Page 81 of A Darkness So Sweet

Gunnar didn’t let it show that he was nervous, though. Even back here, she could see the flash of his grin as he lifted his hands from his sides. “We’re here to talk, and that’s all. We don’t want to kill any more of you.”

“Is that so, troll?”

“The rest of your people are lying out there in the woods. We could hear them groaning as we healed our own. You didn’t kill more than three trolls. How many of your men did you lose, soldier?”

Then, slowly, blatantly, Gunnar wrapped his fingers around the pommel of his sword.

She could see how much that affected the man. Even the one behind him flinched and shoved his wife toward the trolls on instinct. Perhaps in an offering, or perhaps to try to save himself first. The woman staggered, then fell onto her hands and knees.

And that one little movement sent the entirety of the trolls into a frenzy. Everyone around her started drooling and growling. The sounds of their anger rose into the air, filling the space around her with so much rage and tension that it made her heart race.

The soldier laughed. “You don’t want to fight? You’ve got a pack of slavering animals at your back!”

“We don’t treat women like that,” Gunnar said.

“I’ve seen you kill women and children before.”

“On accident,” Gunnar spat. “We have no fight with those who cannot lift a sword against us.”

They were not willingly kind to human women, Maia knew that. But she had never seen them blatantly want to harm someone, like what had happened just now. No troll would have shoved a woman to the ground, and certainly not one of their own.

Gunnar stepped toward the woman, keeping his hands raised so no one tried to attack him. And then he reached his hand down for her. What an image he made. A massive troll, skin green as the grass surrounding them and his hand the size of the woman’s head, reaching out to help her.

But then the woman stood so quickly that she was almost a blur. Ragnar grabbed Maia and spun so he protected her with his body, but not before Maia saw a dart from the woman’s hand catch Gunnar in the chest. He took a step back, his hand over his ribs where the weapon had sunk. And when he drew his hand away, it was coated in blood.

There were no choices after that. Not for any of them. In one rushing movement, the trolls rushed forward. Maia’s hair blew in front of her face at the speed of their storming rage. She stood still in the center of all that anger, watching as the humans ran back toward their home. Soldiers stood in front of the trolls, but it didn’t matter. They would go through the wall of those men like they were paper.

Ragnar cupped her cheek in his hand, a sturdy rock in the madness of all that anger. “I must avenge my brother,” he said, his gaze searching hers.

And Maia knew he was waiting for her to bid him to go. He wanted her permission. If she said no, he would get her out of here and allow the other trolls to fight.

But this was his fight, too.

“Go,” she whispered. “I’ll be safe.”

He kissed her fiercely before turning and leaping into the fray. She was left alone as an empty vessel, as the trolls took all her rage with them. They rushed into a battle she could not join, so she sent her own aching pain with them.

Maia had never wished for blood in her life. She’d never wanted to hurt someone else just because she was angry. She’d done everything she could to give them a chance. The humans weren supposed to prove her right. They were supposed to prove that they were reasonable, and that it was just the crown who wanted the trolls dead. People on the outskirts of the kingdom could use their own common sense and know that a deal with the trolls was beneficial. But now she wondered if she’d ever been this angry in her entire life.

Finally, her feet moved. She raced across the grass toward Gunnar, who was still standing where he had been moments before. The air filled with the sound of battle. Shouts, clanging metal, screams of pain. But none of that mattered as panic filled her veins. He was so pale. The moment she touched her hand to his shoulder, he staggered.

“Gunnar,” she said, grabbing onto his arm and trying to tug him in the opposite direction. “Come with me.”

“Where is Ragnar?”

She could just barely make out her husband. He was a purple blur tearing through the ranks of humans as they stood in front of him, slowly but surely carving a path into the village. “Fighting.”

“Good,” Gunnar wheezed. “Good, he should be fighting. Take the knife from my thigh.”

“What?”

“Take the knife.” His weight listed to the side, and there was nothing she could do to stop him from toppling over.

Lunging for the knife at his thigh, she grabbed it and then held it up for him to see. “What now?”

He wasn’t breathing right. The air exiting his lungs rattled and wheezed in an unnatural sound. But he still rasped, “Now run, fire hair.”

Run? Why would she run?

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