The gangplank was already being hauled in, the ropes slithering free of the dock with a sound like snakes through grass. The sails unfurled, catching a breeze that seemed to have been waiting for exactly that moment. Through the chaos, she caught one last glimpse of the harbor—Leif on his knees, bleeding but alive, shouting orders to a man already sprinting toward the castle road.
The ship lurched beneath her as it caught the tide, pulling away from Uist with the terrible, unstoppable certainty of something that had been planned down to the last detail. The island grew smaller. The castle on the headland—their castle, their bed, their library full of books and broken quills and the ghost of a kiss that still burned on her lips—shrank to a dark shape against the grey sky.
He’ll come fer me.
The captain stood at the helm, his face the color of ash, his hands steady on the tiller despite the tremor running through the rest of him.
He wouldn’t meet her eyes.
He kens this’ll cost him everythin’. He kens what Ragnar will dae tae him—tae all of them.
The wind shifted, carrying them south through waters Ragnar didn’t control, toward a man who had spent six patient weeks orchestrating this moment.
And somewhere behind her, growing fainter with every heartbeat, the alarm bells of Uist Castle finally began to ring.
“Well, we cannae just?—”
The sound cut through the solar’s thick walls—the frantic, overlapping clang of the alarm bell from the harbor, and right after, the horns blowing.
His chair hit the stone floor behind him.
“Freyr!” He was already moving, every nerve firing, his body responding to the crisis. “Where is she?”
Freyr was a step behind him in the corridor. “I’ll check the chamber..”
Something was wrong.
She’s gone.
He knew it before Freyr came tearing down the corridor from the eastern wing. Knew it the way a man knows the ground is aboutto give way beneath him—from the sudden, terrible absence of something that had been holding him upright.
“She’s nae in the keep.” Freyr’s face was white. “Ewan says she left fer the harbor a little over a half hour ago. Wi’ the document they’d forgotten.”
Ragnar didn’t wait for a horse. Didn’t wait for his men. He ran down the path from the castle to the harbor with a speed born of pure, uncut terror, and when he crested the rise above the docks and saw the ship—already past the headland, her sails fat with wind, pulling south through the strait toward open water—he stopped dead.
He stood on the ridge with his chest heaving, his hands hanging useless at his sides, and watched the vessel carrying his wife shrink against the grey line of the horizon. Around him, the dock was smeared with blood. Leif sat propped against a mooring post, a rag pressed to his head, barking at the men who surrounded him. Two bodies lay covered with cloaks.
Freyr reached him a moment later, breathing hard. Neither of them spokes as the ship disappeared behind the headland.
I failed ye, Isolda.
His hands curled into fists at his sides. His breathing steadied and his face settled into the flat, controlled mask that Freyr hadn’t seen since the night Ragnar had walked out of that storehouse with bloody knuckles and a confession.
“Orders?” Freyr asked.
“Get Bjorn. Tell him tae prepare the war room.” The words emerged quiet, measured, and cold as ice. “I want every patrol route, every shippin’ lane, every approach tae the mainland laid out before the hour’s out.”
“Aye, me jarl.”
Ragnar stood at the docks a moment longer, staring out at the empty water. The wind off the strait carried brine and the distant call of gulls, and nothing else—no voice, no sharp tongue, no grey-green eyes looking at him like he was worthy.
I’m comin’ fer ye. And every man who touched ye will wish they’d never been born.
He turned his back on the sea and walked back to the castle.
A message arrived at dusk, carried by a fisherman who’d clearly been paid well enough to risk the crossing, but not enough to hide his terror. The parchment bore no seal, but the handwriting was precise, unhurried.
Jarl Ketilsson,