The smoke of the burning village curled like dark fingers toward the sky, and Ragnar stood in the center of it all—shirtless, blood-stippled, eyes gleaming with the wild focus of a predator who sees something far more intriguing than prey.

He had just cut down two Saxon guards when he saw you.

You—small, crooked, tan-skinned, hair like spilled gold lit by firelight, clutching the ruins of a house that didn’t belong to you. Your round brown eyes didn’t widen the way the others did. Your gaze held nothing—no fear, no plea, no attempt to flee. Just… a stillness. A strange, foreign stillness.

“Take her!” one of the English soldiers shouted before Ragnar slit his throat. “She’s the lady—”

But Ragnar knew better the moment he approached you.

You weren’t dressed like a noblewoman. You weren’t trembling like a princess. You smelled not of lavender oils but of lemon balm and rain-soaked earth, a scent that clung to you like a secret.

Ragnar tilted his head, studying you through the drifting smoke. The gods whispered in moments like this—fate brushing his ear like a raven’s wing.

And when he reached for your arm, his fingers paused.

Your hands.

Calloused, rough, ink-stained in places. The hands of a maker. A crafter. A shaper.

His blue eyes sharpened. “Who are you, hmm?” he murmured, voice rough as gravel and far too curious. “The Saxons tried very hard to keep you.”

He touched your chin, turning your face toward the firelight. Your brows, your lips, your lashes—every detail drew him nearer, as if the air between you had suddenly become thinner.

“You look like no princess,” Ragnar said softly. “No queen.”

His thumb brushed your cheek.

“But your hands…”

He lifted one, inspecting it as if it were a weapon forged by dwarves. The moment he touched the pads of your fingers, something electric passed through him. A pulse. A promise. A prophecy.

“Oh,” he whispered, almost reverently. “So this is how the gods speak.”

Later, when his warriors had finished pillaging and the ship was waiting, Ragnar didn’t give you to any of his men. He didn’t even let them touch you. He gripped your arm—not cruelly, but with the unshakable certainty of a man who has just claimed something he believes has always belonged to him.

You stumbled once on the sand, your short legs struggling to keep up, but Ragnar didn’t slow. He glanced back only once—watching the way your gold curls clung to your shoulders, the way your wide frame moved with quiet strength, the way your eyes darted everywhere except him.

“Messy little thing,” he muttered with a grin. “Your spirit shows on your skin.”

That night on the ship, he didn’t sleep. He sat across from where you were kept under a fur cloak, staring. Thinking. Smiling to himself in that way he did when he believed he had tricked fate.

When you stitched the torn hem of a shieldmaiden’s tunic in less than a minute using techniques no Viking had ever seen, Ragnar’s breath caught.

When you touched a noblewoman’s face in Kattegat and transformed her with pigments mixed from berries and herbs you requested by name, Ragnar’s knuckles whitened on the table.

When you muttered angrily about pens, and pencils, and “useless eras,” Ragnar’s lips parted, hearing words he had never heard, tasting a world that didn’t exist.

And when the Seer said— She is the one. The woman not of this time. The hands of Freyja. The storm that will follow you across every life.

Ragnar laughed—too loud, too wild, too sure.

The next morning, he stood in the doorway of his chambers where he kept you, watching your unfocused movements, your restless hands, your disinterest in everything except the pile of sewing you had made for yourself.

“You were mine in another world,” he said simply, leaning on the frame as if he’d been waiting centuries to say, “And you are mine here.”

But he looked at you—as if you were a saga he had been trying to remember since childhood.

“You make queens more beautiful,” he murmured. “But I am greedy.”