Jonas and Sander Childhood – Bonus Scenes

Kase had each arm wrapped around the necks of two boys. They squirmed in his grip. 

“You stepped on my wife’s toes,” he said to the boy with messy hair. It was always on end and looked like the brown of autumn. “And you,” Kase snarled at the second boy. Taller, with more waves to his dark, chestnut hair. “You shoved him. Now both of you apologize.”

The dark-haired boy lifted his bright green eyes. He offered me a toothy grin. The front two had finally filled in the gaps from when he’d lost his smaller teeth. He wiggled, but Kase only tightened his hold around his neck. 

The boy grunted. “Daj, I’mma say sorry, but you gotta—oof—” he flipped off the seat in the coach when Kase released him without warning. He snickered when Kase laughed, then wheeled on me and threw his skinny arms around my neck. “Sorry, Maj. Didn’t mean to smash ya.”

Kase put particular focus on our second son. Born only moments after his brother. Sander was soft-spoken, but a schemer as much as Jonas. Our firstborn was simply louder about it. 

With a squeeze to the headlock, Kase looked at Sander’s darker green eyes. “And you? What do you have to say, little heathen?”

Sander started pinching his father’s arm until Kase was forced to release him. With a sly grin—one that let me know he was hardly done causing trouble—he came over to my side of the coach and kissed my cheek. “Sorry, Maj.”

I pulled each of our sons against my side and kissed the tops of their heads. “It’s been a long journey, but we’re nearly there. Try not to wiggle out of your skin just yet.”

They laughed, and their busy bodies did stay still for a few heartbeats as they looked out the window at the different shapes of houses and roads in Etta. But as expected, after a bit of time, our sons promptly returned to wrestling once Sander insisted Jonas wouldn’t be able to run up the castle staircase as fast as he would. 

Kase sighed and offered the entire bench for the boys to torment each other, then came to sit beside me. “I give up on them. They’re bleeding lost causes.” 

I laughed and elbowed him in the ribs. 

Kase played the irritated father, but in truth, he was madly in love with his sons. He protected them, taught them, he bandaged their scrapes, and kissed their heads before they fell asleep. And I think he took a heady bit of pride knowing their mesmer used darkness like his. 

The princes’ mesmer was a strange collision of both mine and Kase’s. 

Sander used shadows to create nightmarish images. It did not need to be a fear already in someone’s heart. He could create an independent fear they did not even realize they had yet. Then, Jonas would take the nightmare and place it in the minds of anyone he wanted. A dark memory for them to always cherish. 

It might’ve been a formidable sort of magic if the boys had a cruel bone in their body. They were plotters, schemers, and they would age me faster than the turns, but our sons were made of light. Vibrant and curious. Their favorite weeks were when they spent time with their Uncle Niklas and Aunt Junius at the academies, or when Raum took them hunting, or visits with Tova and Bard where they could set traps on each other all day.

They were loved by our folk, and would either be forces for good, or the cleverest thieves the East had ever produced.

Kase’s dream of three littles would not be. Giving birth to twins had seen to it there would only ever be the two when my body practically split in half, and I nearly met the Otherworld. But I could not imagine our life any other way. 

Since the bloodline of the fated queen was restored in the East, and since there was no female heir, more than a few had made deadly suggestions about how Kase ought to handle the predicament. 

Lynx had been forced to intervene when Kase tortured a drunken councilman from Hemlig after the man had suggested Kase take up with a consort who had the ability to properly birth children. 

I doubted the man would ever breathe right again the way Kase had strangled him with his darkness. 

I hated that my worth, to some, was gauged by how well I could ensure the crown continued. My sons would grow to be powerful men, dangerous, likely with questionable morals at times, but they would be heirs the East could be proud to claim. 

“Boys,” Kase barked, tugging on the collars of their tunics, tearing the twins apart. “Listen. Hells, for one more moment, listen—”

“You cursed, Daj,” Jonas sang.

“Cursing means penge,” Sander said with a bit of smugness. 

Kase looked to me like he needed to be rescued. I shrugged. “I warned you not to teach them how to make deals, Nightrender.”

His eyes darkened. For other folk, when Kase’s shadows blackened his eyes, it was a thing of terror. For Sander and Jonas Eriksson, it was a delight. The boys mimicked his eyes, darkening their own. 

“We’re here,” Kase said. “You’ll both be on your best behavior. You won’t tease Livia like you did last time—”

“Us?” Jonas squeaked. “Livie’s brutal, Daj. Brutal.”

