Chapter 18 | Ravinica

Chapter 18

Ravinica

GRIM MOVED PAST ME before I could say a thing, taking his hands off me in a way that pained my soul. Magnus and Sven were close behind, encircling the elf, while Arne stayed a few feet back nursing Dieter's bleeding, broken arm with his sister.

The iceshaper opted to scowl at the elf instead. I got the feeling he was slightly scared of Corym, too, after the elf had lent me his dagger to hold to Arne's throat.

Corym shifted his battle stance to take all three opponents at once, showing his grit and determination. " Lunis'ai . . ."

"Wait!" I cried out, rushing to Grim.

The man was a moving mountain, shrugging my hand off his bare shoulder in an instant. He seemed lost in the bloody daze of his curse again, reverting to the feared berserker.

My heart slammed against my ribs as my head swiveled between the bear shifter, wolf shifter, and bloodrender. I tossed Corym a helpless look, as if to say, "I have no control over this. Run!"

I knew he wouldn't. The elf was too proud.

For what it was worth, so were the three men approaching him. They saw an enemy, and rightly so after Corym's people had taken me from them.

At the same time, had they not just seen him fighting alongside us?

Alliances meant little at the moment.

Sven picked up a dead man's sword as he passed, swinging it to test. His eyes never left Corym's face, a scowl etched on his impossibly handsome face. I watched his taut ass, the muscles of his body flexing—a perfect specimen I had unfathomably seen naked too many times to be so distracted by.

"Guys, don't do this!" I yelled.

Magnus answered for the group, saying in a low, raspy voice, "He took you from us, silvermoon. He must pay."

"No!" My barrage caused Magnus and Sven to stutter a step—to second-guess themselves.

Not Grim Kollbjorn though, who I had as much control over as the moon.

"Ravinica," Corym said, slightly panicked, "tell the big one to stand down or I go for him first."

"You see?" Sven crooned. "He wants this, menace. We want this."

" I don't want this!" I cried, balling my hands into fists.

I felt like such a weakling. A sniveling little girl throwing a tantrum. It wasn't who I was—wasn't who Swordbaron Korvan trained me to be, or how my mother raised me.

I am Ravinica Lindeen, daughter of a scorned woman, fighter of injustice, assassin of . . . no one. They will listen to me!

With my inner pep talk complete, I roared to get their attention.

"STOP THIS!"

Grim froze, mere feet from the Ljosalfar. Sven and Magnus turned their heads toward me, a few steps back from the bear shifter.

"Don't you idiots see? He saved me! He fought with us!"

"He took you from us first."

This, from Arne Gornhodr. The last man on this bloody battlefield who should have opened his mouth.

I spun around and marched toward him, my face a mask of fury and loathing.

Arne flinched at the sight of me storming toward him. Even Dieter and Frida exchanged looks and then backpedaled slightly away from him, wanting nothing to do with me.

Walking up to the iceshaper, he lifted his hands in surrender, palms out. "Little fox—"

I slammed my fist into his face, sending him stumbling to his ass.

Grim, Sven, and Magnus lost their focus on the light elf, watching me.

"He took me because of you," I growled at the wounded face of Arne, adding a new bruise to his sharp jawline. "I don't want to hear a damn word from you about taking . Do you understand me, iceshaper?"

My tone was as cold as his magic. I had no love for this man, and wanted to hate him with every fiber of my being, even if my accursed heart was making that difficult.

Swallowing hard from the ground, staring up at my face backlit by the moon, Arne nodded once. "I understand," he answered glumly, dipping his chin.

I spun around and thrust a finger at the other three. I couldn't scold them too harshly, seeing as how they'd just saved my life and everything. But I'd be damned if I was going to let them slaughter the man who had sacrificed his own people to help me.

"That elf—that man—is named Corym E'tar. He is the leader of the Ljosalfar vanguard," I said. "He saved my life from the Huscarls well before you all showed up." I threw my arms out wide, letting everyone get a good look at my body. "Do I look wounded? Harmed? Corym treated me with respect while I was a captive at his camp."

"Why did he take you?" Grim spit through gritted teeth. His eyes had returned to their amber hue as he tried to control his unbridled rage.

"Because he saw the ears of someone like him—an elf, or something close to it—being dragged away as a prisoner to the academy."

The field fell silent. The stench of death and blood hung thick in the calm air.

