This Golden Coil (Ragnarök's Edge Book 1) by Kaylin Lee

Author:Kaylin Lee [Lee, Kaylin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2021-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

Serving the feast tonight is relaxing, even though the last few days have been hard, because the warband that sold me to King Harald is finally gone. I don’t know where they went, and I don’t care.

At last, I can lose myself in serving dinner and perhaps, just a little bit, keep an eye out for a handsome Viking who looks my way. I wave to Einar, the friendly one who helped me clean the floor earlier in the week, ignoring Anna’s knowing laugh as I do so.

I am serving wine in the far corner where a collection of newly arrived Vikings are seated when a hand grips my arm with sudden force.

I jerk back and look down. It’s true—I did see him on the docks. Olaus is here.

“You survived after all, I see.” He looks me up and down, humor dancing on his expression. “I didn’t think you would make it one day as a thrall, and here you are serving dinner like a prize.”

His words slowly sink in. I rub my brow. He thought I wouldn’t last one day as a thrall, did he? That meant he had been home, watching the warband take me past his farm, and he’d done nothing.

“I am a prize,” I manage to whisper. He’s dressed like a Viking from head to toe. There’s a long scar across his eye that wasn’t there before, and his pale-blue hair is shaggy, with a braid along one side. “What happened to you? What happened to your farm?”

He grabs my arm again. “There was nothing I could have done,” he says simply, as though he’s read my thoughts. “They had a berserker. We’d have been powerless to stop him. Would you ask me to give up my own farm, maybe even my own life, just for a sweet little neighbor?”

“What happened?” I ask again. I’m not sure my skin has ever held less lys than it does in this moment.

“A new band of raiders came, barely a week after you were taken. King Harald is getting weaker,” he mutters, lowering his voice so the others around us can’t hear. “We had twice as many foreign raiders come through Resolution than in years past. They leave the villages alone, for now. But we farmers along the Viper River pay the price. They came up to my farm and demanded a ransom I couldn’t pay, not after another group took so much last year.

“We fought. They won. But instead of killing me, they set fire to my crops, took me aboard their ship, and put an oar in my hands.” His nostrils flare. “No respect, no gratitude for all I’ve given the raiders over the years. They treated me like a common laborer—like a disgusting thrall.”

I want to look away from his handsome, square-jawed face as it twists in fury, but even in my horror, I find I cannot. I need to know what happened. “You escaped?”

“I cut them down on the boat that night. While they slept.” Olaus watches me from beneath lowered lids.

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