Chapter 45 Bjorn
I paced the length of my cell, sensing that dusk was coming despite the sun never reaching the bowels of the fortress.
“Freya is here!” Harald’s voice carried down the dim hall toward me, singsong and cruel. Then he appeared, the grin on his face making me want to break the bars between us so that I might strangle him with my bare hands.
“She lurks with her rotting army of the dead, desperately trying to think of a way to rescue you that won’t necessitate her killing every Skalander I’ve manned Grindill’s walls with.”
“And what will you do if she does?” I asked. “Fighting draug is no easy task, I would know.”
Harald waved a dismissive hand at me. “She won’t. Her morality won’t allow it. Just as it won’t allow her to drag all those who oppose her down to Helheim because she perceives them as victims of my trickery.” He stretched his arms above his head, sighing as his back cracked. “She’ll try every ruse she can think of and then take my offer to accept her surrender in exchange for your life in exile. It’s just a matter of stymieing her until she reaches that depth of desperation, and then she’ll come close enough that Leif can order her to stand down. And I think we are nearly at that moment.”
It was a struggle to keep dismay from my face, because Freya’s fucking oath would drive her to surrender. To sacrifice her life for mine. Though in truth, even without it, I knew she’d do the same. With Leif rightfully angry at me—and Freya—he’d be easy for Harald to manipulate and use as his tool against us, and Ylva had risked as much as I suspected she would to aid us. Her goal now was survival. For Leif. For herself. And for all the Skalanders who trusted the former lady of Halsar to protect them.
“And what will you do after we are defeated?” I asked. “You can’t really believe that you can maintain this farce. It is one thing to be two men, quite another to be two kings. More and more people will begin to ask questions, and the seeds of truth that Freya has no doubt been sowing in towns and villages will take root. They’ll realize they are all pieces in your game, and they’ll come for your blood.”
“What fun is there if there is no risk?” Harald cocked his head. “I remember when I first met young Harald of Hrafnheim many long years ago. I listened to him weep and moan about his lot in life, despite being heir to his father’s jarldom back in Nordeland.
“Before I consumed him, he told me that I was mad if I believed I could become him. That those who knew him would suspect and that I would be swiftly discovered. Except I learned well and learned early that people do not doubt what they see with their eyes, even when every other instinct tells them something is amiss. Sight is truth, and so no one ever suspected when I returned to Hrafnheim and challenged my dear father and killed him. No one believed me to be anyone other than the Harald who had left them.”
Shock filled my core. “You aren’t even Harald in truth?”
“I have been Harald for so many years that I’ve become him.” He tapped his chin. “Or he became me. Either way, we are one in a way that I’ve never achieved with another skin. Perhaps it has to do with the amount of him I consumed, for I let not a piece go to waste. Either way, what you see before you now is the true me.”
Bile burned in my stomach as I understood his meaning. And also why he had taken Snorri’s corpse. I did not want to ask. Did not want to know. But I needed him to reveal the full story so that Steinunn would hear it from where she hid in the next cell. “You…eat them? Why?”
Harald shrugged. “Loki’s blood allows me to take the shape of anything I wish, anything I can envision, but there are other sorts of magic that allow me to take on more than just a shape. The sagas sung in Islund taught me that to truly take on something’s attributes, you must take them into yourself.”
“My mother…Did you…” I couldn’t say it. Couldn’t allow myself to put voice to that horror.
A slow smile climbed onto Harald’s face, and turning away from him I fell to my knees and vomited. Over and over, my body trying to rid itself of the knowledge that was surely stamped across my mind for eternity.
When the heaving ceased, I slowly looked up at him as I wiped my mouth against my shoulder. “Who are you really?”
He held his hands wide. “I am everyone and everything.” The grin fell away. “And nothing and no one. As Nameless as my Nameless, cast aside the moment my mother realized what blood flowed in my veins. Unloved and unwanted because of what I was, and so I made myself into someone new. Over and over again, learning from my mistakes and discovering pieces of lore until I had mastered my art. Harald is my masterpiece, your mother a close second, but Snorri…” He sighed happily. “All of Skaland will sing my name even as they dance to the beat of my drum.”
“You are a monster,” I whispered. “Your mother should have strangled you and spared the world.”
Harald’s eyes hardened for a heartbeat, but then he smiled. “It’s time, Bjorn. Time to lure your Freya in.”
“She’ll kill you.”
“Not with my Unfated to protect me.” He snapped his fingers, and Tora came down the hall, head lowered. Four of Harald’s Nameless followed her. “Gag him and then bring him. If he puts up a struggle, feel free to make him scream.”
“Yes, my king,” Tora responded tonelessly. “Ylva is looking for her husband.”
Harald cast his eyes skyward in irritation. “Fine.”
His face melted, then re-formed as Snorri. Pulling his tunic off, he turned it inside out, revealing a second garment sewn within that was not green but gray. Straightening it and loosening his belt to accommodate Snorri’s greater girth, he departed without a word.
Tora met my gaze. “It’s time.”