Page 121 of Storm of Fury
“Don’t you seek the same?”
If only she knew.
He glanced down at his hands. “Aye. I want my own name. I want….” It wasn’t greatness that he searched for. It had never been greatness. “You know, I’ve never told a single soul this, but… Tomas used to call me “that bastard.” He was kinder than his wife. She used to refer to me as “Ruth’s shame.” I used to tell myself that it didn’t matter what she called me, but I still felt it. Because it wasn’t me she denigrated. It was my mother. And I always thought if I could make a name for myself, if I could be… someone great, then I would tell them all that I was Ruth’s son. I wasn’t her shame. I was her gift. Her pride. Her joy.”
“I don’t think you need to forge a name for yourself,” Bryn said softly. “You already were her joy, and everyone who meets you knows she gave the world a gift. You’re the type of man who drags an enemy over his shoulder and carries him to safety. You’re the kind of man who makes little girls smile and little boys worship you.” She took a deep breath. “You’re the kind of man who makes a woman doubt herself.”
“Herself?” he asked gruffly.
“Everything she’s ever believed in.” But there was no joy in her eyes as she said it. Merely a distance as her gaze returned, once more, to the fire she was trying to light.
And he knew she hadn’t resolved those doubts.
Their days together were growing shorter. They’d made headway today, gaining several miles upon the Keepers. There was little sign of Ishtar yet, but he suspected they were only a day behind the Keepers now they had horses.
He needed to push her.
“Now that you know that, I believe you owe me a secret, my lady love.”
Bryn struck her flint. “What do you want to know?”
“How did you become Valkyrie?” Tormund asked as he watched Bryn blow on the small tinder she’d just lit, fanning a tiny flame.
She glanced up, flame flickering off the green of her eyes. “I told you my mother left me on my father’s doorstep one winter when I was barely four or five months old.” A small muscle ticked in her jaw, and she fed a twig into the flames. “She left a note for me to come and find her when I was old enough, if my immortal blood was beginning to show. My father burned it, and his wife was the one who told me of it.”
“And if your immortal blood didn’t show?”
“Then I stayed in the mortal realm. I would not be worthy of Valhalla.”
There was so much more to that statement, but he didn’t dare put it into words. Her mother’s love had clearly had a price to it....
“So if your blood never showed, you would never know her?”
“I would never know her.”
“And your father was not kind,” he murmured.
“No, he was not.” Every glimmer of expression vanished from her face. “He accepted me into his household for he believed in his Christian duty. But as the years passed, it became clear I wasn’t human, nor were my gods his. He would punish me for daring to say I could see them in the skies and hear them in the thunder. His lectures and prayers felt like someone was dragging iron over flint. I was a child of the Disir, and the prayers of a foreign god felt like someone was screaming inside my head. He thought me the devil’s child, and turned me from his door when I was nine.”
Mother of dragons. Tormund scratched at his beard. It made a great deal of sense. This entire journey she’d held him at arm’s length, tolerating his kisses and sharing a bed with him but granting him little more of herself. For the first time, he felt as though he understood why.
She’d been abandoned by her mother as a child, offered a mother’s love only when orifshe showed promise.
And her father….
“But you found a place with the Valkyrie?”
A soft smile touched her lips, as if she was picturing a memory. “I did. For a while. It’s the only time I’ve ever felt as though I belonged.” She clasped her hands together, rubbing at her knuckles. “We called each other sisters. We swore we’d have each other’s backs until the day we died. And we worked together to pass the tests and prove ourselves worthy to rise to the ranks of the Valkyrie.” The smile died. “The only downfall was Róta. We were the best of our training group, each of us vying to become the ultimate champion. All I wanted to do was win. I craved it so fiercely I spent hours forcing my body to its limits, so that I would be undefeated when the final tests came. I wanted my mother to be proud of me. I wanted….” She swallowed hard. “I wanted to prove myself. And I cannot help thinking that if I had only been a little less determined…. If I hadn’t won, if I hadn’t been so arrogant when I defeated Róta, then my mother might still be alive. Róta killed her because of me—because I took her place and my mother’s love, and she could no longer bare to be left in the cold.”
Shit. Tormund went to the dirt before her, resting a hand on her knee. “I’m so sorry.”
“The only things I had in the world were my sisters and my calling, and Róta took them from me.” Bryn held out her trembling hands, showing him the gold tattoos inked into the skin of her wrists. “These tattoos chain my powers. I woke in the dirt of this mortal realm with my Valkyrie side suppressed and my mortal side in ascendancy. I am still half-Valkyrie. I don’t age. I heal within seconds. And I cannot be killed by a mortal weapon. But my mortal side weighs me down like an anchor. I can no longer hear the gods singing in my ears. I can barely see them in the world around me. And my strength and speed are almost mortal now. I was cast from my home, and now I have no home. Now I have no family.”
It was that, perhaps, that hurt the most. He could see it in her eyes.
All those years of striving to find her place in the world and she had finally achieved it, only to have it torn from her grasp by the cruelest of lies.
Tormund squeezed her hand. “And your sisters? Those that argued for you? Have they visited? Have they spoken to you?”
