Chapter 41
Forty-One
Bjorn
Bjorn hated waiting. It had always been the worst part of the labyrinth, too. Standing there, waiting to know what kind of creature would fight him, or what kind of fight it would end up being. The other trolls around him didn’t understand where his nerves were coming from, but how could they?
Hunkered down in the bushes after getting Astrid’s message, they were so certain this was a battle they could not lose.
The raven was one of the troll king’s own. The bird had been trained to carry messages all the way across the realm to where King Egil had hidden his son. None of them had seen the prince in a very, very long time. But they understood why the king hadn’t wanted him here.
Humans were too dangerous. Sons were lost all the time, just like Bjorn had been lost. The message the raven brought had been very easy to read, though.
Midnight in two nights.
The door will be open.
Stay safe. All of you.
Astrid
Part of him hadn’t wanted to believe the message had come from her. She was so certain in her message, so short. There wasn’t a declaration of love or anything to let him know that she was still fighting to be with him. He would have taken anything. Another “I love you”, perhaps.
They both knew he was going to fight like he had in the labyrinth. Surely she understood that meant he might not come out. And yet, the message had been short, brief, and to the point.
Damned woman. It was like she wasn’t even worried about him.
Now they were all waiting outside the door for it to open, and he was getting antsy.
There were too many things that could go wrong.
She hadn’t even informed them if Tolly had been willing to help, which Bjorn somehow doubted.
The man was self-serving and wanted nothing to do with any troll.
He’d even tried to get Astrid’s favor back through the barrier between the noblemen and the trolls, as if that would let him assuage his guilt.
The door swung open slowly, creaking too loudly. All the trolls around him winced, staring in the town’s direction that was so close surely someone had heard the door opening. He didn’t remember it being so loud when he and Astrid had made it out of there.
Bjorn was the first one on the path, so he was the first to see the man who poked his head out.
The human was scraggly at best. He wore no armor, although he had the build of a soldier.
His brown hair was slicked with sweat to his skull, suggesting he had just been wearing a helmet.
And he went pale at the sight of the wall of trolls waiting for him, but then he cleared his throat. “She said you’d be here.”
“And so we are.”
“She didn’t bribe me enough for this,” the man muttered. “I’m to open the door, walk down the path, and not look back. That’s all she told me.”
“Is she with you?”
He shook his head. “She headed off into the labyrinth by herself. Her and a bunch of women.” Then his eyes widened. “Shit, I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.”
“Why did they enter the labyrinth?”
The guard shrugged. “Don’t know. There’s not much in the direction they went, really. Just the women’s holding cells.”
Of course, that was where she had headed.
Astrid was supposed to stay out of all this, but he had the sneaking suspicion that she had learned something none of the rest of them knew.
Likely something that had to do with Rose and all the other women that were locked up in there, ready and prepared to be gifts for anyone who had won a fight.
He took one large step to the side, but not big enough that the man wouldn’t have to touch him as he passed. Bjorn stared down at the smaller guard, who paused right before he reached all the other trolls.
“I saw you fight once,” the guard said. “It’s like you weren’t the same person you were in the cells. Like you became something else entirely.”
“I do.”
“How do you do that?”
“I am Bjorn, son of Dag the Destroyer. I come from a long line of berserkers who have fought and won, no matter the pain or the cost. I watched my grandfather fight to his death, missing an arm. His blood coated all of his victims, and he refused to die until they all did.” Bjorn could almost taste metal on his tongue.
He knew who he was, and what his line was.
“I protect my people. I stand between them and torment. Even here.”
The guard slipped away, perhaps one of the first human men who had walked through an army of trolls and never once been touched. That was what his Astrid had done for this guard, and he could only hope she had picked the right person to do so.
The man could run to the other guards. He could tell them where they were. But Bjorn had a feeling this man wasn’t going to do that. He was going to take his money and run far, far away from this place.
“Come,” he said to the other trolls, knowing that the heat at his back was likely Ragnar. “Follow me.”
“What is the plan?” Ragnar asked.
“Kill every human in sight. Spare no one unless they are female. Otherwise, kill them all. Release every troll you see. Any humans in those cells? Leave them.”
He thought of the man who had been across from him, the human who had made comments about Astrid and who had made women cry when they were gifted to him.
Bjorn would love to tear that man apart with his claws. He would love to see his blood dripping from the walls of his cell, but he also knew leaving all of them there was death itself. Starvation took time. A long, horrible period of time.
Perhaps men like that deserved to wait and wonder why they hadn’t been freed. They deserved to panic, to fear what would become of them, to realize that no one was going to find them.
And then they deserved to die alone.
The first group of guards found the trolls almost as soon as they entered, and by that point Bjorn had already worked himself up to near berserk already. He could feel it pressing down on him, even though he knew it wasn’t yet time. He needed to guide the other trolls to the cages first.
So he held himself in check as they rushed toward the guards. None of those men stood a chance against the cleaving motion of his axe, nor did they seem to understand the danger they were in. Some of them must have recognized him, but they didn’t have time to even blink before he was on them.
Oh, it felt good to use this weapon again. Somewhere in this pit was his father’s axe, where it would remain buried as it should be. But he couldn’t deny it was far more pleasing to swing this weapon in both directions and slice heads from shoulders with every movement of his arms.
Soon enough, blood splattered the walls of the tunnel, and he turned the trolls into the hall where the cells were. There were many of them, though. That was the problem.
Breathing hard, he tried to speak though he knew it would be difficult. A berserker didn’t think. He wanted to fight, to make things bleed. He wanted to hear the cries of the dying begging for mercy that he would not give.
