Chapter 9
Nine
Astrid
“You’re certain it curves to the right?” Astrid asked, barely avoiding tapping her mouth with her dirty finger. She did that when she was thinking, but she couldn’t do it now. Her hands were smeared with dirt and whatever else covered the floor of this cell.
Rabbit chuckled on the other side of the wall. “Yes, Priestess. We’ve all gone that way more times than I can count. We go to the right.”
“So the left leads out of the labyrinth, and the right goes deeper.” She shook her head and changed the lines she’d just drawn. “I could have sworn we went the opposite way.”
She’d been trying to keep track of every turn they had taken to get to her cell, but it was damn near impossible.
Whoever had created the labyrinth, and cells that were attached, had designed it to be difficult for even the guards to find their way around.
She had seen a couple of the guards with rolled-up maps in their pockets, and she assumed those were the guards who were newer.
Of course, that led her to the point where she was. Scratching her own map on the floor with their combined memories, hers and Rabbit’s, to try to figure out the best way out of here. She backed up to the door with the window, pressing her spine against it so she could see her work.
The floor was covered with scribbles, growing larger and larger the more they both remembered. It was daunting to look at it and try to even imagine a way out. No one had managed before, and it would take quite a bit of ingenuity to get out of here.
Giving up, she tapped her finger on her cheek, where she knew she had left smudges. The mask was back on the cot, considering no one had bothered her in the hours after they’d taken Bjorn.
Rabbit was already talking before she could say a word.
“They probably took you in the opposite direction. There are parts of this labyrinth that none of the prisoners have been to. I think it’s fairly obvious that way will lead you where you want to go, but we have no idea after that.
You’ll have to improvise.” He seemed almost excited by the idea.
She pressed her hand against the door behind her. “Rabbit, I don’t think...”
“I know you can’t bring me, Priestess. I’m just happy to think he’ll be getting out. A lot of staying sane in here is just dreaming. Dreaming of what could be, the outside world, anything to keep you out of the darkness that nips at all our heels.”
Astrid’s heart broke even further. Being down here, hungry, dirty, thirsty, she now realized what conditions these warriors had been kept in.
Some of them were bad people, at least the humans down here were.
But the trolls? She knew they were stolen from the battlefields.
They were the ones who’d been left behind, or who had been presumed dead but weren’t.
Someone rattled their door down the hall. The cells exploded into commotion all of a sudden, shouts and cheers echoing so loudly it was hard to think. She spun, holding on to the bars of her window and peering out into the hall.
All she could see was a group of guards walking down each and every cell. They were carrying something, but she couldn’t see it just yet. And it wasn’t like she could hear anything other than the angry shouts of prisoners.
“Rabbit?” she called out, but no one answered her.
Instead, all she could see was the grin on the face of the man across from her. The same greasy man with missing teeth who loved to stare. Without Bjorn in the cell with her, the feeling of her skin crawling from his attention came on even stronger.
He waved at her, and she ducked away from the window until a guard’s helmeted features filled the space she had just stared out of.
“Bowl?” he asked.
“I don’t have a bowl.”
“Then no food.”
He started to move past until she shouted, “Wait!”
Apparently, some people still had pity. The guard paused, looking through her window for just a few more seconds. Astrid grabbed the cup next to her cot and raced toward him, holding it out through the bars.
He grabbed it, looked over the dented cup a bit before shrugging and then...
Oh god.
She gagged, watching as he used his bare hand to dunk the cup into a bucket of what looked like vomit before holding it back to her. “This is what food is down here, Priestess. Eat up, or starvation will kill you before your troll’s lusts will.”
“This isn’t food,” she hissed, her decorum forgotten over the chunks of... whatever it was that floated on top of that sludge.
“Troll whores get the same as the rest of the prisoners.” He spat through her window, and she narrowly avoided it.
Thankfully, he didn’t look beyond her into the cell. Otherwise, he might have noticed the giant map she had drawn out on the floor. Not that he would have cared. The guards here all seemed to be very certain that no prisoner could escape, despite a few of them having done so only months ago.
