My lips snapped shut when Darcke stuttered, both of us reeling with the truth of his words.
“Huh,” he breathed. “I need you to be safe. More than anything I need you to be safe.”
I wanted to savor the way he said it: as if he’d figured out what made the waters in our realm ebb and flow. But steps thundered behind us.
“If you want me to be safe, you need to set me down,” I cried as the hrimthurs licked its blue lips before lifting the ice pick in its hand.
I felt Darcke’s decision to sacrifice himself—to throw me down and cast himself in the giant’s way—before he could act. I didn’t allow him to read my instinct. Smacking my hilt against his head, I kicked at the same time, making him stumble and lose his grip.
As I spun, I lifted the sword, and a groan ripped from my lips when the ice pick in the hrimthurs’s hands struck the steel, the impact shaking my bones until they ached. I ducked under the frozen hand that followed and sprinted between the monster’s legs, using my sword to cut at its knees.
The roar the hrimthurs let out shook the ice beneath my boots, and my eyes flew wide when bodies stared back at me from beneath the frozen water, their pale eyes unseeing and mouths open in their final cry.
“I will not join you today,” I vowed as I whirled, crouching as the giant lifted his ice pick again and hoping my arms could withstand the force with which it swung through the air.
“As if I’d fucking let you.” Darcke shoved me out of the way, sending me flying back on the ice, and I was about to scream at him when I saw the sword in his hands.
It was massive, one of the widest blades I’d ever seen, but that wasn’t what made me gape.
The weapon was the brother to my own, the same sparklingblue sapphires lining its hilt, and the silver it was forged from as pale as a moon reflecting on a calm sea.
Darcke didn’t have the finesse I’d been taught when wielding a sword, but it didn’t matter. When he swung it like he did his axe, meeting the giant’s weapon earlier than the latter had intended, the air roared with metal clangs. With a twist of his wrists, Darcke sent the pick clattering onto the ice, wrenching it from the hrimthurs’s grip as easily as he’d gotten me on my back when we were training.
“Don’t go yet,” Darcke taunted when the hrimthurs scrambled back. “I’m not done with you.”
The monster whipped his head around when he limped further backward, the ice in his eyes beginning to thaw, leaking down his frozen cheeks.
More roars split the air as his kin died. Vero had also earned her sword, and she screamed as she drove it upward through one of the smaller hrimthursar’s jaws, making his head shatter into a million tiny shards of ice.
As Darcke followed the one who’d attacked us, something within my stomach wrenched. His violence heated my blood, and while I could taste the same iron he did, I placed a hand on his shoulder.
“Leave it,” I ordered.
“I don’t think so,” Darcke growled, trying to shake my hand off. “He went for you.”
“And now he’s leaving,” I said, trying to calm the primal possessive fury that was Darcke’s and my bond.
“Why should he get away with it?” Darcke asked, his muscles flexing beneath my touch and chest rumbling from the snarl building in there.
It was a struggle not to give in—not to let him chase and kill and satisfy the vengeance that had burrowed into his chest like the arrows the previous owner of my blade had taken. But I held on as the giant threw a final look at the carnagebehind us before spinning around and escaping behind the bend with steps that crunched against the ice.
“Why?” Darcke demanded again, the muscle in his jaw working.
“Because he’s not the one who deserves our wrath.”
Darcke’s eyes went between mine, reading the promise there before he crushed me against his chest. His sword pressed against my back as he held me like the world would end if he didn’t.
“What was that for?” I asked when he pulled back.
He lifted the sword as if it were poisonous, letting it dangle from his fingers. “It made me watch you die.”
“Mine showed me the past.” I touched the blue stones. “I guess it makes sense that yours would show the future.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he snapped.
“They’re siblings—twin blades.” I showed him my sword. “I think I see now. Their owners had a purpose. What if we inherited that, and that’s how we earn the swords?”
I’d found mine only when I realized who my enemy truly was—who was behind everything cruel and cold in our world.
