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It smelled like hay. That was how I knew something was wrong.
My eyes opened slowly, almost unwillingly, sealed shut with a layer of soot and dust. I coughed softly and tried to rouse myself, but my legs didn’t seem to be working. My head didn’t seem to be working. There was something wrong with my arms.
Am I awake...?
For a terrifying moment, I couldn’t actually tell. My brain was slow and sluggish, thoughts dragging slowly forward, like they were pulling themselves from mud. I remembered running from the tower, the bright blaze of the fire. I remembered the pounding of fists, as Erik and some other man started fighting each other. But the man was too big to have been real, my mind must have been playing tricks. Erik had won the fight, hadn’t he? Hadn’t we started running?
I tried to sit up, realized I already was. There was something pressing into my back, something cutting into my wrists. I tried again to move, only to slump suddenly forward.
What’s happening...?
“You’re awake.”
A voice came out of the murky darkness. Harsh, yet it sounded pleased. It carried an eerie familiarity, though I was too disoriented to recognize it. My eyes fluttered open, when had they shut?
There was a man standing in front of me, though it wasn’t the one I’d been expecting. He was tall, slicing the shadows. He wore a soldier’s uniform. The memory started coming back.
“That’s right, you’re starting to remember.” He strode out of the gloom that blurred the edges of my vision and crouched down in front of me. There was a coil of rope in one hand, a blade in the other. “I’ve been waiting ages for you to wake up, almost started without you.”
There was something ominous in the way he said it, and my stomach clenched.
Started what?
“Where am I?”
The words slurred together, turning to paste in my mouth. My breath was coming quicker now, and there was a faint ringing in my ears—a throbbing along my hairline. I tried to lift a hand to examine it, but couldn’t move them from my sides. I tried again, struggling in panic.
I couldn’t move, not more than a few inches.
My eyes lifted again to the rope.
“It doesn’t really matter, but you’re in the stables. I brought you here after catching you and your little bannerman trying to escape.” He leaned back on his heels, grinning like a jackal. “I wasn’t expecting to see him there, only you. But I should have guessed you’d be leaving together. Never have I seen someone so love-struck. It hangs over him like a cloud.”
I blinked again, trying to clear my vision. The image was becoming sharper now, and certain things began to click into place. A silver coin, a flash of eyes. A fight outside the barracks.
“You’re him,” I said, unable to manage anything more.
The lieutenant grinned, and nodded. He was still twirling that curl of rope absentmindedly between his fingers. Every so often, he would give it a little squeeze.
I saw the whitening of his knuckles. The flicker of his torch in the dark.
“Yes, I’m him,” he echoed, seeming pleased that he’d made an impression. “And you’re the little witch everyone is so excited to burn in the morning.” He said the words lightly, but his gaze sharpened around the edges, catching mine. “I wasn’t aware we’d be lighting the flames tonight.”
Trina. The brothel.
In a sudden rush, the rest of the night came back. Not in pieces, but in a flood.
I remembered the escape from the tower, our terrible brush with a company of soldiers, the scorching blaze on my cheeks at the heat coming off the enflamed brothel. I remembered the fight, and those moments just after, when I’d told Erik I was leaving, when I’d told him to stay.
We’d been arguing. Now he was gone, and I was here.
Start with something easier.
“I saw the fire from my window,” I stammered, still dizzy enough to spin. Again, I tried to move my arms, but found them anchored somehow behind my back. “I can’t imagine how it...” I trailed off, casting a sudden look around me. We were in the stables? “Why did you bring me here?”
He clapped his knees, pushing abruptly to his feet.
“That’s a very good question,” he said pleasantly. “But before I tell you, I’d like you to answer a few of mine.” He paused, giving me a chance to reply. It was utterly beyond me, the very most I could do was sit there and stare. “Where were you going tonight? Where was he taking you?”
It took a few seconds to process, another few seconds to formulate a response.
Erik.
“I was going to the forest,” I mumbled, hoping this would suffice. I didn’t need to work, to make my voice waver. It was doing it all by itself. “I was going there alone. Erik saw me running and cornered me by the arena.” I let my eyes drift to the window. “I think he was helping with the fire.”
Considering my present state, I’d thought this was genius.
The soldier apparently disagreed.
“Is that right?” he asked, chuckling to himself. “Is that the story you’ll be telling? The boy had nothing to do with the fire or your impossible escape from the tower; he merely chanced into you by the arena? You did the rest of it by yourself?”
