Chapter 25 #2
Another child stood with him, a girl our age with fierce eyes and white lines painted beneath them in branching streaks of bone ash, mimicking the war paint of shield maidens.
She grunted as she tried to push the heavy cart off him.
Joining her, we forced the wagon back onto its wheels and freed Kayn.
I grabbed his arm and threw it over my shoulder, hefting him up and over the edge of the cart.
Gripping the wood, Kayn pulled himself in the rest of the way.
His bulging eyes peered around me with a wild look.
I craned my neck to be sure the bully had vanished in the crowd of bodies milling about the village. In shades of brown, green, and blue cloth, men and women went about their duties, some conversing lightly, others busy in work, spinning wool into thread, or chopping wood.
“He’s gone,” I said as I turned back to Kayn. He nodded slowly. “Are you hurt?”
“My leg is broken,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “I knew that. And it’ll heal in a few weeks, then you’ll be faster than me again.”
“Give me my sword,” he demanded.
I bent to pick it up, but the girl snatched it away from me.
She tossed it to Kayn, who caught it easily.
Though I knew most of the children in our village, I hadn’t seen her before, maybe because she worked on one of the farms farther out, or perhaps her father built longships and they lived closer to the sea.
“Who are you?” I asked.
She smiled and only responded by lifting her own makeshift equipment.
She used a web-like shield of woven sticks to block Kayn’s blows, then pushed back against me when I struck her shield with my stick.
A smile spread across her dimpled cheeks, and her free-flowing auburn hair blew into her face, sticking to her lips as she turned and ran from me.
Our battle resumed with gleeful shrieks from the mysterious girl.
Laughing, I chased her down, trying to grab at her shield, but she used it to push me away.
I darted after her and grabbed her wrist. She let out another shriek, spun, and slammed her shield into my chest, then tossed her long hair over her shoulders.
A gust of wind carried it out behind her in a dance of soft, rusty tendrils.
Her brow furrowed, and she poked a finger at me, scolding me for grabbing her arm but it wasn’t a second later that she flung herself at me, and our play battle began again.
“Show me you’re a warrior,” she said. Her pink cheeks bubbled as she returned my smirk. “Don’t play easy.”
So I didn’t. I slammed my sword against her shield again and again, and she carefully angled it to protect her fingers. Though I pushed her back step by step, she didn’t seem to mind.
“Rune! Rune!” Kayn’s voice was an echo behind me.
I was so absorbed in the rhythmic clash of my weapon against her shield that I no longer felt the snowflakes tickling my cheeks.
Kayn’s shout fell away from my focus, and I wanted nothing more than to rise to the challenge this girl gave me.
I would prove to her that I was a warrior. I’d show her I didn’t tire.
The whack of the stick became my battle cry. Her laughter inspired me to try harder and harder to break her shield. This is how the warriors trained. They practiced and fought into the wee hours of the morning until their weapons cracked or the shield-maiden’s defenses splintered.
I pulled my stick-sword back, preparing to hit with more force than I had before. Bringing the weapon down, the girl dodged out of the way. When she stepped to the side, my sword smashed against the stone base of Freya’s feet. The stick shattered into a dozen splintered pieces.
For a moment, I stared at the remnants of my destroyed weapon until the girl’s voice plucked me out of the stupor.
“Protecting others,” she said.
I couldn't help but notice the way the white war paint concealed a few scattered freckles on the apples of her cheeks. “What?”
“That’s what it means to be a warrior.” Her dark eyes flickered to where Kayn’s shouts echoed. Shrugging, she continued. “And protecting our land, and all that is ours. What the gods have given us. All of it. That is what I will record in the poems when I become a skald.”
“What is your name?” I asked, intrigued by her compliment. She’d nearly granted me the title of a warrior by suggesting that I was there to protect Kayn. Of course I protected Kayn because his damn leg was broken.
The blush blooming beneath her bone-ash spread across the bridge of her nose and down the curve of her cheeks.
“Fight for it,” she said, giving me another challenge.
“My father says that’s another thing that makes a warrior.
Earning the right to something.” Her eyes sparkled with mischief, and I grinned.
“Rune,” Kayn yelled. I turned to him in time to see his arm rear back. He hurled the stick I’d given him into the air. Catching it, I beamed and spun on the girl.
“Follow me?” she asked with a giggle as she darted away from me. Throwing me one last look, she ducked behind the statue of Freya.
I charged after her with my newly gained weapon. After a few solid whacks, she pushed me back harder, and I slipped on the slick earth, now coated with a sleek layer of snow.
When I fell to the ground, she stepped up, standing over me with her shield. Looking down her nose at me, she smiled.
