“Darcke,” I warned.
“I like it when you say my name.”
I bit down a smile. He was impossible.
“You’re the one who’s impossible,” Darcke said. “Impossible to get out of my fucking head.”
A yawn rounded my mouth. “There is probably a big likelihood one of us will die tomorrow, so you might be free sooner rather than later.”
My hand hurt with how hard he squeezed it. “I’m not going to let that happen.”
My tiredness was beginning to get the better of me. “You say that like you can control it.”
“I will try,” he whispered when I drifted off. “I will try to keep you safe from all of this.”
Thirty-Eight
“That looks sufficiently horrible,” Ottoh said.
I could only agree. We were sailing into an inlet of ice, the cliffs towering on either side of us covered in white. Even the sky above us was silver gray, and each breath I pulled into my lungs ached, the air so cold it felt brittle, shards making their way through my throat.
I was grateful for the fur-lined jacket I’d brought, and I pulled it closer, so the fur that covered the shoulders tickled my nose, protecting my neck from the harsh cold.
“Are we sure that’s where we’re going?” Kilia asked. “It looks like Hel.”
“It’s part of Hel,” Darcke mumbled. “It’s a graveyard.”
A knot of fear filled my throat as the ship broke through the thin, almost translucent ice, sliding to a stop when we crested the frozen beach. The world was too still here, the wind too quiet and the waves too calm.
“Is it true that their bodies remain?” Vero asked in a whisper.
Ilse slipped up to my side. “Yes,” she answered. “When the battle of the North happened, it was so cold that every fallen man and woman was frozen over, each captured in time in theirmoment of death. They’re all sleeping here, like everything else on this island.”
“Do not wake what doesn’t wish to be woken,” I said.
Ottoh’s third shuddered. “I thought that was a children’s story to keep us away from the ice in winter.”
So did I. But there was something about this island.
Darcke stepped closer when pressure laced my chest.
“We stay together,” he ordered. “Better be more of us if we need to fight old dead guys.”
A giggle overcame me, but I quieted when Ilse shot me a wide-eyed look.
“Let’s go,” I said. “I’d like this to be over with.”
When this was done, I’d have earned wood for our people and a blade for myself, and the only thing that would remain was the reckoning by the gods. Then it was out of my hands. I’d done what I had to do to survive, and if that wasn’t enough for the gods…
My eyes tracked Darcke as he threw an anchor into the sea before swinging his legs over the railing and pushing off, landing with a crunch on the snow-covered beach.
He’d fight for my people. The man who’d lost his own would not leave another to die.
I didn’t care what my mother believed, or what Ilse and potentially others suspected. Darcke was a good man. He hid that goodness beneath a shell of assholery and cold glares and violence, but it was there.
He’d held my hand all night, and when I woke in the morning he’d been snoring softly, the gentle hum weaving through the room. For the first time since we’d bonded there had been calm radiating from him, a warmth that I imagined had been there before he lost everything and was leashed to the man who’d caused it.
Anger rose within me, and Darcke frowned. I rolled my shoulders to try to soothe it before he asked. As I did, the othership rounded the bend of the inlet, and urgency made my feet tap against the deck.
