Chapter 51 Bjorn
As the roots exploded from the earth and wrapped around Freya, I lunged. Cutting and slashing at them, but more appeared to take their place. I reached for her, my fingers brushing the side of her face as the roots dragged her, and the beast that was Harald, down into the ground.
Leaving only undisturbed dirt in their wake.
“Freya!” I screamed, flinging myself down and clawing at the ground. “Freya!”
I couldn’t lose her. Not like this, knowing that she’d sacrificed herself. Not for any reason, because she was my life. My heart. Where she went, I went with her, yet she’d gone somewhere I could not follow.
“Freya!” I howled, digging down and down, but there was nothing but dirt and rocks and roots from the trees around me. “Freya!”
“Bjorn!” I turned my head to see Tora running toward me, Guthrum and Voland on her heels. “What has happened?”
“She’s gone.” My nails tore from my fingers as I dug, flinging aside rocks and earth. “Hel took her and Harald.”
Then cold hands closed over my wrists, tendon and bone visible where skin had fallen away, and I looked up into what had once been Geir’s face, now barely recognizable.
“She has gone to the place between realms.” His voice was awful and strange. A draug’s voice. “No matter how deep you dig, you can’t reach her.”
I ripped my hands from his grip and kept digging. “I’ll find her. I have to. She can’t be…”
“She’s not dead,” Geir said. “Else our souls would be liberated from the shells she bound us to and we would have moved on to Valhalla.”
Cold comfort, because I’d seen the wound on her leg from Harald’s stinger. How she’d staggered beneath the weight of the venom. How her skin had been deathly pale. She needed a healer. Needed a child of Eir to save her life, but I needed to find her first. “Freya!”
“She can’t hear you. She’s beneath Yggdrasil.”
His words were noise in my ears, because I needed to find her. “She’s hurt.”
“As are you,” Volund said, the healer stepping closer. “You are no good to her if she returns to find you dead.”
They didn’t understand. If she didn’t come back, life meant nothing. My path was at her side. That was my fate. The only future I wanted. “Freya!”
Next to me, my glowing axe disappeared, casting us in darkness; but I didn’t care. I kept digging. No one stopped me, and I cared not for their silence. Their pity. Because as long as Geir and the other undead were still standing, she was alive. And I’d never stop fighting my way to her. “Freya!”
“Bjorn!”
I froze, not certain if I’d heard my name or imagined it, only that it had been Freya’s voice. “Did you hear that?”
Geir shook his head.
“I heard her,” I whispered, then shouted, “I hear you, Freya!”
My fingers were a bloody mess, but I didn’t care as I clawed at the earth. Geir dug too. Everyone around me dug to find the woman who had fought to save us all.
I ripped away a rock, then sucked in a breath at the sight of pale scarred fingers smeared with dirt. Still fingers.
No.
All the world fell away. Nothing else mattered but getting her out of the ground. Having her in my arms. But above all else, her still drawing breath.
“Freya!” I roared. “I’m here!”
Her arms were free, limp, and my fingers caught in her tangled hair as I struggled to expose her face.
She was so still.
Her face was cleared now, eyes closed. Someone was screaming. I was screaming. Struggling to pull her free, Geir and the others digging around her body.
Then she was in my arms.
Her skin was cold.
I’d lost her. Lost my heart as surely as I’d cut it out of my chest. “Please, Freya,” I pleaded, holding her close. “Do not make me walk alone.”
Then she stirred and sucked in a ragged breath, blinking up at me with dirt-crusted eyelashes. “Bjorn?”