Chapter Twenty-Five
Freya awoke on a cold stone floor to the coppery smell of blood.
She lifted her head and blinked at her surroundings. She recognized this place, though she had only been here once, well over a decade ago. The crumbling stone walls. Blood smeared on every surface, handprints and splatter from the slaughter that took place here.
This was the temple where she’d found Brenn. Brenn had been one of two survivors, and the warlord Freya served at the time had taken both priestesses into his warband. Priestesses were a valuable resource in war. They could make you hallucinate your commander telling you to turn on your own, or convince you your loved ones are in peril, drawing you into danger. Visions so real you could smell them.
Freya touched her scalp. Her hair was short, and she was wearing the leathers she preferred in Torden. Her senses were too vivid. Not one of her sick dreams in which she had to repeat the past, then.
“Brenn?” she called.
As if summoned, Brenn appeared in the middle of the room in a raised chair. This place was transient, everything and nothing at once. Freya would have sworn Brenn had not been there a moment ago, but the other part of her brain warred with her, telling her Brenn had been watching since she arrived.
The vision could come from any priestess, not necessarily Brenn. A tactic used against other warbands who also had magic on their side.
“Where are the bodies?” Freya asked.
Brenn touched a hand to her throat. In the wake of the massacre of Brenn’s temple, bodies had been strewn everywhere. The blood was here, and so was the stench of death, but the bodies were now gone.
“I could not bear to see them,” Brenn said.
Freya approached the raised chair. “Do you remember the name of the warlord we served?” she asked. “The one who did this?” Freya had served so many warlords, she’d lost count. She couldn’t recall their faces now, the people she had murdered for over and over again, until someone usurped the leader and the cycle began anew.
“Of course I remember,” said Brenn. “He ruined my life.”
“He’s gone now,” Freya said, thinking it must be true.
“Yes,” Brenn agreed.
“Why are we here?” Freya asked. Something faint came to her as if through a tunnel—she’d been wounded. An arrow, she remembered. An arrow had run her right through. “Am I dying?”
Brenn’s eyes filled with tears. “I hope not.”
“Have they found the archer?” Freya asked.
“We know very little. I don’t know how we would identify him.”
“It was a woman,” said Freya.
“A woman?” repeated Brenn.
Another memory came to Freya—a glimpse of the archer in a window. Freya hallucinated her now in a shattered window of the temple. A flash, and then gone. “Just a feeling I have,” she said, but she could not specify how she knew.
“Sometimes the goddess gives us answers when we need them,” Brenn said.
Freya scoffed. “The goddess hasn’t given me shit.” Everything she’d earned had been on her own. All the goddess was good for, to Freya, were vague omens about bad things happening, or else no news at all. What use was that to Freya, who needed to know everything to feel safe?
“It is a little ironic, don’t you think? That you are named for her, but you do not trust her power.”
The only explanation Freya could come up with was that her mother had had a wicked sense of humor, or, perhaps, she, too, had had some unrefined foresight into the trajectory of Freya’s life.
Freya Wedd had been named for the goddess, but destined for the shadows. Ironic indeed.
“She has not seen fit to show you if I will die?” Freya asked.
“You will die,” Brenn said. “I know that to be true. But I do not know when.”
“It will happen violently? A murder?” Freya asked. It was only fair, she supposed. She had taken her share of lives.
