Except she hadn’t.
My breath caught, my chest a riot of pain as I remembered Bodil’s blade on the ground, dropped so that she might catch me. And I hadn’t stopped to put it in her hand before fleeing. I’d left her to die without it.
Suddenly, I was running. Sprinting through the smoking fortress toward the gate, each step like running over knives, but I embraced the pain. The gate was entirely gone, charred wood littered across the ground as though it had been smashed by a giant fist. But my eyes went beyond, to the smoldering remains of the ram and the unrecognizable figures scattered around it.
The smell of burning flesh and hair filled my nose and I gagged, slowing my pace as I picked through the wreckage.
So many bodies.
So many, and their faces were gone, leaving only size and shape and soot-stained armor to identify them. The wind gusted, sending plumes of smoke rushing sideways, but I caught a flash of silver.
Tears dripping down my face, I moved closer. A long lock of silver hair, spared by some act of the gods from the fire, floated on the breeze from where it was pinned beneath the charred remains. Dropping to my knees, I caught hold of the hair, tangling it around my fingers as it pulled loose. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “This is my fault.”
Taking a deep breath, I moved my gaze from her skull, down her arm, to where her skeletal fingers clutched the hilt of her sword. I exhaled a loud whoosh of air, my shoulders slumping in relief. She is in Valhalla.
The ground burned my knees, but I didn’t move as I wrapped her hair into a coil, then gripped it tight in my fist as I heard him approach.
“Come to say that you told me so?” I asked softly. “If I’d waited for a healer to tend to my feet, Bodil might still be alive.”
Exhaling a long breath, Bjorn shook his head. “Or perhaps she would have slipped and fallen to her death as we retreated to find the healer. Perhaps it was her time to die.”
I dug my nails into my palms, wanting to scream.
Bjorn crouched next to me, his gaze fixed on Bodil’s blackened blade. “To have these thoughts will drive you mad, Freya, for there is no way to know if your choices caused certain outcomes.” He was quiet for a moment, then said, “I think most people find comfort in being fated. In knowing that everything has already been set out for them, because…because no decision is truly yours but rather something determined by the Norns. Even the gods must take comfort in knowing that their fates are certain, the outcome of the end of days already known. But for whatever reason, those like you, and me, and Bodil are able to alter the weave of our threads, which means we must bear the full burden of every choice we make.”
“They say being given the blood of a god is a gift,” I whispered. “But it’s a curse.”
For a long moment, Bjorn was silent; then he said, “You were not yourself today. You—” he broke off, giving his head a sharp shake. “If you keep down this path, Born-in-Fire, if you allow yourself to be controlled by my father, it will destroy you. You need to change your fate.”
“You may be right.” I rose to my feet and headed back inside the fortress. “The trouble is that each time I try to change the course of fate, everything becomes so much worse.”
“Freya?”
A soft voice filtered through the door, but rather than answer, I rolled over in bed and buried my face in the furs. Just as I’d done for the past several days. At first it had been exhaustion that drove me to my bed, but it had grown into a desire to avoid facing what I’d accomplished.
Or rather, how I’d accomplished it.
“Freya? It’s Steinunn. I was hoping to speak to you.”
Go away, I wanted to scream. Leave me alone. Because the last thing I wished to do was recall the taking of Grindill. Bodil falling. Losing myself to the rage.
The silence stretched, and I hoped the skald had given up. Gone away. Then her soft voice said, “King Snorri has ordered me to speak to you before I finish my composition.”
King fucking Snorri.
I bared my teeth into my pillow, knowing that I had no right to be angry because it had been me who allowed him to claim the title.
“Freya,” Ylva’s voice pierced the walls. “Open the door.”
I sighed, because there wasn’t a chance that ignoring Ylva would cause her to go away. The lady of Halsar, now the lady of Grindill, I supposed, had arrived not long after the battle was finished, and it was likely only because she’d been busy tending to the wounded and to rebuilding that I’d avoided her scathing tongue.