Chapter 44
Forty-Four
Astrid
She would always remember this moment. Everything happened so quickly, it was almost impossible to track it all. She was being held by a guard, likely as a way to antagonize Bjorn.
The other women had been able to run, though.
They slipped away while the king had been talking to her, and he hadn’t cared all that much.
Women like them were dispensable, after all.
He could find more. It would take so little for him to find as many women as he needed as prizes.
They had no choice, because he was king.
But Astrid was different. Astrid had the attention of a troll that the king very much wanted. And that meant she was useful. She knew how men like this thought, and she knew that she was going to suffer just because he wanted to use her pain.
Watching Bjorn walk down that empty hall had nearly broken her heart. She’d thought there would be countless trolls helping him, representing him. Trolls who fought alongside him and instead, he was all by himself.
Maybe he’d done the same thing as her. Maybe he had sent away the trolls and all those who had been captured, so they would all remain safe. It sounded like something he would do.
She didn’t pay attention to what they were saying. The words didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she got a single moment to look at him before they died.
But she wanted to live. She wanted to live with him, to grow with him, to see everything unfold in their lives as they grew a garden and a family and all the other beautiful things that had been a potential in their future.
Then a sword lifted to her throat, and she knew that wasn’t going to happen at all. The king had other plans.
“Slit her throat,” the king said, and she could hear how little he cared about any of this as he spoke. “Then kill them all, even the ones hiding in the next passage. Will you?”
Astrid felt the cold metal pressing more firmly against her throat, and something in her just snapped.
She didn’t care if there were so many soldiers that the odds seemed insurmountable.
She didn’t care if they served the king and therefore felt as though they were in the right. They were not innocent.
Magic boiled at her fingertips at the same time a boom echoed throughout the entirety of the labyrinth. It was sheer luck that the other priestesses had chosen that time to blast through another level, but the floor beneath their feet shifted.
The soldiers let out angry sounds, some of them reaching for the king at the same moment Bjorn slammed into them.
The rage she saw pouring off of him was something she could use.
She took it from him, an unending, vast amount of anger that she then poured into all the men around her.
They were suddenly enraged too. They wanted to fight, and it didn’t matter who they fought.
The guards turned on each other, all of them battling without thought of who or what they were hitting.
All except for the few closest to the king. He glared at them all, and she swore she heard him mouth something along the lines of, “Weak.”
He turned with the closest guards, six men who were the largest of them all.
They started down a corridor at the same moment Bjorn stood in front of her.
She could see there was nothing left of him.
Just the berserker, who had killed hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of people at this point.
He was rage and glory, venom and vice. He wanted to destroy the entire world before him, and it didn’t matter whose death he counted as long as he was covered in blood.
“It’s me,” she whispered. “It’s me, Bjorn.”
Then she had the marvelous and miraculous sight of his berserker recognizing her. She could tell when it did. The beast inside him knew exactly who she was. It blinked, and then it turned away from her.
Instead of fighting her or trying to harm her, it stood between her and pain. It was a shield as the guards fought, some of their weapons coming so close that they might have clipped her. Instead, he protected her.
Heart in her throat, she prayed to any god who would listen to keep him safe. She wanted to see him still in one piece when all of this ended. And apparently, he felt the same way.
He did everything he could to keep himself safe. Instead, he took hits meant for her. He was bleeding from multiple places, and throughout it all Bjorn remained stoic and calm, blocking any attack effortlessly and then killing the man without hesitation.
She blinked, and suddenly there was a flood of other trolls. Men, women, and their spirit guides, all of them rushing into the fray. They didn’t come just to her aid, but it felt as though the trolls were here to protect her.
Then she saw a flash of yellow rushing toward them. A very familiar yellow that had her gasping and racing out from behind Bjorn. She trusted him to protect them both, and he did. Somehow. Somehow he was controlling himself even though historically he had never been able to do that before.
Rabbit caught her up in his arms, laughing with her and then framing her face with his massive hands. “The king?”
“He took off in that direction.”
“Take your berserker and go. He cannot get away, Priestess. He needs to be punished. For all of us.”
She nodded, then looked up at Bjorn. “Will you come with me to hunt the king?”
He tilted his head down to look at her, nearly no expression on his face. But then he nodded slowly, and she conversed with the berserker perhaps for the very first time. His voice was lower, gravel rumbling in the depths of the mountains. “Let us hunt, Priestess.”
She didn’t think about it, didn’t hesitate. She just turned with Bjorn and chased after the king.
But the farther she got from the other trolls, the more she questioned whether this was the right thing to do.
The king could have any manner of tricks up his sleeve.
Likely he had a plan that would keep him away from the trolls, but she feared what it would mean.
Did he have some kind of hidden weapon in these corridors?
Or was he leaving another way she did not know was an exit?
Perhaps he would bring them out to an entire army of people who were waiting for them on the other side.
It was the second option.
They finally caught up to the king at the end of this corridor with all his guards working on a complicated looking structure that had many wheels and dials.
A hidden secret in the wall, she suspected.
A door that was likely never meant to be opened unless under dire circumstances. Which, of course, this was.
After all, the troll he had been torturing for years was hunting him, and he was the fool who had trapped himself.
Another echoing boom rocked through the labyrinth, and earth rained down on their heads.
Astrid wasn’t sure how long this place would even stay standing, but it seemed appropriate given the circumstances.
The last battle between the man who had created this terrible place and the people he had hurt.
The king turned to see him, and she could tell there was fear in his eyes. Fear, because he had seen how Bjorn could fight, and because he had no idea how powerful Astrid was.
“You should never have come down here,” she said. “Why you would ever come yourself, I will never understand.”
