"Peace, fair lady. I mean you no harm." The troll set down a few straight sticks beside her leg and a bundle of fabric that had seen better days. "My name is Gunnar. This is going to hurt, but it is the best we can do to keep it safe. We still have a long way to go."
She just... froze. Didn't know what to do while he reached for her leg. The feeling of his hands touching her was a little better than a human man's. At least she knew it was different. Strong hands still, yes, with callouses that she had felt countless times, but those claws made it hard to think of him as the gladiators or other men who had taken from her for years.
The trolls never took. They only killed when the women begged them, and Rose had considered it countless times.
He looked up at her again, those vivid green eyes holding on to hers like a lifeline. "Just look at me," he murmured. "Look at me and think of how terrifying I appear, or how disgusting you find my tusks. Whatever it takes to get you through this."
She wanted to tell him he wasn't all that disgusting. She'd seen a lot of trolls in her time, most of them heavily scarred and misshapen from years of fighting. He wasn’t that bad, really.
Then he grabbed onto the broken segment of her leg and twisted it into place, and all she could do was scream.
Ten
Gunnar
Gunnar could still hear her screams echoing through the forest. Of course he had known it would be painful for her to have her leg reset, but something about her had made him wonder if she'd be silent through it. She hadn't even noticed the pain while he’d carried her.
Apparently, he had been wrong. She very much felt every moment of pain as he manipulated her leg. Perhaps if she had been able to speak, she would have begged for a real healer. But Ragnar was very much focused on his own wife, and a leg like this wasn’t life threatening. It could wait until they reached Trollveggen.
She passed out quickly. The leg took a lot more manipulating than he’d thought because the muscles had already stiffened around the injury. If he wasn't careful, he was going to pinch the muscle into the bone as it healed, and that would cause more issues. He'd learned a long time ago that rushing a process like this would only make it worse.
Ragnar had hit him upside the head for worse.
By the time he had finished, so had his brother. Maia was already sitting next to a tree, leaning up against it with her face still pale but certainly better than she had been before. And so Ragnar headed over to Gunnar, crouching down to survey the strange creature they had caught up in their midst.
"She can go to the nearest village," Ragnar murmured. "They have a healer there. I assume the man is good. Her leg might never heal correctly, but at least she is no longer in that place."
"I'm keeping her."
"Her people will search for her, and we cannot bring back a liability like that to Trollveggen."
"You are bringing Maia."
"She is my wife," Ragnar bit out. "You know as well as I, this is a foolish thing to do, Gunnar. We cannot make a habit of stealing human women again, or the humans will have even more reason to hunt us. They already refuse to give us an ounce of rest. You think stealing more women will stop that?"
Gunnar sighed and leaned back. He looked at the woman where she had fallen, splayed out on the ground with her nearly white hair a cushion around her.
He didn't see just any human when he looked at her. He saw a creature missing a soul. She was without it again. He could feel that the body before him was almost corpse-like, but if he ordered her to do something she would come awake like he was some kind of necromancer ensorcelling her to do his bidding.
It was wrong.
It was twisted.
"When I agreed to become the Bone Keeper, it wasn't only because I wanted to help families. It wasn't only because I thought I would be good at it, or that I knew it would give me a chance to hunt down Tindra's body." Gunnar shifted a bit, his claws digging into the ground beneath him. "It was because Ilove to put people back together. Dead. Alive. It doesn't matter. I like seeing someone be whole again."
Ragnar nodded. "I know this about you, brother."
He gestured toward the woman. "What do you see when you look at her?"
Ragnar looked. He gave her a very detailed inspection, both with the eyes of a healer and a warrior, so Gunnar knew his answer was well thought out as he spoke. "I see a starved woman, broken from her time in that place. I know you think you can piece her mind back together, but a mind is a fragile thing. It is not like healing a body. It's more like weaving on a loom. One thread missing and the whole thing unravels again."
"No," Gunnar replied. "Where is her soul, Ragnar?"
He could see the dawning of comprehension come over his brother as Ragnar breathed out a long, slow, horrified breath.
"Her soul," Ragnar murmured. "Where is it?"
"I don't know."
