I gagged, recoiling from his fervor, climbing to my feet.
“No!” Bjorn stepped between us, axe blazing bright. “She’s not a weapon.”
“Her fate is inked in her blood,” Harald said, giving a wry shake of his head. “It’s carved in her bones. This power is Freya’s destiny.”
“Freya, run!” Bjorn lifted his weapon. “Run!”
I twisted on my heels, sprinting into the forest, branches lashing at my face, roots tripping my feet.
Hel’s daughter.
I clenched my fists, pushing myself for more speed as though I might outrun the truth of what I was.
But it was the one thing I could never escape.
My foot caught on a rock and I went sprawling, rolling and tumbling down a slope to stop with a sickening crunch against a boulder.
“Get up,” I hissed, pushing myself onto hands and knees, but my arm buckled, a sob ripping from my lips. “Keep going.”
“Easy, Freya.”
A familiar voice filled my ears and I lifted my face to find Steinunn bending next to me. “I need help,” I gasped. “Bjorn…he’s allied with Harald. They’re here.”
Steinunn smiled. “I know, Freya,” she said, her voice no longer that of a Skalander but bearing a Nordelander’s accent. “I know everything.” Then she lifted a bowl and blew the smoke rising from it into my face.
Panic hit me as I understood, but I was already spinning down and down. As I hit the ground, my eyes fixed on the red leather laces on her shoes.
Then all that remained was darkness.
My bed was moving beneath me, rising and falling as though I’d had too much to drink, the sensation sending a wave of nausea through me. “Bjorn,” I mumbled, trying to reach out to him.
Except I couldn’t move my arms, rough rope binding my wrists together.
My eyes snapped open and daylight stabbed into them like daggers. At first, all I could see was white, but as I wildly blinked, my vision cleared to reveal the hull of a drakkar, booted legs all around me. Memory flooded my mind, of Harald and his men arriving at the cavern. Of the truth of Bjorn’s allegiances being revealed. Of corpses on the ground all around me, dead by my curse.
Of Steinunn, blowing smoke into my face as she revealed her true allegiance.
“Good to see you’re finally awake, Freya.” Harald’s voice filled my ears, and I rolled over, looking up to meet his pale gray gaze. “Where am I?”
“On a drakkar,” he answered with a faint smile, mocking me with the obvious. Then he lifted one shoulder. “We are in the strait on our way back to Nordeland.”
“Let me go,” I snarled, struggling to sit up. But my head still spun from the motion of the drakkar and the effects of whatever Steinunn had drugged me with. The skald herself sat at the far end of the boat, cloak wrapped tightly around her, eyes fixed on the sea.
“I think we both know that freeing you is not possible,” Harald answered. “You’d only allow your anger at Bjorn to send you running back to Snorri armed with your newly discovered magic, and he, in turn, would use you against me, whether you willed it or no. He’s already proven exceptionally capable of forcing your hand.”
“I don’t need Snorri to curse you,” I hissed. “I need only my own tongue.”
Harald eyed me for a long moment, expression considered rather than alarmed. “True,” he finally said. “Except I don’t think that you will. I saw the look on your face when you murdered my warriors. When you cursed their souls to Helheim when their rightful end is in Valhalla. You might well put a knife between my ribs, but cursing me means embracing a side of yourself that I think…terrifies you. As it is, I’d ask you to remember that I’m the only one who has never lied to you.”
My skin crawled as if a thousand spiders danced across my flesh, his words breathing new life into the horror I’d felt over what I’d done. Not the killing, although that was bad enough, but cursing souls for eternity. Men and women who’d raised no arms against me—had only been following the orders of their king. Worst of all, it hadn’t even been them to whom my fury had been directed.
It was Bjorn.
My heart stuttered at the thought of him, and I managed to right myself, eyes skipping over the figures in the drakkar until they landed on his familiar form. He sat on one of the benches, elbows resting on his knees, shoulders slumped.
“Traitor,” I screamed, lunging. “I’m going to fucking cut out your heart!”