“Nothing I do is because you killed Aksel! Or even Hulda.” Her face is solemn and exquisite in the starlight reflected off the water, so beautiful that it’s splintering me. “But you lied to me, Ansa. The reason why doesn’t matter. We were alone that night in the forest after Gry accused you. No one else would have heard the truth. It was just you and me, as it is now. You could have trusted me. Confided in me. And instead you put a wall between us, to protect yourself.”
I swipe my nose on my sleeve. “Please,” I say, my voice thick with tears. “I’ll never do it again. Don’t push me away.”
Her smile is unfocused. Like a fog off the lake. “When you’ve done it once, the way becomes easier. The paths unblocked, the hesitance rubbed away with repetition.”
Cyrill said that to us, as he prepared us for our first raid. He was talking about killing.
I never thought one simple lie could be just as deadly. Except it wasn’t just one lie.
“But I had never deceived you before that moment,” I say in a low voice. “It’s just that with everything that was happening—”
“When it is difficult, your decisions mean the most. Then we discover what we’re made of.”
I want to howl with rage as she quotes her own father, standing on the deck of our longship just before we pushed out onto the Torden. The night swirls with a rush of hot and cold air. Thyra staggers backward under the force of it, a look of betrayal and shock on her face.
I sink to my knees, my fists pressed to my thighs, shaking as I try to hold my curse captive. “Kill me, then, if you hate me so much. Just don’t banish me from the tribe.”
Her expression crumples. “I wish I could hate you,” she says in a strained voice.
Hope glows warm in my belly, like a flame on a windy night, precious and fragile. “You know I’m yours. You know I would never do anything to hurt you.”
She winces, her eyes bright with pain. “You already have, Ansa.” She holds up her hands as my arms rise, trying once again to reach her across the chasm. “Enough. I’m not banishing you. We will tell the others that Aksel ran away after being rebuffed by both me and Jaspar. You will tell everyone that you found his tracks along the shore, headed back to the north. I will say the same.”
“They’ll ride after him.”
“No, they won’t. He was one of our weakest warriors, and he had proven himself unstable. Jaspar will let him go. He’s too eager to reach Vasterut to pursue a broken warrior.”
“What about Aksel’s body?”
She takes a step forward, her expression smooth. Cold. “We bury him in the stones. It won’t be visible from the bluff if anyone looks down. And then we will go back to camp, tell our story, go to sleep, and get up tomorrow as if nothing has happened. You will not tell anyone of your curse, and you will use every ounce of power and will you possess to suppress it. This is for your safety and that of every member of our tribe. Do you understand?”
I understand so many things, each piece of knowledge a blade of sorrow inside me. “Yes.”
She stares at me for a long moment, letting me feel the twist of her weapon, the way my heart gives way beneath her will. “Good. Let’s get to work.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
I do not sleep at all. Thyra walked away from me the moment we reached the camp again. She stared at me coolly while she slowly and deliberately poured water over her hands, rubbed them together, and dried them on her cloak. Perhaps it was just to clean the stink of burned meat from her skin, but I could not help but think she was washing me away too, the way she’s touched me, the bond we shared, my place at her side. When she was finished, she crossed to the other side of the dying fire and laid her blanket next to Bertel.
I am curiously numb as I rise from my blanket and roll it around my spare weapons and bloodstained tunic. My muscles ache with fatigue, and my steps are heavy as I fall into line behind Thyra and a group of warriors who are loyal to her—today Sander is among that group, and Jaspar hikes at the front with the warriors he brought from Vasterut. However, they seem more like one tribe, the distance worn away by the shared journey, talking and teasing as we slowly make our way up a sandy trail that winds along between grass and forests and dunes. The sand is marbled with black, and the Torden is smooth and blue as the sun arcs over us. The wind bites at our ears and the tips of our noses; the snow will come any day. In a fog, I find myself wondering if the weather is the same here as it is in our northern camp. I hadn’t lived there all my life, but it is the only place I truly remember thinking of as home.