“I have always handled things myself.”
“You are the monster that causes nothing but pain and suffering. You are the one who should hide,” she spat.
The king lifted his arms as though he was not surprised by what she said. “I know. You all think I am horrible, but I just know what’s going to happen. I know when everything is going to happen.”
So that was his power. He could see the future. But how far ahead could he see it?
She narrowed her eyes, planning out something that would end his life very quickly.
But she saw him react almost immediately.
He snapped his fingers, and the guards surrounded him, a wall of human flesh that would do very little to stop any of them but would buy the king enough time to get out of that complicated door.
There were two men still working on it. The gears ground against each other, rust and age making it hard for them to turn, but they were managing the massive puzzle behind them swiftly.
“To think,” the king said. “It would be you in the end. How poetic.”
“Me?”
The guards parted just enough for her to see him. Those icy blue eyes captured hers. “Haven’t you always wondered why you look so much like the princess? Why do all of the most powerful priestesses look like my daughter?”
“Because you hunted us down in the streets. You chose the girls who look like your daughter so you could pawn us off. The lords all want your daughter, but you would never give her to someone like them, so you chose instead to find little girls who looked like her.” Astrid’s voice dripped with rage. “You were wrong for that.”
“I didn’t have to find you. I always knew where you were.
” He grinned, and that expression made every hair on her body rise.
“You’re mine, after all. All of you. I found the most powerful women in this kingdom and I created power.
So much power, and all the kind I could gift to those who I deemed worthy.
My mother was the one with blonde hair. She looked just like you, and your sister, and my daughter, and all the other golden women I created. ”
Astrid felt like the floor had dropped out from under her. Surely he lied. Surely no man was so twisted that he would do that.
And then it all hit her. She’d believed no man could be so evil that he would do what he had done to Rose. If he was telling the truth, not only had he tried to sell off his daughter to a lord who had wanted to defile her, but the king had punished his own blood in the labyrinth.
Her words turned ragged and raw. “You could do that to your own child?”
“Do what, exactly?”
“You could condemn your own child to a life in this darkness? You did it not just to my sister, but to me, likely to others as well. We are your daughters.”
“You are an experiment,” he hissed. “Not my children. You do not get to have that name. I have one daughter, and she is the most powerful of you all. Her mother was half elven, and she has more power in her pinky than you could ever dream of. I created perfection. The closest being to an elf that is alive. You are nothing but scraps that I threw out onto the streets because you were not as powerful as she.”
Astrid’s heart shattered. Not just for herself, but for all the priestesses who looked like her. All the priestesses who had cried as children in the sisterhood, wondering where their parents were and if they had been loved before they were given up to that place.
“You...” She didn’t even know what to say.
What was there to say to a man like that? A man who should have loved her. A man who had tried to kill her rather than care for a child he had helped create.
And who was her mother? What woman had been forced to bear a child, likely under duress? The king wouldn’t take no for an answer, not from any woman. What had happened to her mother?
These were answers she would never get. The king watched every expression on her face before he shook his head in disapproval.
“Now, girl, you know the truth. And you are likely the only one to ever know it. You can take that to your grave, as payment for letting me go.”
“I don’t want to let you go.”
“You have no choice. You should have been dead back there, after one of my soldiers slit your throat. I’m letting you live now, so it’s a trade. You wouldn’t want to kill your own father, would you?”
She felt something cold growing in her chest. Something that was so unlike her she almost didn’t recognize this part of herself.
After all, she had spent so much time dreaming up what her father would be like.
All the while, she’d been the perfect priestess.
Astrid had known everything that was happening in every part of the kingdom.
She’d kept secrets. She’d played out every opportunity for what the future would be so she could appropriately prepare for whatever happened.
But right now, she didn’t want to prepare. She wanted revenge.
“I wouldn’t want to kill my father,” she replied, straightening her shoulders. “But you made it very clear that I am not your daughter.”
Bjorn lunged forward, as though her words untethered a leash that held him in place.
Astrid did not hide her face this time. She watched as he tore through the guards, one by one.
It didn’t matter that they stuck swords in him, that they slashed at his skin or that they tried to shoot him with arrows.
He did not stop until he loomed above the king.
Then Bjorn grabbed him by the back of the neck and twisted.
Slowly. She could see the panic in the king’s eyes, and the way he tried desperately to get away.
But she could also see the realization that he wasn’t getting out of this one.
He peered into the future, his eyes going white, and then all she could see was despair. There was no future where he survived.
The snap of his neck echoed through the hall, and he fell limp in Bjorn’s grasp.
Her beloved troll let the body drop and wiped his hands on his already bloody pants, as though he could clean them.
The angry energy seemed to drop from him, then he listed to the side, reaching out one massive arm to brace himself upon the wall.
“Bjorn?” she asked, rushing to his side and planting her hand on his chest. She couldn’t hold him up, though. He was too massive. “What do you need?”
“Ragnar,” he breathed.
“Where is he?”
“Back with the others. Tending to the wounded.”
Ragnar’s voice boomed through the corridor. “I am not, in fact. Astrid, I need you to move. Time is of the essence.”
She stood to the side, wringing her hands as she watched Ragnar work.
His cool magic immediately healed many of the wounds dotting Bjorn’s body, but there were still so many oozing blood.
She could hardly see where they were because he was so covered in red, and how much of it was his? How much of it was others?
Their gazes met, and Bjorn gave her a little sad smile. “I’m all right,” he said, giving her a firm nod. “I’ll be fine, Astrid. I’ll be fine.”
She wasn’t so sure he was correct. But she would stand here waiting for him to get better. No matter what.