Náströnd

He keeps one rule and a private count of the dead. The North is about to cost him both.



Steingrímr was born a thrall and sold twice before his beard came in. Now he is the fastest blade in a starving raider band, wearing a grey wolf-coat he cannot remember earning - and on a famine-winter raid up a frozen valley, a spear to the belly wakes the thing the coat has always carried. He does not die. He heals, catastrophically, and comes back down the mountain no longer sure where the man ends and the wolf begins.



The jarl who owns him wants a weapon. The völva who prices him - a cold, ageless woman named Skuld who reads the living from the inside - wants something older and worse, and set a bowl at her fire for him before he ever had the coat. Between them, Steingrímr has exactly one rule he will not break, and slowly, patiently, they teach him that the most dangerous thing you can do with a good man is not break his rule. It is make him keep it.



NÁSTRÖND is Book One of the VARGÖLD trilogy - Norse grimdark fantasy for readers who take their darkness cold, examined, and earned. No clean heroes. No justice coming. Kindness is a tax the cruel collect, and mercy is only a slower set of teeth.



For readers of Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence, Glen Cook, and R. Scott Bakker.