“Good.”
It didn’t take long to make their way toward the exterior mountain wall of the city. Bryn stroked Freki’s face and caressed her soft nose. Then she unfastened the reins from her bridle and wrapped them around her forearm. “We must leave them here. It will be easier to evade notice by the sentries if we are on foot.”
Sigurd nodded and did the same. But he spent the same quiet moment with Geri, stroking the stallion’s velvet face before he joined her on the path.
A pair of sentries kept watch at the mouth of a cave. Bryn didn’t want to hurt them, but they stood between her and a stealthy entrance into the hold.
“What will we do with them?” Sigurd asked.
If they were seen, the sentries would sound the alarm.
Her heart pounded, surging blood through her veins. It felt wrong, murdering the two of them in cold blood, even if it would guarantee them a silent entrance into the city.
“Bryn?” Sigurd urged her in a quiet voice.
The two guards were alert and fresh. One looked young, smooth-faced. “All that we can do,” she whispered.
Regret twisted her stomach into knots as she drew the arrow.
That guard was someone’s son. Barely a man. Dying here and now would deny him entrance to Odin and Freya’s halls.
Her hand shook as she nocked the arrow, and the feeling of wrong persisted as she drew the string. All the while that she had the guard in her sight, Sigurd watched her in silence.
When the arrow didn’t fly, he touched her shoulder. “Maybe there is another way.”
“They’ll alert the city.”
“They won’t. Leave it to me.”
“But—” He touched her lips with one finger. “Just trust me.”
She gazed into his face, lost for a moment in those cobalt eyes and the imploring look in them.
Sigurd had brought her back from the dead. He slew a basilisk for her.
He’d sacrificed the chance to return home to the family and friends who loved him, all to aid a country that didn’t deserve his allegiance. Sigurd wasn’t just a good man, he was outstanding in every way. What could she do but trust him?
Bryn nodded, biting her lower lip. He scaled the wall beside her with unexpected agility, and then he vanished over the ledge. She waited during the long minutes he was out of her sight, with no alternative choices, and she wondered if there had been another patrol on the mountain ledge.
No, she’d have heard the scuffle. Someone would have called out and raised the alarm.
Someone would—
Bryn’s heart almost leapt from her chest when Sigurd jumped down from the cliffside ledge above the two sentries. He landed on one of the guards, throwing him to the ground beneath his weight. Then he spun up to his feet again in a fluid motion that seemed impossible for a man of his size. His bare fists flew, a hard right and a left, before he spun into a kick launching a lightning-fast boot into the second sentry’s stomach. The next kick dislodged the guard’s helmet. As it flew, he stumbled back against the wall and cracked his head against stone.
Sigurd didn’t fight like a brawling berserker. Each swift blow had purpose. The first sentry who had been taken to the ground rose and tried to shout, but Sigurd delivered a punch to his throat. He choked instead on his words, and then he was trapped against Sigurd’s chest, the young man taken down to his knees while a muscled arm pinned him across the neck.
In seconds, it was over, neither having been prepared for an unarmed intruder.
“What was that?” Bryn breathed when he returned to her.
“Samaharan fighting style I learned during the years of visiting their shores. I liked to make beneficial use of my shore leave.”
“I see that. That was…incredible.”
“I am but a humble student.” He smiled. “I’d be helpless against an armed opponent. These two, I took by surprise. The master who taught me, though? Wouldn’t matter if you had a bloody hand-cannon, he’d disarm you and make you eat the slug.”
Using the reins from their horses, they tied up the two sentries then slipped inside the hidden path. It descended into the mountain and continued underground for miles before they were beneath the city. Bryn knew the way, having traveled it before with both her mother and father, and later as an adult leading the shield maidens under her command. Knowledge of the tunnels was critical to the safety of the stronghold and allowed them the freedom of relocating fighters as necessary throughout the mountains. Because of the tunnels, Koldgrun had never fallen to invaders.
At the end of one path, they came upon three short wooden stairs set below a stone square carved in the ceiling. “Here. This is the way inside my father’s keep.”
Bryn pushed against the stone door, expecting it to lift away. When it didn’t, she shoved harder, grunting from the effort. Without questioning it, Sigurd joined her, but even their combined strength refused to budge the entrance.
“Oh no,” she finally wailed.
“What is it?”
“This was the way to the undercroft of Staerkvaeg Keep. We would have emerged in the cellars where my father keeps the mead and wine.” It had been a long shot, hoping to find it unsealed, but the design had not been intended as a method of creeping into the castle—merely escaping in the event of a siege against it.
“What do we do now?”
“Another route. There are miles of them beneath Koldgrun, all for the purpose of never allowing ourselves to be surrounded by the enemy. The plans came from Creag Morden, built by one of my ancestors during a time when the kingdoms were willing to trade.”
“I had no idea.”
“As I said, it was long ago, before the king betrayed the jotuns. When I was a child, my parents always told me that our dynasty fell out of favor with the other nations of the gulf over our stance toward magic and our refusal to use it as a crutch. Now I wonder if Creag Morden knew of the king’s treachery and cut ties.”
“Perhaps, but why would they have lost contact with the giants too? Why not continue to trade with them?”
“Jotunheim retreated to the mountains and turned their backs on all humans. If their brothers of the land were not to be trusted, what hope could there be in trusting the humans from distant kingdoms?”
“Point.”
Bryn led him down another underground path. Once or twice, they heard the echo of footsteps thudding above them. Staerkvaeg Keep was located on the lowest steppe of the impenetrable mountain range straddling the city. When Bryn tested a stone door, it lifted away, and pale moonlight shone in through the narrow opening.
Peering through the tiny opening confirmed no one was near. The area was on the patrol routes, but no one stood watch over it. Usually.
At last, they were in the city. Quietly, under the cover of night, they avoided lamplit street corners. They’d come out of the tunnels in the central square of the Gyldenbane District, the area closest to the lord’s keep, where all the best merchants and craftsmen resided. The worst crowds departed before twilight, though a few lingered to make last-minute coin or to sit by the fountain her father had built in her mother’s image.
On that fountain, the late Frú Astrid posed in full armor with her sword, a glorious set of Valkyrie wings on her back. Gods, Bryn couldn’t wait to tell him that their beloved Lady of Koldgrun had truly been chosen by Odin.