Dark magic.
The sun must have set.
She knelt next to him, fear-stricken, imagining him change from bear to man. She heard his nails scrabble on the stone floor, his body twist in pain, and shoved her knuckles in her mouth. Bit down.
What could she do?
Again she felt the brush of ice-cold evil on her face and then sensed it dissipate into the air.
The groan Bjorn let out this time was a very human one.
“Turn on the lights,” she whispered in the echoing hall, and nothing happen. “Turn on the lights,” she screamed, leaping to her feet with her hands clenched to fists at her side.
Her panic echoed back at her eerily.
Bjorn must have made sure she had no power to command the magic outside of her room after sundown. She knelt again, despairing.
She was tired. Tired of not understanding. Tired of being locked in at night. Tired of being in darkness.
She felt him move, shiver from lying on the cold stone, and he groaned again. She reached out to touch him and found he was freezing. He needed blankets and clothes.
Standing unsteadily, Astrid lifted her hands in front of her and headed in the direction of the stairs. It seemed to take forever, but at last her fingers touched the wall, and she edged left until the wall ran out. Bending, she felt for the first stair, and stifled a sob when she found it.
If she cried now, she would not stop.
She crawled up the stairway and then leant against the passage wall at the top, walking with her body touching the smooth stone until she came to her door.
She knew it would not open from the inside, but surely it would open from the outside?
Steeling herself for disappointment, she found the handle and pulled down. The door swung open, and her chamber lay before her, as dark as everywhere else.
She held the door and stepped in. “I want a doorstop,” she called out, not willing to chance being shut in. It appeared in her hands, and she jammed it firmly in place.
She wished up blankets and cushions, and after some thought, a shirt and loose cotton pants for Bjorn, water and food. She lay it all on a blanket she could pull along behind her.
Then she found the bed and crawled to her side of it, feeling beneath the mattress for her bundle. She felt within for the tallow candle and the tinderbox, stroked them with her fingers.
If there was ever a time to use them, it was now.
* * *
He was beautiful.
Handsome in the way gods are handsome—blindingly. She could not look away.
His hair was white blond, his skin golden. The proportions of his face were an artist’s dream.
She crouched beside him, lifting the candle closer to his face, and saw his neck was bruised and black.
The body her fingers knew so well lay naked before her. He was big, his frame as broad and muscular as she imagined it. The burns on his legs wept and the slashes on his chest bled. She could not waste time drinking him in.
She arranged the cushions and blankets, and as gently as she could, tugged him onto them. The hot water she’d brought was now warm, and she dipped a cloth into it, moving quickly to clean him.
Even as she wiped away the blood, she saw in the weak candle light his wounds were healing, the skin knitting together and smoothing over.
He shivered as the water cooled on his skin.
With infinite care, she lifted the soft white cotton shirt she’d wished for over his head, slid his arms into the long sleeves, and then struggled with the pants. His leg wounds were well enough healed by now that the soft fabric would not stick to them, and he desperately needed the warmth.
She was breathing hard by the time she’d finished dressing him, and she knelt back, candle raised, to look at him again.
He moaned in his sleep and she smoothed back his hair and kissed him gently on the forehead.
Bjorn jerked awake with a cry, startling her, and three drops of tallow fell, hot and black, onto the white of his shirt.
“Astrid?” His voice was hoarse from the yggren’s strangling hands, and befuddled. He struggled up to his elbows.
She could say nothing. She could only look at him, wide eyed, suddenly shy; overcome with emotion and a sense of strangeness to truly see him at last. See his eyes when he spoke.
“Astrid.” He looked at the candle, nothing more than a stub in her hand, and then back to her. “What have you done?”
* * *
They were doomed.
Every sacrifice he’d made, every check and balance he’d put into place was for nought.
And it was his fault. He could have left her alone. Let her be, instead of making her his lover, drawing her deep into his world, but he had taken the chance.
And he had failed.
Astrid’s eyes were wide in the waning candle light, and he saw hot tallow drop on her hand, unheeded.
“What have I done?” she asked, and her voice trembled.
“You have lost me,” he replied, the words scraping over his throat and tongue like sandpaper. “I have lost you.”
A roaring, desperate anger built in him and he felt the tendons in his neck stand out, the muscles in his arms bunch. “We are lost to each other.” He could barely speak, the roaring filled his ears and thundered in his heart, and he pushed up from his elbows, and stood. Looked up to the ceiling in the dark hall, his hands clenched.
“You win, your majesty!”
His shout bounded and echoed in the chamber and Astrid jumped, dropping the pitiful piece of wax that had brought them so low, extinguishing the struggling flame.
They were engulfed in darkness.
“Because I saw you as a man? I have lost you because of that?”
“Why do you think I went to such lengths to ensure you never saw me? Why do you think I begged you, begged you, Astrid, to never try?” He spun in her direction, snarling as if he were still a bear.
“I didn’t know why!” Her cry was anguished and angry, all at once. “And I’ve abided by your request. I’ve had the means to see you for weeks and I haven’t done it. But tonight you needed help.”