But that had been within the arena, and no one had ever escaped from the cells. She was going to change that.
Glaring as they walked by, she held the cup in her hands and waited until everyone quieted down. It sounded like maybe people were eating, which was... horrific. She couldn’t imagine eating what was in her hands.
“Rabbit?” she tried again.
He grunted, clearly through a mouthful of food.
“What are you eating?”
“Scraps. Whatever they eat up above, they scrape the plates and leftovers into buckets for us.” He made a little “ooh” sound. “I got a bone!”
Her stomach rolled at the crunching sound that came after he said that.
Was he... eating the bone? It sounded like many of them were.
The horrible sounds of men eating made her even more nauseous than she had been before.
She couldn’t even hold the cup because looking at it, smelling it, knowing that other people’s mouths had touched this food made everything in her revolt.
She would go hungry. She would starve. She wasn’t this desperate.
Setting it down next to the cot, Astrid crouched down in the corner where Bjorn usually was. Planting her hands over her ears, she tried to block out the sounds.
Her feet were on the cold ground. There was air in her lungs.
She could breathe in deeply, but then all she could smell was that fucking food.
And it did smell like food. It wasn’t an unpleasant scent, and that was even more confusing.
Her stomach was clenching now, desperate to eat something that wasn’t leftovers from other people who didn’t deserve to eat as lavishly as they did.
Panic set in. She couldn’t control her heart rate, and she had always been able to do that. Her carefully cultivated control was now gone. She had nobody, was no one, and nothing she did or begged for would be given to her.
Back to the street rat.
Only good enough to be a whore.
Warm hands covered hers, and then all the sound was actually gone. There was just silence, blissful silence without the constant sound of eating that somehow slipped through her fingers.
She blinked a few times, focusing on her breathing until she looked up. Bjorn must have returned at some point, although she couldn’t guess when. Crouched in front of her, wearing but a tattered loincloth to cover his lean, muscular body as he used his hands to block out the sound.
He watched her with dark eyes that saw far too much.
It was like he knew she needed these few seconds of silence before she could pull herself back together again.
And she did. She forced herself back to calm, even if it felt like she was kicking and screaming the whole way.
Astrid rebuilt the shield she always kept up until she could be herself again.
She was the priestess who was affected by nothing.
That was who she was. That was who she had always been.
If she could just get control of her emotions, then she had control of something.
Her fear eased enough to be reasonable again.
She was Astrid. High priestess. Capable of handling this situation just like she had the moment he’d left.
She had a map on the floor. She had a plan.
Except then she looked at the ground and all of her map had been wiped away. There were footprints through the whole thing, most likely his, because they were huge and claw-tipped. She’d spent hours on it. Hours and hours of work that were now destroyed.
Breathing in deeply, she pulled her hands away from her ears, forcing his hands to drop.
“It’s all right,” she told herself. “I can redraw it.”
He looked down at the markings on the floor and grunted. “Maps are no good.”
“Maps are helpful when you’re planning an escape.”
“I know how to get out of the labyrinth.” He stood, and once against she was faced with the looming man over her. He was massive. Far bigger than anyone she’d ever been close to, and all that glistening muscle...
Not shiny with sweat, she realized. With blood.
At her horrified expression, he glanced down at himself and winced. “Not mine.”
“Not your blood?”
He shook his head, then headed toward the cot where there was that single cup of food waiting for him. Dropping down onto the edge of it, he sat heavily. As though he had weights on his shoulders that curved him forward.
He didn’t reach for the cup. Instead, he just stared at her. It seemed like he did that a lot, and she wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or an act that should make her nervous.
Astrid curled her legs under herself, tucking the blanket a little tighter around her shoulders before pointing at the cup. “There is food for you.”
“You should eat first.”
“All I have done is sit around in this cell all day. I do not need the energy.” She pointed at it. “Eat.”