Page 23 of A Light So Blinding
“You kill all of them,” the guard snorted, before waving at Astrid. “Looks like you’re the lucky one, Priestess.”
He didn’t think, just reacted. He reached forward and slammed the guard into the wall. The man wheezed, and Bjorn leaned his weight even more into his hand that compressed the man’s ribs. It would be easy to crack them. So easy to shatter those thin bones even through the armor the guard wore.
With a snarl on his lips and tusks close enough to graze the guard’s face, he snarled, “You gave her to me. Don’t look at her. Don’t talk to her.”
The guard nodded frantically, but he would have done that no matter what. He just wanted to live.
A blade brushed against his side, sharp enough to do damage. He looked over to his right and saw all the guards who normally brought him to the arena at the ready. They wouldn’t kill him—he knew that from experience—but they would do their best to make him bleed.
Bjorn released the man and started down the hall. He didn’t look back at the priestess in his room, but he didn’t have to. He knew without a doubt they would leave her alone while he was gone.
Nine
Astrid
“You’re certain it curves to the right?” Astrid asked, barely avoiding tapping her mouth with her dirty finger. She did that when she was thinking, but she couldn’t do it now. Her hands were smeared with dirt and whatever else covered the floor of this cell.
Rabbit chuckled on the other side of the wall. “Yes, Priestess. We’ve all gone that way more times than I can count. We go to the right.”
“So the left leads out of the labyrinth, and the right goes deeper.” She shook her head and changed the lines she’d just drawn. “I could have sworn we went the opposite way.”
She’d been trying to keep track of every turn they had taken to get to her cell, but it was damn near impossible. Whoever had created the labyrinth, and cells that were attached, had designed it to be difficult for even the guards to find their way around. She had seen a couple of the guards with rolled-up maps in their pockets, and she assumed those were the guards who were newer.
Of course, that led her to the point where she was. Scratching her own map on the floor with their combined memories, hers and Rabbit’s, to try to figure out the best way out of here. She backed up to the door with the window, pressing her spine against it so she could see her work.
The floor was covered with scribbles, growing larger and larger the more they both remembered. It was daunting to look at it and try to even imagine a way out. No one had managed before, and it would take quite a bit of ingenuity to get out of here.
Giving up, she tapped her finger on her cheek, where she knew she had left smudges. The mask was back on the cot, considering no one had bothered her in the hours after they’d taken Bjorn.
Rabbit was already talking before she could say a word. “They probably took you in the opposite direction. There are parts of this labyrinth that none of the prisoners have been to. I think it’s fairly obvious that way will lead you where you want to go, but we have no idea after that. You’ll have to improvise.” He seemed almost excited by the idea.
She pressed her hand against the door behind her. “Rabbit, I don’t think...”
“I know you can’t bring me, Priestess. I’m just happy to think he’ll be getting out. A lot of staying sane in here is just dreaming. Dreaming of what could be, the outside world, anything to keep you out of the darkness that nips at all our heels.”
Astrid’s heart broke even further. Being down here, hungry, dirty, thirsty, she now realized what conditions these warriors had been kept in. Some of them were bad people, at least the humans down here were. But the trolls? She knew they were stolen from the battlefields. They were the ones who’d been left behind, or who had been presumed dead but weren’t.
Someone rattled their door down the hall. The cells exploded into commotion all of a sudden, shouts and cheers echoing so loudly it was hard to think. She spun, holding on to the bars of her window and peering out into the hall.
All she could see was a group of guards walking down each and every cell. They were carrying something, but she couldn’t see it just yet. And it wasn’t like she could hear anything other than the angry shouts of prisoners.
“Rabbit?” she called out, but no one answered her.
Instead, all she could see was the grin on the face of the man across from her. The same greasy man with missing teeth who loved to stare. Without Bjorn in the cell with her, the feeling of her skin crawling from his attention came on even stronger.
He waved at her, and she ducked away from the window until a guard’s helmeted features filled the space she had just stared out of.
“Bowl?” he asked.
“I don’t have a bowl.”
“Then no food.”
He started to move past until she shouted, “Wait!”
Apparently, some people still had pity. The guard paused, looking through her window for just a few more seconds. Astrid grabbed the cup next to her cot and raced toward him, holding it out through the bars.
He grabbed it, looked over the dented cup a bit before shrugging and then...
