Chapter Text
Pflugzeit 21st, 2525 (1000 Gospodarin Calendar)
The field lay quiet. Too quiet for a place where so many had died.
Nyvena sat his horse atop the low rise and looked out across the grasslands of the Troll Country, where the wind moved in slow, whispering currents through the lichens and early spring growth. The land stretched wide and open, as it always had, indifferent to the slaughter that had just been visited upon it.
Hundreds of bodies lay where they had fallen. Kurgan warriors sprawled in the blood-stained grass, twisted in death, their powerful frames finally stilled. Their horses lay among them, some tangled in heaps of the fallen, others collapsed mid-stride, as though the arrows had rained down from the sky itself.
It had been a clean kill. His scouts had done well. They had found the warband at dawn, twelve hundred raiders, perhaps fifteen. A probing force, moving south with the careless confidence of men who believed themselves hunters rather than prey.
It had not been difficult to bait them. Kurgans were predictable creatures. Strong, fearless… and impatient. Blood called to them louder than reason ever could. A feigned retreat, a glimpse of fleeing riders, and they had given chase without hesitation.
Straight toward the low hill, straight toward the waiting bows hiding behind it. Nyvena could still hear it if he closed his eyes, the sound of it. Not the shouting or the thunder of hooves, but the arrows. Over ten thousand bowstrings had loosed as one. It made a sound like the sky tearing open.
The Kurgans had not even slowed. By the time they understood, it was already done.
"It's a good start," Nadia said, looking down at the corpse of the enemy Zar. The Ice Witch spat upon his ruined body from the saddle, the gesture sharp with disdain.
The dead chieftain was a monster of a man. Even in death his size was striking, corded muscle stretched beneath copper skin, inhuman limbs thick as young tree trunks. The great warhorse that had fallen under him looked like a pony beneath him. He looked more beast than human, as though some dark god had shaped him for war and nothing else.
"This is just the start," Nyvena laughed. The sound carried across the still field, low and untroubled. "You are powerful, Ice Witch, but you have not seen war as I have." He gestured broadly to the dead. "The Kurgans do not ride in bands like this alone. They come in hordes of tens of thousands. Their twisted hosts blacken the steppe when they ride."
His smile faded slightly. "There will be far greater battles ahead. This skirmish," he said, nodding toward the field of corpses, "will matter little in the end."
Nadia said nothing to that. She did not argue. Nyvena studied her for a moment.
The woman wore the furs and leathers of the steppe, rode as any Ungol might, and spoke the tongue without fault. Yet there was something different about her. Something colder. It was not just the magic. Nyvena knew her story well enough.
Nadia Uneska Voreskova had been born beside the River Lynsk, raised among the wandering tribes like any other daughter of the steppe. But her people had mingled long with the Gospodars, more than most Ungol bands, and their blood showed in her. Their blood did not show in her features alone, in her dirty blonde hair and pale skin, her tilted eyes and high cheekbones. At the winter equinox, as was the custom, she had brought her ten-year-old daughter before the Ice Witches for judgment. And the Witches had seen something, just not in the child. In the mother.
Nyvena had seen many kinds of power in his forty-one years. He had seen a minotaur break open a man's skull with its bare hands. He had seen Hag Witches call forth spirits from the wind and the bones of the earth. He had seen Gospodar noblewomen wrapped in frost so thick it turned arrows aside like pebbles cast at stone.
But what lived inside Nadia Uneska Voreskova… Nyvena remembered the story as it had been told to him, half in pride, half in warning. The Ice Witch had called it a well. Deep and still. A thing of ice buried beneath flesh and blood.
The Witch had come to her after the equinox rites, not for the daughter, as was expected, but for the mother. She had spoken calmly, as though it were already decided. Nadia would come south to Kislev City. Nadia would train. Nadia would leave her tribe behind for however many years her training with the Ice Court demanded. That was the way of it. The steppe gave its daughters when called.
