His voice trembled. “Sol . . . I . . .”
“How long did you look for me?” she asked again, tears streaming down her face.
“Solveig, please understand—”
“How long until you decided to break yet another oath to me? How long did you leave me chained to the ground? Which day did you stop looking? On day twenty-three whenhefilleted all the skin from my body? What about on day forty-two, when they strung me up naked by my ankles and pressed a red-hot poker to my body over and over again? Or how about day sixty-eight? That was a special one. He shattered every single one of my bones, one at a time. I remember them all. Every. Single. Day that you didn’t come. Which day was it, Latham?”
“Thirty-two,” he whispered.
“Ah, day thirty-two,” she said coldly. “I was hanging from the ceiling by my wrists taking lash after lash. He whipped me one hundred and twenty-seven times. I wasn’t conscious for all of them, of course. He told me afterwards. He only stopped because his arm got tired.”
Latham didn’t meet her eyes. He stood staring at the ground, and Solveig thought he was shaking from shame or guilt. She was wrong. When he finally looked up, rage filled his gaze.
“Maybe you should’ve thought about that before banning me from joining the raid.”
Disbelief was a slap to her face. “So you do agree with that wench, then? Getting captured was my fault?” Venom and magic crackled under her skin.
He reared back. “That’s what this is about? Just because I found someone who actually wants to be withme—”
“Latham, I loved you, but I made it clear when we couldn’t be together that I wanted you to find someone else—”
“But the moment I do, you take all your anger out on me, blaming me foryourchoice—”
“My choice?Mychoice? I wanted to be tortured from the moment the sun rose to when it set for eighty-nine days? I chose to—”
“You chose to keep me at camp. You chose to stop them from taking me!”
His words stunned her. Even after everything she learned, everything she knew, hearing him blame her for his choices proved every doubt she’d had about him, about them, she’d been right.
“I guess I chose wrong then,” she said with lethal calm. Shock flashed across Latham’s face.
“How can you—”
“You broke the oaths you made to me. First when you followed me on that raid. And then again when you stopped looking for me. I never would’ve stopped. Damn the people and damn the consequences.”
“You always said we couldn’t be together because you had to put your people before your relationship with me. How can you blame me for doing what you said you would do?”
He never understood her reasoning and now she understood why. He thought she was scared of putting her people first, but it was the other way around. “That was the whole point of us not being together, Latham. We couldn’t be together because I knew I would choose you if it came down to it. And that’s exactly what happened. But I thought you would keep looking for me.”
“When we made that promise, neither of us thought the other would be taken.” He was still trying to justify his actions.
“And that makes it less dishonourable to break?”
Latham looked as though she’d slapped him. He opened his mouth to speak again but snapped it shut.
Solveig trembled, the soft breeze caressing her tear-stained cheeks. “In the end, I put you first. I chose to save you instead of going after my target. That was my choice. You chose differently. I don’t care who you take to bed. I hope she makes you happy. I care that you betrayed me in every single way that counts.”
She didn’t wait for his next words. Fresh tears fell freely down her face as she walked away, the last remaining spark of hope she had for Latham snuffed out.
Overthenextmonth,Solveig followed through on every one of her promises to herself.
Much to Laeknir’s grumbling, she moved out of the tent in the infirmary and back into her old living quarters. Gerrie had moved in while she was gone to stop the others from giving it away, but with Solveig back, she returned to the tent beside her.
After the first few nights of listening to Solveig scream from the night terrors, Gerrie insisted on staying with her. It helped, having someone there to remind her she wasn’t trapped in the cave anymore. When she could smell Gerrie’s sun-kissed skin and feel the warmth of her body beside her, she felt something like safety. Solveig started to sleep through the night after a week of Gerrie staying with her.
With her sleeping arrangement settled, she began training. Hard. She pushed herself to the brink every day to regain her strength. It was difficult to train when she was still so weak, but she couldn’t afford to show any weakness.
One day, while on a ride with Helle, she came across an open clearing, and an idea sparked. The process of hauling rocks and chopping down trees, and heaving bags of wheat was exercise enough, but at the end of it all, she had created a small training course for herself.
