"Hela took her," he replied numbly. "Before the fight. She's in the wind."
"Fuck," was all Liv said as she ushered Bryn into the longboat.
Gunnar and Hakon lay Dahlia down on one of the benches before settling down next to her. Bryn finally pulled herself from Liv, straightening her spine and drying her tears with a gust of wind as she swallowed her sorrow.
But Herrick couldn't join them yet. He kept his back to the water and faced the tunnel. They would have to make it out; they wouldn't just sacrifice themselves. Would they?
As the sun started to dip behind the high rocks that shielded the beach from enemy eyes, Herrick began to believe that his parents were not coming and that they never had any intention of following. He had just let them step in for them in the fighting and had allowed them to finish the fight he had started.
He thought of all the ire-driven words he'd spewed at them the last time they really talked as remorse filled him. He could never take it back now, never tell them he was sorry.
Gunnar came up to him, his hand landing on his shoulder as he tried to pull him back. "We can't linger any longer. By now, the palace will have been taken by Helvig's soldiers and they'll be securing the city."
He knew all of this but still couldn't bring himself to move. So much had been lost in the last few hours; he couldn't stand to lose his parents, too.
"Aeric's ships are full of Veter's citizens and soldiers," Gunnar went on. "We've been ferrying them to the ships since we arrived. They need to be brought to safety, or this was all for naught. Or Alva and Njal's sacrifice will have been fornothing."
His friend knew precisely what to say to break through his walls. The words tore open his chest and left him bleeding. Of course Gunnar was right, but he couldn't move from the land he had gained and lost so much on.
"He has won nothing but an empty city and empty land. Our people— our true kingdom— survives his cruelty, but only if we leave now."
Herrick nodded, his friend's pleas finally wearing him down. Closing his eyes, he turned away from the tunnel he knew his parents would not appear in and climbed into the longboat. He didn't open his eyes until he could feel they had cleared the shore. His heart tugged in his chest back toward the sands, prompting him to turn around.
That tug on his core was the same as when he'd been searching for Maude in the Palace of Wind and Embers. He scanned the beach, the growing darkness shrouding the sands in shadows, but Herrick could feel someone watching him. His fatemark burned on his chest, pulsing with every inch he was pulled from Ahland's coast. The sun broke through the clouds as he scanned the shore.
Just as he was about to give up, he saw the faint shimmer of a golden thread that started at his chest and extended out to the shore.
At first, he couldn't see where the thread ended as it had been swallowed by shadows, but—
There. An outline moved out of the darkness of the tunnel. His heart stopped beating in his chest as he saw a flash of moss green behind pitch black. Only a second, long enough to have possibly been a hallucination. But his fatemark burned with confirmation at who stood on that beach as that golden thread pulsed between them. She was there, and then she was gone.
The burning on his chest stopped as the sun disappeared behind the clouds again, but the tug in his gut didn't stop pulling him back to shore.
Maude was still fighting inside of Hela's control, enough to have brought herself there before the goddess of the underworld ripped her away again. Herrick knew then what he had to do. When they reached the longship where Aeric waited for them, he went to speak with hiseldr'sfather first, a plan already forming as his mind whirred through the probability of his success.
"Your Majesty," Herrick said sharply, his mind so preoccupied with his next steps that he did not shield his tone. "Hela has taken your daughter and I intend to stay behind and find her."
Aeric allowed one shocked moment to overwhelm him as he took in the seriousness of Herrick's tone. He nodded once.
"I would expect nothing else from you, General. How do you intend to bring my daughter back?"
Herrick launched into his plan, the parts he had already been able to come up with, and as he spoke, the King of Shadows nodded periodically. If he was surprised at what he said about the thread of gold he'd seen on the beach, the Shadow King did not show it.
"It seems you have a journey ahead of you, Herrick," the King finally said. "I will do as you have asked and bring your people to Ljosa with Hakon and the rest to regroup."
The longship had started to sail away with the help of some of the Elven pushing the wind into the sails to pick up speed. Herrick made his way to the railing and waited until they curved around the long stretch of land separated from the mainland by one of the rivers that protected Veter. The shore behind Tafeld was rocky, but Herrick had been swimming in these waters for as long as he could remember.He would make it up to the tree line once he swam to the shore in no time and would start his search for Maude.
His fatemark and that iridescent thread that bound them together would lead him to her; he was sure of it. Though he had been reluctant to name the sensation, he suspected that Maude was aware of the threads that tied them together. The tug of theirhjartparanbond back to the mainland was all he had to go off right now, but he would find Maude and free her from the goddess Hela before sending the miserable entity back to the underworld.
"Bring her back, Herrick. May the gods guide you to victory and watch over you," Aeric said quietly as they watched the land pass them.
With her father's blessing, Herrick climbed the railing of the ship with nothing but his battle axe, dagger, and his wits and dove into the water before swimming back to land in search of hiseldr.
54
Perched in the trees of the Lamenting Woods, Maude watched as the lines of soldiers from two kingdoms clashed in the center of the field.
Her vision was shrouded, the edges blurry from shadows that worked to hold her in this imprisonment. Her eyes moved without her control to watch soldiers fall. She felt each death, felt as the Goddess who controlled her body drank in their pain.