“It wasn’t a request, it was an order.” His roar echoed all around him, and he sensed Astrid stand up.
“You do not order me, Bjorn, and you never have. You have put me in the middle of this, without ever telling me all the stakes.”
He closed his eyes and breathed deep. “You are right.” He could not help the desolation in his voice. He was blind with regret, consumed by the enormity of his loss. “How did you come to have that candle? Did you want to make sure you slept with a man, not some dark creature from your mother’s nightmares?”
She gasped, the sound clear in the darkness. “And if I did? You have seen me for all I am, but I haven’t seen you. Tonight, tending your wounds was the reason for bringing out the candle my mother gave me, but I admit, beholding you was an added benefit.”
“I had no choice,” he shouted, then clenched his fists, bowed his head, and fought for control. Her pain, the agony that ran through her voice, calmed him. “I had no choice.”
“What happens now?” She tried to match his calm.
“As I haven’t already disappeared, I think Norga will take me at dawn, when I become a bear.”
“Take you?”
“To her palace.” He moved forward and found her in the dark, pulled her to him. She came easily into his embrace, her arms tight around him.
Why were they stumbling around in the dark? There was no more need. “Lights!”
He blinked as the sconces lit, flooding the hall with a warm glow. He saw the little nest she’d made on the floor for him. It made a lonely island in the vast space, and he realized she had managed it all in complete darkness.
“Let’s go to your room.”
She nodded. Allowed him to lead them up the stairs.
“What will happen to you? Why does Norga want you?”
“It’s a long story.” By the top of the stai
rs, he was breathing hard and his legs felt like giving way. He lent against her.
“We have until dawn.” Her voice was strong—defiant, almost—but he could hear the thread of fear. The note of panic.
He opened the door to her chamber and felt like an old man. Every movement hurt.
He used some of his strength to create sconces and light her room. Astrid followed him in and sat on her bed, her eyes bright on him, missing nothing.
“Use all your power to heal yourself,” she said as he limped toward her. “We have no need of light.”
He looked at her a long moment. Sighed. “No. We don’t.” As he reached the bed, he plunged the room into darkness.
* * *
“Norga enchanted me while I sat beside my father on his deathbed. When I was at my lowest, and so that he would see, the moment before he died, how she had tricked him. What plans she had for me.”
Astrid made an inarticulate sound at the back of her throat.
Bjorn eased himself onto the bed, and pulled her close.
“She laid out my future. She had plans to take control of the realm, but she was not interested in keeping the balance. She wanted to rule as a tyrant, not as an arbitrator like my father, where everything is in harmony. Because of that, most of my father’s subjects would not accept her. She could only count on support from some of the darker corners of the realm.”
Astrid said nothing, feeling Bjorn’s arms tense, the muscles rippling under her hands.
“She has a daughter, hidden in her palace. And her plan was for me to marry this troll daughter, and command the vedfe and the others to accept us as the new lord and lady.”
“Why would you do that?”
“If I did not agree, she swore we would go to war. Her and those loyal to her, against me and those loyal to me. It would be carnage. And an end to the balance, no matter what the outcome.”
“But that would have cost her, too.”
“Which is why she agreed to the bargain. She knew a war could destroy that which she sought to control.”
Astrid sat up, her mind racing. “She thought the bargain gave her a better chance of winning.”
Bjorn sighed. “I had to walk a knife’s edge with that bargain. Making it seem likely she would win, but giving myself a chance of winning, too.”
“What was the bargain?” This is what she’d longed to know since she’d met him.
“I had a dream. One that came to me every night, sometimes. Of a clearing, and a girl, and a dead hag, and Norga and another woman talking about me. I told Norga I wished to marry none but the girl, and I wanted a chance to find her. That if, after a year, I could not, I would marry Norga’s daughter.”
“The boy in the clearing was you.”
“While we sat together, you whispered something to me, something that stayed with me from that day until this one.”
“What did I say?” Astrid turned her face toward him. How could she not remember?
“You said: I will love you forever.”
Chapter Twenty-two
“I will love you forever.” With the words came determination.
Bjorn pulled her back down, into his arms, and she forced herself to lie calmly beside him when she wanted instead to pace and plot. To think up a way around their predicament. She wanted action to overcome her fear.
His voice was strong. Back to normal. “I have loved you since that day in the clearing. You gave me an escape from Norga’s spite and my father’s spell-blinded eyes.”
“How long did it take you to find me?”
He shivered beside her. “Almost my full year.”
“But you did find me. You beat her.” Astrid felt the first surge of hope.
“Norga agreed to my bargain on a condition. That I take you to my palace, and keep you for a year. She would allow me to take my human form at night, but you could not see me as a man for that whole year. If you did, the bargain was broken and I had to marry her daughter.”
“She thought to torture you by having me under your roof and not be able to come to me as a man.”