I nodded mutely, unable to think of a better reply. I’d thought the most I could do was sit there and stare, but even that was a challenge. No sooner would I start to get my balance, than the ground would lurch, and the world would start tilting once again.
Thank the gods for this thing at my back; I’d never stay upright otherwise.
My fingers twitched against it. “What is—”
“How did you escape the tower?”
This was a harder question, I hadn’t yet thought of a reply. My sluggish brain struggled to come up with an answer as he drifted ominously closer, the harsh edges of his face flickering in the torchlight. I couldn’t tell how old he was, maybe five or six years older than me. His hands were large, and kept tightening around the edge of his blade. It glinted silver, catching the light.
“I stole the key,” I mumbled, knowing full well I’d be unable to substantiate this. Why did I need to justify my escape? I’d been captured, did it really matter? “Where is Erik?”
The slap came before I was ready, knocking my head to the side. There was a burst of pain, and I gasped without thinking. The sound faded quickly, swallowed by the shadows.
“You will not speak his name,” the soldier commanded, almost growling. He crouched once more in front of me. “Do you understand me, witch? You will not say it again.”
I stared at him in shock, rigid as a stone.
I had known the man harbored ill-intentions—he’d made that perfectly clear. I had known he was furious with Erik for thwarting them. If it wasn’t the action itself, it was the look on his face when it was done. That enraged impotence; I’d seen it on men before. For the first time since we’d started talking, I glanced again around the stable, seeing it in a whole new light. Suddenly, the rest of my questions didn’t matter. There was a single thing that dominated my mind.
“Why am I here?” I asked shakily.
The man leaned back on his heels, regarding me with a slight smile. The anger had faded as quickly as it had come; he was enjoying himself now—drawing out each moment with the savor of a man who’d been planning it for a long time. He let me hang a few seconds, then tossed the rope.
“You are here because I desire it,” he said simply, rising to his feet and pacing calmly across the ground. There was a clank, as he bolted shut a door. “You are here because you ran.”
We were in a stall, I realized. One of the larger stalls in the back of the stable. Ironically enough, it was the same place I’d seen Steffen railing at Erik just a few days before. The ground was damp with condensation, and the air was thick with the must of straw. The horses had already been evacuated—it was the first thing my people did in a fire.
There was no one around but us.
“You intend to kill me?” I asked softly, surprised I could force the words. It was something I wouldn’t have been able to manage a few days earlier, but things had changed since then. “Here?”
He glanced at me, nodded. “I intend to do a great many other things first,” he replied, eyes sweeping up and down my body, “but then, yes, I intend to kill you.” He paused. “Unless you try to stop me.”
Another pause, another smile.
“I am hoping so very much, you will try to stop me.”
Stop you?
It was only then, I realized where I was sitting, the ways I’d been bound. It wasn’t a wall behind me, as I’d imagined, but a large post they used to tether the horses. The ground around my feet had been cleared of hay, scraped to the bare ground, and I was positioned beneath a hole in the ceiling, the one the stable boys complained about and used to gather rain. Beneath my legs and behind my back, there were bundles of hay, scratchy and smelling faintly of dung. The man hadn’t merely brought rope and blade, I was seeing him by the light of a fire. He’d brought a torch as well.
He’s going to burn me.
“So what do you say, witch?” He leaned forward with a grin, both hands on his knees. “Are you going to make this interesting? Or shall we get started right now?”
The shivering stopped, and every part of me went abruptly still.
For all my dark imaginings of this moment, for all my vague plans, there was no part of me that had counted on something like this. My wildest dreams could not have conjured it. Trapped in a stable, lost to the rest of the world. Alone with this man, and all his twisted fantasies.
He wanted me to stop him? He wanted to outmatch the witch? Yet I was bound and bleeding. Bound by more than just rope—by a sacred oath that held fast to all my sisters.
But does it hold me now?
The tower was gone, the door opened by a key. Wherever he was—and I prayed he still lived—I could thank Erik for that. They could not assume it was witchcraft that freed me. There would be no swell of vengeance, no purges, little girls being dragged from their beds at night. This man had done his best to even the score—uneven as it was—and the question plagued me.
Does it hold me now?
