Page 5 of A Spark So Bright
She always knew how to make him angry. The accusation burned through him as he made sure his pack was secure before heading up the mountain after her.
Gunnar had climbed like this his whole life. He'd even raced Tindra up the mountain, but only on the inside. This was different. The sun was in his eyes. The rocks reflected that light in a strange way. Wind brushed against his sides, feeling like the fingers of someone he did not know. How strange it was to know that the world was alive around him, and so different from his home.
How long had it been since he'd been outside the mountain? He didn't know. A year? Maybe more?
He turned for a moment to look out at the land that was slowly being revealed now that they had crested above the tree line, and his breath caught. There was just so much space. So much land that he had never seen or explored.
The mountain gave way to rolling hills in the distance. He could just barely see the white dots that covered the fields even farther beyond, and those must be the sheep that trolls loved to steal for food. They had a few in the mountain, but they never lasted very long. Whenever they raided a human village, they took some sheep home with them. The meat was sweeter when the animal had seen the sun.
He wondered if trolls would be sweeter if they lived up here too. Supposedly there were trolls who lived far beyond the mountain, wild and free as they were supposed to be. Gunnar had never met one, though.
Breathing harder, he hurried to catch up. Tindra had already crested the very peak of the mountain and sat atop it like a conqueror. With one elbow on her knee and her chin on her fist, she looked like it had taken absolutely zero effort to climb all this way.
She started rummaging through her pack while he worked to get to the top with her. The peak wasn't razor-sharp like it looked. There was actually about two troll heights of space where they could lie down.
Which was exactly what he did. Gunnar crawled the rest of the way to the peak and then flopped onto his back. He was a little embarrassed about how hard he was breathing. He'd been training for years and had the endurance of an ox. But somehow he’d struggled very much to get up the mountain.
"Someday you'll do this faster than me," Tindra said as she handed him an apple. "But that's not today. And I'll admit, I'm quite pleased about that."
He grunted and tried to sit up, feeling his abs screaming as he did so. But he managed eventually and sat on the top of a mountain eating an apple with his closest friend.
They both stared out over the clouds that meandered by them, down toward the human kingdom and the castle that was always on the edge of their view. It was hard to look at it sometimes, knowing what he did. King James wanted to see the trolls eradicated. Wiped out. Destroyed beyond reckoning and he and Tindra knew firsthand what this king was capable of doing.
Still, he didn't want to ruin this moment.
Tindra leaned a little, bumping his shoulder with hers. "I'm real proud of you, you know. That wasn't an easy fight to win. You proved yourself worthy of a good warband."
"Did I?"
"Oh, stop fishing for more compliments. You're ridiculous," she said with a chuckle. She did nod again, though. "You did us all proud. All of us."
Something burned a little harder in Gunnar’s chest. The flame had been growing for a while now. He knew damn well there was a lot to be said about his ancestors, and how he could still feel them watching him. Every inch of their history was written throughout his body. From the speckles on his skin that were barely visible, to the better hearing he had that only wild animals shared, even to the curly locks of his hair. The path his ancestors had taken was written all along his skin.
And hers. The more he looked at Tindra, green as he was, the more he could see that.
"Do you think we'll ever fight together?" he asked, even though he knew the answer would make him worried. He didn't know if he could fight beside her. He wasn't sure he could focus at all.
She shrugged. "If the king decides to do so, then we'll fight. We're good at that, you and I. Fighters to the end."
"Do you think you could fight with me by your side?"
She shrugged. "Maybe. It would be easy to get distracted if you were there. But we'd both have to. We'd have to fight the right way, the way we've been trained. And we'd win. Because we always win."
“But it’s unlikely we’ll have to?”
She bit her apple, the crunch echoing around them. “Don’t know, Gunnar. We may very well fight beside each other and watch the other die. Hard to know.”
Gunnar put a hand to his belly where something strange brewed. A feeling. A warning.
He'd been so sure life was about to change for the better, but... it felt like something deep in his soul wasn't all that certain.
Three
Rose
There were no windows here. No way for her to tell time.
She'd tried to track time in her first few years. She'd made a mark on the wall for every single day, something that the men who’d visited her found to be hilarious. They'd commented on her derangement right before they’d set themselves upon her. Eventually she’d stopped tracking, though. Right about when she had reached 729 marks on the wall.
