Chapter 31 #2
“Elf, I believe.” Releasing the hold on my scruff, she moved to a shadowy corner and rummaged through a pile of junk. An eyeball rolled across the ground.
My gut twisted. To be granted safe passage, we must provide an offering, the queen had told me, even if only temporary. Safe to say, the last offering she sent became a permanent guest.
I would make it out.
I had to.
Swiping a spoon off the table, I tucked it under my thigh. “I seem to be missing utensils.”
She grunted.
I crossed my arms. “I can’t eat without a spoon.”
A blistered palm slammed onto the tabletop, splintering the wood with its force. In it, a flash of bent silver twisted, twinkled. “Here you are.”
Plastering on a fake smile that soured my cheeks, I chirped, “Thank you.”
I gripped the handle of the spoon, even against the trembling of my muscles.
Pushing empty bottles and trinkets aside, she plopped into the seat across from me at the other end of the table and opened a wicker basket.
“Delicious.” I pretended to slurp, the foul liquid brushing my lips. Hints of rot and ash tore into my taste buds. Disgusting. “So, are you a collector of sorts?”
“Hm?” The angle of her head drifted from the knitting needles in her hands, to me.
I gestured to the cages, eyes falling on a rusted one in the corner with a soiled rag for a blanket. Is that where she’d kept her last visitor? Is that where she’d keep me?
Gulping, I shook the gruesome thoughts away. “You just have a lot of nice things.”
“That queen sends gifts. Trying to ease tensions.” I didn’t miss the way her lip curled at the mention of Hildur, how her gnarled fingers tightened on her tools.
At my staring, she held up the thick implement, then dug the tip into a flimsy square, too translucent to be fabric, too delicate to be flesh.
A soul.
A blanket of them, stitched together like a patchwork quilt. Trapped in this realm, in this cave. I eyed the human-sized cage more closely. Red stains dappled the bars. Thin scratches scored the bottom—nail marks.
Horror clenched my insides.
Another fake sip, another gag, another lie. “Yeah, she’s awful. You know, she talks about you incessantly. Gryla, Gryla, Gryla. It’s her favorite topic. She’s obsessed.”
The ogress’s fingers stilled. Loose cloth still shielded her face, but at this angle, I swore I saw a thin lip quirk up.
Resting my chin in my palm, I batted my eyes, the extra lashes heavy on my lids. “What did you do? Tell her off? Curse her kingdom?”
“You have things confused, my dear.” Her nails curled inwards, growing longer, sharper. “A curse is not a curse when it is one half of a bargain.”
“What kind of bargain?” I leaned in, like we were in on some secret. “A soul for a soul?”
“A soul for a kingdom.”
A lighthearted laugh bubbled out of me, but neither one of us was smiling anymore.
“Bit by bit, until it crumbles,” she sang.
My words were spitting, harsh. “You don’t mean you’re the one destroying the Galdur?
Sending ískastali to its ruin…” I trailed off.
Judgement would get me nowhere. Flattery would get me…
somewhere. I hoped. I swallowed my pride and sweetened my tone.
“And all the way from here. How crafty of you. How do you do it?”
“The elves can banish me all they want, but I was forged from that land. I was there, in the rocks, in the moss, as a whisper on the wind, as a horse hoof scuffing the dirt, before anyone else showed up.” With a wave of her skeletal hand, the dark green cloak, the painful hunch to her back, all of it shimmered away.
A wisp of a woman grew upward from the empty robes on the floor. An entire silhouette formed in front of me, growing together with roots and ivy, leaves cascading from her head like strands of hair, flowers sprouting over her torso, grass carpeting her limbs.
I glanced up at her, my chin kicking back as if I were staring into a forest’s canopy.
And then she transformed.
The foliage fell to the floor, crisp and dry. The bark shriveled, turning dead and bleached. The years of wanting and waiting and cursing flashed by in a second, stealing her beauty, turning her eyes glacial, until she was no longer a woman of nature but a woman of revenge. The ogress.
“The elves may have the spirit of that island,” she tsked, hooded and hidden within the folds of her cloak again. “But I am the spirit.”
Gryla was sent here against her will. And now she was ancient and crooked, starved and lonely, consumed with rage. I rested my chin in my palm, my brows dipping. “Why would they banish you?”
“Bargains. They’re only as good as your word, and she found a way to twist mine.”
Eldi’s warning floated to mind. The elves are cunning. Creative. They’ll use their words against you, even the ones you do not say. “What kind of bargain?”
