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Sown in Steel and Bloom
Paperback
Series: Short Stories by Brandon, Book 5
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 12 2026
Pages: 170
Weight: 0.52
Height: 0.36 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Astrid Icebiter didn't come to the southern coast for lavender. She came for gold, for blood, for the next name to carve into saga-song.
She kicks in the door of a cottage and finds Lyra - not screaming, not running, but calmly braiding wildflowers. A farmer with soil under her nails and a voice steady as winter wheat. Lyra looks at the axe at Astrid's throat and asks not for mercy, but if Astrid intends to starve the whole valley before the snow falls.
In that pause, the raid breaks. Astrid lowers Icebiter, tells Lyra to run, and walks back to her longship a different woman.
She leaves her crew, her title, and the North. She returns alone, with nothing but a dried sprig of lavender tucked against her heart. Lyra doesn't offer forgiveness. She offers a trowel. The soil doesn't need to be fought, she says. It needs to be invited.
What follows is not an easy peace. Astrid must unlearn thirty years of conquest to learn one season of growth. She trades the shield-wall for irrigation ditches, war-cries for the hum of bees, and the weight of a chieftain's axe for the weight of a harvest basket. When Ragnar - her former second, hungry for glory - sails back to reclaim his traitor and burn the fields, Astrid must choose again: pick up the blade she buried, or defend the bloom with the same hands that once destroyed.
Sown in Steel and Bloom is a slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers sapphic romance about a Viking war-leader who finds that the hardest battle isn't taking a life, but learning how to tend one.
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