But Nadia had refused. First with words. Then when the Ice Witch had tried to force the issue, with winter.
Nyvena's gaze drifted again to the dead Kurgan Zar, but he did not see his corpse. He saw another as it had been described to him, the moment the Witch had pressed too far, spoken too surely, reached out with her powers as though Nadia already belonged to her.
And the cold had answered. Not the careful, measured frost of a trained sorceress. Something deeper. Something instinctive. The Witch had frozen where she stood, locked in ice so sudden and absolute that she had not even had time to scream.
Nadia had fled that same night, taking her family and her tribe with her, vanishing into the endless grasslands before the Ice Court could answer the insult. Most would have called it a death sentence. The Ice Court did not forgive easily.
Yet they had not come with blades and fire. They had sent another Witch. An elder this time. One who understood. Nyvena had met that one, years later. A hard woman with eyes like winter stars and a patience that bordered on the unnatural. When she realized that no words would sway her, she had not tried to take Nadia.
She had joined her. Ridden with the tribe. Eaten their food. Slept beneath their hide tents. Watched, and waited, and taught. Years of it. Slow lessons, carved into bone and spirit alike. Until there was nothing left to teach.
Nyvena glanced sideways at Nadia now. She sat straight in the saddle, the wind tugging at the furs about her shoulders, her expression unreadable as frozen rivers in deep winter. An Ice Witch. And yet not.
When the elder had finally left, she had given Nadia the title, but not the leash that came with it. No summons to the Ice Court. No commands to undertake dangerous missions from which she might never return. And so, Nadia had remained with her people. She had chosen the steppe. Chosen her tribe.
Since then, she had walked a narrow path between two worlds, never fully belonging to either. She guarded her people with her magic, brought winter against their enemies, and healed what she could when the fighting was done.
But she would not leave. Not for councils. Not for gatherings. Not even for the rites the Ice Witches held sacred. This, Nyvena thought, was the first time she had ever truly gone to war in her thirty-odd years. He studied her a moment longer, then turned his gaze back to the horizon. Even Nadia had answered the call. Because this time, there was no refusing. Not when an Everchosen rode south to kill them all.
…
Pflugzeit 22nd, 2525 (1000 Gospodarin Calendar)
Elsa stood over the cradle a moment longer than she'd meant to. The chamber was awash in the pale light of dawn, cold and clean as new-fallen snow, spilling through the tall windows in long, golden shafts. It touched the cradle, the furs, the carved posts of the bed, and the child within.
Her son slept. Aleksandr lay bundled in soft linens, his small chest rising and falling with the steady rhythm of the untroubled. Two months in the world, and already he had the look of strength about him. A good weight. A healthy color. The faintest hint of strawberry-blonde hair upon his head.
He did not stir. Babes slept through anything, the priestesses said. Even the end of the world, if it came softly enough.
Elsa's lips pressed into a thin line. It would not come softly.
Darya stirred slightly where she lay nearby, though she did not wake. The woman had learned to sleep lightly, like a soldier in camp on a mattress laid out on the floor. When the boy cried, and he would, in time, she would rise at once to tend him. Darya would feed him. Not Elsa.
For a brief span, no more than a week, she had done so herself. The priestesses of Salyak had urged it. Good for the child, they said. Good for the bond between mother and son.
They had not been wrong. There had been something… grounding in it. Something that cut through the noise of duty and expectation and fear. But such things did not last. War did not wait upon motherhood.
Her gaze lingered on the child one last moment, then she bent and brushed her lips against his brow. His skin was warm. Alive. Strong. He would need to be. When she straightened, the weight of the world settled back upon her shoulders.
Nearly all of her father-in-law's host had arrived. Even now, as the sun crept higher, the last of the ships would be disgorging men and horses onto the docks below. Forty thousand state troops, armored and disciplined, brought across the sea aboard more than two hundred vessels of the Second Fleet.
