The message had arrived strapped to a hawk, visibly worn out from the long exhausting trip. Its feathers were matted with the brine of the Great Sea; the little messenger collapsed once into the stone balcony, without making a single sound. This was not the official messenger from the High Council, the parchment was stained with a single dark thumbprint of blood, and smelled of the North’s biting salt and the metallic tang of danger.
Lykos slept peacefully in his birch cradle, when Gustav noticed the bird and the dark smear on its leg. When Gustav broke the seal of the parchment, the air in the room shifted, from heavy scent of late-summer jasmine, into chill of the impending change.
The wax on the parchment belonged to the broken shield of Kaelen, the only man on the High Council who still held an oath to the North Castle, that weighted more than his own ambition.
“The Oak is rotten from within while the ravens wait for the rot to claim the crown. Erik is calling his blood while the Council locked the gates. Come with fire or stay where you are when all is lost.”
Gustav let go of the parchment, his hand shaking, and his face gray with a sudden morbid realization.
Linde quickly moved towards him, her eyes scanning his face, then the script.
“My father…” finally Gustav whispered, with a low jagged voice. “He is slipping away, my love, the weight of his burdens dragging his down. I can sense his exhaustion from across the sea. The vultures are circling his as a wounded prey. He needs to see his kin… but they are holding the gates.”
Linde rested her hands on his shoulders, beneath his tunic, she could feel his muscles coiled like iron springs. She felt torn. She was home here, the daughter of these lands, the Witch of the High Forest, finding her own inner Ragané. The sister and the aunt. She belonged to this earth, the ancient rituals and the magic. She felt her heart sinking at the thought of being torn away from the source of her strength.
But she felt Gustav’s frantic heartbeat and she felt the truth clearly as a splash of cold spring water. She was needed there more, she made the promise to be the Healer for his people, and to be his companion. His heart was calling him back to the jagged spired of the North Castle, and this debt to his blood meant more right now than anything else.
“We always knew that we would go back in fall, my King. When Lykos and I are stronger and ready for the road..” - she said softly, like a soothing song. “This message just confirmed that this is the right time. Our time of peace in the sun is coming to its end, we must go back home now. We must see your father and Lykos must know the land of his father’s fathers…”
Gustav turned around, locking his large hands round her waist, and pulling her close enough to feel her heartbeat in his chest.
“You have given me so much, Linde” he said tenderly, his voice soft and thick with emotion. “You always follow me through the fire, you saved my life and saved our son and now, you’re willing to leave the home that nurtured you and build you up after the fall, travel across the brine with a young child into the uncertainty and cold of my kingdom…. It will be so hard.” - he looked her straight into the eyes “And I see you here, I see you bloom here, with your kin and your forest. I’m sorry to take you from the light into the darkness of where my kingdom is now”.
“You are not taking me from the light” - she whispered, her lips almost touching his ear." “You are my light. We’re going together, as a storm”
He pulled her even closer, and captured her mouth with a kiss that had more tenderness and pride than anything they have shared since the day Lykos was born. It was the kiss that reminder her that while she was the witch of these lands, she also belonged with him, while Linde was melting against him, her fingers playing with his hair, returning his kiss with a promise the she wasn’t just following him, she was choosing him in this moment, all over again.
She pulled back to look at him, with a sweet but firm expression.
“Let’s start getting ready, my love. We leave for the Heart of Stone at the first light”.
The breakfast hall smelled of hearth-smoke, roasted grains and delusion of the family pretending that one meal could delay indefinitely the inevitable departure of their soul.
Linde looked at the spread covered with honey-cakes and thick yellow cream, and let out a laughing sigh: “I see. Creme and clover honey, someone expects me to have stamina of an ox!”.
Vlad didn’t look up while slicing his dark loaf of bread: “Yes, heavy hand, stamina and stomach that doesn’t turn, you’ll need all three to make it alive”.
Linde snorted into her cup.
“I’m not even joking” - Vlad continued, unflinched. “You’re riding to the North Castle. You know how grief can sour the humors? When the black bile rises from the spleen, your mind will follow, and you’ll get indecisive and prone to dark ideas”.
“Oh, and I thought that the High Council was the source of dark ideas” - Linde noted.
“The Council. The Council attacks the choler, it makes the blood boil and the liver overheat. “ Vlad lectured calmly. “Different mechanics, but the outcome will be the same: you end up cutting where you need to be stitching”.
