Amazed yet again by our Icelandic blue drakaina.
“You have to understand, our bloodline has always been masters of the sigildric arts,” Baldur says now as he watches me, direct. “We are what is known as Sigilwrights in our Icelandic culture, and Hekla was a master of the craft. I was not a Bloodwalker like her, only a Blood Sage, but I learned at her feet all my life. From her, I became a shaman of our people, able to use my sigildric arts for a specific purpose—to see partway into the Void and change what I saw there. I couldn’t communicate with the Ancestors like she could, but I could use my power to heal people, change fates, and undo timelines that had been cursed… providing better ones for those I healed.”
My eyebrows rise. “I’ve never even heard of such a talent among our people as being able to change a person’s fate.”
“Don’t get me wrong, it’s not easy.” Baldur’s lips quirk as humor touches his eyes now. “Still. I learned from a master in all things Veil and Void. She noticed that strange talent in me, that I could alter a person’s fate by my special ability. I have since honed it all my life.”
“Making tinctures?” I smile at him, teasing.
“Art.” His gaze drills into me. “For a thousand years, I have honed my ability to make sigildric art, Rikyava, which can reach through the Veil into the Void, and change someone’s fate. I’ve given my everything to do this, sacrificing a life I might have had as a warrior or a palace healer for my King, both of which I had a vast talent for. But Hekla was firm about my fate when she raised me. She saw into the weft and weave of worlds, beyond the Veil, watching where my auric dragon came and went. She knew I would meet you in a thousand timelines and a thousand timelines more. That no matter how I might change my destiny, it would alwayscome back to you: the Hög Skjaldmær with a heart of gold, but with the blackest stain upon her bloodline. Even with all my vast ability, mine was an inescapable fate. And so Hekla counseled me to make the most of it, and to be ready to help you when you at last arrived.”
“So everything you’ve done in your life has been to prepare for meeting me?” My eyebrows practically shoot up off my face now.
“Not everything, no.” He chuckles as that sexy smile quirks his lips again and his blue eyes sparkle. “For two hundred years or so, I railed against what she was telling me, perfecting my sigildric art only to change my fate, over and over. Yet whenever I asked Hekla to scry into my future, always, she saw you. Whether I was a healer at the palace or a Captain of the Guard, or a nobody caught in battle the night your sister led her coup and died, always, we met. Always, I became your drake, one way or another. Through every lifetime that ever was and ever will be. It’s my fate.”
“Why don’t you hate me?” I breathe now, stunned by his admission and barely able to wrap my head around it.
“How could I?” His gaze softens as he looks me over, that wisp of smile touching his lips again. “At some point, when you realize your life has a destiny… you either embrace that destiny, or end it. I tried to kill myself in those early years, a few times. It never took. When my sister told me what a great purpose you and I would have together, to bring down the Black Dragon in glory or die trying… how could I not already love the ballsy, brave, incredible drakaina I knew I would meet, who would take on this task? The dream of any Blood Dragon, to go out fighting in such a blaze of glory as that…”
“So when you saw me at Mikkel and Lærke’s club that night, you knew,” I say now, fully aware of how bizarre all this is.
Though strangely, it feels sane.
“I didn’t.” Humor sparks in his eyes and he smiles again. “I had never seen you before. We had never crossed paths, and I never went to the palace while you were there to find out who you were. I was contentto know that I would recognize you when I saw you, but I didn’t know what you would look like. And I had no idea we would have our first meeting that night at The Vault, when one glance from you speared me to my core… and gave me the most powerful magic I’ve dealt with yet. I painted it high into The Vault’s dome all night long.”
“My power gave you something that night?” I blink now.
“Deeply.” He holds my gaze, intent. “One look from you, and everything inside me lit up like I had never felt. Like pure, molten gold pouring through my veins, everything inside my Blood Magic leapt to you when we made eye contact that night.”
“I don’t recall your eyes being this color they are right now, that night… and you didn’t have any tattoos, either,” I say now, curious about the difference.
“I hide my tattoos with my magic when I am out and about, for they are sacred to me. As for my eyes… I felt them change when I mate-tasted you, and you, me. They changed to a fiery feel I haven’t had in ages, thanks to the connection we shared that night. I wanted to search for you, to follow you that night and claim you as mine… but I knew from Hekla that you had to come to me. And that night… you didn’t.”
“You must have felt awful.” I frown, trying to imagine feeling that way about someone, then knowing it wasn’t going to happen.
“But I did know it was going to happen.” That wisp of a smile haunts him again, lovely and intense. “I’ve always known. It was only a matter of time.”
“And then we’d become life-mates.” I say, frowning even more now than I was before.
So much of Baldur’s tale rings true, confirmed by what I’m feeling around him right now and by Aesa’s Truthstone going ballistic upon my chest, shining with a blazing light that we should be life-mates. Something else inside me, however, feels conflicted.
As if all the free will in my life was ripped away, some part of me wants to rebel from this fate that Baldur’s sister saw for my life, over and over.But something else feels soothed as I look at him, feeling how all this is so very right. What I don’t know is what his power can do.
And what it might give us, to fight the Black Dragon.
“It’s not a sure thing that we become life-mates.” Baldur sobers now as his gaze digs into mine. “Hekla saw it was our fate to meet, in every version of my life. What she did not see was whether we would for certain become bonded as one. Only that if we do, we have a chance at bringing down the Black Dragon. And if we don’t… the world will meet its end. Forever.”
“The world…?” Shock wallops me right in the gut at what Baldur’s saying. “Are you insinuating that if you and I don’t bond… that the Black Dragon will kill the entire world?”
“Every tree, leaf, and flower,” he says. “Hekla scried into the future ten thousand times, and ten thousand times more, concerning the Black Dragon. For she was part of the True Knights, central to their measures to prevent the Black Dragon’s future rise, if they could. In every timeline, she saw an unavoidable fate; that someone you knew personally would resurrect the Dragon of All Souls. The young Hög Skjaldmær Bloodwalker of this era would battle it with all her drakes at her side, but she would lose if I was not among them. The earth would fall to the demon… and not just all Blood Dragons, but all souls everywhere. It would be the end.”
I breathe hard now as I take it all in, overwhelmed as a sudden panic grips my heart. Both my inner dragons gnash their teeth inside my chest, as I understand that we’re not just up against the fate of all Blood Dragondom if the Black Dragon’s terrible power is fully unleashed.
But the fate of the entire world, like the Archangels feared—inescapable.
“And if we do bond?” I ask him now, breathless, like I’ve just been sucker-punched.
“Fortune is not guaranteed.” Baldur’s voice is quiet as he watches me. “But if we do bond, if I become one of your drakes and fight at your side against the Black Dragon… we have a chance. In just seven out of ten thousand Bloodwalkings that Hekla undertook to learn about our fate and the Black Dragon, she saw our success.”