“Many questions.” She rose from her chair, the legs clicking against the ground. “Didn’t you know that hungry mouths are often silent?”
“Well, I have a right to know.” Time. I needed more time. “I mean, if this is going to be my last supper, I’d at least like to understand what put me here.”
“It was never our choice to fight. It was not our battle, yet it was our blood that was spilled.” She pressed her knuckles into the splintered wood, the color draining rapidly beneath the tight skin.
“The elf queen agreed to pull out of that war, and I vowed to shield her kingdom until her enemies retreated.”
The incident reports Olivia had found—they’d indicated that the earliest recorded failure of elven magic was during the Cross-Realm War.
My eyes narrowed. That was a century ago. What was Gryla doing here?
“I’ve no other option, dear girl,” she said, as if the question had been written on my face. “I performed my job too well.”
My heart lurched.
“I’m trapped,” she emphasized, spit flying out with the word. “Just like you.”
“No.” My eyes darted behind her, above her, to the wall and back. “There’s got to be a way out.”
She lunged, teeth bared and bloody, stopping only inches away from my own. I shot back, the wooden legs of my chair lifting off the ground. “The only way out of here is through the cauldron, I’m afraid.”
I stared into her dark cowl, into the impenetrable shadows. A chill slithered across my shoulders. It struck me then: without visitors, there would be no food on her table, no souls to keep her company—and no magic to shield the elven realm.
As long as Hildur had Gryla, her kingdom was safe and hidden.
And even though Gryla tampered with the Galdur, it’d never fully fail—so long as the queen fulfilled her end of the deal and kept bringing the ogress visitors.
Because the bargain had been twisted to last for eternity, so clever Hildur never had to worry about threats of another war, just broken pipes and moldy walls and endless winters; retaliation—inconveniences, really—the monarch was willing to endure for the protection she got in return.
Chin slowly dropping to my chest, my gaze caught on the sapphire straps of my dress, the metallic paint shimmering over my collarbone, the bangles collecting at my wrists…
That queen sends gifts, in hopes to ease tensions.
How do I look?
Like a most perfect offering.
Hildur had wrapped me up in a pretty little bow.
Vapor rose from my bowl. Sickly, sweet. Two fingers pinching my nose, I swatted it away.
A gnarled chin, a flash of teeth. “What’s wrong, angel? You don’t like your soup?”
Shit. “No—I mean—I do.”
“You’ve barely touched it. Tell me, how does it taste?” She hunched lower, lower, until the tip of her warped nose skimmed the lip of the bowl.
“It’s great,” I ground out, fists bundled in my lap.
I flexed my hand. Source crept up my veins, gathering in the tendons, a small surge of adrenaline and salt and power ripping through the muscle and then just… falling, fading, like a fire with no spark, like a flame that’d been smothered by a blanket.
The gravity of it carved a hole in my stomach; the weight of it pulling me down.
They were right—Flóki, the demons.
I bit down on my lip, the bitter tang of iron coating my tongue.
This wasn’t Jarearbaeli. This was something different. Another one of the queen’s games.
Tears flecked my lash line. I was so fucking tired of being a pawn.
The metal hidden in the folds of my dress bit into my thigh. I needed to act fast—if the witch could cause an avalanche, freeze a river, turn a castle to ruins across realms, there’s no telling what she was capable of here.
And I was armed with a spoon.
I gently removed the utensil, holding my shoulders straight, keeping the bowl tight against my palm. It was far from perfect, but it’d have to do.
At least to get me a head start.
“You know what I think.” I met that empty void, that soul-sucking emptiness where her expression should be, head-on. “I think you’re no better than the Queen of the Huldufólk.”
A howl of laughter erupted from her hood, so shrill it nearly splintered my bones. “You have no idea how ruthless they can be. What kind of grudges they hold.”
“You killed innocent people with that avalanche.”
“I was due a visitor. I had a point to make. They kill people for sport.”
“And what do you think you’re doing here, collecting souls?”
“Getting a taste of home.”
Before the words fully left her lips I flew out of my seat, shoving the tip of the spoon up, up, up into Gryla’s draping of fabric, into the shadows where an eye might have been.
A guttural shriek echoed off the walls, the cages rattling, the sky cracking, the cauldron tipping. Her clawed hands swished past me, reaching, smothering, squeezing the air.
My heart racing, I grabbed the back of the chair and swung it around, ramming it into her side. It knocked her against the table, the fabric flinging back just far enough to reveal something ancient and rotting, her skin like decomposed leaves, her eye sockets hollow like the cavities in a tree.