The Cursed Queen (The Impostor Queen #2)(39)

“Why, Ansa? What will you do if I don’t?”

I sink into a squat and wrap my arms around my knees. “Nothing,” I whisper. The weight of death threatens to pull me straight into the ground. “Nothing. I just need to be by myself right now.”

Sander looks over his shoulder. “Too bad. Greetings, Chieftain,” he calls out, stepping toward the shore to reveal Thyra striding toward us, a torch upraised.

Thyra catches sight of me and begins to jog. “Ansa, are you hurt?”

Sander snorts. “She claims to have had a little mishap with her own dagger.”

Thyra’s eyes go wide. “By accident—or on purpose?”

Sander looks both surprised and troubled as he gazes down at me, and I bury my head in my knees to hide my burning cheeks. “I didn’t realize—” he begins.

“Sander, go back to camp,” Thyra says in a flat voice. “I’ll deal with Ansa.”

I raise my head to see her catch his arm as he walks by. “Think about your loyalties, Sander,” she says quietly. “Whatever happens now, please know that I love our tribe, and I will die before I allow harm to come to them. You and Ansa are my only first-wave warriors, and I will not succeed without your strength—and your discretion. My sister is waiting for you in the eternal fields. In her name and memory, if not in my father’s, stay with me.”

Sander swallows hard as Thyra raises the specter of his lost, beloved mate. “I hear you, Chieftain,” he says hoarsely, then sets off through the dark. Something tells me he needs some time by himself now too.

Thyra squats beside me as soon as his footsteps fade away. Her fingers slide into my hair, and my eyes fall shut as I treasure her touch. “What happened?”

I press my forehead to my knees again. “Nothing. I’m just tired.”

She puts her arm around me, gathering me to her. I feel her lips graze my temple. “I know you’ve had to work harder than all of us, and that your burden is great. But I also know you’re more than strong enough.”

My throat is so tight that I can’t breathe. “I’m trying.” It comes out of me broken and rasping.

She touches my elbow, near the shallow gash across my forearm, and I flinch. “Did you really slip on the rocks?”

“You doubt me?”

Her arms drop away. “I didn’t say that. But before we left the northern camp, you seemed intent on—”

Killing myself. “It was an accident, Thyra, I swear.”

She gives me a long, questioning look. “As you say. And Aksel?”

I shoot to my feet. “I lost track of him—he must have kept to the rocks. No footprints. Let’s go back to the camp.”

But Thyra doesn’t follow as I start to walk back the way she came. Instead, she looks up and down the beach . . . just as the wind shifts. The stink of burned flesh makes her grimace. “Ugh. What is that?”

My heart seizes. “Oh, probably from the camp—”

“No, it’s close by,” she says, taking a step toward the place where Aksel’s corpse lies.

I grab her arm. “But nothing we need to—”

She pulls herself from my grip. “Aksel might have been stupid enough to make a fire nearby,” she whispers, drawing her dagger and creeping toward the rocks.

I lunge between her and the evidence of my crime. “He’s not back there! I already looked.”

Her eyes narrow, and then she tucks her face against her upper arm as the smell surrounds us, heavy and bitter. “What’s causing that stench, then?”

“It’s . . . um . . .” I pause a moment too long, and her expression hardens. She pushes past me, her torch held high, and I’m too paralyzed to stop her.

My stomach turns as I hear her gagging with disgust. She returns to me, spitting onto the sand and looking like she’s about to lose her dinner. “You did this,” she says slowly.

“No, I swear!”

“No?” Her voice rises high, matching the blaze of her eyes. “You don’t even look surprised, Ansa! You know exactly what lies behind that rock.”

My lips tingle cold with the realization that she’s caught me out, that my mountain of lies has crumbled to dust in the space of a moment.

“Why would you do something like that?” she says in a choked voice. “I can understand meeting him blade to blade, but why did you have to—”

“He attacked me!” I gather enough courage to look up at her, and immediately wish I hadn’t. “I didn’t mean to.”

“But you said you could control the curse.” She’s staring at me with that wary look in her eyes again, as if I’m a stranger. “You killed Hulda, too, didn’t you?”

The sob wrenches itself out of me as Hulda’s frozen eyes rise in memory. “Please, Thyra—”

“No.” The sound lashes from her like the bite of a whip. She backs away from me. “You lied to me, didn’t you? You’ve been lying this whole time.”

“I didn’t want you to think—”

“That you murdered an innocent slave in cold blood? Or—and I find this hard to believe—did she threaten you somehow?”

“N-no,” I stammer.

“Hulda was Kupari. Did you do it as revenge, to get back at the witch for what she did to you?”