Page 53 of Blood Beneath the Snow

I gnawed on a stick of dried meat the Hellbringer had broken out of his pack a while ago. My nose was utterly numb and I was shocked my ears hadn’t fallen off, abandoned in the snow behind us somewhere. And since my companion wasn’t keen on conversation, I felt like a petulant child when every half an hour I asked, “How much farther?”

He responded to my current inquiry the same way he had all the others. “A ways.”

I slowed my pace, the piece of dried meat finished, and glared at his back. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

My retort was met with silence. I don’t know what I expected. The Hellbringer had shown me exactly who he was and exactly what he thought of me. I’d spent most of the night tossing and turning, wishing that if he hated me so much, he would have refused this job. Or even left me stranded in the snow. Because discovering a formidable ally shouldn’t have felt the same as dealing with the worst of my brothers.

My patience snapped, worn thin by the cold, the hunger gnawing at my stomach, and the uncertainty of knowing when this trek would end. I stopped walking. I’d been taken from the front no more than two days ago and I was already at my wit’s end with my captor. “What is the point of this?”

The Hellbringer glanced back over his shoulder, but didn’t stop or fully turn around. “To make you a weapon. One that actually has a chance of defeating your brothers.” The rest of his words remained unspoken, but I heard them clear as day regardless.Are you daft?

My captivity was wearing on me, but I was confident I knew what I was doing when I retorted, “If you think you deserve Bhorglid’s throne so badly, then kill me.” I held my arms out.

At this, he did turn, surveying my position with no readable emotion in his voice. “Believe me, I wish I could.”

“You can. Pretend it was an accident,” I snarled, snow cracklingbeneath my boots as I moved toward him. He stilled, like a prey animal hiding from a predator, aware it had been seen but unable to overcome its basest instincts. When I reached him, I pulled my sword from its sheath in one fluid movement, pressing the hilt to his chest. With only inches between us, I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Tell them I fell on my own damn weapon.”

I stared into the eye sockets of the wolf skull, wondering what he saw in my face. I hoped it was the fury of my helplessness at being his prisoner, the rage of being treated by my enemy as if I were less-than. The Hellbringer made it clear he had no interest in helping me; he did it because his queen had ordered him to. I couldn’t change that.

He made no move to take the weapon from me.

“I’m more than aware you don’t want to be here.” I said every word slowly, deliberately. There would be no misunderstandings on my watch. “I don’t either, in case my escape attempt at the crack of dawn didn’t make that utterly clear to you. But I’m not going to stand for you treating me like mud under your boot. If you can’t manage to act like we’re equals despite your godtouch and my complete lack of magic, then this is where we part ways.”

For a moment we stood there, the only sound the wind in my ears. I didn’t move my weapon, leaving the hilt there, ready for him to take. He didn’t need it to kill me. But his queen had given orders to keep me alive, and the Hellbringer appeared to be her obedient servant, so I wasn’t truly worried.

“You’d die on your own out here.” His murmur, distorted through the mask, was still gentle somehow. “I estimate you’d make it an hour before you came crawling back.”

I shrugged. “You think I’m going to die in the Trials. So does it matter whether I die now—by your hand or the wastes’—or later?”

His shoulders stiffened, and despite the many layers he was wearing, I saw it. He’d tried to call my bluff, tried to make me admitI wanted to live more than I wanted to be rid of his sorry attitude. And in return I’d called his bluff right back.

Still, my heart sank a bit knowing the truth. He thought his task was useless, that training me was for naught. At the end of it all, he expected me to be nothing more than a lifeless body on the arena floor.

I smiled without humor. He was much taller than me, and at this close range I had to tilt my head back to look into the skull eyes of the mask. Was he afraid to move because he worried he would kill me if he did? It was entirely possible. With only a twist of his wrist, the blade would plunge through me irrevocably. There would be no time to get me to a healer before I bled out in the cold. And yet I felt like I’d pinned a moth by the wings with only my gaze.

He was listening. Caught in the truth. It made me all the more powerful.

“Here’s how this is going to work.” Gods be damned if he thought I was going to sit patiently and let him act superior when my life was the one on the line in the first place. “If you want me to continue on with you, there are two requirements. The first is that you convince yourself—even if you believe it’s a lie—that I am going to win the Trials. No matter what happens in the future, you have to pretend. Understand?”

I was met with only the rush of wind in my ears, and I took it for an answer.

“Good. Next, I need you to understand that you’re being an absolute asshole. I know it’s part of your natural charm, but I’m sick of it. So, Hellbringer”—I pulled my arm away from him, ignoring the warmth in my fingers and wishing the memory of his heartbeat wasn’t pressed permanently into my knuckles—“tell me something true.”

My last command seemed to bring him back to himself. For a long moment there was only stillness and silence.

“Something true?”

I nodded. “Don’t fling an insult at me. Don’t say something vague just to get under my skin. If this is going to work, then you need to be honest with me. So tell me something true.”

I waited with bated breath. The next moments would decide whether I followed him the rest of the way to the forge willingly or if he’d have to drag me kicking and screaming.

“Mira dropped us off so far because no one knows the true location of this forge but me.” His hands flexed at his sides. I wasn’t sure what it meant or what he was feeling beneath his monotone voice. “It’s abandoned.”

Not just any truth, but the one I so desperately needed to hear. The one that eased my suspicions. He wasn’t trying to kill me and leave me for dead out here, wasn’t trying to make things harder on me than they needed to be. There was a legitimate reason for our long trek.

My next thought soured my relief.He hates you so much, he couldn’t even tell you that until you gave him the chance to kill you and make it look like an accident.

I stepped forward, smiling thinly, and clapped a palm across his chest. “See?” I raised an eyebrow. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

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