I bit down on my lip to hide my smile. 

Kase looked like he was fighting one of his own as he went on. “Doesn’t change that you two will be quiet and still during the ceremony, understand? This is for Laila. Respect your cousin.”

Jonas and Sander both nodded their heads. They loved Laila Strom. She was the cousin who kept every little across the kingdoms glued together. Even the littles in the South and the West. Laila would visit, and once a turn she loved gathering all the little royals for a week of adventures. But today was her honor. 

The day she joined the rank of a Rave warrior. Like the rest of her family, Laila had a tender heart, but a fighting spirit. 

When the coach stopped the twins lined up at the door, bursting at the seams to be free of the tight space. All hells, sometimes I wondered how we made it to the fort without one of the boys leaping from the coach. 

Jonas and Sander spilled out of the coach, but both boys stopped at once. They crouched. One looked left, the other right. Their eyes were dark as a moonless midnight. Jonas even had a small knife he’d gotten for Jul last winter in his hand. 

“See them?” Sander whispered. 

“No.” Jonas flipped his head to the left. Sander turned to the right. 

Three more steps and the twins visibly relaxed. Jonas puffed up his chest, grinning. “Told you they’d be too scared—”

In the next breath, great battle cries rang out over the manicured lawns of the Crimson Fort, and two darkly clad, tiny assassins leapt from the bushes. 

Sander and Jonas hardly had a chance to cry out before they were pinned beneath beautifully blooming vines of moonvane and lush shrubs that started to swallow them up. 

“Livia!” Jonas shouted with a touch of venom.

A pitchy snicker came from one of the attackers. Livia Ferus pulled back a black mask hiding her mouth. The girl was petite for eleven, but she was fierce. She pinched Jonas’s nose as more of her vines tethered his wrists. 

“Told you I’d get you, Jo.” Livia wiggled her fingers and the vines thickened. She had a gift of healing the earth, or if it did not need healing, it was made lusher, fuller. 

The second attacker tore off his mask. Aleksi was taller than all three of the others, but did not share the same proclivity for mischief. He could aid in the trouble, but he was never the first to cause it. 

“Alek,” Livia said, voice low and dark when she looked to her cousin. “Do it.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Jonas grumbled. “I’ll give you bad dreams. Swear I will, Alek.”

Aleksi simply smiled and whistled a bright tune. At once a swarm of sparrows burst from a nearby tree and perched on the shrubs clinging to our boys. How the boy summoned blood from any beating heart close by was a bit of a marvel. 

Kase couldn’t hold it in any longer. He barked a laugh as Aleksi’s glamour kept the creatures fluttering around our sons’ heads. 

“Daj!” Sander whined. “Help us.”

Kase took my hand and strode past the shrub. “Figure your way out, boys. I have a feeling you deserved it.”

“They did!” Livia insisted. “They locked me in the dark with a bleeding monster last time!”

Jonas grumbled. “I’m gonna get you back for this, Livie.”

Aleksi and Livia snickered again, clapping their palms together in unity.

Laughter from the front of the castle drew my attention. Elise and Valen watched the battle from the stairs. 

“I’m leaving the boys here, hope you don’t mind,” Kase said as he clasped Valen’s forearm. “We need a break.”

“I can’t take them,” the Night Folk king said. “We were going to send Livie with you.”

I laughed and embraced Elise. In her arms was a wiggling baby boy. Prince Rorik’s dark eyes gawked at the commotion of his older sister and the princes shouting all manner of threats. The boy protested in his mother’s arms. Gently, I pressed my fingers to his brow, inserting a memory of our journey. The babe cooed and giggled, calming for a breath, as the images flashed through his head.

“Is it boys, Mal,” Elise said with a sigh. “Rorik is one turn, and already I imagine him as boisterous as yours.”

I laughed. “It must be.”

“It’s true, Gunnar was a force to be reckoned with. But I think the daughters are the cleverest and, at times, the most brutal.” My brother stepped from the doorway, grinning. 

Hagen was dressed in a fine tunic and two swords. 

I rushed to my brother and wrapped my arms around his waist. “It’s been too long.”

“A few months, Mal.”

“Are you saying you didn’t miss me?”

Hagen chuckled. “Not at all.” He released me and looked at the yard with an arched brow. Jonas had broken free of Livia’s vines and now chased her across the grass while Sander was still swatting at Aleksi’s birds. Hagen scoffed. “I’m not even going to ask.”

