Chapter 38
Thirty-Eight
Astrid
Astrid had known this little bubble of happiness would disappear. They weren’t lucky enough to come to Trollveggen and then simply live out their lives, happy and unaffected by anyone and everyone else around them.
The message came early in the morning. Bjorn didn’t even get out of bed. He muttered about a door locked by magic and then rolled over and ignored the pounding of someone’s fist on the stone. But Astrid couldn’t sleep.
What if something had happened?
What if Rose had run?
She laid there, thinking about all the things that could have gone wrong. Her sister’s decisions shouldn’t matter so much, and yet, somehow, they did. She was still frozen with the fear that Rose would want to leave and Astrid would lose her all over again.
So she got out of bed, sneaking away from the big man sleeping naked in their bed. She glanced back at him one last time, her gaze tracing over the broad expanse of his back and the naked globes of his ass that made her want to turn right back around and crawl back under the covers with him.
But she couldn’t. Not without checking to make sure everything was all right.
She threw on a robe, trying to ignore the feeling of the soft fabric as it clung to her newly pierced nipples.
They were so sensitive, and she still couldn’t tell if that was good or horrible yet.
Everything they touched was a sensation.
She just couldn’t tell if she liked it or not.
Astrid opened the door partly to distract herself at this point.
She’d thought it would be some messenger she didn’t know, but it was Gunnar. And her sister. Rose stood behind him with a soft, dreamy look on her face as she stared off into the distance.
Gunnar grunted at Astrid as he pushed past her into the home. “I’ll get him up. Watch her.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Astrid asked. Her sister wasn’t even moving. She was standing there, staring off into the distance.
“Nothing’s wrong with her. She’s just off wandering.
She gets herself in trouble when she does that, so don’t let her wander without being with her.
Yeah?” Then he disappeared into the bedroom as though that wasn’t a strange thing to say.
She could hear Bjorn cursing and then something breakable being thrown inside the room.
“Right,” Astrid muttered, leaving the cave and grabbing her sister by the arm. “Come with me, Rose.”
She guided her sister to a rock and sat her down, gently holding on to her ice cold hands. The poor thing had bare feet. Dirt smeared between her toes, but at least there weren’t any cuts and scrapes. Astrid reached up and brushed Rose’s tangled pale hair away from her face.
It broke her heart to see her sister like this. Wandering in her mind was something she’d always done, but it still made Astrid nervous.
“You did this when you were little, and I’d ask you when you were coming back to me,” Astrid said. “Wandering has always been your power, I know that, my dear, but you cannot always disappear into fantasy worlds. You weren’t given this gift so that you wouldn’t take part in living.”
It took a while for Rose to come out of it. Throughout it all, she could hear Gunnar and Bjorn shouting inside. Apparently, her husband had very little interest in coming with Gunnar, if that was what he had been sent for. And she didn’t blame him.
A twisting feeling in her gut warned her that they were about to travel again.
No good king could know that another was stealing his people, forcing them to perform and die for profits, and not want to do something about it.
Her heart ached that Bjorn had to be involved at all, but she had known that he would.
He knew the labyrinth better than anyone else. Astrid had only been there for a week or so, but she’d had help creating a map to escape. Visiting the labyrinth with a lord wasn’t the same as living inside of it for ten years.
Rose blinked, and then she was back. Her gaze was soft, her eyes still dreamy, but she was looking at Astrid’s face and not into a world that didn’t exist.
“Oh,” Rose said quietly. “What am I doing here?”
“Gunnar brought you.”
“That was nice of him. I had wanted to see you.” Rose blinked a few more times, clearly trying to get herself to detach from whatever world she had built in her head.
“You know the king wants you and Bjorn to return to the labyrinth? He wants Bjorn to fight for him, and then destroy everything there. He has a plan and everything.”
“Of course he wants his revenge. It doesn’t surprise me that Bjorn and I are involved in some way.”
Rose’s eyes filled with tears. “But it means you will have to return to that place. That horrible, horrible place, Astrid. You can’t go back there.”
Astrid had known there would be some struggle in this. Her sister’s memories of the labyrinth were a dark cloud that followed her around. They were the memories she ran from over and over again, but no matter how fast or how far she went, she’d never outrun them.
