Something inside me softened at his kind words and his worried eyes, and this frightened me so terribly that I summoned my flagging strength and righted myself. My head ached, and my side where the hound had scratched it burned, but I found I could bear it. It certainly wasn’t a serious enough injury to cause me to lose consciousness. The more I tried to puzzle out the strange occurrence, the more muddled my thoughts became.
Leif halted Sleipnir and helped me down, his hand lingering on my shoulder. “Will you be all right alone?” he asked. “I want to get you water, but . . .” He looked so unsure, so far from his usual arrogant bravado, that my breath hitched.
“Water would help,” I said, just so he would leave and stop looking at me like that. Fool, I thought. Someone—an enemy—shows you the least bit of kindness and your heart softens like—
Like it did toward Séamus. Thinking of him made me reach toward the necklace he’d given me, but when I touched my collarbone, there was nothing but skin. With a painful stab of regret, I realized the hellhound must have ripped the necklace free during the battle. It was lost in the Faerie Tunnel now, and my throat swelled. The last connection to my life before my powers manifested had been torn away. As I spent many moments lost in that disturbing line of thought, I didn’t notice right away that Leif had returned until he handed me the flask of water.
“Better?” he asked after I had guzzled most of the flask down.
“Yes.”
He took the flask from me and sat down. “What happened?”
“I just fainted for a moment.” And somehow floated outside my body. “I must have hit my head harder than I thought.”
“We should make camp here. I don’t think you will make it to Dyflin tonight.”
He got to work on a fire, and I watched him, willing my head to stop spinning. I’d never lost control of my mind so much that I left my own body, and I feared it would happen again. If Leif hadn’t been with me, I would have fallen. “Thank you for staying with me,” I said quietly, without looking at him.
He turned. “Did you just thank me?” He laughed as my expression quickly turned to a scowl. “I wouldn’t leave an injured ally. You fought well against those hounds.”
Though I didn’t want to be reminded of anything we’d just seen in the Faerie Tunnel, it made me think of our strange rescuers. “The ravens there,” I said. “Who are they really?”
The smile fell from his face. “The Valkyrie—the Choosers of the Slain. They decide who lives and dies in battle, and the dead they carry to Valhalla.”
Awareness trickled through the haze. As a pagan war goddess, the Morrigan was also said to be responsible for who lived and died on the battlefield.
A gift of the gods, then, Leif had said to me when we’d discussed my power, as though he had experience on the subject.
I thought of his otherworldly abilities in battle, and a slim connection formed in my mind. “What have the Valkyrie to do with your power?”
He was quiet for a moment. “I have a pact with the Valkyrie; they endowed me with the power to defeat Fenris and his kind.”
“And the terms of this pact?”
“They are not something you need concern yourself over.”
“Such a thing does not often end well for the mortal,” I said quietly.
He chuckled humorlessly. “I care not.”
“You told me you wanted vengeance on the giants. Is that why you sought out the Valkyrie?”
“You put things together quickly.” He sounded grudgingly impressed. “Yes, vengeance was what motivated me.”
We sat and listened to the fire hungrily consume the wooden branches, and I thought Leif would say nothing more, but then his voice joined the sounds of the fire. “That village I told you about—it wasn’t just bloody footprints we found. We also found my sister . . . what was left of her.”
I glanced at him, but his face could have been carved from rock. Every muscle in his body was tense. I was surprised by my desire to reach out to him—to place my hand on his arm to tell him without words how much I understood—but I knew it would stop him from continuing his tale, and I knew it needed to be told.
“Finna was visiting our aunt and uncle in our mother’s home village—she spent every summer there for as long as I can remember. I think she needed that—to have someone be a mother to her. I could only do so much for her,” he said, and nodded toward my braid with a ghost of a smile. “Summer is the best time for trade, so my father and I were often gone for many months anyway. But this time, we came home early. Father sent me to get her, and I remember as I rode there . . .” He trailed off, his mouth twisted in pain. “I remember thinking how excited she’d be to see the silks we’d brought back.
“When I got there, I kept telling myself that I’d taken a wrong turn somehow. I couldn’t be at my mother’s village. There was nothing left. Everything was blackened, and ashes floated in the air. I walked to where my uncle’s house was, and that’s where I found Finna on the ground just outside where the door used to be. She was mangled almost beyond recognition,” he said, his voice gruff and angry. I couldn’t look at him. I knew this pain: seeing your sister, once full of life, dead. “Her hair was soaked with blood, her chest was torn open from neck to navel, with her organs spilling out around her.”
Nausea burned in my throat as I imagined not only his sister’s body, but Alana’s. This time, I couldn’t stop myself. I reached over and touched his arm—just once, and only for a moment. “I know what it is to endure the loss of a sister, and I understand that need to have revenge on her murderers.”
His eyes met mine. “Then you know there is nothing I wouldn’t give to stop the j?tnar.”
“So you made a pact with the Valkyrie?” I thought of the way the Morrigan had always followed me as a crow, and how she’d finally revealed herself to me. I shivered and moved closer to the fire. “How did you find them?”
“When I brought my sister’s body back to our village, I went immediately to the seer. I begged her to tell me what I could do to destroy the creatures that had done this to Finna. The seer told me I would have to cross a glacier and scale a mountain, and even then, I would have more to pay before I’d receive the power I needed to avenge my sister.” His hand curled into a fist. “I started for the cave that same day. The Valkyrie only appear during midsummer solstice, in a cave where seers receive their first visions, high on the mountain. It left me a mere three days to get there.
“I was nearly frozen and exhausted from lack of food and sleep when I finally clawed my way to the cave. A red light glowed from within, as though Hel’s fires burned in its depths, and I had to crawl inside like an animal. They weren’t ravens in the cave—they were women dressed in identical golden armor, huge black wings soaring out from their shoulder blades. There were six of them, and they stood in front of the red fire, with their faces half in shadow.”
I thought again of the Morrigan, appearing as half bird, half woman. “How terrifying it must have been to seek such creatures out.”
Leif shook his head. “It wasn’t bravery at that point. I was desperate and almost delirious from the cold and lack of food. Fear was the furthest thing from my mind.” He scoffed. “Though now I think I should have been afraid.”
“I think we’ve seen firsthand just how frightening these immortals can be,” I said as my side and head throbbed in sympathy.
He passed me the water flask. “Do you think you can eat?”
“I’d rather hear the end of your story.”
He flashed his teeth at me in a grim smile. “There’s not much more to tell. They made predictions, one of which has already come true: that I’d be forced to ally myself with my enemy.”
“Hm. We share the same prophecy, I see.”
“Did I not save you from those hounds? It seems the prophecy worked in your favor.”
“We saved ourselves,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in correcting his arrogant assumptions. “There must be more to the tale—what did the Valkyrie promise you?”
“They told me they would give me the power to defeat the j?tnar—strength, fighting ability”—he glanced down at his arm, where scratches from the hounds were already fading—“fast healing. Strength of mind so I never lose focus during battle.”