Keep me? I stiffened, though neither of them seemed to notice.
“On what conditions, Father?” Bjorn retorted. “I know you. There is no chance you’d have been able to resist using her to further your ambitions. All I desire is to take her away to a place where she can make her own fate.”
“I would not have used her.” Harald gave Bjorn a look of disgust. “What you fail to see, my son, is that if you’d given Freya the truth, she might have chosen to serve Nordeland. If she is half the woman you claim, then she’d have surely joined our cause, if only given the opportunity. But instead you denied her the chance to do great things so as not to risk your ability to use her to satisfy your own ends.”
Use her, use her, use her.
The words repeated in my skull, growing louder with each saying until it felt like a giant screamed inside my head. Everyone had used me. Everyone—but Bjorn had been different. Had been the one who’d put me first. The one who’d cared.
Except it turned out that he’d used me worst of all.
“I curse you!” I screamed, and it felt like the world trembled, tilting beneath my feet. “I curse all of you never to see Valhalla. I curse all of you to Helheim. May Hel take all of you into her keeping!”
Then the ground surely did tremble, rumbling and bouncing, everyone struggling to keep their balance.
“Freya!” Bjorn stumbled toward me, but before he made it two steps, great blackened roots exploded from the earth, wrapping around his legs.
And not just him.
All around me, roots exploded from the earth to grasp the legs and arms of Harald’s warriors, men and women screaming as they hacked at them with axe and sword, but the weapons just passed through the roots as if they weren’t there.
Bjorn’s axe appeared in his hand, and he too slashed at the roots, flames severing them, but more burst from the ground, trying to drag him down.
Panic overwhelmed my rage, and I lost my footing as a concussive blast of thunder sent me staggering. Tora’s lightning exploded the roots attacking her, only for more to appear. Skade was screaming and shooting her magical arrows into root after root.
The other Nordelanders had no such defenses.
On my knees, I watched in horror as the black roots wrapped around the other warriors, digging into their flesh, the screams unlike anything I’d ever heard as they were dragged to the ground.
Then, as one, the roots vanished into the earth.
Leaving only silence.
On my knees, I stared in horror at the dozens of bodies lying on the ground, chests still and eyes glazed. Dead.
“Freya?”
I swallowed my bile, eyes going to Bjorn, who still stood alive, as did Harald, Tora, and Skade.
No one moved.
Harald stepped down from the rock on which he perched, moving toward me. “That was what they meant by ‘child of two bloods.’ Not god and mortal, but of two gods.” He drew in a ragged breath, gray eyes filled with delight. “She’s Hel’s daughter. The first of her kind.”
I wasn’t. I couldn’t be. “No.”
“Yes.” Harald grinned. “You cursed all before you to your mother’s domain and she took them. All dead. All denied Valhalla because of your power.”
A whimper exited my lips and I crawled backward from him, my eyes skipping from corpse to corpse. All dead. All cursed. By my temper.
By me.
“That is why you are so special, Freya,” he said. “That is why even the gods themselves recognized your power. The power to unite Skaland, yes. But also the power to destroy all who stand against you.”
I gagged, recoiling from his fervor, climbing to my feet.
“No!” Bjorn stepped between us, axe blazing bright. “She’s not a weapon.”
“Her fate is inked in her blood,” Harald said, giving a wry shake of his head. “It’s carved in her bones. This power is Freya’s destiny.”
“Freya, run!” Bjorn lifted his weapon. “Run!”
I twisted on my heels, sprinting into the forest, branches lashing at my face, roots tripping my feet.
Hel’s daughter.
I clenched my fists, pushing myself for more speed as though I might outrun the truth of what I was.
But it was the one thing I could never escape.
My foot caught on a rock and I went sprawling, rolling and tumbling down a slope to stop with a sickening crunch against a boulder.
“Get up,” I hissed, pushing myself onto hands and knees, but my arm buckled, a sob ripping from my lips. “Keep going.”
“Easy, Freya.”
A familiar voice filled my ears and I lifted my face to find Steinunn bending next to me. “I need help,” I gasped. “Bjorn…he’s allied with Harald. They’re here.”
Steinunn smiled. “I know, Freya,” she said, her voice no longer that of a Skalander but bearing a Nordelander’s accent. “I know everything.” Then she lifted a bowl and blew the smoke rising from it into my face.
Panic hit me as I understood, but I was already spinning down and down. As I hit the ground, my eyes fixed on the red leather laces on her shoes.
Then all that remained was darkness.
My bed was moving beneath me, rising and falling as though I’d had too much to drink, the sensation sending a wave of nausea through me. “Bjorn,” I mumbled, trying to reach out to him.
Except I couldn’t move my arms, rough rope binding my wrists together.
My eyes snapped open and daylight stabbed into them like daggers. At first, all I could see was white, but as I wildly blinked, my vision cleared to reveal the hull of a drakkar, booted legs all around me. Memory flooded my mind, of Harald and his men arriving at the cavern. Of the truth of Bjorn’s allegiances being revealed. Of corpses on the ground all around me, dead by my curse.
Of Steinunn, blowing smoke into my face as she revealed her true allegiance.
“Good to see you’re finally awake, Freya.” Harald’s voice filled my ears, and I rolled over, looking up to meet his pale gray gaze. “Where am I?”
“On a drakkar,” he answered with a faint smile, mocking me with the obvious. Then he lifted one shoulder. “We are in the strait on our way back to Nordeland.”
“Let me go,” I snarled, struggling to sit up. But my head still spun from the motion of the drakkar and the effects of whatever Steinunn had drugged me with. The skald herself sat at the far end of the boat, cloak wrapped tightly around her, eyes fixed on the sea.
“I think we both know that freeing you is not possible,” Harald answered. “You’d only allow your anger at Bjorn to send you running back to Snorri armed with your newly discovered magic, and he, in turn, would use you against me, whether you willed it or no. He’s already proven exceptionally capable of forcing your hand.”
“I don’t need Snorri to curse you,” I hissed. “I need only my own tongue.”
Harald eyed me for a long moment, expression considered rather than alarmed. “True,” he finally said. “Except I don’t think that you will. I saw the look on your face when you murdered my warriors. When you cursed their souls to Helheim when their rightful end is in Valhalla. You might well put a knife between my ribs, but cursing me means embracing a side of yourself that I think…terrifies you. As it is, I’d ask you to remember that I’m the only one who has never lied to you.”
My skin crawled as if a thousand spiders danced across my flesh, his words breathing new life into the horror I’d felt over what I’d done. Not the killing, although that was bad enough, but cursing souls for eternity. Men and women who’d raised no arms against me—had only been following the orders of their king. Worst of all, it hadn’t even been them to whom my fury had been directed.
It was Bjorn.
My heart stuttered at the thought of him, and I managed to right myself, eyes skipping over the figures in the drakkar until they landed on his familiar form. He sat on one of the benches, elbows resting on his knees, shoulders slumped.
“Traitor,” I screamed, lunging. “I’m going to fucking cut out your heart!”