“The price?”
“Just fighting the Jotunar took nearly all of your strength. Loki was weakened by trying to leave Midgard. What’s going to happen to me?”
“You are already paying a price in losing the life you knew and taking on the grave responsibilities your mother has bequeathed you,” he said.
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” she said. “If I’m going to have to hoard my magic to keep from burning out—”
He gathered himself to rise. “If you are not prepared to continue—”
“Sit down, Dainn. Fehu, right?”
Dainn resumed his position, his body stiff and his expression guarded. “Fehu,” he said, as if he were reciting from a book. “The Rune can bring great good fortune to those who master it. Fehu reversed is failure, discord, bondage. Like all the Runes, it can be used for good or evil. And there is a fine balance between the two aspects. It requires great skill to keep that balance and not fall into that place where the Merkstave, the Reversal, takes precedence.”
“You sound as if you think I’ll be tempted to use it.”
“You must walk both paths before you can control either aspect. It is the darker way in which you will need the greatest guidance. If you surrender to hubris, the magic will fail you when you most need it.”
Was Dainn speaking from experience? Had he walked that same path and gone astray when his own magic had flowed freely?
She knew better than to ask.
“Are you ready to open your mind?” Dainn asked.
Mist nodded and closed her eyes, bracing herself as if for attack. She could never forget what it had been like when they’d touched minds the first time—the way his emotions came to her so clearly, the anger and the shame and the sorrow. She didn’t want to feel that again.
But her personal fears didn’t matter now. She tried to relax, and after awhile she began to sense Dainn’s mental presence, resting feather-light on the surface of her thoughts.
“Let go,” he said. “Release your barriers.”
“What barriers?” she whispered, as if a louder voice might jar their fragile connection.
“There are doors in your mind. Let them open.”
Mist tried to envision such doors, but they didn’t seem to exist. “I’m not trying to keep you out,” she said. “If there’s something in the way, I can’t feel it.”
“It is there, I assure you.”
“Then show it to me!”
After a long silence, Mist opened her eyes. Dainn was staring at her, his eyes black and cold.
“Very well,” he said.
Dainn attacked.
He threw everything he had into the assault, every Merkstave he had avoided so assiduously, every particle of anger and hatred he had nurtured since the fall of Asgard. He remembered the laughter in Loki’s eyes when he had revealed his hideous deception . . . remembered each humiliation, each betrayal, the contempt on the faces of the Aesir and Alfar as they pronounced his punishment.
With rage and black Galdr he constructed a Rune- etched blade sharper than anything made by god or man, swinging it mercilessly at the wards Mist denied, aiming for the very heart of her being.
Still she resisted him, utterly oblivious to her own power, shattering the blade and casting him off as easily as a hound sheds water from its coat. The fierce icefire gale she had thrown at him so unwittingly in Asbrew—the terrible weapon that could have destroyed him had its owner understood what she possessed— remained quiescent behind the gates.
This was the trial Dainn knew would come when his mind touched Mist’s again. She hadn’t known what she’d done in Asbrew; she couldn’t drop her instinctive barriers unless she accepted that they were there. He would have to rouse those frigid fires once more, hoping that Mist could control them when she understood that they, and the wards that bound them, were equally a part of her nature.
One more weapon remained to him. He would never have considered it if he believed Mist was incapable of protecting herself. If Mist had failed to recognize the true nature of the beast before, now she would see it for what it was. She would
Nor could he be sure he could ever again defeat the thing he had fought so long. The cage had already been weakened by his use of magic, by Freya, by Mist herself. If he was lucky, he would keep enough control to avoid causing damage. He would have to.
Pushing himself beyond the restraints of rational thought, Dainn unleashed the beast. The creature, fed by his rage, was as strong as it had ever been. It slammed its bulk against the bars and burst through, roaring in triumph, slashing through Dainn’s defenses as if they were built of ancient, crumbling parchment. Dainn had just enough will left to send it outward, leaping for the enemy walls.
Mist screamed.
Dainn had no time to brace himself. Mist’s counterattack came hard and fast, slamming against the beast, driving it back with ice and flame and air and stone. It scrambled for purchase on formless ground, snarling and slavering and howling defiance.
Wracked by indescribable pain, Dainn tried to call it back. He had achieved what he had intended. Mist had broken through her own wards, her resistance purged like pus from a festering wound. He could not enter her mind yet; that would be impossible until Mist ceased her furious assault. But as long as the beast resisted . . .
The creature was far from stupid. It knew Dainn might deceive it for his own protection. But the temptation was great, and Mist’s unrelenting onslaught was telling on its strength, burning the black fur from its massive body, blinding it with slivers of ice and rock.
In the end it had no choice. It began to retreat, edging back toward the relative safety of Dainn’s mind. Dainn felt it come and cried out in agony, his own breached defenses attempting to rise against it, instinctive rejection he could not afford to permit.
So he embraced it, endured the searing pain of its invasion as he had done so long ago. When it was safely within him again, he soothed it with promises until, exhausted, it fell into a momentary stupor.
But Mist was not finished. She drove after it, sweeping through the raw wound it had left in its wake, carving out a void in Dainn’s mind and controlling his body with all the ease of a mortal child manipulating a puppet. Runes and Merkstaves, their true shapes barely distinguishable—scythe-wheeled chariot, driving hail, seething flood, needles of yew—plunged like flame-tipped arrows into his heart, his belly, every vulnerable part of his body. The icy-hot wind picked him up and flung him across the room while her will stabbed at every nerve, flaying him alive. His throat was too raw for screams, even as every bone shattered when he hit the floor.
He had failed. In the fury of her attack, Mist had lost herself.
An ebony veil fell over Dainn’s eyes, and he began to let himself go. He had feared death, and longed for it; so many times he had tried to take his own life and had been prevented by the instincts of the beast. But if he had driven Mist mad by forcing her to confront her own vast power, his existence was meaningless.
And the beast would die with him. He would never have to pay Freya’s price for its destruction, abandoning the last traces of decency he had clung to since his fall.
Mist would never know how he had planned to betray her.
He closed his eyes and released his life.
“Dainn!”
At first all he knew was that the pain was gone. Hands fluttered over him, strong, long-fingered woman’s hands, touching him here and there as if their owner could not keep them still.
“Dainn! Can you hear me?”
Mist’s voice. A little rough, and urgent with fear. He felt Mist’s hands cup his face, Mist’s breath on his lips.
