“But you don’t want to die.”
She sighs.“I have to die.”
“Yet you won’t let me kill you.”I shake my head.“You’re very frustrating.Why can’t you just tell me the third option?”
“It must be freely given,” she says.
“You want me to take your place,” I say.“Not take the heart to save my sister and Hyperion—you want me to accept this place from you.They’re chanting for me...because I can become their new master.”
Freya sighs with total exhaustion.“Thousands of years, Gullveig.Thousands of years.”A single tear forms in her right eye and rolls down her perfect, inhuman cheek.“Please, please take it.”
“Or, I could kill you and take it.”
Her grin this time isn’t compassionate.It’s not understanding.She’s enraged.“That’s the wrong answer.”
“You want me to take it, because the vanir wanted to enslave the humans.They were bad, bad creatures.”
“You know that much already,” she says.“But if you knew how bad they’ve become in all this time, trapped here and suffering for thousands of years?You’d never even consider an alternative that would release them.”
“You’re right,” I say.“If I knew the truth, if I knew how things were, I’d do exactly as I was told, right?”
She nods.“Exactly.”
“What would I have to do, exactly, to take over for you?”
Freya’s shoulders soften.Her mouth parts, and she exhales.“Bless you, Gullveig.You never were selfish.”She steps closer.“First, you take my right arm with your left.”She holds her hand out.“Then we clasp one another’s wrists, and you rest your head on my shoulder.”
I do as she asks, stepping toward her slowly.
She feels like a bright, fresh spring meadow.
She smells like fields of lavender just unfurled into brilliant blooms.
She sounds like sunshine and ocean waves and laughing children.
She’s devoted her entire life to ending the suffering that she and Gullveig swore to stop.She and Gullveig made that vow to Jörð, to honor the love she had for Veralden Radian.They both wanted to set the world’s wrongs right, and she’s suffered terribly for it.
“Now,” Freya says.“Repeat after me.”
“Okay,” I say.
But instead of repeating the words she begins to chant, I clasp her hand as tightly as I can, and I channel Azar’s energy into a shield to hold her in place, and I kick the hilt of my sword upward with my toe.
I grab it with my right hand, and I plunge it into her heart.
And I never once let go.I never waver.
Her voice is pained.“Gullveig.”
Even here, in this strange place, standing on a floor that’s not a floor, holding a blade that she gave me, blood bubbles up out of her mouth and splatterseverywhere.
Apparently dying sucks everywhere, and it’s always messy.
“I’m sorry,” I say.“But I’m not Gullveig, and I never made a vow, not to Jörð, not to you, and certainly not to Veralden Radien.In fact, he can burn, for all I care.”
I pull the blade out, and as it’s almost loose, it grinds on something.
I smile as I reach my hand inside and yank the heartstone from her chest.“I bet this freaking hurt for the last few thousand years.You must have been choking on it all the time.”I shake my head.“And I know I should feel really terrible right now, but here’s the thing.”