“I was so pleased to know I would have time as a man again, I agreed readily. I thought I could live with you without touching you for a year, and then, I came up with the plan of visiting to you in darkness. That way, I kept to the letter of the bargain, but not in a way Norga intended.”
“Until I came with my tallow candle.” Astrid’s voice cracked. She should have listened to the niggle of doubt she’d had since her mother first pressed the candle into her hand.
“Shhh. No tears or blame.” He brushed her hair back. “I should never have come to you at all.”
“Can you not reverse this? Enchant Norga somehow?” She tried to grab any idea, however unformed, that swirled through her mind.
“No.” He held her even closer. “I am not as powerful as my father. I’m half-human. In a physical fight, I might be her match, but she has older magic than me.”
“Where does Norga take you, then? Perhaps I could rescue you, somehow.”
He shook his head. “That is impossible. Norga’s palace can only be found east of the sun, and west of the moon.”
“But that’s . . .” She lifted a startled face to his.
“Yes. That’s no place at all.”
“I do not care. I will find a way.”
“Astrid.” His voice was dead, despairing. “I gave my oath, and must fulfill this bargain.”
“You gave your oath, but I did not give mine.”
His fingers tightened, clamped her waist. “Norga becomes even more powerful the moment I marry her daughter. Do not endanger yourself.”
She did not reply, and eventually his hold on her relaxed.
“Let us not waste our last hours on this.” Bjorn brushed his lips to her cheek, and light, soft and mellow, bloomed like a flower, filling the room.
He looked almost completely healed, and she stared at him, filling her eyes so she would never forget.
“I want to see you, to not waste a minute more. So I have this memory whatever may happen.” He reached behind her and tugged at the ties on her dress, his fingers clumsy with haste. When he raised his eyes to hers, they were molten. Sea green mixed with fire.
Her heart lurched as it caught his urgency. She pushed her dress off her shoulders and began wriggling out of it.
He raised his white shirt off his head, and then looked at it, perplexed. “Where did this come from?”
“I wished for it. You were so cold.” Astrid fingered the soft cotton, marred only by the drops of tallow over the left breast.
“Something truly from you. From your heart.” He looked thoughtful. “I shall wear it when Norga takes me.”
He laid it carefully aside, and the light gleamed off his skin and hair as he turned to her. Framed her face with his hands.
Astrid traced a finger over his lips as their bodies slid together, familiar and yet unfamiliar.
“If there is a way to find you, then I will.” She found a center of calm in her words. A new resolve. When dawn came, she would not lie, crying and wishing for him back. She would push away the anguish and she would get him back.
* * *
Astrid woke to the pale, cold touch of early morning. She stretched out and then froze. With a cry, she twisted up and onto her knees, her heart thundering. Her gaze went to the empty place beside her in the bed.
How could she have slept through? How could he have gone without waking her?
The empty bed was proof she had and he did, but how could it be?
They had lain together, soft and sated, and she had closed her eyes to savor the moment. The smell of his skin, the feel of it against hers. How could she have slept?
Unless . . . she looked again at the dented pillow, the ruffled sheets on Bjorn’s side, and wondered if he had made the choice for her?
“As least now, I know nothing is unsaid between us.”
He had whispered that to her only a few hours ago.
Co
uld he really have enchanted her one last time? Thinking to save her from the trauma and heartbreak of his leaving. Thinking to force her to be angry with him, move on and find a new life.
“No!” She pounded the bed with her fist and leapt up. “You do not get rid of me that easily.”
“Hot water,” she called. Nothing happened. “Breakfast?” Again, nothing. The magic in her room was gone.
So was everything else, she realized, except the furniture that had been in the room the evening she arrived. The bed and a chair and table were all she could see. The ladder was gone. The dress she wore yesterday, her bath—all gone.
Naked, panicked, Astrid fell to her knees and began scrabbling under her bed. As her hand touched her old rag bundle, tears of relief stung her eyes.
She dug in the cloth sack and lifted out her old dress. The one she’d worn from her home the night Bjorn came for her. It had once been cornflower blue, now faded to match the winter sky; thin, scratchy, and over-patched. Before her, Freja and Bets had both worn it.
It had served her well enough before. And it would do so now.
She pulled it over her head. Threw the sack over her shoulder, and winced as something within it struck her back in the pendulum swing of the bag. She dug her hand inside, and came out with the gift Eric had given her before she’d left home the first time.
The tiny carving of a bear.
He’d sanded and oiled it, and it was smooth in her hands. Why had he given it to her? Guilt, perhaps. Some strange idea of a parting gift.
Whatever the reason, it comforted her. Increased her determination. She slipped it back in the sack and walked to the door, her hand resting a moment on the handle. Would it open for her?
As she pushed the handle down, something dropped from the skylight, and Astrid looked over her shoulder to see what it was.
A little dwarf. And then another. And then another. Red capped, blue shirted, with little leather boots.
The first one looked at her and let out a laugh at the surprise and horror on her face, and she did not wait a second longer.
Trusting the castle was free of all magic, she flung the door back and ran for her life.
Mistress of the Wind Page 11