My shoulders shook, I was laughing so hard. “I would never tell.”
“Women always talk.” He led me up a section of stairs, my legs wobbling with each step. “Especially to one another. There is no secret sacred enough to your kind to silence your tongue when you gather. Especially when there is wine.”
I smiled even though I barely had the strength to keep moving. “You speak as though from experience. Tell me, what grave secret of yours was aired by a woman? What did she know that you were so desperate to keep from mocking ears?”
“I have no secrets.” He winked as he looked down at me, arm moving from my shoulders to around my waist, supporting me. “Only large truths that I hope women will not share lest they bring envy into the hearts of their fellow women, which, in turn, will bring their men to my doorstep in a jealous rage spurred by a sense of inadequacy.”
“Ah.” My cheeks flushed, because I suspected what he alluded to was the truth. Bjorn was a large man, so it only made sense that he had a large—“So your demands for discretion are entirely altruistic?”
“I’m glad you understand my self-sacrifice in the name of the greater good.”
I snorted. “I’d sooner believe you’re hung like Thor himself than that you’d sacrifice a drop of piss to protect the vanity of other men.”
Bjorn lifted me over some rubble. “This is why I like you, Freya. You’ve got a brain between your ears and a saucy tongue to voice the thoughts within it.”
Heat flooded me. “Trying to distract me with compliments? You’re losing your edge, Bjorn. Next you’ll tell me that I’m pretty and I’ll lose all respect for your wit.”
“It is hard to keep one’s wits when faced with a woman as beautiful as the sight of shore to a man who has been lost at sea.”
My heart skipped, then sped. Because that was an entirely different sort of compliment, meaningful in an entirely different kind of way. I’d spent so much time thinking about how I felt about him, but this was the first time I truly considered how he felt about me. “Bjorn—”
My legs chose that moment to give out from exhaustion, and only his grip on my waist kept me from crashing to the ground.
“My feet hurt,” he declared, lowering me so that my back rested against the tunnel wall. Setting his axe on the ground, he sat next to me. “And I’m hungry. Fighting makes me hungry.”
“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I don’t know why I’m so tired.”
Bjorn dug around his pack, extracting some dried meat, which he handed to me. “Because you’ve barely slept in days. Because you just climbed halfway up a mountain. Because you just battled an army of draug. Because—”
“You made your point.” Biting off a piece of the meat, I chewed, my eyes blindly staring at the crimson flames of his axe. I was exhausted, but my mind kept skipping from thought to thought, too overwhelmed to focus but unable to relax.
A scuff of noise followed by the sound of scattering pebbles caught my attention and I tensed, staring back the way we came. Bjorn went still as well, but then he shook his head. “The draug are vanquished, Freya. They are a threat no longer.”
I knew that. Had seen it with my own eyes, but I still stared into the blackness for a long time until my heart settled, my breathing slowing enough for me to take a bite of the meat I held.
We ate and drank in silence, the only sound the draft of wind through the tunnels and the crackle of Bjorn’s axe, which had turned the stone it rested upon black. With the distance we’d climbed, long gone were the gusts of fetid steam, and the cold seeped into my bones, the draft coming from above frigid. Shivering, I held my hands out to the heat of the flame, my right knuckles seeping blood from punching the draug. My fingers ached with stiffness, my skin painfully tight, a constant reminder of the moment my life had changed.
“Where is Liv’s salve?” Bjorn asked. “You’re to use it every day.”
The thought of digging it out felt exhausting. “I don’t need it.”
“You do.”
“I don’t know where it is.” Glancing up at him, I added, “You’re the one who is injured.” No lie, given that half of his face was covered in dried blood, his sleeve was soaked in crimson, and I was sure he was sporting many bruises from his battle with the draug jarl.
“You’re right,” he answered. “Not only am I in a great deal of pain, but this cut”—he tapped his face—“was also from a rusty draug blade and is likely going to fester, thus ruining my good looks. And I know how you value them, Born-in-Fire, because you’ve told me twice.”