Page 67 of A Curse Carved in Bone
Tora releasedme.
I didn’t stop to question why, only staggered to my feet and snatched up my fallen shield. Springing across the distance, I threw myself over Snorri. “Stop!”
Bjorn wavered, his axe disappearing. “He’s dead, Freya,” he said. “He can’t survive that.”
I knew Snorri wouldn’t survive, and yet I could still feel the threat to the blood I’d sworn to protect so viscerally I could barely breathe.
I pressed my hands to the wound, gagging at how the burned flesh crackled beneath my palm. Snorri groaned in agony. “Don’t. Please don’t.”
“Don’t! Please don’t!” Saga mimicked his voice, and then she began to laugh.
She moved, skipping around the perimeter of the square, her midnight braids bouncing against her back.
“Mother, enough.” Bjorn was watching her with the same unease I felt.
Saga ignored him and kept skipping, but the tone of her laughter began to change. Shifting and warping into deeper, yet familiar, tones. Wild and cruel.
Not Saga’s laugh.
ButHarald’s.
Horror pooling in my guts, because it was Harald’s laughter pouring from Saga’s lips.
“What madness is this?” Bjorn whispered, even as Saga’s features shuddered and blurred, her shape distorting and then suddenly re-forming as the king of Nordeland.
“Child of Loki!” Snorri choked out, blood running down his chin. “A shape-shifter. A trickster.”
Harald laughed, the sound turning wild and maniacal even as heclapped his hands like a small child and continued to skip around the square. “Long have I waited for this moment,” he said when his mirth finally calmed. “And it was more perfect than I’d ever dreamed!”
“Where is my mother?” Bjorn demanded. “What have you done to her?”
Harald snickered, his demeanor entirely different from what I’d ever seen, yet every part of me screamed that this was the real him. That I’d been fooled.
“Most of Saga is nothing more than ash on the wind.” Harald’s mouth spread into a wild grin. “You can ask Snorri where he buried her bones before he expires. Though I think that will be very soon.”
Oh gods oh gods oh gods.
All this time, Harald had been impersonating Saga. Been pretending to be Bjorn’s mother. Manipulating him with lies and false sentiment.
Just as he’d done to me. Bile burned up my throat as I realized I’d sat naked in a sauna with this monster, spilling my heart out, and for Bjorn, it was so much worse.
“I’m going to kill you,” Bjorn hissed, his axe appearing in his hand. He lunged at Herald, only to stagger backward as he struck the ward.
Fear filled my chest and, drawing my sword, I lifted my hand and walked forward, my worries confirmed as my palm encountered an invisible barrier.
“Silly, foolish girl.” Harald laughed. “Racing into your own trap, never stopping to look at the runes before you crossed. Not that you’d understand them anyway, ignorant fishwife that you are.” He rolled his eyes skyward. “Pretending to hold you in any level of esteem was more challenging than mimicking Saga all these years.”
A thousand curses rose in my throat, but I bit down on all of them, looking instead to Tora. The child of Thor stood beyond, shoulders slumped, eyes dull with resignation. “Tora, help us.”
“I cannot,” the other woman whispered. “I am sorry, Freya.”
“She was another foolish girl.” Harald glanced back at Tora. “So quick to make promises she shouldn’t have.”
“I hate you,” Tora whispered, but Harald only huffed out an amused breath. “To be hated holds more power than to be loved. You serve either way, Tora. Now be silent.”
Tora’s jaw shut with an audible click, bound to obey Harald in all things.
We were trapped.
