder and set it aside.
He walked over and sat on the edge of her bed. She leaned forward and pressed her cheek against his shoulder. Arne Odinsson gently hugged his wife, careful of her mending ribs. At least this time, they had each other, promises to a trickster god notwithstanding.
A wave of power rolled through Alfheim. Both Arne and Dag—and all elves and wolves in Alfheim, he knew—turned toward the source: the woods around Frank’s lake.
Hot power hit the hospital. Overheating, witch-born power.
They’d known they had a witch in Alfheim. She’d appeared the night after Frank’s “brother” attacked Akeyla, but no one had been able to locate her, or to communicate, or to judge if she was a danger because there were concealments much like the ones he’d installed to keep his son from becoming a problem.
This witch likely supplied the flawless seer photographs that Frank lied about coming from that useless notebook, which meant she wasn’t showing the psychosis that took Rose. And Frank was clearly in love with someone no one in town had met.
Arne understood how to work around concealments he could not influence. He trusted his gut, and his gut said that this witch was worth protecting.
Dagrun’s eyes widened. “We have another witch?”
Arne wove his fingers and held up her hand. “Yes. Our new seer.”
“Ah,” she said, as she remembered that they could not remember anything beyond “seer.”
Arne closed his eyes and tuned his ear into the wave. “Listen.”
The wave slowed and cooled. It fluttered for a second, almost at a standstill, until the engine generating the concealments began to pull it back.
Dagrun’s lips rounded. “Arne, that much power in Alfheim is not safe.”
No, it wasn’t. But they had an extinction-level Ragnarok coming. They could use all the help they could get.
And this witch wouldn’t take their babe.
The wave changed.
What had been fae-born became steadfast and sturdy. It rooted to the earth and it reached for the sky. It knew all the cycles, old and new, and lived them intimately. And it touched all the realms.
Dagrun stared at the window. “By Odin, it’s here, Arne. It came here,” she breathed.
There was no stopping the Ragnarok now. No recourse.
Yggdrasil had come to witness the end of their world.
Arne kissed Dagrun’s fingers. He refused to let the inevitable happen. He refused to allow World Spirits or Titania or that scum-sucking bloviator, Oberon, to harm his family. He would keep his wife and children safe.
No matter the cost.
III.
Oberon’s Castle, the Fae Realms….
“Why am I here, Robin?” Wrenn Goodfellow watched her mentor smooth the lines of his well-tailored midnight-blue uniform.
