The Cursed Queen (The Impostor Queen #2)(40)

“What?” I hold my arms out, but it only causes Thyra to move further away. She looks disgusted, the back of her hand pressed over her mouth. “I had no intention of harming Hulda!”

“But you did, didn’t you? Only with ice that time.” Her voice is dead. Emotionless. “And now you’ve killed Aksel with fire. Did he really draw first blood?”

“Yes,” I shout, my voice cracking. “How can you question that?”

“Because you lied to me,” she roars. “Right to my face! Knowing what was at stake, knowing where we were going, knowing that I was depending on you, you lied to me. Your chieftain.” She rolls her eyes. “Not just once, either. Over and over again, it seems. And I ate your lies like honey cake.” Her voice shakes as she adds, “I was so eager to believe.”

“I can control it, Thyra. I’m getting better every day,” I say.

“How can you say that, when Aksel’s roasted corpse lies only feet away from us? His death had to have taken minutes, Ansa, not seconds. He was cooked, not devoured by sudden flames. Either you were controlling it in the most evil way, or you were out of control for longer than you want to believe. Which is it?”

Evil. My stomach clenches and I nearly heave as I recall the way Aksel clawed at his belly as his innards boiled. I had no idea how to stop it—the enemy inside me was in control. “It won’t happen again. I swear on my life. I’ll kill myself before I let it happen again. Please.”

I take a step toward her, but stiffen when she leaps out of my reach. And when the flames of her torch flare, she yelps and hurls the stick into the lake, as if she thinks I would use it against her. Hot tears burn their way down my cheeks.

“It’s been you all along,” she says raggedly. “When the fires flare. It wasn’t just the ice on the marsh.”

“I helped you,” I say with a sob. “I saved all those children, all those andeners. They would have perished in the marsh if not for me. You couldn’t have saved them.”

“I thought you were controlling it, but now I see what a fool I was.” She stares at me with a cold kind of fear. “We all could have ended up like Hulda, though. We’re lucky you didn’t kill every single one of us.”

“I did everything I could to keep that from happening!”

Thyra nods slowly, never taking her eyes off me. “And I’m grateful for that. But it doesn’t erase your lies.”

“So I make one mistake”—I grit my teeth as her eyebrow arches—“two mistakes, one of which was to kill a warrior who had ambushed me with the full intention of cutting my throat, and now you abandon me?”

“I’m doing no such thing!”

“Really?” I walk toward her, and she backtracks.

“Nothing I do is because you killed Aksel! Or even Hulda.” Her face is solemn and exquisite in the starlight reflected off the water, so beautiful that it’s splintering me. “But you lied to me, Ansa. The reason why doesn’t matter. We were alone that night in the forest after Gry accused you. No one else would have heard the truth. It was just you and me, as it is now. You could have trusted me. Confided in me. And instead you put a wall between us, to protect yourself.”

I swipe my nose on my sleeve. “Please,” I say, my voice thick with tears. “I’ll never do it again. Don’t push me away.”

Her smile is unfocused. Like a fog off the lake. “When you’ve done it once, the way becomes easier. The paths unblocked, the hesitance rubbed away with repetition.”

Cyrill said that to us, as he prepared us for our first raid. He was talking about killing.

I never thought one simple lie could be just as deadly. Except it wasn’t just one lie.

“But I had never deceived you before that moment,” I say in a low voice. “It’s just that with everything that was happening—”

“When it is difficult, your decisions mean the most. Then we discover what we’re made of.”

I want to howl with rage as she quotes her own father, standing on the deck of our longship just before we pushed out onto the Torden. The night swirls with a rush of hot and cold air. Thyra staggers backward under the force of it, a look of betrayal and shock on her face.

I sink to my knees, my fists pressed to my thighs, shaking as I try to hold my curse captive. “Kill me, then, if you hate me so much. Just don’t banish me from the tribe.”

Her expression crumples. “I wish I could hate you,” she says in a strained voice.

Hope glows warm in my belly, like a flame on a windy night, precious and fragile. “You know I’m yours. You know I would never do anything to hurt you.”

She winces, her eyes bright with pain. “You already have, Ansa.” She holds up her hands as my arms rise, trying once again to reach her across the chasm. “Enough. I’m not banishing you. We will tell the others that Aksel ran away after being rebuffed by both me and Jaspar. You will tell everyone that you found his tracks along the shore, headed back to the north. I will say the same.”

“They’ll ride after him.”

“No, they won’t. He was one of our weakest warriors, and he had proven himself unstable. Jaspar will let him go. He’s too eager to reach Vasterut to pursue a broken warrior.”

“What about Aksel’s body?”