Page 25 of A Light So Blinding
“Not your blood?”
He shook his head, then headed toward the cot where there was that single cup of food waiting for him. Dropping down onto the edge of it, he sat heavily. As though he had weights on his shoulders that curved him forward.
He didn’t reach for the cup. Instead, he just stared at her. It seemed like he did that a lot, and she wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or an act that should make her nervous.
Astrid curled her legs under herself, tucking the blanket a little tighter around her shoulders before pointing at the cup. “There is food for you.”
“You should eat first.”
“All I have done is sit around in this cell all day. I do not need the energy.” She pointed at it. “Eat.”
He just slowly shook his head. Those eyes stared at her with a certainty that she knew he wouldn’t accept her argument. No matter what she said, he wasn’t going to eat until she did, and she just... couldn’t. No matter how hard her stomach growled, she knew she was going to vomit the moment that food touched her tongue.
Rabbit’s voice broke through the wall. “She doesn’t want to eat it because it’s their scraps. Probably looks disgusting to her. It looked disgusting to us too, once upon a time.”
Bjorn’s gaze seemed to sharpen. He looked at her, then at the cup, and then reached to pick it up.
She was miserable that what Rabbit had said was the truth. It really was the issue of where the food came from, who had prepared it, and how little she wanted to put that in her mouth. “I feel like the most difficult prisoner to keep,” she said. “But it’s been years since I ate anything that wasn’t prepared for me.”
There were times when she had. When she and Rose had scrounged through garbage cans to eat, but those memories were so deeply buried, she couldn’t even remember reaching into bins for food that had likely been in there for a day or two. Astrid most certainly did not remember getting so sick that it took weeks for her to get better. She didn’t. She didn’t have those memories because they were from a different time, a different person. Now, she was a priestess. She was used to fine dining and foods that most people had never even seen in their lifetime.
The massive troll seated on the cot had started cleaning off his hands. He used the loincloth covering his lap, so she averted her eyes the moment she realized what he was doing. Why was he cleaning his hands, though?
She gave him long enough to reasonably clean the blood off, then looked back at him. He seemed to be waiting for that. He’d been staring at her again before he gestured for her to come closer to him.
“Sit with me, Priestess.” That low voice was a bit of a siren call, even if she was terrified of what he was going to try to do.
“I can’t eat that food,” she said, moving to sit next to him and giving up on preserving the map on the floor.
He shook his head at her and then nodded over his shoulder. “Sit behind me.”
“I... what?”
He stared until she did what he ordered. Did he not want her to watch him eat? That seemed... odd. Maybe trolls ate differently, though. He did have those tusks, and maybe that made eating a rather stomach-turning sight to watch.
But the moment she sat down, primly folding her hands in her lap with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders, he said, “Hold out your hand.”
“Why?”
No response.
She did so, preparing herself to be sick the moment something touched her. But what he placed in her hand was... a perfect slice of tomato. Sure, it was a little soggy around the edges, but it was a perfectly round tomato slice.
“Oh.” This wasn’t so bad. She could eat a tomato.
Even though her mind screamed at her that it had just been in the cup, it didn’tlooklike it had been. With a quick nibble, she could say it didn’t taste like anything other than a tomato either.
Swallowing it down, she waited for her gag reflex to kick in. It didn’t.
“Good?” Bjorn asked, not even looking at her. He was fiddling with the cup again, and she realized he was using his body to block the sight from her. If she wasn’t looking at the food, it wasn’t so bad. Not to mention, she couldn’t really smell it. All she could smell was the metallic scent on him and the strange warmth of his body. He didn’t smell terrible, just not like the food.
Taking a deep breath, she replied, “I suppose it wasn’t so bad.”
“Take this, then.”
She reached out her hand, and he handed her half a carrot. Then a piece of broccoli. Three strangely savory grapes that she didn’t like all that much, and a few slices of chicken breast that were rather impressively good. By the time she was done, she wasn’t full in the slightest, but her stomach didn’t hurt quite so much.
And then when she finally looked around the massive back that prevented her from seeing anything, she realized there wasn’t much left in the cup. Just what had made it look like slop in the first place.
