“Was I supposed to let those people die?” I bit back through gritted teeth.
“Why would she take you to Jarðarbæli?” he returned. “Keeping you around solves many of her problems.”
“I can walk out that door at any moment. I can find a way there myself.” Even as the words left my lips, I wasn’t sure I believed them.
He lifted his dark brows. “You honestly think you could navigate that glacier? Did you see the corpses, or were you too bewitched by the Galdur?”
Bile stung my throat. There… there had been a peculiar crunch beneath my crampons, but I’d assumed it was the culmination of ice and snow.
“Gunnar wouldn’t”—still stuck on the visual, I almost gagged—“Gunnar wouldn’t let me wander that wasteland until I was nothing but a pile of bones.”
“Gunnar has a duty.” Flóki licked his lips, as if to draw my gaze, then bit down, canines dimpling the plump skin. “Crush or not.”
My face heating once more, I gripped the towel tightly around me. “So I’m trapped here.” The Coffin Seeker, the jelmadag, Eldi—even those stories of Grýla—they’d all hinted as much.
Unbidden, my eyes tracked the vaulted ceiling, cringing at the hanging rocks as if, at any minute, they might come crashing down. “What do you propose I do then?”
He shrugged, bare shoulders flecked with water glistening under the low light. “You could enact elven law.” He phrased it like a suggestion, not a warning. Yet still… why did the words hit me like a gut punch?
I kept my voice flat, bored—the very last thing I was. “And what does that entail?”
“A fight to the death.”
My heart thumped erratically, the only sound ringing through the quiet cavern.
Flóki’s face cracked in a grin that was all too sharp. “Ha! You should have seen yourself.”
Was it me, or had his pupils doubled in size? “Ok, so what is it really?”
“It’s a way to get what you want.” With a jerk of his chin, he gestured to a towel folded next to his mess of clothes.
Grabbing it, I tossed it over and spun around, trying not to give in to the itch to turn at the sound of his wet steps. “How does it work?”
“You say the magic words.”
“And then what?” My muscles clenched at the trickling of water surely raining off his abs, at the swish of the lagoon?—
At the patter of his footsteps, growing closer. “Hildur will grant you a pardon, a mercy, a wish.”
“A simple phrase and the queen just… gives me whatever I want? I don’t buy that one bit.” I knew how she worked—always strategic, always one step ahead. “What’s in it for her? What does she get out of it?”
“Alright, so she may not want to comply, but it’s an incantation so potent, so ancient, no one can interfere.” Energy prickled my back. He was standing behind me. “Not even the gods.”
Figures. Gods were never on my side, anyways.
“What’s the catch?”
“You simply have to prove your worth.”
“How?”
“You’ll be publicly pitted against an equal match.”
That could be anyone. A worrisome thought ran through my mind like the hair-raising drag of a claw. “Like in some kind of duel? What if I lose?”
“Hildur is the speaker of your fate.”
My stomach flipped.