At their head was Theoderic Gausser, a formidable man, by all accounts. A warrior lord in the old style, who rode to battle atop his griffon Razortalon as though born to the saddle. His men and his ships would be needed. Every last one of them.
Most of the ships were shallow-drafted, she knew. Built to ride the rivers as easily as the sea. They would push inland soon enough, up the broad, winding Tobol, toward the cattle town of Zoishenk and beyond, where the real war would be fought.
And more would follow. The Westerlands. Their fleet would begin to arrive on the morrow, if the winds held. Thirty-five thousand more state troops, and ten thousand Tilean mercenaries besides.
Ragnar Weselton would not be among them. Elsa's mouth tightened slightly. The old man was a strutting peacock, more suited to courtly display than war. He would remain in his palace, waiting upon the birth of Anna's first child, wrapped in silks while others bled.
Instead, his eldest son would come. Norman. Elsa knew little of him beyond reports and rumors given by Kislevite traders who had traveled to Marienburg, who claimed that he had led men in battle on land and sea, and had acquitted himself well enough.
She would soon see the truth of that. She turned from the cradle at last. Hans had already gone. Of course he had. He would be halfway to the docks by now, no doubt, wrapped in furs against the morning chill and eating as he rode, bread and cheese, most likely, taken in haste between duties.
Her lips softened at the thought, just for a moment. Then it passed. There would be no such simplicity for her. She stepped into the corridor, the door to her room closing softly behind her, already feeling the pull of a dozen unseen threads: messages waiting, envoys arriving, decisions demanding to be made. She would take her meal in her private dining room. She would ask for something warm, something substantial. And she would not taste a bite of it.
Elsa did not linger long. Duty had a way of finding her, no matter how thick the walls or how heavy the doors, and so it was that before the sun had climbed far above the Tobol she was seated at her private table, with her breakfast laid before her in quiet abundance.
The pancakes were thick and golden, their edges crisped just so, a slow drizzle of honey catching the morning light. Beside them sat deviled goose eggs, dusted with spice, and fluted glasses filled with dark blueberry and tart currant juice. The fare was fine, as befitted a Boyar of Arendelle, though Elsa scarcely noticed it. Hunger had become a distant thing of late, a memory more than a need.
The messages came as swiftly as the food. Servants moved in silence, placing sealed letters and folded reports before her as soon as she had taken her seat, until the table seemed as burdened with paper and parchment as with plate and cup.
"Word from Praag, my lady."
Captain Mattias stood at her right hand, a smile brightening his dark features, the mark of Abyssinian blood carried proudly on his face. He held a letter in his hands fresh from the rookery, yet he looked at it not. This was news so good it was carried in memory, eager to be passed on.
"The Emperor and Chancellor Stark arrived at Praag two days past, on the morning of the twentieth," he said. "They came with the hosts of Reikland and Ostermark entire, transported by some sorcerous working of Imperial magisters."
Elsa leaned back in her chair, surprise plain upon her face. "I did not know such a thing was possible. They brought their whole strength?"
"So, it is said. Seventy-five thousand from Reikland, and fifty thousand from Ostermark. Forty thousand Gospodars have already mustered beneath the walls of Praag, and as many more are expected within the week." Mattias's smile thinned, and for a moment a flicker of annoyance crept into his voice. "Yet only five thousand Ungol riders have answered the governor's call. Nyvena has taken thirty-five thousand of them north instead, into the Troll Country, to harry Archaon's outriders."
Elsa's fingers brushed the rim of her glass, though she did not drink. "Even so, it is an incredibly potent force," she said. "More than two hundred thousand souls, when all are gathered. Enough to make even the Everchosen take heed."
'He may not heed,' she thought, 'but he would bleed.'
"And us with scarcely half that," a voice boomed from the doorway, loud and pleased with itself.