But he was still himself. He was still Bjorn.
For now.
He pointed to five of the splintering passages. “Each of these has warriors in it. Get them, and bring them to the armory.”
“Where is the armory?” Ragnar asked.
He... Shit, he hadn’t brought them to the armory. He was already losing his mind, and he couldn’t remember where the damn room was. Lips twisting around his tusks, he tried to remember the mental map he had built over the years.
But the walls were closing in on him. The smell of mud and blood only reminded him of all the things that had happened.
He’d been little more than an animal in this hovel, and just being here made him feel the same.
He needed Astrid’s cool touch to ground him.
He needed the touch of his woman, who had always seen him as more than just a beast to be pointed in a direction and loosed until everything was dead.
One of the trolls moved past him into the hall, and his shoulder struck the light hanging from the ceiling. Unfortunately, that made it swing wildly, and all Bjorn could do was try to focus on the ground that seemed to be getting closer and closer.
He would not pass out. He was Bjorn the Destroyer.
No, he was just Bjorn. Bjorn, who wanted his family and friends to never fear that they would face the same horrors he had. He would not stand by while they had to suffer.
This place would be destroyed. He would honor his father’s memory in that sense, but he would never go too far. Not like Dag had.
“This way,” he growled, the words getting harder and harder to say.
Ragnar followed him as they both stalked down the lines of cells.
There were fewer trolls than what he remembered.
A sign that something terrible had happened here.
He blamed the king, but of course he did.
The king would need to put on much more complicated shows than he ever had before.
He’d lost his favorite troll, the one everyone knew they could bet on.
Losing Bjorn had likely cost the king an exorbitant amount of money.
He had his eye on one cell in particular. His stomach twisted on the way, though. What if something had happened? What if Rabbit was dead? All the questions bubbling in his mind came to a halt as he paused in front of the doorway to the man’s cell, who he might even call friend.
Rabbit stood in front of the small slot with bars. He held his arm at a strange angle. Bjorn could see that even through the tiny space between the metal. Rabbit was alive, though. That was all that mattered.
“Bjorn!” Rabbit said, shock and relief in the sound of his voice. “You made it back.”
“Of course I did.”
“I doubted you. That pretty little thing could easily have been a trap. I thought the king was going to tempt you into something even worse than this place. Glad I was wrong.” Rabbit leaned a bit to the side, trying to see around him. “Who did you bring with you?”
“Ragnar.”
“No idea who that is.”
Ragnar huffed out an angry breath behind him. “You didn’t even talk about me in this place?”
“Rabbit was brought in years after me. I stopped talking about my life outside of these walls long before that.” Bjorn grabbed onto the bars of the window, then nodded toward the bar that served as a handle. “Pull with me.”
“You think these can be removed by sheer force?” Ragnar shook his head. “I doubt that. They were built to hold trolls.”
“They were built to hold trolls who were injured, drugged, or nearly dead. They were built, so that they were impossible to open from the inside. Grab the fucking door, Ragnar.”
Together, they heaved against it, pulling and pulling until the stones around it gave. Bjorn grabbed it and then threw it across the hall. The metal and wood hit the neighboring cell and cracked through the door of that one. The other troll would let himself out.
Rabbit let out a low whistle. “You’ve gotten stronger.”
Shaking his head, Bjorn stepped to the side to make some room for them. “No. Just angry.”
“Fuck,” Rabbit said, drawing out the word. “We should all get out of the way then.”
“Armory.”
“Why?”
He was already struggling to make sense of why he wanted anyone to go to the armory. Thankfully, Ragnar stepped in quickly. He even stood in front of Bjorn, blocking the view of his friend, who had gotten even thinner.
“There are a lot more trolls waiting to get inside here. Plenty of them to fight. We’re getting all of you out, and those who can fight with us will need weapons.” Ragnar kept explaining while Bjorn shook his head, trying to get the memories out of his mind.
All he could see now was how thin Rabbit had gotten.
And he had already been a very thin man before Bjorn had left.
It looked like the king was now completely starving the trolls, and that made him see red.
He couldn’t just destroy this place. He couldn’t just bring it down, revealing all the horrors to the people who lived here.
Would it even matter to them? Would they even care what their king had done?
He had to try. He had to make sure that no one would ever return to this place, no matter what happened.
“Bjorn?” Rabbit said, his voice hesitant. “You know these halls are too tight. You can’t do that here.”
“Do what?”
“Do what your father taught you to do.” Rabbit reached for him, his skeletal hand surprisingly strong as he grabbed onto Bjorn. “You have to stay with us. We can get everyone out, and then you can do whatever you want to do. But you know you can’t win if you fight them like this.”
But he could. Because he had. Every battle he had ever fought like this was one that he had eventually come out victorious. Just like his father and his grandfather. Like all the men in his bloodline who had forgotten what it meant to care for themselves in the end.
Because other people mattered more than them. Their world was more than just a quiet, calm life. It was protection and honor and pain.
Striding away from them all, he ignored Rabbit’s call for him to stop. He couldn’t. If he looked at Rabbit one more time, then he was going to lose his mind. He was going to kill anyone and everyone who stood in the way between him and the king, who should know that Bjorn was coming for him.
“Free them all,” he called out, his voice echoing through the halls. “I hunt.”
And though they were supposed to be quiet, a cheer rose behind him. A whooping, haunting war cry that would make every human guard in this place know what it was to feel terror. They would know he was coming for them, but they would never see him before it was too late.
Bjorn the Destroyer hunted through these halls now.
And he was going to make them all bleed.