Squeezing her sister’s hands, she watched as Rose realized they were touching. For a moment, she thought Rose would rip her hands away. But then, marvelously, her sister squeezed her back.
“I’m going to go back and I’m going to help them destroy it,” Astrid said. Her mind was already spinning with how she could do it, but that was a hard question. “I don’t know how yet, but I’m going to. They need me, Rose.”
“I don’t want you to go through the same thing I did. I couldn’t survive it knowing he was punishing you like he punished me.”
“Who?” Astrid asked before she thought about it. “The king?”
Rose nodded vigorously.
“Oh, my sweet sister. He cannot trap me. I’m so much stronger than I was when we were children.”
Astrid stood when the door to their home burst open and Bjorn came careening out. He had her new blue dress in his hands and wore an expression that was better suited for war than it was this moment.
“Come on,” he snarled. “We’re telling King Egil to go fuck himself.”
The blustering weight of his anger startled even her. But then Bjorn froze, looked at Astrid and her sister, before correcting himself. “Sorry, Rose. Didn’t see you there.”
Her sister seemed to relax at least a little. “That’s all right, Bjorn. I’d be just as angry.”
Astrid had a hard time believing Rose even remembered what it was like to be angry.
Maybe that would help her in many of the situations she struggled with these days.
What if her sister went with them? Raged at the men who’d harmed her, killed them all, and left victorious?
Perhaps soaking in their blood would fix some part of her that was still hiding deep inside her body?
But Rose hadn’t even been able to kill a bug. Astrid remembered how hard her sister would work to catch the smallest housefly and release it outside because it wasn’t fair of them to murder an innocent. She didn’t like harming anything at all, and that... Well, that had always been Rose.
Astrid had a feeling that trait hadn’t changed in the slightest since they’d been children. Most likely, her sister would only hurt more if she took part in killing those men.
Sighing, she stood and walked over to Bjorn. “Gunnar is inside, I think. Why don’t you join him there, Rose?”
Her sister scuttled off, and Astrid took her place beside her husband. Bjorn looked her over, clearly furious, but at least that anger wasn’t directed at her. It never was.
He handed her the dress without a word. Astrid dropped the robe to the ground, pulled her dress on over her head, and then made sure the robe was folded up by their front door.
Hopefully, no one had been looking, but really the trolls seemed so much less concerned about the physical form than her own people were. It was kind of freeing.
“Let’s not keep the king waiting,” she reminded him. And together, they headed back toward the castle.
He took her on a shorter path this time, a strange route that seemed to go through a few small portions of the mountain itself before arriving at the castle on a back path.
She was surprised there was even a way for someone to get into the castle from behind.
But then again, the trolls did like to have ways to get out of any situation.
She’d heard in battle they were almost impossible to pin down.
There were countless people in the castle, yet again. But this time they all appeared to be warriors. She had never seen so many weapons all in one place, nor so many people wearing them all at once.
Every troll ignored them all until she heard the whispers start up again.
“That’s the Destroyer’s son.”
“Bjorn has returned?”
“I didn’t know we had a berserker on our side. We surely cannot lose now.”
All of those whispers were a weight on Bjorn’s shoulders. He grew tenser and tenser the closer they got to the king’s chambers where they had met the last time. This time though, Bjorn threw the doors open without asking.
King Egil and a few other much older looking trolls were at the end. One of them was a woman wearing the same clothing Bjorn’s mother had worn. Bones were threaded throughout her hair like beads, and she looked Bjorn over with a soft smile on her face that made him pause.
“Vilde,” Bjorn said, his voice tinged with surprise. “You still serve the king.”
“Of course I do, boy. I have always served the king.”
Bjorn leaned closer to her and murmured under his breath, “The king’s smoke reader. A very renowned prophetess.”
“Ah.” Someone to be honored, then.
Astrid carefully bowed to each of them in the room.
She was graceful as always, poised in a way that spoke of how many kings and nobles she had dealt with in her life.
But just as she opened her mouth to compliment them, to woo them into telling her what the plan was, Bjorn decided to bullishly shove his way into the conversation.