“Come on,” Elise said, linking her arm with mine. “We’ll let them wear themselves out, then they might be calm for the feast.”

We laughed because the likelihood of that happening was miniscule and we all knew it. 

We’d fought battles with these people, and had become a family bonded by love, blood, and magic. Strange how once Kase and Hagen were the only people I truly had in my life. 

Now, our walls were bursting with littles, thieves, and royals. I’d fight a dozen wars if it brought me here, to this moment, with these people.

“The Southern caravan will be here soon,” Valen said. “No one forget to wish Ari a happy anniversary.”

“Oh, we wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. 

Kase tugged on my hand, a look of worry furrowed in his brow. “What anniversary have I forgotten?”

I laughed and kissed him quickly. “Ari won’t allow you to forget, but this day marks the day he became king. Again.”

Kase grinned, shaking his head at the memory of the ordeal that once more placed a crown on the head of Ari Sekundär. A surprise to us all, but one the man enjoyed repeating whenever the day came each turn. 

He made light, saying it was the day the Norns came to their senses and remembered he was born to be a king, but in truth, I was more of the opinion that Ari enjoyed repeating the story because it was the tale of how he gave up his heart and never took it back.

Felstad Ruins—Klockglas Region

“I’m just sayin’ they coulda taken me.” 

I chuckled as Jonas gave a rather aggressive swipe of his knife against the wood he was whittling. The eldest of our twins, Jonas had the proclivity to pout when his father and Raum left him out of Kryv business. 

“It’s dull work today, son.” 

He blew out his lips with another swipe of his knife. “That’s what you say when it’s the best work.”

I grinned and closed my eyes, letting the sun heat my cheeks. I’d embraced shadows when I fell in love with the Nightrender, but as of late, I preferred daylight vastly over the night. 

A new crimson moon had put every region on edge. Kase had hardly shown his true eyes in days, always shadowed, always blackened with fear as he doubled down on the protections of our kingdom. 

In truth, the Kryv were adding more spiked gates on this side of Klockglas, not the normal feckless schemes in which they allowed Jonas and Sander to join. 

Raum, Isak, and Fiske enjoyed teaching the two princes how to use whalebone picks on locks, or how to read a man’s eyes to tell if they were lying. The rest of the Kryv took it upon themselves to teach my sons to thieve. 

Thieving princes. Perhaps in other lands it might be a thing of disgrace. In the East, most folk had a touch of thief in their blood. It’d be a disgrace if they didn’t make use of tricky hands. Jonas and Sander only snatched the purses of the Kryv or Falkyns, mostly to prove they could. 

They were usually caught and dubbed the failures of the games. Each time they tried harder, grew slier, and attracted more mischief.

Raised to be crafty, still we kept Jonas and Sander shielded in a way. Like on days where their father joined his guild to argue over how best to prevent war and death, sights we never wanted our sons to witness. 

Sights I wasn’t so certain we could keep from them much longer. 

“Maj. Made this for you.” Jonas stood in front of me. Tall for nine, lanky like me, but a face like his father. His tousled brown hair was always on end, and his verdant eyes were always alight with some trouble he planned to make. 

Jonas smiled and held out a small wooden trinket. 

“Jonas, owls are my favorite.” I took the piece and admired the rough cuts around feathers and a tufted face. “It’s beautiful, my love. Thank you.”

Despite his protests, I clasped his face in my palms and gave him a wet kiss on his cheek.  

“Decent, I suppose. Beak’s a little off.” Frigg popped her shoulder across the lawns and held up a handful of wooden beads she’d been carving for a week. “Try making a small shape, Prince Jonas. That’s where knife work gets hard.”

Jonas let his eyes shade over, the same as Kase’s could do, although their mesmer was different. Where Kase worked in the fear of others, our boys worked in creating it. They worked in nightmares. 

“Why’d I wanna make stupid beads? Do you see me wearin’ a dress, Friggy?”

“They can be for hair too!”

“Oh.” Jonas snorted and mocked tossing back his short hair. “Like a bleeding girl.” 

I swatted the back of his head as Frigg narrowed her eyes in a way that made her look wholly like her father. Hob and Inge took the stronghold at Felstad after the battle of the Black Palace. Their daughter wasn’t much older than the princes, and like Hob and me, they couldn’t seem to do anything but aggravate each other. 

I stood, letting them argue, and strode across the lawns to where Sander read near the creek’s edge, back against the stone tower of one of the many warning flame torches.