The Grand Baron of Nordland entered as if the chamber were his by right, his boots ringing upon the stone, his smile broad as a summer sea. Despite his years, there was iron in him still, Elsa thought, in the solid set of his shoulders and the heavy rhythm of his stride, as though the battlefield had never quite left him.
Elsa turned her head, studying him a moment. "Just under half," she said at last. "A hundred thousand, by my count."
She began to number them off, calm and precise. "Twenty thousand Ungol riders camped along the northern bank of the Tobol. Forty thousand Gospodars from the northern reaches of the Western Oblast, rallied to my banner. And your own forty thousand from Nordland." Her gaze lingered on him. "That makes a hundred, before the Westerlands add their strength."
"What of it?" she went on, before he could answer. "The Tobol is broad, and your fleet commands it. You may ferry men where they are needed, and break any foe who comes within range of your guns. We hold the river, and so long as we hold it, we can hold everything from Arrendelle to Zoishenk."
It sounded simple when spoken aloud. Rivers could be held. Lines could be drawn. Armies could be counted. But even as she spoke, Elsa felt the truth beneath the words, cold as the ice that answered her call. The enemy would come, in numbers beyond counting, with powers no wall nor river could long deny. The Tobol and their armies would not save them forever.
Still… it would make Archaon's forces pay dearly for every step they took.
"It matters," the Grand Baron said, "because Duke Baratheon's Celestial Journeyman dreamt ill last night. Not of the war in general to come, but of this day, here and now. He claims we shall be attacked. Today."
Elsa started despite herself. The words struck like a sudden fracture across a frozen lake, a sharp, jagged crack that threatened to swallow her whole. "How?" she demanded. "The Ungols range far from the north bank every day looking for signs of the enemy. They would have seen something. Even if a force had drawn close under the cover of night, word would have reached us by now. Doubly so if the enemy was strong enough to disdain stealth and attempt to force themselves through. And the river…" She shook her head. "They cannot cross it. Not under the eyes of our riders, nor beneath the guns of your fleet, nor with the whole of our armies drawn up along its banks. It is not possible."
"Very little is impossible in war," Gausser replied, "if one strikes with surprise." He spoke as a man who had made a study of such things, and practiced them too. "My men have been put on alert. You would be wise to do the same with yours."
"Of course." Elsa inclined her head. "Captain Mattias, see to it."
He went at once, the easy smile gone from his face, replaced by the hard set of duty. Elsa watched him go, then turned inward, her thoughts racing ahead of her, seeking some flaw, some gap she had missed. "How?" she murmured again, more to herself than to any other.
"A flock of flying beasts, perhaps," her father-in-law suggested lightly, as if he spoke of seagulls rather than monsters. He popped a deviled egg into his mouth and chewed. "Daemons. Dragons. Manticores. The Wastes are full of such delights, or so I am told."
Elsa frowned. "It is possible," she allowed. "But not by themselves. Not unless they come in great numbers. Anything less would be swept from the sky." Her gaze lifted slightly, as if she could already see them there, black shapes against the pale morning sky. "You brought magisters with you. Nine, I am told."
"Correction," the irascible Elector-Count said at once, ever quick to take the opportunity to disagree with or correct someone. "One Lord Magister, three Magisters, and five journeymen."
"Even so," Elsa said, unmoved. "That is a very considerable force. And I am here. Among the Ice Court I am the strongest after the Tzarina." There was the faintest tightening at the corner of her mouth. "There is another Ice Witch besides, and three Frost Maidens. Between us, we command more than enough power to scour the skies clean."
She spoke the words with calm assurance, yet even as she did, Elsa felt the faint stir of unease beneath them, like ice groaning deep beneath the surface of the frozen sea.
"Pardon me, my lady," Gerda interposed, her voice cutting across the chamber with the blunt certainty of a woman long accustomed to being heard, "but is not the most likely avenue of assault the sea?"
Her head maid stood with her hands clasped before her, broad-shouldered and solid as an oak, her years worn plainly but without weakness. The blood of Norscan refugees ran in her veins, folk who had fled south decades past, trading one harsh shore for another. It was only natural her thoughts would turn seaward. To such people, danger most often came riding the waves.