“Of course, there are other things I’d like to do first,” he continued, striding towards me and kicking one of my feet to the side. It rolled open as he crouched between my ankles, reaching boldly forward and tucking back a lock of my hair. His hand lingered on my skin, curved around my jaw. It was warm and sticky, stained with resin from the torch. “You know what they say about witches—”
We bite?
He pulled back with a yelp, waving his hand in the air. Thick drops of blood splattered onto the ground, from the perfect crescent I’d left in his palm. This time, when the slap came, I was ready for it—almost relished it. The man could play his twisted game. I would not play along.
“You bitch!” he cried, slapping me again.
But some part of him was smiling. This was what he wanted, I realized. The struggle, the fight. The fear would have been best of all, but I wouldn’t give him that. I merely lifted my chin and stared up at him, jaw clenched, fingers clenched, my stomach churning with the taste of blood.
There was a rustling of feathers as a hawk landed in the window.
A feeling was rising within me, a kind of surging. Something that refused to diminish, refused to be tamed. I knew what I should do. I knew what I needed to do.
It struck me suddenly; they were two different things.
“You will regret that,” he breathed, fingers scrambling to unclasp his pants. He was hurried now, almost clumsy in his excitement. Pieces of straw flew back in a gust as he reached for my dress. “You will regret it a great many times—”
A burst of light split the air, cutting through it like a blade. It came with no warning, it came with no heat, nothing but a cold and precise rage. Not since I was a child had such a feeling surged within me. Even then, it had been hours of preparation, trying to summon the power. It came to me quickly now, almost unbidden. No sooner had it crossed my mind, it was already happening.
The soldier flew back with the force of it, his feet rising off the ground. The look on his face was one I would remember, pain and confusion, mingled together with overwhelming surprise. It lasted only a moment, that expression, then his face went slack, never to express anything again.
I watched with stunned satisfaction, as he crumbled to the ground.
“...Liv?”
And revealed the man standing just behind.
Erik.
* * *
He just stood there, that was what was so scary. He didn’t speak, he didn’t move. He just stood there in the doorway and looked at me, arms hanging limp at his sides.
The rope had fallen loose when the light burst from my hands, and I picked myself up slowly, trying not to look at the body crumbled in the hay. I hadn’t noticed the door to the stable open, any more than I noticed the muted sounds of a hundred people still swarming towards the settlement. It seemed they were a world apart from us now. It was just him and me.
And the corpse at my feet.
“Erik?”
He jumped in his skin, pale as a sheet.
There was a slight tremble in his hands, and his clothes were disheveled. A stain of blood had seeped through his ivory hair. I remembered him standing in front of me by the arena, the surprised pop of his eyes as something had struck him from behind. Most likely, the soldier had—
My thoughts stopped there.
I cannot think of the soldier.
“Erik,” I tried again, keeping both hands in plain sight, “are you all right?”
It was a silly question. He was not all right, he was reeling. It looked as though the slightest wind could knock him down. He’d managed to say my name a single time before words shriveled like ash in his throat. Every time I managed to speak myself, he startled like I had screamed.
Perhaps I had screamed, who was to say? I was in little better shape myself.
The second I was vertical, the world tilted abruptly, like I’d fallen to a single knee. My head was throbbing and there was a faint burn in my fingertips, as if I’d held them too close to a flame. I wanted to examine them. The magic was still coursing through me, like a fever that was too high to break. But I didn’t dare raise my hands, not even a little. For all I knew, he’d reach for a blade.
Please, say something.
“Is he dead?” he blurted, eyeing me from a distance.
Eying me from a distance, not the corpse. Like I was the one to fear.
For a split second, I debated lying to him. If not to help him breathe again, to hurry things along. At this point, neither of us could stay long in the stables. There was a body in the straw that would need to be explained. He would be returning to the mob, while I would be running as fast as I could towards the forest. It didn’t help, I’d always been rather bad at lying when I didn’t want to.
If he lets you run to the forest. If he doesn’t kill you first.
Vikings had sworn oaths of vengeance, not unlike me and my sisters. He might have skirted the edges of his conscience by sparing me what he considered an unjust death, but the same couldn’t be said now. He’d seen me use my power to strike down another. The bloodline must be broken.
My eyes flicked to his sword, then to his face.
“Yes, he’s dead,” I answered softly, feeling suddenly the gravity of it. I had never killed anyone before. Never dreamed that one day I would kill anyone. I felt the weight of his body in front of me, as though we were counter-balanced on the ground. Then I looked into his empty face, and felt nothing at all. “He was going to rape me, and then burn me. He tied me to a plank.”
