Page 117 of A Light So Blinding
“Take your berserker and go. He cannot get away, Priestess. He needs to be punished. For all of us.”
She nodded, then looked up at Bjorn. “Will you come with me to hunt the king?”
He tilted his head down to look at her, nearly no expression on his face. But then he nodded slowly, and she conversed with the berserker perhaps for the very first time. His voice was lower, gravel rumbling in the depths of the mountains. “Let us hunt, Priestess.”
She didn’t think about it, didn’t hesitate. She just turned with Bjorn and chased after the king.
But the farther she got from the other trolls, the more she questioned whether this was the right thing to do. The king could have any manner of tricks up his sleeve. Likely he had a plan that would keep him away from the trolls, but she feared what it would mean. Did he have some kind of hidden weapon in these corridors? Or was he leaving another way she did not know was an exit? Perhaps he would bring them out to an entire army of people who were waiting for them on the other side.
It was the second option.
They finally caught up to the king at the end of this corridor with all his guards working on a complicated looking structure that had many wheels and dials. A hidden secret in the wall,she suspected. A door that was likely never meant to be opened unless under dire circumstances. Which, of course, this was.
After all, the troll he had been torturing for years was hunting him, and he was the fool who had trapped himself.
Another echoing boom rocked through the labyrinth, and earth rained down on their heads. Astrid wasn’t sure how long this place would even stay standing, but it seemed appropriate given the circumstances. The last battle between the man who had created this terrible place and the people he had hurt.
The king turned to see him, and she could tell there was fear in his eyes. Fear, because he had seen how Bjorn could fight, and because he had no idea how powerful Astrid was.
“You should never have come down here,” she said. “Why you would ever come yourself, I will never understand.”
“I have always handled things myself.”
“You are the monster that causes nothing but pain and suffering. You are the one who should hide,” she spat.
The king lifted his arms as though he was not surprised by what she said. “I know. You all think I am horrible, but I just know what’s going to happen. I know when everything is going to happen.”
So that was his power. He could see the future. But how far ahead could he see it?
She narrowed her eyes, planning out something that would end his life very quickly. But she saw him react almost immediately. He snapped his fingers, and the guards surrounded him, a wall of human flesh that would do very little to stop any of them but would buy the king enough time to get out of that complicated door.
There were two men still working on it. The gears ground against each other, rust and age making it hard for them to turn, but they were managing the massive puzzle behind them swiftly.
“To think,” the king said. “It would be you in the end. How poetic.”
“Me?”
The guards parted just enough for her to see him. Those icy blue eyes captured hers. “Haven’t you always wondered why you look so much like the princess? Why do all of the most powerful priestesses look like my daughter?”
“Because you hunted us down in the streets. You chose the girls who look like your daughter so you could pawn us off. The lords all want your daughter, but you would never give her to someone like them, so you chose instead to find little girls who looked like her.” Astrid’s voice dripped with rage. “You were wrong for that.”
“I didn’t have to find you. I always knew where you were.” He grinned, and that expression made every hair on her body rise. “You’re mine, after all. All of you. I found the most powerful women in this kingdom and I created power. So much power, and all the kind I could gift to those who I deemed worthy. My mother was the one with blonde hair. She looked just like you, and your sister, and my daughter, and all the other golden women I created.”
Astrid felt like the floor had dropped out from under her. Surely he lied. Surely no man was so twisted that he would do that.
And then it all hit her. She’d believed no man could be so evil that he would do what he had done to Rose. If he was telling the truth, not only had he tried to sell off his daughter to a lord who had wanted to defile her, but the king had punished his own blood in the labyrinth.
Her words turned ragged and raw. “You could do that to your own child?”
“Do what, exactly?”
“You could condemn your own child to a life in this darkness? You did it not just to my sister, but to me, likely to others as well. We are your daughters.”
“You are an experiment,” he hissed. “Not my children. You do not get to have that name. I have one daughter, and she is the most powerful of you all. Her mother was half elven, and she has more power in her pinky than you could ever dream of. I created perfection. The closest being to an elf that is alive. You are nothing but scraps that I threw out onto the streets because you were not as powerful as she.”
Astrid’s heart shattered. Not just for herself, but for all the priestesses who looked like her. All the priestesses who had cried as children in the sisterhood, wondering where their parents were and if they had been loved before they were given up to that place.
“You...” She didn’t even know what to say.