With a sigh I sat beside my second son. He shared most of Jonas’s same features, from the green of his eyes, to the constant mess of his auburn hair. Sander was a thinker. Most took Jonas for the boisterous troublemaker, but if they knew the truth, they’d know most of the schemes were born in this boy’s brain. 

“What book today?”

He lifted his head, noticing me for the first time, and proudly held up the leather book. 

“Blood Herbs: Spell Cast Codex.” I arched my brows. “Have you, all at once, become a spell caster?”

Sander grinned softly. “Uncle Nik gave it to me. Teaches you all the herbs and berries and leaves and such. There’s a nutshell that can cause the tongue to tie up in nonsense words. No matter how you try, you can’t say anything right for at least a clock toll.” He snorted and his smile widened. “I’m gonna do it to Jo sometime.”

“You’re not poisoning your brother.” I reclined on my hands. 

“Maj,” he whined. “I’m not poisoning him. But you gotta admit it’d be funny to hear him go on about nothing and not be able to help it.”

I wasn’t going to survive my sons. 

“That,” Sander went on, voice softer. “Or I’ll use something to kill that sea creature and the shadow man.”

“Kill what?” A groove shaped between my brows. “What sea creature, what shadow?”

Sander eyed the creek warily. “I don’t . . . I don’t know if I should say. You’ll think I’m losing my mind and—”

“Sander.” I gripped his arm. “What are you talking about?”

For the first time, I noticed the shadows buried in his young eyes. Not from mesmer, from true fear. “I saw something in the water and she brought . . . a man with her.”

My blood froze. Instinct took hold, and I dragged Sander behind me as I peered into the creek. 

“Not today. But . . . yesterday. I didn’t want to say since I thought it might’ve been my mesmer playin’ tricks with me.”

I wheeled on him. “Tell me what you saw.” 

Sander’s chin quivered. “Why do you look so afraid, Maj?”

Dammit. Kase and I grew in a world that held little kindness. I praised the gods our children did not know the same world. But the downside of it all was they did not know how to react to dangers and tended to panic if a look of fright crossed our faces. 

I smoothed his hair and forced a smile. “You’ve done nothing wrong, but tell me what you saw.”

“A monster in the shadows,” he whispered. “Not as frightening as the ones I’ve made in dreams, but the shadow man came with the sea creature. I think it was a girl, but sorta like a fish with needles as teeth.”

“What . . . what did they do?” 

“Laughed at me.” Sander licked his lips and clung to the book until his knuckles turned white. “Said I was a dead earth fae. Told it I’m not a fae. Said I was an Alver, and it only laughed harder.”

Three hells. There were many creatures in our wood. Cats with jagged teeth. Wolvyn with black claws. Snakes with four eyes. All dangerous, but there were no sea creatures that spoke. Not that I knew. 

“May I see?” I held out my palm. Sander didn’t hesitate, and pressed his forehead against my skin. 

Smoke and shadows came at once. With the ring on my finger, pulling memories was swift. Once, it took a great deal of my mesmer, now it was as though a story played out in my mind. A dream of sorts. 

Ribbons of misty shadows coiled around my son as he searched for his brother near the lakes Valen had helped shape behind the Black Palace. Sander cursed in the memory, words that would make Kase seek out Ash and Raum for teaching the boys that sort of language. 

Another time, I might laugh, but I was bleeding panicked. 

Sander paused in the memory and kneeled beside the lake. True enough, beneath the surface, bulbous eyes stared back at him.

“What are you?” Sander asked. His eyes darkened with his mesmer. 

“Prepared to die, earth fae?” her voice was wet and soft. 

“I’m not a fae. I’m an Alver. Get gone, or I’ll give you all the nightmares you don’t want.”

She laughed, a strangled kind of sound, and rose from the water, revealing a jagged grin with those sharp, pointed teeth, and fins where her legs ought to have been. “Perhaps you’d like to swim with me. Or perhaps . . . with him?”

In the memory, the strange sea fae pointed over Sander’s shoulder. My blood turned to ice as I watched my son spin around and face a dark, looming shadow. 

“Daj?” Sander whispered. 

From the darkness a face, pale as stone, a sneer cruel as a rabid wolf, stepped into the clearing. 

By the gods—_____. 

He’d stepped onto our land. How had he avoided Niklas’s wards? I wanted to scream for Sander to run, but he was in my arms, he was here. Clearly, he’d managed to flee. 