Andrej blinked across the table, his knife hovering over a slab of ham: “What is this? A blessing? It sounds like a lecture to me”.
“No” Linde and Vlad said in unison.
Gustav’s mouth twitched, he sat with his hands wrapped around a heavy mug, watching the familiar, sharp rhythm of the siblings.
“You take too much pleasure in this” - Linde pointed out, casting a daring look at Vlad.
“I take just the right amount of pleasure” - Vlad replied. “You’re about to enter a next of men who think a fever is a curse and governance is whoever has the loudest lungs. I cope thorough the humors”
“Be honest, Vlad” - Laila leaned over, her tone soft and playful - “How many councilors will succumb to bad air while she’s gone?”
“If Linde behaves herself? Probably two. But if she doesn’t? Maybe fewer, but they’ll be more miserable” - Vlad explained.
Linde raised an eyebrow: “You have no faith in my diplomatic powers.”
“I have kept a tally of the men who underestimated you” Vlad replied, “and the count is not in their favor: you terrify them when you’re polite, but it’s that dangerous look in your eye that says you know where the humors are unbalanced and you’re considering which vein to cut open”.
Everyone laughed.
Andrej shook his head and looked at Gustav: “Do you see what I have to live with? They are so annoying”.
“And yet, brother” - Linde said swetly. “notice how often you bleed and survive”.
“Fair” - Andrej grunted.
Vlad looked at Gustav then, studying him with his clinical eye of a healer. “She’ll be fine, Gustav. “ He said, “Assuming you don’t let anyone poison her” He quickly added.
Gustav let out a short laugh: “That’s… comforting?”
“Oh, I’m note finished” Vlad continued, his voice with a playful edge. “Let’s assume that no one undermines her, locks her out of her own infirmary, or questions her while she’s holding a blade in her hand…”
"Linde smiled, her mind drifting to the cold stone halls of the North Castle, and the infirmary filled with people waiting for her decisions. “You forgot condescendingly explains the knitting of bone” She joked.
“Ah yes, a fatal mistake” Vlad nodded.
Then, smoothly and without ceremony, he slid a rosewood box across the table: “You know that infirmary better than anyone” he said, his voice steady but his eyes intent. “You built that infirmary while the rest of us were playing solder and pretending blood was romantic”.
Linde looked at the box: she knew it. It was her mother Velena’s medical tool box. For a heartbeat the banter and the breakfast - all fell away, leaving only the weight of her heritage.
“Use Mother’s tools,” Vlad said softly. “Ignore anyone who tells you that a Queen’s power is in her crown, power is knowing where to cut, and when to wait.”
Linde swallowed the lump in her throat. “If I come back with fewer patients and more enemies…”
“I’ll call it a win”, Vlad said quickly. “Fewer infections”.
Miro took Linde’s hand under the table, she squeezed it back, her voice as light as her grip fierce: “I’m not dying, Miro, I’m going to have to endure something… something annoying”.
“Oh that’s posibly even worse,” Vlad pointed outj. “Annoying places can ruin the spirit, you’ll come back ruined and then I will have to hear all about it.”
Andrej leaned forward, pointing his knife at Gustav, the gesture of the brotherhood they forged in their shared warrior past. “All joked aside, you and I have stood in the embers, side by side, my brother.”
The room stilled and the light seemed to have sharpen then.
“I did not drag you out of the burning barn so you could get murdered by your own Council, “ he continued. “If they come for you, or my sister, don’t you wait, send a rider.” He tapped the table. “I’ll give you five thousand spears before the moon turns twice. We are brothers through fire and blood, Gustav. That doesn’t end at the border.”
“Andrej…” Linde said softly.
“No, sister,” he said gently. “It’s the only way I’ll sleep”.
Laila reached over and flicked Andrej’s ear. “Why don’t you finish your bread before you declare another war, my giant. You’re getting crumbs all over the baby”.
“I can do both,” he muttered.
“King Artemij rose at last. “Well,” he said dryly, “this has been very uplifting. I feel quite refreshed.”
A ripple of laughter followed.
“The North is stone, it’s strong, brittle, and it cracks in frost.” Artemij’s gaze settled on Linde. “You are the moss in their fissured, the quite thing that keeps the mountain from crumbling.” He turned to Gustav: “And you are coming back to the Heart of Stone to keep it alive.”
He raised his cup. “Go, be clever, and stubborn, and try not to bleed unnecessarily.”
Vlad also raised his cup. “That last part was meant especially for you, Gustav.”
