“It’s great,” I ground out, fists bundled in my lap.
I flexed my hand. Source crept up my veins, gathering in the tendons, a small surge of adrenaline and salt and power ripping through the muscle and then just… falling, fading, like a fire with no spark, like a flame that’d been smothered by a blanket.
The gravity of it carved a hole in my stomach; the weight of it pulling me down.
They were right—Flóki, the demons.
I bit down on my lip, the bitter tang of iron coating my tongue.
This wasn’t Jarðarbæli. This was something different. Another one of the queen’s games.
Tears flecked my lash line. I was so fucking tired of being a pawn.
The metal hidden in the folds of my dress bit into my thigh. I needed to act fast—if the witch could cause an avalanche, freeze a river, turn a castle to ruins across realms, there’s no telling what she was capable of here.
And I was armed with a spoon.
I gently removed the utensil, holding my shoulders straight, keeping the bowl tight against my palm. It was far from perfect, but it’d have to do.
At least to get me a head start.
“You know what I think.” I met that empty void, that soul-sucking emptiness where her expression should be, head-on. “I think you’re no better than the Queen of the Huldufólk.”
A howl of laughter erupted from her hood, so shrill it nearly splintered my bones. “You have no idea how ruthless they can be. What kind of grudges they hold.”
“You killed innocent people with that avalanche.”
“I was due a visitor. I had a point to make. They kill people for sport.”
“And what do you think you’re doing here, collecting souls?”
“Getting a taste of home.”
Before the words fully left her lips I flew out of my seat, shoving the tip of the spoon up, up, up into Grýla’s draping of fabric, into the shadows where an eye might have been.
A guttural shriek echoed off the walls, the cages rattling, the sky cracking, the cauldron tipping. Her clawed hands swished past me, reaching, smothering, squeezing the air.
My heart racing, I grabbed the back of the chair and swung it around, ramming it into her side. It knocked her against the table, the fabric flinging back just far enough to reveal something ancient and rotting, her skin like decomposed leaves, her eye sockets hollow like the cavities in a tree.
Skirts whipping behind me, I sprinted around the fallen pot. The soup spilled out, bones crackling beneath my feet as I tore out of the cave.
Clouds gathered above me, thick and swollen. Black threads spun through them, lightning—magic—just like the ones I’d seen suspended over the debris in Hamarinn.
Wood splintered. Ice shattered.
The whole earth seemed to shift.
I sped down the path, a whir of blue and gold and silver, slippers skidding in the dirt, hem snagging on the rocks.
Behind me, laughter rumbled with the thunder.
I dared a glance back. In that split second, I saw only the rock face, the roiling of the sky.
Still, my heart beat harder.
Maybe the ogress was hiding, maybe she was a speck of dust, maybe she was a whisper on the wind.
The valley unfolded before me. I needed to get out. I needed to go. But where? Where was the exit, where was?—
