But even legends attract enemies. The Templar remnants — men who had evolved from robed zealots to robed merchants, men who believed every quiet had a price — perceived Dodi as an infection. They hired an Inquisitor, a man named Halvard with a face like winter and eyes that measured people like coin. Halvard’s methods were slow and bureaucratic, which made him dangerous. He began tracing tokens, mapping patterns, and collecting witness accounts until the net tightened.

Her most audacious act, however, was not a single kill but a replanning — a “repack” of power. A greedy earl lorded over a walled manor that kept the river toll high and the villagers poor. He hired mercenaries, bristling in foreign armor, to collect extortion. Dodi could have slipped through the battlements in the usual way: rooftop, rope, cold steel. Instead she repacked the entire scheme.

The longship cut through a silver seam of morning mist, oars biting rhythm into a sea that smelled of iron and distant pine. Eivor’s thought-voice hummed with the old songs, but it was not Eivor who stood at the prow today. She had handed the helm to a new legend: Dodi, called in whispers across England and the North as Empress Dodi — a name that sounded like mockery before it bent to respect.

On the last page of the tale, Dodi stood alone on a cliff where the ocean roared like a thing with lungs. Her knives were dulled from use and sharpened again with care. A raven landed on her shoulder and cocked a black eye at the horizon.

Halvard lunged, bureaucratic rage turned physical; Dodi’s reply was a ballet of economy. He fell not by one blade but a dozen tiny misdirections: a dropped candelabra, a snapped beam that toppled a statue, the rope of the bell that rang the alarm so early men came running into the wrong place. When the chapel doors slammed shut, it was Halvard who lay bound, bewildered.

When Halvard cornered her in the ruined chapel of a once-rich abbey, it was not a bloody ambush. He brought statutes, witnesses, paper-scented proof. He expected her to be taken by surprise; he expected a confession. Dodi smiled then, the small smile of a woman who had always known the point of a fight was not only to win but also to teach the enemy how fragile their victory could be.

Dodi moved like a thought better left unformed. The basket fell and the basket-bread rolled. While the magistrate bent to snatch a loaf and issue a public correction, Dodi’s shadow slid along his boot. One guard sniffed the disturbance. Then two blades were between his ribs, silent and clean; the magistrate found himself on his knees, his breath stolen by the same silence that coated the market cobbles. The dog yelped, then whimpered.

Word of the magistrate’s fall traveled faster than rumor usually did. Where the old Brotherhood had used symbols carved into trees and cryptic letters bound in oilskin, Dodi left small, ironic tokens: a brass gear from the smith’s own shop, a child’s wooden horse, a scrap of embroidered cloth identical to the one her grandmother had once given her. People came to believe these little things meant she was watching, and they began to tidy their consciences accordingly.