Page 135 of Storm of Fury
Or was this Freyja’s will, filling her with strength so that she could stop Ishtar before the magic consumed her?
Either way, nothing was going to stop her now.
Bryn set her jaw.
“Stop!” Tormund slammed into her, driving them both back through the vortex. He hauled her tight against his chest. “Don’t kill her!”
“I wasn’t going to kill her!” She could feel the magic threatening to tear the world apart. Bryn gritted her teeth, trapping a scream. “She needs to be stopped somehow! She’ll destroy the world!”
This was the start of Ragnarök trapped indrekiflesh—though not all the signs had come true. Above them, the skies roiled. The moon vanished as if Sköll and Hati had eaten it. The world plunged into darkness, until all she could see was the green fire in Ishtar’s eyes.
The two Keepers crawled toward Ishtar, their faces grim, but a green spiritdrekitore itself from the magic and lunged toward them. One of them screamed, throwing his hands up to protect himself, but the other touched thedreki,and the spirit-form disintegrated in a shower of sparks, before turning to his brother.
“She just needs a chance!” Tormund yelled in her face.
A chance? The girl had the power to tear the world apart. Bryn shook her head. “We can’t risk it! She could crush us all! Can’t you see that?”
“All I can see is fear,” he yelled, his arms flexing like steel bands. “If we give in to fear, then that is all she shall ever know. And your prophecywillcome true.”
He didn’t understand. She’d trained for this her entire life. Stopping this sort of destruction was what she had pledged her life to. It went against everything she’d ever known to even contemplate allowing the girl to go free.
Tormund let her go.
“Trust me,” he told her, their fingers gripping and their eyes meeting. “Trust me.”
Bryn’s breath arrested in her lungs.
“One chance,” she whispered and lowered the sword.
Tormund stepped toward Ishtar, his hands held low. “Remember me?” he called through the vortex.
“No.” Bryn scrambled toward him, but she lost her feet and the winds smashed her back into a pair of rocks. “Tormund!”
The fool would die. He had no magic, he had no armor, no weapon. He was mortal. The magic would tear the skin from his bones.
“Tormund!”
Crawling to her hands and knees, she lifted her head as he took a step toward Ishtar.
Bryn’s breath caught in her chest as he lunged through the rest of the vortex and fell into the eerie calm that surrounded thedrekiprincess. Ishtar dug her fingers into her head as if it ached, but he held his hands up in surrender, and Bryn could see him mouthing something as he bent to pick up the cloak at the princess’s feet.
The shower of Chaos sparks stopped hissing, and were blown away harmlessly across the snow. Ishtar looked down at the cloak Tormund held, and he took a careful step toward her, talking all the while.
Moving ever so slowly, he draped his cloak around Ishtar’s shoulders.
The vortex trailed into a wisp of wind, lashings of Chaos magic sparking across the snow. Bryn’s jaw fell open as Tormund slowly wrapped his cloak around the princess.
“You’re safe now,” he told her, tying the cloak under her chin with bloodied hands. “Nobody will hurt you. You’re safe. Safe.”
He kept repeating the word, as if Ishtar might come to understand it if he said it often enough. Those huge hands came to rest upon Ishtar’s shoulders, and the Chaos died in her eyes as she looked up into his face. The winds vanished. The magic died. There was nothing but a bare, windswept circle where the vortex had hissed. For a second Ishtar looked like a young girl, confused to find herself amidst the wreckage of this snow-swept cliff.
Oh. Bryn sat back on her heels.
He tamed the rage with a kind touch, soft words, and a warm cloak.
The world was filled with such silence. Snowflakes drifted down out of the gray skies. Behind the pair of them, Bryn could see Sirius and Marduk pushing to their feet from where the storm had battered them. She hadn’t even seen them arrive.
And beyond them, a dark-haired Keeper nocking an arrow to his bow.