“Maj, you’re squishing me.” Sander’s distant voice carved through the memory. I ignored him and clung to my boy as I observed, helplessly watching the sleek, horridly appealing features of our enemy peer at my son. 

“Hello,” _____ said, voice like a chill in the frosts. “Would you like to use your power on me, body worker?”

“Alver,” Sander shouted. His eyes turned black as pitch. 

_____ chuckled. “What a delightful boy you are. Like your father. Like your mother. Have you been told tales of them? Have you been told fate chose them?” His voice took on a bitter tone, sharp as new steel.

Sander ignored the bastard and reached for a stone hidden in the reeds. “Get gone or you’ll find out yourself. My daj has better shadows than you, and my maj’ll rip your brains to bits.”

I held my breath. To taunt such a man should surely bring his rage. Instead, the memory of the ghostly spectral, like a mist of _____, laughed. As though my son were an utter delight. 

“I’m sure you think so. Tell them I look forward to meeting again, won’t you boy?” _____ slid back toward the dark billows of his glamour. “Tell them to watch their shores. They might get a bit dodgy.”

In the memory, Sander threw the rock in his hand with all his might at the darkness. All that was left was the distant echo of _____ laughter.

I let out a short gasp when the memory faded. Sander wrapped his arms around me, squeezing. Gods, he was trembling. 

“You were so brilliant,” I whispered against his hair. “But why did you not tell me?”

When I pulled him back, his mouth was tight. “I thought I might’ve made it up since I was reading so much, but . . . I looked it up, Maj. I think that thing was a merfolk. Don’t know who the shadow man was, though. Maybe a haunt. Fiske thinks there’s haunts in Jagged Grove.”

I didn’t care what the fish creature was. She could be a goddess of the deep, and if she returned to threaten my son, I’d pluck out those bulging eyes and wear them around my damn neck. 

What I cared about was the sight of _____. He’d slipped past the wards, and I didn’t understand how. A spectral? A projection. He didn’t look whole. 

“We’re going to speak with Daj, all right?” I kissed his forehead, smiling as though this was another day. It wasn’t. 

Every kingdom needed to know what had happened here. Why were we to watch our shores? Sea fae? It was possible, the sea folk hadn’t shown their faces since the Ever King had been slaughtered and Valen pulled a wall from the seafloor just beyond the Howl Sea. 

But hadn’t King Thorvald’s brother made some threat about ten turns? We were months into the eleventh turn since our battle of the Black Palace. Late, perhaps, but if they were preparing to return to make good on their threats, if _____ was behind it, war was near.

A shout snapped my eyes toward Jonas and Frigg. Hob sprinted out of Felstad. Lanky as always, but his beard was a great deal longer, and his eyes were filled with a strange fear. 

“Mal!” Hob yanked his daughter behind his back, Jonas next, and pointed behind us. 

All. Gods. The warning tower beside the creek spluttered and hissed, then a tall, red flame, rich as blood, flared at the top. Distant screams rose through the trees from the shore. No mistake, all the towers had ignited. 

In the next breath, billows of dark shadows wrapped around Felstad. I gripped Sander’s hand and reached out my other until the long, callused fingers of the Nightrender grabbed hold and Kase stepped through. Kryv, warriors, and Falkyns followed. 

Kase had his arms around me in the next breath, crushing both me and Sander against him. He looked about frantically until Jonas sprinted across the lawn and Kase had both his sons clasped tightly.

“Sander saw _____,” I whispered against Kase’s ear. “Yesterday. Like a ghost of him.”

Kase’s eyes went wide. “You’re certain?”

“I saw it.” 

Jaw tight, Kase looked to the flame, then to his sons.

“The warning,” I asked, a tremble of hesitation in my voice. “Which direction?”

Kase’s fingers dug into my spine. “From the North.”

“That’s Livie and . . . and . . . Alek! That’s Uncle Hagen and . . . Auntie Herja,” Jonas wailed. “Daj, we gotta go help ‘em. We gotta go. Shadow walk, and—”

Kase silenced him by scooping him up. Too long to be held like a tiny boy, but Jonas crushed his father’s neck and wrapped his legs around his waist, true tears on his cheeks as the boy cried for his friends and family in Etta. 

Kase rubbed Jonas’s back and strode toward Felstad. “They’ll be safe, boy. They’ll be safe.” 

He kept assuring the princes their playmates and cousins were unharmed, but when his blackened eyes met mine, I knew the truth—he feared he was dead wrong.