Chapter Twenty-nine:

SIGRUN

I had been in the North for long enough to accept that giant wolves existed, but not long enough to stop mentally screaming about it.

And tonight, apparently, I was meeting the people who helped govern them.

No pressure.

Absolutely none.

I stared at my reflection for what had to be the fiftieth time.

The woman staring back at me looked nothing like the Sigrún I knew.

Rita had transformed me into a person who looked as though she belonged in a fantasy movie with an unnecessarily large budget.

The dress was deep blue velvet, soft beneath my fingers and embroidered with silver threads that shimmered like frost. My hair had been braided back from my face with tiny silver pins worked into it.

I looked expensive.

But dressing like royalty and being royalty were two very different things.

And if there was one thing I had learned since arriving in this world, it was that the North took its titles very seriously.

A knock sounded at the door.

My stomach immediately attempted to migrate into my throat. Oh good.

Time to go meet the medieval United Nations.

Except with more fur.

***

The air in the room was suffocating. It smelled like ancient stone, burnt animal fat, and an underlying, collective tension that felt less like a political dinner and more like a war council waiting for a spark to hit a powder keg.

I sat at Varul’s right hand, feeling incredibly small in the high, carved back of my oak chair. My knuckles were white where I gripped my heavy pewter goblet, trying my absolute best to just blend into the masonry. I didn't want to make a sound. I didn't want to draw attention. I was entirely out of my depth, surrounded by thirty hulking Northern men who looked like they could tear through steel, let alone a girl from Brooklyn trapped in a dead princess's shoes.

I kept my chin up, desperate to mask the fact that my heart was practically hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I had to get a feel for this room, to analyze the players before I accidentally stepped on a landmine. But looking down the long table, I didn't even know where to start. I didn't know a single one of their names. To me, they were just a wall of muscle, fur, and intimidating glares. And right now, those glares were tight with a raw, mounting panic.

They weren't arguing about petty court drama. They were talking about the massacre that had pulled Varul away from me on our wedding night.

"Eight dead wolves at the eastern border, Alpha," a massive, graying man rumbled from halfway down the table. He was built like a boulder, his thick fingers tearing off a chunk of dark rye bread with raw, aggressive force. He had patches of thick hair showing at his collar, his voice vibrating with a terrifying edge.

"Slaughtered like cattle. Cut down by something that tears through full-grown wolves like parchment. And now we have ravens flying from every pack house because fear is spreading like a sickness. If our borders aren't secure, the North will fracture from the inside out."