As they drank, Linde laughed, because if she didn’t, the weight of the impending road and the coming cold could actually crush her ribs. The warmth of the ale hit her stomach and she felt the anchor of them.
The shadows of the apple trees stretched long in the twilight as Linde slipped away to find her sisters.
Zora was waiting there, along with all the women who had shared the sacred rituals in the forest twilights. They brought the bundles of mugwort, bowls of river water and the rhythmic beat of a hand-drum that sang the pulse of the earth.
Linde stepped into the circle, with hands open in the air thick with the scent of crushed herbs and damp soil.
The transference ritual had begun.
Zora took the lead, with fluid and trance-like movements, she danced around Linde, her bare feet kicking up the scent of fallen fruit. Her dance was weaving a protective shroud of sensory memory for Linde, a barrier of warmth to stand against the coming ice.
“You are going to a place of white silence,” Zora chanted, her was low and melodic, vibrating with a strange new resonance. “But the forest lives in your bones, the roots do not forget the sun because the snow has fallen”/
The women joined in a low, humming chant, that sounded deep in Linde’s chest. Then, one by one, they stepped forward and pressed their palms to Linde’s arms, her back and her forehead. It was the ancient Shield of the Sisters. They were imprinting the memory of their earth into her skin, ensuring the faraway land would not steal her spirit.
Zora stepped closer, her eyes were glowing with an esoteric light, the gaze of someone who stood with one foot in the spirit world. She took Linde’s hands, pulling her into the slow, hypnotic dance. They moved together, like a prayer in motion.
As the drumbeat picked up, Zora leaned in with her forehead resting against Linde’s. Her voice was a low, melodic rasp.
“Every time you feel alone, remember this song. If the world tries to silence you, remember the scream of the wind in these trees, remember you are the voice of the woods and they can not cage what is infinite…”
As the drumbeat quickened, Zora leaned in, her forehead resting against Linde’s. Her voice was a low, melodic rasp. “Every time you feel the cold, call on this heat. Every time the world tries to silence you, remember the scream of the wind in these trees. You are the voice of the woods, Linde. They cannot cage what is infinite.”
She finally pressed a sliver of warm, raw amber into Linde’s palm. “This is the sun’s blood. It will burn for you when the hearth goes out. Remember the heat, Linde. Remember that you are the fire they cannot cage.”
Linde felt the magic settle into her bones, a weight of emerald and honey to counter the coming iron and slate. She was a vessel of the Earth, carrying the soul of her sisters into the heart of the storm.
The journey North was a road built of ghosts.
As the caravan climbed into the throat of the mountains, color leeched slowly from the world, and the vibrant, honeyed greens dulled, then vanished entirely, replaced by slate, iron, and the bleached, skeletal bones of rock. Pines thinned into jagged needles, rivers narrowed into cold, relentless cuts through stone, and even the sky seemed to lower itself, heavy and watchful, like a lid closing over a tomb.
Linde sat inside the gilded carriage, gently holding little Lykos, her posture completely still. Her mind, however, was far behind them.
The carriage rounded a sharp, narrow bend, and her breath caught so sharply it felt like a wound reopening. Below them, the river curved dark and glittering, cold as a blade. She knew that bend. She had memorized its geography in a fever of terror once before.
Here, her mind whispered with a clinical coldness, the way it did when panic threatened to drown reason. This is where she died.
She remembered the sack over her head, the suffocating, dusty press of coarse fabric against her mouth, the smell of damp earth and old fear. She remembered how sound had warped inside that darkness: the river roaring like a starving beast, the laughter of their captors echoing so close and so loud. She remembered being forced to strip, the humiliation, the cold, her skin prickling as her dignity was flayed away.
The river below sparkled now, innocent in the daylight, but Linde saw only the black water where her innocence had been submerged. She pressed her fingers into her palm, the sharp edges of the amber stone Zora had given her anchoring her back to the present.
I survived, she reminded herself, her pulse a steady, rhythmic drum. I learned. I returned. I am no longer the prey.
Across from her, Gustav sat unmoving, his presence a solid, lethal weight, a man shaped by fire and the endurance of stone. She was returning not as a prize, but as a sovereign. Not as a girl with a bag over her head, but as a woman whose hands had mended the very men who now rode behind them.
As the spear-like spires of the Heart of Stone pierced the leaden horizon, rising from the rock like a crown of knives, Linde sensed with a quiet, sharp clarity:
This was not home, but a battlefield where the weapons were silence, tinctures, and time. They arrived without ceremony, no horns heralded their approach, no banners snapped in the wind, no sound but the low, mournful whistle of the mountain air through the battlements.
