Page 70 of Vow of the Undead
Was this how Freya expected me to spare my fellow witches for years to come? Kill the vampires?
I straightened my spine and fixed him with my stare. “Kayn, you may not need rest very often, but I do. We will sleep here and then when I wake, if you want me to do this, for whatever reason you refuse to explain, then you’ll take us to her.”
If nothing else, my mother and I could offer another sacrifice and cut my ties to King Drakkar.
Hours of walking left my legs wobbly. The two days my body demanded I rest had all of us impatient to move faster now.
Pure fear and determination had pushed us deeper into the forest than I had thought possible that night. Far enough that Stasia claimed the wasteland was only a few more steps beyond the trees and to the side of us.
And she was right.
Between the crowd of tree trunks, I spotted dead plants with branches poisoned in black and gray earth stretched over the ground. Red lines, like veins snaked through the dry-packed dirt, and the stagnant clouds that clung to the border of the wasteland, threatened to inch its way into Mara.
We’d hiked a path parallel to it as we made our way deeper into the southern side of the kingdom.
Curiosity had me glancing to the edge of the forest, hoping to glimpse the place that was only spoken of in sagas. Sagas that scared me as a young girl, leaving my imagination as scarred as the battles left the earth. It was a morbid curiosity, not unlike my interest in King Drakkar before I had proof of his brutal behavior.
“Once you cross into the wasteland, you lose all sense of direction,” Stasia said from the path above. She’d turned to walk backward and explain this to me.
“Yet you plan to go there,” I said, my voice careful.
“Eventually, I’d find my way to Finan.” Her voice was simultaneously confident and tinged with sadness when she spoke of him. “And where else would I hide from the vampires while I look for him? Don’t you think being lost is worth survival? Or are your delicate sensibilities as queen more attuned to self sacrifice for the glory of it all?”
She feigned being faint by draping the back of her hand against her forehead. In the time we weaved through the trees, she’d grown more comfortable teasing me.
Perhaps she picked on me because we were following my plan now, rather than hers. But Stasia didn’t strike me as someone who needed to control others, more that she found humor in times of distress as a way to cope. Likely because of her many years spent serving that monster.
I found entertainment in her teasing as we trudged through the darkness.
“I do love glory,” I said, fueling the pep in her step.
Besides, I relished speaking the truth out in the open air. I didn’t know glory in my own life, nor care for it, but I adored the sagas of triumph, of the Gods and Valkyries selecting the honorable for Valhalla and the chosen for Folkvangr. It was outlawed to speak of it, but I kept my dream to myself, to someday be taken to Valhalla where I could hear the stories of the Nine Realms from Odin himself where he sat at the head of the table with his wife Frigg.
I hurried to keep pace with Kayn who was picking through the forest’s overgrowth a step ahead of me. It wasn’t long before Stasia fell behind us as she became distracted by the wasteland. Perhaps she hoped to catch sight of Finan, but we saw no life and no movement beyond the scarred border.
We emerged at a remote village, where the view of theking’s castle was only a scrap of gray against the rolling green hills. The scattered structures didn’t form a village you would recognize. No signs indicated what was inside each structure or if they were actively used.
The hillside was bare, with little trees and shrubbery, different from the full rose bushes all across Mara’s Keep and the surrounding forest of thick trees that reached into the sky. Here, stones were crumbling from the buildings, moss and vines cracked through the closest structure as if the earth’s growth was slowly swallowing it.
The spiked roof that reached as tall as the trees was cracked at the tip of the spire so that the tip lay sideways, pointing south rather than to the sky. Stained glass windows were either shattered or splintered into cracks until the artist’s rendering in the glass was no longer recognizable.
Stasia caught up with us as we paused, her breath heaving from the effort of climbing the steep hill. She could run like a hunted deer in the woods but climbing was not a skill she’d mastered yet with her thin body and minimal muscle. I was the opposite.
“Where are we?” I shot Kayn an impatient look. “You said my mother was in Mara.”
Stasia made a strange sound and folded her arms as she eyed Kayn. “He’s also a monster, I wouldn’t put it past him to be a little deceitful. Vampires love to trick and lie to their vessels so the humans come back for more torture.”
Kayn narrowed his deep brown eyes at her. “You instructed me to lead the way.”
A defiant hum came from her as she turned away from him. “Just because you’re an Exile who can’t turn us in without getting caught doesn’t mean I trust you. And it definitely doesn’t mean I like you.”
Ignoring her, he faced me again. “This is Mara. A forgotten side of Mara.”
“This is hideous,” Stasiasaid.
“Is it abandoned?” I asked.
“The Hall of the Gods?” He turned to me, his gaze sharp with the golden rim closing in, etching away at his dark eyes. “Yes, long ago.”