"Ha!" The Grand Baron's laughter rang out, loud and pleased. "Aye, that does have the ring of sense to it. Let us hope they are so obliging. With my fleet upon the water and the guns on your walls to greet them, they will be cut to pieces before they set foot ashore."
Elsa inclined her head, though the gesture held more habit than conviction. She hoped it would be so. Truly, she did. The sea was a battlefield the Grand Baron understood; his ships were strong, and their guns stronger still.
Yet hope was a frail thing, easily broken. If the Second Fleet were to suffer serious losses, if even a portion of it were crippled or burned, then the river would no longer be theirs to command. And without the fleet, the Tobol would cease to be a shield, and become instead a road to transport the archenemy into the heart of Kislev.
Elsa shook her head, as if to cast the thoughts from it. 'No,' she told herself. 'I am letting my mind run too far ahead, chasing shadows and shaping them into horrors.' A worrywart, as the Ungol women would say, fretting over storms not yet risen.
Even should the Second Fleet suffer losses, all would not be undone. So long as the fleet held, so long as it won, the course of things need not change. The enemy would pay dearly for any assault, bleeding men and monsters alike against shot and steel, and what remained would be broken long before it reached her walls.
And the Westerlands fleet was coming. It would begin to arrive on the morrow, if wind and tide proved favorable. A host of sails and cannons as great as the Second Fleet, perhaps greater, with fresh hulls and unspent powder.
'Yes,' she thought, cold certainty returning to her. 'So long as we defeat whatever force comes our way, the plan will hold.'
…
Euron Greyjoy no longer counted days. When a man treated with entities who had watched the stars ignite and die, the scratchings of a calendar or the passing of the seasons meant less than nothing. Time had simply grown hazy, a fragile construct left far behind. Somewhere along the windswept coast of Norsca, on a day that could have been yesterday or a season past, the world was grey and angry. The Sea of Claws threw itself against the rocks with a sound like a thousand giants smashing shields, and the wind carried the sharp, clean scent of salt and the promise of a storm to come. It was a good day for dying.
Aegir Steinbach, priest of Manann, possessed a stoicism that impressed even Euron Greyjoy. The old man was tied to a stake driven deep into a rock that jutted into the surf like a broken tooth. He was bare to the elements, his skin a canvas for the blasphemies Euron's men had carved into it. The runes were still raw, weeping blood in the salt wind, but the priest did not cry out. He did not beg for the torture to cease, or even for his life to end. He simply set his jaw, a bearded line of granite against the gale, and stared out into the distant, churning waves, his lips moving in silent prayers to his pathetic patron of tides and fish.
"Still think your glorified merman is going to save you?" Euron laughed, the sound swallowed by the roar of the sea. He sat on a rock and turned his attention back to the sacrificial knife in his hands, polishing the blade with a scrap of silk. The metal was unnaturally dark, a slice of obsidian midnight that held absolutely no reflection, and was incised with symbols that would make a non-believer blanch, sigils that writhed and twisted at the edge of one's vision.
Steinbach looked at him for the first time in quite a while. His eyes, the color of the deep sea, were not fearful. They were not even angry. They were… disappointed. "And you," the priest said, his voice raspy from disuse, "do you somehow think this fleet will amount to anything but bloodstained splinters sinking to the sea floor?"
The words themselves did not bother Euron; he had heard far worse from men with far more steel at their command. But the expression on the priest's face did. He looked at him not as an enemy, but as a stupid child, a willful boy playing with a torch in a dry forest.
Euron rose slowly, the thick sea-leather beneath his mail groaning like a thing in pain. "This fleet dwarfs the legendary armada of Cormac Bloodaxe. He had four hundred ships. He humbled Sigmar himself in battle and laid siege to Middenheim before he was defeated. I have seven hundred ships!"
