Page 116 of A Light So Blinding
“You have one chance to let her go,” Bjorn said. “One.”
“Slit her throat,” the king said, his tone bored. “Then kill them all, even the ones hiding in the next passage. Will you?”
Bjorn’s entire world slowed down to the motion of the sword that was already drawing across her throat as the familiar red haze tore through his eyesight. He heard the shouts of his own men, the trolls behind him who raged at the thought that one of their own would be injured. He heard Rabbit shouting at him, but he didn’t understand the words.
They’d touched her. Now they would all pay.
Forty-Four
Astrid
She would always remember this moment. Everything happened so quickly, it was almost impossible to track it all. She was being held by a guard, likely as a way to antagonize Bjorn.
The other women had been able to run, though. They slipped away while the king had been talking to her, and he hadn’t cared all that much. Women like them were dispensable, after all. He could find more. It would take so little for him to find as many women as he needed as prizes. They had no choice, because he was king.
But Astrid was different. Astrid had the attention of a troll that the king very much wanted. And that meant she was useful. She knew how men like this thought, and she knew that she was going to suffer just because he wanted to use her pain.
Watching Bjorn walk down that empty hall had nearly broken her heart. She’d thought there would be countless trolls helping him, representing him. Trolls who fought alongside him and instead, he was all by himself.
Maybe he’d done the same thing as her. Maybe he had sent away the trolls and all those who had been captured, so they would all remain safe. It sounded like something he would do.
She didn’t pay attention to what they were saying. The words didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she got a single moment to look at him before they died.
But she wanted to live. She wanted to live with him, to grow with him, to see everything unfold in their lives as they grew a garden and a family and all the other beautiful things that had been a potential in their future.
Then a sword lifted to her throat, and she knew that wasn’t going to happen at all. The king had other plans.
“Slit her throat,” the king said, and she could hear how little he cared about any of this as he spoke. “Then kill them all, even the ones hiding in the next passage. Will you?”
Astrid felt the cold metal pressing more firmly against her throat, and something in her just snapped. She didn’t care if there were so many soldiers that the odds seemed insurmountable. She didn’t care if they served the king and therefore felt as though they were in the right. They were not innocent.
Magic boiled at her fingertips at the same time a boom echoed throughout the entirety of the labyrinth. It was sheer luck that the other priestesses had chosen that time to blast through another level, but the floor beneath their feet shifted.
The soldiers let out angry sounds, some of them reaching for the king at the same moment Bjorn slammed into them. The rage she saw pouring off of him was something she could use. She took it from him, an unending, vast amount of anger that she then poured into all the men around her. They were suddenly enraged too. They wanted to fight, and it didn’t matter who they fought.
The guards turned on each other, all of them battling without thought of who or what they were hitting.
All except for the few closest to the king. He glared at them all, and she swore she heard him mouth something along the lines of, “Weak.”
He turned with the closest guards, six men who were the largest of them all. They started down a corridor at the same moment Bjorn stood in front of her. She could see there was nothing left of him. Just the berserker, who had killed hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of people at this point. He was rage and glory, venom and vice. He wanted to destroy the entire world before him, and it didn’t matter whose death he counted as long as he was covered in blood.
“It’s me,” she whispered. “It’s me, Bjorn.”
Then she had the marvelous and miraculous sight of his berserker recognizing her. She could tell when it did. The beast inside him knew exactly who she was. It blinked, and then it turned away from her.
Instead of fighting her or trying to harm her, it stood between her and pain. It was a shield as the guards fought, some of their weapons coming so close that they might have clipped her. Instead, he protected her.
Heart in her throat, she prayed to any god who would listen to keep him safe. She wanted to see him still in one piece when all of this ended. And apparently, he felt the same way.
He did everything he could to keep himself safe. Instead, he took hits meant for her. He was bleeding from multiple places, and throughout it all Bjorn remained stoic and calm, blocking any attack effortlessly and then killing the man without hesitation.
She blinked, and suddenly there was a flood of other trolls. Men, women, and their spirit guides, all of them rushing into thefray. They didn’t come just to her aid, but it felt as though the trolls were here to protect her.
Then she saw a flash of yellow rushing toward them. A very familiar yellow that had her gasping and racing out from behind Bjorn. She trusted him to protect them both, and he did. Somehow. Somehow he was controlling himself even though historically he had never been able to do that before.
Rabbit caught her up in his arms, laughing with her and then framing her face with his massive hands. “The king?”
“He took off in that direction.”