The village below the keep lay shuttered, doors barred as if against a creeping plague. Smoke rose thin and reluctant from a handful of chimneys. People watched from behind slats and corners, their eyes fearful and haunted.
The guards at the gate were strangers, they wore the black and silver of the High Council, their faces anonymous beneath steel helms. Their hands rested on their polearms not in salute, but in a cold, calculating assessment.
Inside the gatehouse, shadows pooled thick and smelling of wet iron. Linde felt the shift immediately, the way power had been rearranged into a cage while they were gone.
Hugo had imagined this moment a hundred different ways on the road home. He had imagined Marta running to him in the courtyard, skirts gathered, laughter breaking loose the way it used to when they were younger and fear still felt optional. He had imagined her arms around his neck, her mouth against his jaw, the world snapping back into place with the simple logic of home.
Instead, she did not show up at the gate. She was not at the courtyard at all.
It wasn’t until later, long after the horses were stabled, that she found him, in their keep. She slipped inside like a shadow, bolting the door behind her with hands that trembled too much to hide it.
“Marta?” he said, already rising, relief flooding him so hard it made him dizzy.
She crossed the room in three quick steps and pressed herself into him with a force that stole the breath from his lungs. Her mouth found his, urgent, hungry, not joyful but desperate. Her fingers fumbled at his belt as if afraid he might vanish if she did not anchor him to her skin.
He caught her face, startled. “Hey.. hey. I’m here.”
That was when she broke. She made a sound, small, strangled, and folded into him, forehead pressed to his collarbone, shaking like a body pulled too quickly from cold water. Hugo wrapped his arms around her without thinking, muscle memory taking over, his hand sliding into her hair, grounding her the way he had done a hundred times before.
“I thought you’d never come back to me,” she whispered.
“I’m here,” he said again, softer. “I came back to you.”
She kissed him then, slower now, deeper, and this time he kissed her back without restraint. They moved together with the urgency of people who had memorized each other long ago. Clothes fell away, skin met skin, and for a few stolen moments, the world narrowed to warmth and breath and the quiet, animal reassurance of we are still alive.
Afterward, she lay with her head on his chest, her fingers tracing the familiar scar beneath his ribs. Hugo stared at the ceiling, contentment blooming at last, thinking: This is it. This is the moment everything rights itself.
But her breathing did not slow, she lay rigid against him, listening.
“Marta,” he murmured. “What is it?”
She did not lift her head when she spoke. “They are killing the King.”
The words were barely sound at all, breath shaped into meaning.
Hugo’s body went utterly still.
“What?” he whispered.
“They don’t do it with blades,” she continued, voice flat now, clinical, the healer in her emerging where the woman could not survive. “They poison him, slowly, to quiet him. To make him agreeable so that he forgets to ask questions.”
Hugo’s throat tightened. “Why haven’t you said anything?”
“To whom? The Council? They are the ones doing it!”
His hand tightened on her shoulder. “Gustav. Linde. Why didn’t you tell them?”
Marta finally lifted her head. Her eyes were hollow.
“Because walls listen,” she said. “And because I needed one moment... where I could still be your Marta before I became... whatever this makes me.”
She pressed her palm flat against his chest. “They tell Erik that Gustav is dead. Over and over.”
Hugo felt something cold and furious uncoil inside him. “How long?”
“Long enough that he no longer argues… Long enough that he believes them.”
Silence stretched between them, thick and suffocating.
He closed his eyes. For years, he had fought for borders, banners, names carved into stone. He had dreamed of returning to this room, this body, this peace. And now peace lay beside him, whispering treason into the dark.
“If I speak,” he said slowly, “they will kill you.”
She nodded. “I know.”
“If I don’t...”
“They will kill him,” she finished.
Hugo exhaled shakily and pulled her closer, pressing his forehead to hers. “This is why you didn’t meet them at the gate.”
“I couldn’t,” she whispered. “If I’d looked at Linde, I would have broken. And if I’d broken there... it would already be over.”
He kissed her hair, breathing her in, knowing with a sick, certain clarity that this was the last moment of innocence they would ever share.
“When they ask,” he said, “you say nothing.”
She nodded.
“And when I move,” he continued, voice hardening, “you trust me.”
Marta closed her eyes and nodded.
The stillness of the North Castle was a lie. It was the silence of a held breath.
