The night was fire.
Flames licked the palisades, turning the wooden towers into pyres. The roar of Norse horns shook the walls. Eadric's horse reared as arrows hissed from the dark.
Inside the gate, chaos ruled — servants fleeing, children crying, soldiers fighting in the alleys.
Eadric forced his way toward the hall. "Father!" he shouted.
He found King Edmund on the steps, sword in hand, blood on his brow. Ælfwine lay beside him, still.
Edmund turned, dazed. "Eadric… go."
"I won't leave you."
The king's grip tightened on his son's arm. "The crown must live, boy. Go!"
A Norse axe struck the door. Eadric hesitated one heartbeat — then Osric seized him and dragged him into the smoke.
They fled through the chapel as the roof groaned and fell behind them. The night outside was red and loud. Men ran through the fields, hunted by the glow.
By dawn, Thetford was ash.
At a lonely field shrine miles from the ruin, the survivors gathered — Osric, the priest Ealhred, and a handful of soot-streaked soldiers.
Eadric knelt before the small altar. His clothes were torn, his face streaked with soot and tears.
Ealhred raised a crude circlet of iron. "Edmund is gone, and his line broken. By the will of God and the voice of the people, I name you Eadric, King of East Anglia."
The men around him murmured assent, crossing themselves.
Ealhred placed the circlet on his head. It was cold as stone.
Eadric bowed his head. A prince in ashes. A king in exile.
As he rose, the morning light caught the smoke rising from Thetford. The world he'd known — both of them — was gone.
But within him, something fierce and clear had taken root.
Not Jacob the gamer, not Eadric the second son — but something new, born of both.
"Then so be it," he said softly. "If this is the game You've set before me, Lord… I'll play it to the end."