"Ask yourselves this: Why would he go to such lengths to help me, if he meant to hurt me?" I crossed my arms over my heaving chest, trying to catch my breath while I attempted to control the situation. "He could have killed me along with the Huscarls. If he found me useful, he could've taken all the knowledge I have and killed me right after. But he didn't. Instead, he did this ."

I lifted my palm, called to the inherent magic swelling inside, and Shaped a rune in the air. My fingers lit up like a blazing inferno, fingertips orange-red.

Grim gasped. "Your magic. It's alive."

I nodded sharply. "Because of him." My radiant finger pointed at the elf past him, before it simmered to its normal pale hue. "I don't know the correlation yet. But he has something to do with it. I won't let you kill my savior, even if he was my captor. Stand. Down."

Grim's shoulders sank. The fight went out of him in an instant, confusion taking over on his flat, bearded face. Sven and Magnus exchanged narrow-eyed looks before moving away from the elf. They both tossed him one last glance—the same look of disdain I was so used to seeing from people who hated bog-bloods, which was practically everyone.

I said, "The elves are not our enemies, boys. The traitor behind me took me to an ancient half-elf named Elayina. She showed me something . . . something I still can't understand. Stories, or memories, she said. We can talk about all that later. Bottom line, Vikingrune Academy has been lying to us. For generations!"

The three men in front of me exchanged more confused looks. Behind, Arne groaned when I called him a traitor.

He deserved it and so, so much more. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with him. Even if I couldn't hate him for some stupid reason, I wouldn't let him near me until I learned more about why he did what he did.

I had trusted Arne with my heart, my life , and he'd tossed it aside like it was nothing.

Never again.

"All the redacted texts in Mimir Tomes," Magnus said, "the inaccessibility to certain books." He shrugged. "I'm not surprised if the academy pulled the wool over our eyes."

The bloodrender was the first to come to terms with the truth I was sharing. It was an awful truth that changed everything, and I recognized the same upended expressions on everyone's faces I'd felt when Elayina first showed me.

If anything, the men were even more resistant.

Sven looked the most struck by the news. I read the dozens of questions on his lips—questions he wasn't asking because of our immediate situation.

As the leader of an age-old shifter pack, the Torfen son had grown up with a specific story told to him, fed to him by his father, grandfather, and everyone else in his family line. To learn it was all built on lies must have shattered the man's world, even if he didn't want to admit it.

I owed nothing to him. He had bullied me, harassed me, and been one of the biggest headaches during my stay at the academy.

I repeated my question from earlier, which he hadn't answered: "Why are you here, Sven Torfen? Grim and Magnus, I understand. But you?"

"It's a long story," he muttered, rubbing his neck.

I put my hands on my hips. "You'd better be ready to tell it next time I ask."

Sven's perpetual frown flipped into an amused smirk. It was sinfully attractive, and I hated how it heated my blood. "As you command, little menace."

Before I could feel the flush of my cheeks growing, I flipped my eyes to Grim. The man I trusted most of all these people, yet had to be the most careful around because of his cursed rage.

"Corym helped me, Grim. Before chasing us down, the Huscarls found the elf encampment and besieged it. They burned it to the ground."

"We saw the smoke and followed it to you, little sneak." Grim's voice was low, hurt. In his eyes, I saw the history of his own kin playing on repeat—the woods where he'd grown up, burned down around him by ignorant bastards who had come to kill him and his foster fathers.

If anyone knew what familial loss felt like, it was this huge, kind man. He could relate to Corym in this moment.

I sniffed to fight back tears. "I'm so happy to see you, and I can't ever repay you for saving me. I know you've doomed yourselves at the academy by doing it. But I can't let you kill Corym E'tar. He did the same thing for me. Okay?"

Slowly, as my eyes went from face to face, my mates and my former enemies nodded with understanding.

"There's been enough blood tonight," I finished.

Finally, my heart began to settle. I knew it was only a temporary mellowing, because we weren't safe here. Hel below, there were two dozen dead Huscarls at our feet.

The fact we had slaughtered so many, and only a handful of people on our side had died, astounded me. It showed me how powerful my people were when they fought for a united cause—when they fought with passion for something they cared about.

Me. This is all because of me.

It was a sobering, humbling, awful feeling that gnawed at the pit of my stomach. Realizing all this death had been caused because of me . . . I wasn't sure how I would ever recover from it.

I just hoped I would have aid from these men I had come to care about so much, and my friends back at the academy, to help me down this brutal path of understanding and, hopefully, recovery.