“I followed you,” I said as if I were the one who earned the right to speak triumphantly, even though she towered over me. “Will you tell me your name? Or should I just call you Skald?”
“Myrah,” she said. “But I am whoever I want to be. Maker of longships. shield-maiden. Winner.” Her lips pursed in a mischievous smile before they parted again. “But I’m called Myrah.”
Kayn’s childlike voice called out again. “Myrah’s just a fisherman’s daughter.”
She shot him a look full of vitriol. “I’m whoever I want to be, Kayn,” she snapped.
He just laughed and begged me to pull the wagon closer to us again.
“Shall I show you I can be more than a fisherman’s daughter?” She whacked the wooden stick against the edge of his wagon.
I took this as an invitation to duel again. Raising my little weapon, I advanced on her. She smacked my stick. Then again and again, but it wasn’t as hard as it was the first time.
“Are you going easy on me?” I asked. She shrugged, but the smile that ghosted across her face betrayed her. I lifted my chin and mirrored her smile. “Hit hard, Skald.”
That was why it felt right to call her by that name.
The memory of my childhood vanished, and I knew why I’d given Lux the same nickname. My Skald. Myrah…
This was a name Kayn had known all along, for hundreds of years.
Even if he wasn’t sure who Lux was at first, just like we hadn’t known, he definitely knew now.
There was no way in Hel he stood amongst these ruins, the same place we’d played at battle as children from another lifetime—no, the same lifetime, for him—and didn’t remember.
Blinking away the memory, I lifted my head.
Tendrils of hair the color of oak hung in my face as I dragged my eyes up to stare at the bastard who’d kept yet another secret from us.
We’d been friends. He’d been there since the beginning, always vying for Myrah’s attention, though not always in the best way.
Whenever Kayn found out Lux was Myrah, I couldn’t be sure, but I had no doubt he knew now. Since Lux and I had reincarnated, we had to fight for the memory of our former selves, but he’d been in the same body and the same life the entire time. With the same damn envy for the woman I loved.
When Kayn placed his hands on Lux’s face, I gritted my teeth, letting my fangs scrape painfully across my bottom teeth.
“You must try harder,” he said. My mouth twitched. What the Hel was he asking of her now?
“I am,” she insisted.
He shook his head, a look of almost fatherly disappointment coating his nearly black eyes. “No, you’re not. You’re here, with him.”
“We’re going to Yggdrasil. I can’t let Silver take away my powers.”
“Right, but you can kill them all now. Just be done with it.”
“I know—”
“You don’t,” he argued. “If you knew, you’d be moving faster.You’d be destroying vampires for every minute you had the strength to move.”
“I am, but Kayn, we can’t…I can’t,” she stuttered. “I’m tired, and my mind is so muddled.”
Something flashed in his eyes. Irritation, worry, and maybe anger.
“Exactly, you have to push through it. A human mind—even a witch’s—cannot handle the weight of the gods’s voices.
That’s why you have to move faster. You’ve lasted so much longer than the other huntresses.
They never made it long enough to kill any of us. ”
His gaze flicked to me, no doubt because he was thinking of my mother.
Ingrid’s mind distorted long before she ever came close to hunting the undead.
Like Lux, Kayn had tried to train her, or at least that was my assumption when she vanished for days at a time.
Then Kayn reappeared in my life as The Exile, the vampire who had offended the former king by spending too much time with my mother.
After that, I’d only heard rumors of who Kayn was.
That he knew my mother, that he was the only vampire who still worshiped Odin and Freya and wanted his soul back.
“We tried luring Silver in so that we could cut her off from the vampires, and they’d be scattered without their leader,” Lux explained.
“She got away. So our next best bet is to beat her to Yggdrasil and fight her army there. By the time they make it there, they’ll be weak from the gods’ realm and hunger.
There’s no way they can protect enough human vessels to last all that way. ”
He stared down at Lux, determination setting his bare jaw. “I see the gods within you, Lux. You won’t have control of yourself much longer.”
She tugged against his grip, but he did not let her go. “Kayn, I’m fine.”
“You just said it. You’re tired and your mind is slipping. Before it's lost completely—”
“Fighting makes it worse!” she cried. Shaking, her hands planted against his chest. I nearly broke my fangs as I ground them harder and harder. My jaw throbbed as I held back from attacking him. He needed to hear this from her mouth.
With every fiber of my being, I kept my fists at my side instead of wrapping my fingers around that liar’s throat. Just like when he was a young boy, he needed to be reminded that she wasn’t who he said she was.
Lux was whoever she chose to be. Whether that was the huntress or…my wife.