Read the prologue to The Crown of Fire & Fury

With The Crown of Fire & Fury releasing in just a few weeks (2/22), I wanted to give you a taste of it beforehand! See below for the prologue, from the perspective of a character alluded to in The Throne of Ice & Ash, but not yet seen…

PROLOGUE

Ragnar Torbenson leaned against the stone railing and watched the sun claw its way atop the Teeth.

Wolves ran on the morning winds, biting at his exposed skin. Though spring was late in coming, and Ragnar wore only the long tunic he had slept in, he did not flinch before the cold jaws, but welcomed them. His father, long buried — thank the gods — had told him one night after he had cried over his hunger-racked belly: Quit your weeping! Be a weakling and I'll treat you as one! Then he had shown Ragnar just how weak he was, beating him bloody until he ran out of mead and ventured out to fetch more.

Ragnar's lips curled, remembering the night the old man had cowered before him. A good night. A red night.

He had hated his father; every son did, his own included. But like the frigid wind, his father's cruelty had forged him into the man he was today. Adversity was a gift. 

So long as you survive it.

He had done more than survive. He was Ragnar Torbenson, Lord of Ragnarsglade, the first man to found a jarlheim in three hundred winters. He had built his city from the ground up, gathered men and their families to him through vision and strength, and braved the nearness of their southern enemies to forge the strongest and most prosperous province of all — or it would be, someday.

He wrung the stone railing as if it were a chicken's neck and looked balefully over his surroundings. Petyrsholm, where he presently stayed, likely could claim those honors he envied. It was a grand and ancient metropolis. Though its stone was dun and worn, it possessed a stateliness his own city of wood and straw had many years yet to achieve.

His father, rapacious louse that he was, had a saying for that as well. If you can't grow it, take it.

Slowly, Ragnar pried his clenched hands from the balustrade and straightened his spine. His father had been a forceful brute, a warrior renowned, but he had been unprincipled and malicious. Though born to a highborn family, he had allowed anger and bitterness to poison his prospects, and thus lived and died a pauper. Ragnar had learned from his failures. He had bent his head to lessons while their village still had a gothi who would risk coming to the manor to teach him. He had trained in the yard until he overcame the older boys, then even the battle-tested men. He had learned the art of spinning coins through lending and trading. He had prospered. And through it all, he remembered what it came back to. 

Hunger — and the will to leash it.

Ragnar Torbenson, Jarl of Ragnarsglade, smiled over a city that was not his own as he thought of the coming day when it would be.