Page 8 of Storm of Fury
“Then she doesn’t know what she’s missing out on.”
“Oh, she knows.” Bryn tucked her wrist closer to her chest and stalked past him. “But regret is not precisely the emotion she feels.”
He laughed behind her, but Haakon called out, “Which way?”
The road wound through the mountains ahead of them, fog drifting through the lower valleys.
Sirius had vanished a half hour ago, and no doubt he was soaring through the skies above them. He’d find them, he’d claimed, which made her a little uneasy.
Double-crossing a human was easy enough, butdrekihad long memories, and she’d heard plenty of stories about thedrekithey called the Blackfrost in the past hundred or so years.
Solveig had failed to mention he was one of the party Bryn would need to track. And if she’d known, then she might have preferred to follow at a distance, rather than ingratiating herself with them.
Too late now. Bryn headed into the trees, leaving the road.
“The prince was last seen heading up into the mountains,” she called over her shoulder. “According to the blacksmith’s wife.”
“I thought he was in disguise. How did you know it was adrekiprince if you never saw him?” Tormund asked. “How do you know so much aboutdreki? Most humans seem to be unaware that they’re more than myths and legends that hide up in the hills and steal their sheep.”
Now that she wasn’t batting her eyelashes at him, he was starting to think. Usually she appreciated an intelligent man, but this was the wrong time to find one. “I’ve run afoul ofdrekiseveral times. And my mother told me about them and their world, though she suggested I should avoid them.”
“How did the blacksmith’s wife know it was the prince?”
Bryn rolled her eyes. “The blacksmith’s wife said he had the look of the devil about him and her cross burned cold every time he smiled at her. She was certain he wasn’t human.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Haakon threw over his shoulder. “Crosses don’t react todreki.”
“And in their human form, it’s difficult to see the difference between adrekiand a large man,” Tormund pointed out.
“Trust me, giant. He wasdreki,according to my sources.” And then she waggled her eyebrows in a suggestive manner.
“Do I want to know?”
Bryn knew her smile held the sweetness of a trap about to spring. “I don’t know.Doyou?”
He stared at her for a long moment, and then his gaze slid to the mountains over his shoulder.
Sometimes, it was almost too easy to deflect a man’s attentions.
She headed up a narrow track that diverged from the glade. “This way.”
The climb turned steep and treacherous, and the three of them scrabbled over rocks and boulders. Her breath caught when she saw the side of the path drop away into an immense gully. Though the village was barely a hundred feet behind them, it felt as though they’d entered an ancient world.
A river roared somewhere ahead. And birds pinwheeled through the chasm in front of them. She could feel the last hints of civilization dropping away behind them with every step and practically sense Sýr’s elation as the merlin soared through the gap.
“He followed this track,” Bryn said, pointing to the left. “A plump blonde said she’d tried to tell him not to go this way, but he insisted. He wanted answers, he told her.”
“Answers to what?”
“Hopefully, we’ll find out.”
Bryn peered up the narrow track that diverged from the one she stood upon. It had been built for goats by the look of it, and thick weeds overgrew it.
Tormund paused at her side, full of suspicion. “People don’t use this track very often.”
“People don’t come here at all.” She pointed to a skull someone had hung on a cross stave. A pair of ram’s horns had been drilled into it, but that was very clearly a human skull.
“Just where are you taking us, woman?”