"And the Empire and Kislev have cannons by the hundreds, by the thousands," the priest shot back, his voice gaining strength. "They have priests, magisters, and ice witches to contest your black magics. Their armies will outnumber yours several times over. You bring a pirate's raid to a war of nations."
Euron laughed, a genuine, booming sound that seemed to challenge the storm itself. "They'll make things bloody, no doubt, but the greatest glories demand the heaviest toll. In the end, southern magics and black powder are no match for the power of real gods. We'll see how they fare when we summon daemons and monsters of the sea and air to come to our aid."
He reached back, resting a hand on the wide rim of the horn where it jutted out past his hip. Secured by a heavy leather strap drawn tight across his chest, the massive, three-foot curve of blackened dragon horn was slung diagonally across his back, seeming to drink the light around it. It was banded with red gold and steel forged by the dwarfs of Zharr-Naggrund. Of all the relics he had won in his years of reaving and dark devotion, that artifact of the Raven God was his most valued possession, the key to unlocking a world of glorious ruin.
"It's a shame you won't live to see it," he said with a brutal grin, his uncovered right eye gleaming with ecstatic fervor. "But your god will have you soon enough. I wonder if he'll even recognize the pieces."
"It matters not if you destroy my body entire," the priest spoke, his voice a thin, proud reed against the gale. "Morr will guide my spirit though the Portal and from there deliver me to Manann's great hall beneath the sea. A palace of polished coral and splendor."
The faith of the man was a rock, and Euron delighted in nothing more than smashing rocks to dust.
"Oh, I wasn't wondering if he would recognize the pieces of your body," Euron said, his voice dropping to a deceptive gentility, a lover's murmur as he pulled back his eyepatch and bared his malevolent left eye. It was a dark crow-like thing, running over with malice. "But the pieces of your soul. There's not going to be much left after my four patrons are done with it."
He stepped forward in a single, fluid motion and lashed out with the dark, curved blade. The knife was impossibly sharp, a shard of frozen night, and it opened the priest's throat from ear to ear. Blood did not jet out in a hot, arterial fountain as it should have. Instead, it poured down his body in a thick, deliberate crimson waterfall, flowing with unnatural purpose into the channels carved into his flesh. Each blasphemous rune drank deep, and as they filled, they began to glow, a sickly, violet luminescence that pulsed like a diseased heart.
And then, though it should have been impossible with his windpipe a ruin of torn flesh and gristle, the priest screamed.
It was not the scream of a man. It was the sound of a soul being unmade, a high, thin shriek of agony that tore through the roar of the wind and the crash of the waves. It was the sound of gates being thrown open and horrors, ancient and ravenous, pouring through. Euron watched, both eyes wide with rapturous fervor, as the light of the runes grew brighter, consuming the priest from the inside out, turning his body into a beacon for the damned. The splendor of his patron's coral palace seemed a distant, foolish dream now. There was only the light, and the screaming, and the hungry gods who had come to collect their due.
As blood ran down the rocks and into the water, the sea began to boil, churning as a sudden gale snapped the dark sails of seven hundred longships across the bay. Upon their decks, dozens of warlocks and priests, their lips stained black with corruption, began to chant. The sea answered. Massive, unnatural shapes breached the churning waves, thrashing tentacles thicker than ship masts, and the slick, pale backs of leviathans drawn from the deepest abysses by the scent of a murdered soul. A thick, unnatural fog began to roll off the water, grey and heavy as a corpse shroud.
Euron let the priest's soul burn. He hoisted the heavy strap over his head, freeing the massive horn from his back, and lifted the curve of blackened bone to his lips. The gold and steel bands grew instantly, searingly hot, but Euron did not flinch. He blew.
It was a sound to break the world. The blast did not echo; it shattered the air, a deep, agonizing roar of dragons and burning skies that rolled out across the Sea of Claws, a dark herald for the fleet that followed in its wake.