H.F. Day · Advance Review Copy Request
Child of Ash, Heir of Fire
Her marriage was arranged to save a kingdom she was never meant to rule.
Then she discovered the power living in her blood.
A Viking-era dark fantasy with a slow-burn marriage of convenience, ancient magic waking in the wrong woman, and a lost god’s sword that started wars long before it disappeared.
For readers who want their heroines forged, not found
Leifthasir is a world where the gods have already left. The magic they abandoned — wild, ancient, woven into the bones of the world tree — is slowly running out. The kingdom of Leifthasir was unified by a Viking king and an elf queen a century ago. Their half-elven son sealed a god’s sword in a great act of seidr and disappeared with it into legend.
Now King Sigmund rules from the palace they built, and his eldest daughter Indunna has been married off at a young age to the son of a Jarl who had sons to spare. She was a political instrument—an answer to a crisis of succession.
But when war threatens the kingdom, this princess will be forced to choose between the life that’s expected of her and the power to save her people, knowing that power will destroy her.
This is a story about what happens when a woman built as a cage discovers she was made of something that cannot be contained.
She was forced to marry to save a kingdom. Six years later, she has learned to navigate its courts, its politics, and its expectations. She has not yet learned what she is. That is coming.
— From the narrative “To every girl who felt like she was too much,
and every boy who felt like he wasn’t enough.
Never change yourself to be what the world thinks you should be.
You’re enough.”
Six things this book does that most fantasy won’t
01
The romance is a marriage of inconvenience that becomes something real. Slow burn. Actual obstacles. No instalove. Two people who were given to each other, discovering each other anyway.
02
The magic costs you. Every use. Every time. Parts of you stay with the gods at the roots of the world tree. The seidr waking up in Indunna is not a gift — it is an inheritance she was never prepared to carry.
03
The politics are real and the women are caught in them. Succession law. Reproductive pressure. Marriage as statecraft. The story is honest about what these systems do to people — and honest about who chooses to resist them anyway.
04
There is a lost sword from a god that started wars simply by existing. It has been sealed and hidden for generations. Someone is looking for it. It may have already found who it was waiting for.
05
The world is built from 20 years of research into Norse myth and saga. The Völva, the Thing, the legal traditions, the gods — all of it is present and specific, worn into the story like the grain in old wood.
06
The emotional core is this: what you endure, what you refuse, and what you choose anyway. That’s the whole book. That’s what Indunna’s story is about.
The romance is not what anyone expected
Indunna and Janis are both given to this marriage without being asked. He is the son of a Jarl who had sons to spare. She is the king’s heir in everything but law. Neither of them particularly wanted the other.
Their first real conversation — at their own wedding feast — is about how little either of them was told. “They didn’t tell me anything until I was getting ready today; even then, it was that I was lucky you were handsome.” He finds this genuinely funny. She does not appreciate the amusement. It is the beginning of something she would not have predicted.
What follows is slow, real, and complicated — two people learning each other in a marriage that both resent, gradually discovering that the person on the other side of the political arrangement is someone worth knowing. And then the politics get worse. And the distance between them grows. And the seidr in her blood starts waking up, and suddenly the woman he was given as a function of succession is doing things he has no framework to understand.
He didn’t want to notice these things. She was his wife by arrangement. She was the king’s heir. She was a political calculation dressed in wedding finery.
And he was standing in a doorway, unable to make his feet move in any direction at all.
The magic has been waiting for her
The royal bloodline of Leifthasir carries the elven seidr of their ancestor Anya — the last Regent Queen of Alfheim, who bound her own life force to a god’s sword to save it. Generations of daughters have carried that inheritance dormant and unnamed. The Vanir rites that might have taught them what they were were stripped from court practice long ago.
Nobody told Indunna she had it. Nobody told her that the silver in her eyes is Anya’s blood manifesting, that the pull she feels toward the old sacred sites is the world tree’s roots recognising something in her, that the seidr waking in her body is not a symptom of something wrong — it is something her bloodline has been waiting to produce again since Yngvar sealed the sword and disappeared.
When it starts coming, it does not come gently. It comes like Gullveig from the fire — burned until what remains cannot be burned anymore, risen into something that those who lit the pyre did not account for.
Everyone was still reeling from the sight of Indunna — the way she’d walked into the great hall like Gullveig herself risen from the pyre.
— Child of Ash, Heir of FireWhat the author wants you to know before you read
“These aren’t included for shock value, and they aren’t meant to be romanticised. Leifthasir is built on a brutal succession system, and the story is intentionally honest about how dynasty politics can weaponise marriage, bodies, and faith — especially for women. Some scenes may feel upsetting because the characters are trapped in ‘no-win’ structures. The emotional core of the novel is watching Indunna and the others wrestle with that reality: what they endure, what they refuse, and what they choose anyway.”
This book includes honest depictions of:
Teenage political marriage — treated with full seriousness, not romanticised
Reproductive pressure and bodily autonomy — women as political instruments, and what they do about it
Systemic misogyny — structural, not incidental; succession law and its consequences
Emotional manipulation and control — through duty, shame, and social consequence
War and political violence — present in background and foreground
Magic as cost — seidr that takes from you permanently, no matter what you use it for
Child of Ash might be exactly what you’ve been looking for
The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell — for the Viking-era political complexity and the sense that history is being made by people who don’t know they’re in it
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman — for the mythology woven into the world as living tissue rather than decoration
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon — for the epic scope, the female protagonist at the centre of an ancient inheritance, the magic with genuine cost
An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir — for the political marriage slow burn, the brutal system, and the protagonist discovering what she is capable of within it
The Gospel of Loki by Joanne Harris — for the irreverent, intimate relationship with Norse myth as a living tradition, not a museum piece
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Request Your ARCQuestions? Find H.F. Day at hfdaywrites.com or @theartisthaa on social.