Page 21 of A Light So Blinding
“Let’s hope she’s still alive. You just won her, after all.” A shifting could be heard through the wall, as though Rabbit was getting closer. “Keep her fed. Keep her watered. Keep her warm. That’s all humans need, really.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
There was a long moment of quiet. He wasn’t sure if Rabbit was trying to get his own bearings, or if something was happening in that room. That was always the question. No one knew when the guards would enter their cells, or what would happen if they did. Their lives were full of uncertainty and hardship without knowing how or if anyone of them would survive.
Bjorn did his best not to think about it. He didn’t want to make attachments that would fall apart if he thought too hard about them. He didn’t want to believe that his people were dying around him.
This prison had become somewhat of a liminal space for him. Nothing was real. That was how he survived.
Shifting a little closer to her, he reached out a slow, shaking hand and gently brushed a claw through the tangled, golden waterfall of her hair. It felt soft against the pad of his finger. Which... No, it wasn’t right. Couldn’t be right. It was a tangled mess and therefore, should have been snarled like his own hair. It couldn’t be soft. Not like the silk he’d once touched when a woman walked by him as he was hanging from the ceiling.
Rabbit’s voice came through the wall again, quiet and lulling as though he knew what Bjorn was doing. “They are delicate creatures, humans. Sometimes they are hard to manage, but from what I’ve seen, their females are far more breakable.”
“Why does it feel like you’re warning me to be good?”
There was another shifting sound from inside the cell beside him. “She’s a priestess. We have to care for them even more than the others. A priestess sees the future, you know.”
He didn’t know if the human priestesses were the same as theirs. In the troll realm, women like her were revered. He still remembered the blood witches he’d met, the bone readers, allwomen who had unnatural talents that should have seen into his future and predicted this.
Maybe they had. Maybe he still remembered his mother’s whispered fear to his father. “His path is wrong,” she’d said all those years ago. “Twisted. It should be a straight line.”
His father had taken him away after that conversation. Yes, that was what had happened. He’d thought perhaps his father had wanted to train him all on his own, but that wasn’t how it had gone. His mother had been rambling about twisted paths and how they needed to alter his future. She’d wanted Bjorn to stay with her in the Outlands.
“The Outlands,” he murmured, testing the word on his tongue. He hadn’t thought about that place in ages. But now that he was thinking of it, he couldn’t stop.
The valleys were beyond the mountain. Far from Trollveggen, which the humans knew about. They were so far away that no human could ever traverse their lands, and that was where there were other trolls. Wild trolls. Those of his people who refused to be trapped beneath rock and stone, even though it was safer for them to do so.
The people who were more connected to their roots of mud, and fur, and scales. Hardier folk who cared little for the calm and safety of the mountain home and instead, lived beneath the sun.
“The Outlands?” The voice that broke through his memory was soft and quiet.
He looked down to see her eyes had opened, and she’d tugged the blanket down to her chin. He was caught in that icy gaze, unable to think past the terror of what that gaze did to him.
“You look so much like the princess,” he said. The words were ripped out of him, a fear that burned in his chest because she did. She looked like the worst extension of the king, and a woman who had tormented many of the prisoners.
She blinked up at him. “As I said, that is by design. The king himself picks those of us who are to become priestesses. He chooses us out of a group of girls who have been abandoned by their families. I am a priestess because he made me one, or at least, deemed me worthy to become one.”
That was not how it worked in troll culture. Some were born with talents that others did not have.
Frowning, he stared down at her. “Your power should have been enough to encourage training. Your people do not allow talent like yours to build on its own?”
“I don’t have much talent, really. I just... pull.” She blinked up at him. “My apologies, Bjorn, but you are looming over me, and it is not very comfortable. Would you mind taking a step back?”
It was a very reasonable request, but said in such a way that made him think she’d practiced it. Or perhaps that she had a lot of practice asking people to give her space in a way that wouldn’t anger them.
It made rage burn in his belly. She deserved to not have to ask anyone for space. She deserved so much more than what it seemed like she had gotten.
Bjorn shifted back to his corner, slowly crawling on his knuckles so he wouldn’t look quite so large. He didn’t want to frighten this woman, who had more bravery in her pinky than most human men.
She’d come here after all. How many of her people had faced him in the labyrinth and turned white with fear? How many of her kind had tried to flee when they realized he was running toward them? But she had stood there, waiting for him to reach her. Even perhaps begging him to reach her with her wide eyes and smooth features.
No, that wasn’t what had happened. He shook his head to clear the thoughts, and then froze when she shifted.
He watched her as she sat up on the cot, and the blanket fell to her lap. Those pretty pearls had scattered even more while she’d slept. Perhaps the tension hadn’t helped, because more strands had broken. As she moved, they popped, sending cascading pearls onto the floor that scattered in his direction.
She caught the dress before it fell with the blanket, but he watched her features turn scarlet. She moved her face to the side and grimaced before her hands flew to her face.
Was she looking for the mask? Of course she was. She’d been wearing it every time he had seen her, and obviously that was a huge part of who she was. The mask helped hide her reactions when they might be inappropriate.