A glimpse of my time at Mimir Tomes flashed in my head—the other truth I'd bafflingly learned that I'd never gotten to act out on before Arne led me to my capture.

These four men—Grim, Magnus, Sven, and Arne—were the descendants of the people who destroyed my family. They'd had no direct influence over my past, yet none of them knew what I knew: My name was tarnished because of the actions of their forebears.

I felt less like an assassin than I ever had before. To think I'd ever thought myself capable of killing these men, before I'd even come to know them, was asinine and laughable. It filled me with self-loathing.

The weight that came with that—sudden, sharp—nearly doubled me over. The paradox of these men being my saviors but also my tormentors was something I couldn't reconcile.

I fought to stay upright, my exhaustion from the past hours becoming a burden I couldn't hold alone any longer.

Luckily, I didn't have to hold it alone. Tears trickled down my cheeks as Grim came and swaddled me in a hug, keeping me on my feet. He was like the heaviest, hugest blanket of warmth, and I sighed into his bare chest and inhaled his scent.

Magnus was next to him, putting a cold hand to my shoulder that brought my temperature to a comfortable level. Even Sven stood close by.

Corym E'tar sheathed his blade and remained silent and vigilant, looking out at the woods in every direction, searching for more threats.

"We can't stay here," said a voice behind us.

I slowly turned to regard Arne, who had gotten back to his feet and was rubbing his jaw where I'd decked him.

Arne glanced at a dead Huscarl near him. "Reinforcements may be close behind."

"We killed the reinforcements," Magnus pointed out, gesturing emotionlessly to the second wave of guards that had come from the east. All of them lay dead, in various states of eternal pain, agony, and awkward body angles.

There was so much blood slashed against the grass and stones in this hilly glade. The river where Corym stood was stained brown and murky.

I was glad we hadn't killed anyone I recognized. Still, the notion that all this death had been my fault—not just the soldiers and Lepers here, but also the elves that had been ambushed by these bastards—infected my soul.

"Can we return to the academy after what you've just told us, sneak?" Grim asked. "It won't be safe there."

I gulped, shaking my head. "No. I don't think so."

"We must," Sven growled in return. "My brothers and sister are there. Our lives are there."

"And what do we do, wolf? Act like nothing is amiss?" Grim shot back.

"This is not something we can walk blindly into," Magnus agreed with a nod.

"Use me, then."

All eyes veered to Corym, who had spoken while stepping onto the riverbank. He stood straight-backed, lanky like Magnus, muscled like Sven, nearly as tall as Grim. He was deadly beautiful, in an alien way I'd come to appreciate over the past few weeks.

I quirked my brow. "What do you mean, Corym?"

"My people are either dead or returned to Alfheim," he explained. "I'm the only one still remaining here. Use them as scapegoats to return to your school. Your superiors can learn their soldiers died fighting the Ljosalfar before they left."

It was a cunning strategy that shocked me, coming from the honorable light elf. "But, Corym—"

"Vikingrune Academy already sees us as the enemy, lunis'ai. Capitalize on that. Learn what you must under the guise of peace, while you're there."

I gnashed my teeth together. How could I argue with that? Corym was giving me an out. It was a sound plan, and the others agreed with shrugs and nods.

"That only leaves one more elephant in the room," Grim said, eyes narrowing on the elf. "What do we do with you ?"

"We can hide him," said a new voice.

Dieter stood from Frida's side, flanked by a trio of other Lepers Who Leapt. My heart sank at the sight of him limping toward us, the row of bodies behind him—four men and women who had been "pulled," much the same way the Lepers pulled corpses from the fjord banks of those who had "leapt" to join their rebel crew.

"Are you sure, Dieter?" I asked. Hope filled my heart, even as it was weighed down by the loss of life here. "Even after your people have—"

"They died fighting our enemy. They're on their way to Valhalla now." Dieter gave me a pained smile, wincing from his wounded arm. "Any foe of Vikingrune Academy is a friend of ours, Ravinica."

I bit my lip, turning to Corym. "Are you fine with that?"

The elf's brilliant yellow eyes matched mine. "Doesn't seem I have much of a choice, lunis'ai ."

"That's not what I asked."

"I'll live with it . . . for a time."

With a firm nod, I faced Dieter. "Where will you take him?"

Dieter lifted his shoulders proudly. "We're the Lepers Who Leapt, lass. We'll put him somewhere no one will ever find him."