In the dead of night, Hugo led Marta through the lightless servants’ corridors. He moved with the grace of a man who knew every stone of this fortress, his hand never leaving the hilt of his blade. Marta followed in his shadow, her face a pale ghost in the gloom.
They reached the royal chambers. Hugo gave the low, rhythmic scratch of a soldier’s signal against the oak. The door swung open instantly.
Gustav stood there, his massive frame silhouetted by the dying embers of the hearth. He was still in his leathers, his hand resting on the hilt of his broadsword. Behind him, Linde sat by the fire, the amber stone from Zora glowing like a trapped coal in her palm.
“Hugo,” Gustav said, his voice a low, jagged vibration. “You look like a man who has seen a ghost.”
“Worse,” Hugo replied, stepping inside and pulling Marta with him. He threw the heavy iron bolt, the sound echoing like a hammer strike. “I’ve seen a King being erased, and no one is allowed to see the ink.”
Marta stepped forward, her eyes hollow. She didn’t look at the King; she looked at the Healer. “Linde, they’ve barred the doors. I am the head of the royal infirmary, and the Council Maesters have forbidden me from even crossing the threshold of the King’s chambers.”
Linde stood, the silk of her gown hissing against the stone. “On what grounds?”
“They say it is a holy rest,” Marta whispered, her voice trembling. “But I have seen the dregs of the cups they bring out. I’ve seen the way the King withers day by day. He is fading, Linde. He is becoming a shadow in his own bed, and every time I ask for his vitals, the guards move their hands to their swords. They are feeding him something to keep him in the grey, but they’ve hidden the labels and locked the cabinets.”
Linde’s color drained, replaced by a cold, clinical fury that mirrored the silver scalpels in her kit. Gustav’s face turned to iron. He looked at Hugo, the silent understanding of ten years of war passing between them.
“I’ve already moved,” Hugo said, his voice hardening into the tone he used on the battlefield. “I’ve sent Mikkel. He slipped over the eastern wall an hour ago. He’s headed for the old garrison in the valley to find the men who still remember the King who bled for them. If the Council tries to bar the doors tomorrow, we won’t be knocking. We’ll be breaking them down.”
Gustav nodded once, a sharp, lethal movement. He walked to the window, looking out at the dark, spear-like spires of his kingdom. “The Council thinks they have buried the truth in a grave of silence.”
He turned back, his blue eyes burning with a fractured light.
“Linde,” he said, “Prepare your kit. If they want to play at medicine, we will show them how the Queen treats a rot. Hugo, keep your steel wet. Marta, you stay with the Queen.”
Linde reached for the rosewood box Vlad had given her. She felt the weight of her mother’s silver, the tools meant to heal, but sharp enough to reclaim a throne.
Linde looked at the amber in her hand, then at the iron-clad men before her. “They’ve forgotten that a surgeon knows exactly where the heart is. And tomorrow, I am going to find my father-in-law’s.”
Outside, the wind shrieked against the stones of the North Castle, a precursor to the storm that was finally, inevitably, coming home.
🧠 Behind the Saga: Somatic Anchors
Chapter 41 marks a violent transition where we are ripped from the warm, communal hearth and thrown back into the isolated, paranoid halls of the North Castle.
This chapter is a study of how humans process trauma, and how the presence (or absence) of community dictates our survival.
Here is the clinical and anthropological framework behind the events and the concepts I am deeply exploring in my collaboration with clinical sexologist Dr. Stephanie Gamache.
Before Linde leaves for the North, Zora and the women of the East perform a ritual of Transference. In modern society we often process transitions in isolation, without anchors to help moving us from liminality to new spaces and identities. But our ancestors knew that major life shifts require what anthropologists refer to as cultural containers.
The women use the heavy beat of a hand-drum, the scent of crushed fruit, and physical touch to co-regulate her nervous system. This is the Somatic Village in action using communal connection to literally armor a woman’s nervous system against the psychological ambiguity she is about to walk into.
When Linde’s carriage passes the river where she was abducted, she experiences a somatic flashback. The sound of the water and the shift in the geography cause her body to mimic the exact physiological terror of the kidnapping.
In clinical sexology and trauma therapy, we know you cannot simply out-think a hijacked nervous system, you often need a somatic anchor. Linde presses the sharp edges of the raw amber Zora gave her into her palm, the localized physical sensation grounds her, pulling her brain out of the past and anchoring her back in the present reality of the carriage. It is a example of ancient application of modern trauma science.