Chapter 17 #2
He snorted. “No one there wants to hear what I went through.”
“Friends stay friends even through hardships. Relationships aren’t easy, after all, but we all stay together no matter how hard it gets. That’s just what it’s like being a good friend.”
He headed out, picking careful and intentional steps along the peak of this mountain range. “They don’t want to hear what I’ve been through, or what I’ve done.”
“I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
Astrid thought about the implication there. Perhaps he had done something horrible that would make her fear him. But she had heard much of it. She’d seen him kill countless people now, and she knew he was dangerous. However he’d been kind to her. He’d been soft with her.
“I think I do want to hear it,” she murmured. “Maybe not what you went through there, but the things that make you who you are. You said your father was like you? A berserker?”
“Yes. My father was cursed with rage as well.” He jolted her up, shifting her a little higher on his back.
At first, Astrid thought he’d done it because he wanted her to stop talking. But then she realized he’d just slid her higher up his back so he could hear her better. Now she was speaking right into his ear, rather than the flat of his back.
This man. She never would understand how every action of his was so intentional.
“Your father sounds like a terrifying man,” she finally said.
“He was. But my mother is soft. She is a smoke breather, as I said. She sees the future and always knew that mine would be difficult. She begged my father to help change the path I was on, but Dag was never a man interested in changing the future. He saw it as already set in stone and therefore, something that should never be tampered with.”
“So he was the one who wanted you to be like him.”
“Indeed. And my mother always wanted a better life for me.” Bjorn shrugged again. “Unfortunately, she was never given that choice. My father took me far away from her when they started arguing, and I haven’t seen her in many, many years.”
“Even longer than you were in the labyrinth?”
His long sigh answered before his words. “Yes. Longer than that.”
Astrid wondered what it was like to grow up without a mother. It must have been hard with a father he was terrified of. But then she had to ask, “You said we were going to the other side of the mountain, where there are more witches and people like me. Does that include your mother?”
“It may. I do not know if she still lives.”
That was oddly terrifying. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to think about that. Meeting his mother was a bit forward, especially considering they were bound and wanted to unbind themselves.
It was like he could feel her nerves. “What has you all twisted?”
“Well, won’t your mother think a certain way about me wanting to break our bond?”
He tilted his head back and laughed. “Bright one, if you think my mother hasn’t already seen that in the smoke, then you do not understand what I mean when I say she sees the future. The woman knows more than either of us about the coming days. She knows I’m coming, if she’s still alive.”
Eerie. Astrid wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Her power had always just been in manipulating others, and it felt like a rather strong power the longer she’d had it. But to see the future?
A power like that would need to be studied for ages to come. And he made it sound like there were many smoke breathers out there. As though it wasn’t odd at all for a troll woman to be able to do that.
“If your mother can see the future, why couldn’t she just predict every attack upon your people? Shouldn’t their skills make it easier for them to know when the trolls were going to... I don’t know. I guess how to win battles and fight wars?”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that.
They can only see the future of individuals, not of the world.
If the individual isn’t the person making the choices, then they won’t be able to see the rest of the battlefield,” he explained.
“It’s also exhausting to look into the future.
They can only seek out so many people’s futures before they will collapse.
Magic always has a price and a limit to what can be done. ”
“I suppose so.”
Her power never seemed to be that difficult to control, but she had never tried to manipulate more than one person at a time. If she tried to do an entire crowd, Astrid had a feeling she would also collapse.
She let them fall into companionable silence for the rest of the day.
He was running, and she couldn’t keep yelling into his ear just to have some form of conversation.
So instead, she laid her head on his shoulder and watched the world go by.
The blur of the mountaintops, the birds that soared along beside them, the clouds that looked so fluffy and bubbly around them.
Until finally, they started going... down.
She sat up, looking at the world that was now revealed on the other side of the mountain. Where her kingdom was full of trees and farmlands, this was rolling emerald hills. So many hills as far as the eye could see. There were trees as well, and winding rivers, but they were far more sparse.
“What is this place?” she asked.
He paused on the nearest peak, holding on to the straps with his hands and staring out at the land that she had never seen before. “Home,” he said quietly. “This is home.”
And then they headed down the other side of the mountain range, toward the great unknown.