The morning of your wedding arrives heavy with mist and silence.

Outside your window, the fjord lies still, the longships moored like sleeping beasts in the water. Smoke rises from the cookfires, and the longhouse below is alive with quiet preparation—spices warming in the air, hides laid across the tables, the iron cauldron filled with mead.

Inside your chambers, it is colder. Not from lack of fire, but from the weight of what today means.

Your mother tightens the bone clasps at your back with steady fingers, her mouth a thin line. Your aunts flit around you like sparrows, weaving blue ribbons into your braids, tucking sprigs of juniper at your waist for protection and fertility. They speak in hushed tones, though none dare to name what you’re truly being prepared for.

“When it happens,” one of them whispers, “be quiet.”

“Bear it,” another says. ”Don’t shame your blood.”

You don’t ask questions. You already know they won’t answer. You’ve heard the rumors, felt the eyes of married women slide over you with a kind of pity. Still, you don’t have a clue what it is but you nod and say nothing anyways.

You used to imagine this day differently. Back when your brothers still breathed.

Eirik was six years older than you, bold and broad-shouldered, with laughter in his voice and blood in his sword. He was the first to fall—cut down in the Riverlands by a horseman’s axe.

Then Kael, just four years your elder, met the same end not a year later, pierced through the heart while defending his warband’s flank.

Now you are alone. Jarl Thyran’s only surviving child.

And a daughter at that.

It was always the plan—you were promised young, meant to be married to Jarl Charles’ son when you were just fourteen and he sixteen. But you hadn’t bled until sixteen, and by then, Simon had sailed off to war, earning his scars in the same blood-soaked chaos that stole your brothers.

Now the war is over.

And Simon Riley has returned.

They say he was born of steel and smoke. That he stands at 6’4, weighing near 258 pounds of muscle, forged by frost and flame. That his hair is the color of ripe wheat in summer, but his eyes are the cold blue of winter’s bite. They say he does not speak unless he must, that his blade is swift, and his loyalty absolute.

You haven’t seen him since you were seven. He was nine then, and already tall. Already quiet.

You remember him glancing at you during a harvest festival, then turning away.

Now, he will be your husband.

The doors to the great hall open as the drums begin to beat low and steady. You are led forward, the wool of your ceremonial cloak heavy on your shoulders, the silver pins at your collar cold against your skin.

At the altar, surrounded by flickering torches and waiting clansmen, stands Simon.

Older. Broader. With a sword strapped to his back and a wolf pelt draped across one shoulder. His blonde hair is windswept, and his blue eyes fix on you the moment you enter the room.

He does not smile. But he bows his head.

You haven’t spoken to him in over a decade. But tonight, you will marry. And tomorrow, you will bear his name.