The Grimvik Saga: The King's Gift
Some gifts are given to be repaid. The costliest are given to be worn.
Three years after he buried the woman he loved, Einharn leads other men's sons up a foreign beach, walking in front where the arrows fall thickest, and does not die, and cannot say he is sorry. Grief has done a terrible thing to the carpenter who once held every life in his town too precious to spend: it has made him useful to a king.
While he is away being the king's blade, another keeps the world he left behind. Astrid tends his hall, his motherless boys, his very grief, and asks for nothing, and is never once seen.
Then the crown offers Grimvik a gift no people ever refused: a green country across the sea, black earth a man can sink his arm into to the elbow, harbours that never ice. It is generous past belief, and it is a hook with a coastline for bait, and the one man who might see it clearly is too hollow to look.
On that new shore the town grows rich and strong and dear, and slowly, quietly, it becomes home. Einharn's son grows up while his father is a hundred leagues south, and falls in love with a baker's daughter. But a free town that grows too strong is a debt a frightened crown will one day call in, and the king has one last errand. When the horn is finally sounded, the men of Grimvik will learn what a king's friendship is worth, and exactly what a gift costs.
No villains. No glorious wars. Only good people, a strange new coast, and the quiet, unbearable price of being worth having.
The hands keep the world while the heart is away.
THE KING'S GIFT is Book Two of THE GRIMVIK SAGA.
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