Page 77 of A Curse Carved in Bone
Clouds thickened, the sun nothing more than a faintly glowing orb behind them as it was chased across the sky, the wind growing bitter.
I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to give up, but there was no way out.
Tears leaked from my closed eyes, my shivers violently painful, and I knew it wouldn’t be long now.
“I love you,” I whispered into the wind, willing it to carry my voice to Bjorn. “Keep fighting. Don’t let him win.”
I wanted to tell him that I’d meet him in Valhalla, but Ylva was right: This was not a warrior’s death. And the knowledge that I’d never see Bjorn’s face again, feel his touch, hear his voice, shattered my heart.
Then a faint crackling filled the twilight, louder than the wind and the sea, and I inhaled the scent of smoke. Peeling open my eyelids, I watched a shadowy figure walking toward me, embers and ash trailing in its wake.
The specter.
No…I knew who she was—Snorri had been right all along. “Saga?”
Bjorn’s mother passed through the barrier, then knelt before me, green eyes seeming to glow from within. She remained a horror to behold, flesh blackened and burned away to reveal tendon and bone. Harald had done this to her, left her to burn alive in her cabin, and she still suffered that agony even in death.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “He fooled me.”
Reaching out, Saga curved her skeletal fingers around my cheek, but rather than feeling repulsed by her touch, I leaned into it. Took comfort fromit.
“I’m trapped,” I said. “Ylva is going to trade Bjorn for Leif, and Harald will either kill him or bind him as he has done to Tora, and there isn’t anything I can do. I can’t help him.” I lifted my face, a sudden idea occurring to me. “Can you remove the wards that are binding me?”
“No.” As always, her voice was harsh and pained, forced over burned vocal cords, every word agony. “I cannot.”
Saga’s skeletal hand moved from my face to take my scarred righthand, unfolding my fingers to reveal the tattoo across my palm. Hel’s mark, though twisted beyond recognition. “You are not wholly mortal. Her curse will set you free.”
Then she was gone.
I forced my numb body upright, staring at the twisted tattoo on my hand. It seemed like madness to consider, but what other options did I have? Better to die trying to live than to die doing nothing at all.
So I said, “Hel, grant me your power.” As magic filled me, I donned my chain mail, adjusted my sword belt, and then fastened my shield to my back. Marshalling my courage, I whispered, “I curse myself to walk the path to Helheim.”
The ground began to shake.
Fear flooded my veins as the roots burst from the ground, black and terrifying. They wrapped around my arms and legs, but I didn’t fight them. Didn’t struggle. Gave in to them as they dragged me down.
Dirt closed around me, pressing against my face as though I were being buried alive, and that was when panic setin.
I clawed at the roots, desperate to breathe, trying to climb my way back up, but they dragged me down with relentless strength.
This was no escape.
This was death.
My chest was agony with the need for air, and I tried to pull a hand up to carve the dirt away from my mouth, but my arms were pinned.
I’d made a mistake, oh gods, the worst of mistakes.
But then I was falling.
I managed to suck in a breath of air right before my back struck a root, knocking it back out of my lungs. My mouth opened in a scream of pain, but no sound came out as my body bounced and ricocheted off the tangled web of blackened roots, tumbling down and down.
To hit stone with an impact that sent stars spinning across my vision, my shield clattering down nextme.
Whimpering, I twisted on my side, the only cares in my head for getting air into my lungs and easing the pain in nearly every part of my body.
Then the scuff of a foot against stone filled my ears, and my eyes snapped open to take in a pair of feet next to me. My still-spinning vision climbed up ankles, then a skirt, higher and higher until it landed on a face I recognized, for I had seen Harald wear it before. “Saga?”