I half-gestured behind me, like it would help things. Erik’s eyes never left my face.
“I would never have touched him otherwise. I only wanted to escape.”
Why am I apologizing for touching him?
A flare of anger rose inside me, but it was just as quickly displaced. At no point had Erik even looked at the body, he wasn’t bothered with the death itself. I should have guessed this. He was Viking, death was in our blood. It was the manner in which it happened. It was the magic.
It was the witch who’d cast it.
And is that so unforgivable?
He’d spoken for me in front of the crowd, pleaded with the king himself for my life. He’d even seen me do magic—that golden light that had enveloped me in the prison cell. But this was something different. A page from the same dark fairytale we’d all been told as children.
This was used to kill.
“I never meant for you to see it,” I said again, taking a hesitant step towards him. He stared bracingly from the doorway. “Erik, he left me no choice. You saw what he...”
I trailed into silence, staring across the bare space between us.
Dawn was approaching and time was not in our favor, but for the life of me, I didn’t see how to cross the divide. I wasn’t sure it could be crossed. Some distances were too far to reach.
“Are you hurt?” he asked tersely.
The words were stiff and forced, like it took near everything inside him just to say them. I stared for a moment, having no idea as to the answer, before quickly shaking my head.
“No, I don’t think so.”
There was a crash somewhere outside, followed by a flurry of shouts. The roof of the brothel had collapsed, and pieces of debris were showering over the courtyard. People would have stopped trying to save it, by now. They would be focused on the surrounding buildings. I could picture them gathered around the village well, hauling up buckets to throw on the walls.
My eyes flew back to Erik, and I reached hesitantly for his hand. In this never-ending night, it seemed we’d been running together forever, joined by the clasping of our hands. I’d been shocked when he’d first reached for me, after knowing what I was. I could only hope he’d reach again.
“Can we not just—”
He flinched away from me.
...oh.
Never had I felt the difference between us as I did in that moment; when at last there might have been a kind of parity, neither of us having anything to lose. Never had I felt the difference. It sank inside me like a hook. I was one thing, and he was another. The kind that could never touch.
I lowered my hand slowly, eyes stinging with secret tears.
“No, I suppose not,” I said softly.
We stood there for a few seconds, both of us looking at the ground, not quite certain what was going to happen next. Not quite certain of anything at all. In that moment, I could see him questioning everything he’d believed in, tearing at the roots of things, fingers scrambling in the dirt.
He was also a soldier.
While I knew he found the man detestable, it didn’t change the uniform he wore. The dearly departed lieutenant had been draped the king’s colors, and carried those protections. I remembered Erik’s words as we raced through the settlement. There’s nothing that’s happened that can’t still be undone.
He must have thought I’d cost him everything.
His entire future, gone with a wave of my hands.
He’s not thinking that. He can’t get past the magic.
Sure enough, not a minute could past before those blue eyes would flick to my fingers. I saw him measuring things I would never consider—distances, and probabilities. Lines of attack. A kind of tension rocked through him, like he’d been buffeted by a strong wind.
Then his eyes lifted to mine. “You killed him,” he said plainly. “You could kill me right now.”
Another chance to lie. Another honest answer.
“Possibly.”
In truth, I couldn’t say one way or another. Yes, the powers I summoned would be strong enough to rip a grown man in two, but that was if I could summon them—a feat I’d never been able to do until just a few moments earlier, when it had cost a man his life. It had quite possibly doomed my own life in the process. There was no way to tell what Erik was thinking.
I drew in a silent breath, forbidding myself to look at his sword.
Please, stay with me.
On any other day, I might have actually felt sorry for him. Between the body of the soldier and the brothel crumbling to pieces behind him, it looked like he was at a loss for words himself. A kind of tension was braiding through him, picking up speed and gathering to a point.
He took a step closer, staring directly into my eyes. “Can I see?” he whispered.
I shivered under the weight of his stare, feeling like those eyes were pulling the skin right off my body. I was naked beneath them, every vulnerability laid bare. A second passed, then I conjured the sweetest image I could imagine, feeling the familiar warmth as my eyes glowed gold.
I saw the color wash across his face, heard the quiet intake of breath. For an entire minute, he simply stood there, almost like he was testing himself. Then he gave the slightest of nods.
“Alright.”
