I lunge between her and the evidence of my crime. “He’s not back there! I already looked.”
Her eyes narrow, and then she tucks her face against her upper arm as the smell surrounds us, heavy and bitter. “What’s causing that stench, then?”
“It’s . . . um . . .” I pause a moment too long, and her expression hardens. She pushes past me, her torch held high, and I’m too paralyzed to stop her.
My stomach turns as I hear her gagging with disgust. She returns to me, spitting onto the sand and looking like she’s about to lose her dinner. “You did this,” she says slowly.
“No, I swear!”
“No?” Her voice rises high, matching the blaze of her eyes. “You don’t even look surprised, Ansa! You know exactly what lies behind that rock.”
My lips tingle cold with the realization that she’s caught me out, that my mountain of lies has crumbled to dust in the space of a moment.
“Why would you do something like that?” she says in a choked voice. “I can understand meeting him blade to blade, but why did you have to—”
“He attacked me!” I gather enough courage to look up at her, and immediately wish I hadn’t. “I didn’t mean to.”
“But you said you could control the curse.” She’s staring at me with that wary look in her eyes again, as if I’m a stranger. “You killed Hulda, too, didn’t you?”
The sob wrenches itself out of me as Hulda’s frozen eyes rise in memory. “Please, Thyra—”
“No.” The sound lashes from her like the bite of a whip. She backs away from me. “You lied to me, didn’t you? You’ve been lying this whole time.”
“I didn’t want you to think—”
“That you murdered an innocent slave in cold blood? Or—and I find this hard to believe—did she threaten you somehow?”
“N-no,” I stammer.
“Hulda was Kupari. Did you do it as revenge, to get back at the witch for what she did to you?”
“What?” I hold my arms out, but it only causes Thyra to move further away. She looks disgusted, the back of her hand pressed over her mouth. “I had no intention of harming Hulda!”
“But you did, didn’t you? Only with ice that time.” Her voice is dead. Emotionless. “And now you’ve killed Aksel with fire. Did he really draw first blood?”
“Yes,” I shout, my voice cracking. “How can you question that?”
“Because you lied to me,” she roars. “Right to my face! Knowing what was at stake, knowing where we were going, knowing that I was depending on you, you lied to me. Your chieftain.” She rolls her eyes. “Not just once, either. Over and over again, it seems. And I ate your lies like honey cake.” Her voice shakes as she adds, “I was so eager to believe.”
“I can control it, Thyra. I’m getting better every day,” I say.
“How can you say that, when Aksel’s roasted corpse lies only feet away from us? His death had to have taken minutes, Ansa, not seconds. He was cooked, not devoured by sudden flames. Either you were controlling it in the most evil way, or you were out of control for longer than you want to believe. Which is it?”
Evil. My stomach clenches and I nearly heave as I recall the way Aksel clawed at his belly as his innards boiled. I had no idea how to stop it—the enemy inside me was in control. “It won’t happen again. I swear on my life. I’ll kill myself before I let it happen again. Please.”
I take a step toward her, but stiffen when she leaps out of my reach. And when the flames of her torch flare, she yelps and hurls the stick into the lake, as if she thinks I would use it against her. Hot tears burn their way down my cheeks.
“It’s been you all along,” she says raggedly. “When the fires flare. It wasn’t just the ice on the marsh.”
“I helped you,” I say with a sob. “I saved all those children, all those andeners. They would have perished in the marsh if not for me. You couldn’t have saved them.”
“I thought you were controlling it, but now I see what a fool I was.” She stares at me with a cold kind of fear. “We all could have ended up like Hulda, though. We’re lucky you didn’t kill every single one of us.”
“I did everything I could to keep that from happening!”
Thyra nods slowly, never taking her eyes off me. “And I’m grateful for that. But it doesn’t erase your lies.”
“So I make one mistake”—I grit my teeth as her eyebrow arches—“two mistakes, one of which was to kill a warrior who had ambushed me with the full intention of cutting my throat, and now you abandon me?”
“I’m doing no such thing!”
“Really?” I walk toward her, and she backtracks.