Shewantedto help him.
Ailsa slipped away from Seela when the elfin was adjusting the strap of her weapon. It was only a moment, but it was all she needed to slide away unnoticed. She rounded the border of fae who noticed her too late to react and stood just on the edge of the front line, allowing a clear view of Vali and the intruders.
He had not earned her trust, and because of this she took her safety into her own hands. Her people worshiped the Vanir gods, sacrificed and built altars in their name. For thousands of years, they placed their lives in the hands of the same god she saw before her, and she saw no reason to run and abandon them now based on the unjustified words of an elfin.
But everything changed when she saw him skewered on the god’s blade.
He made a final, desperate attempt to steal back the god’s attention. His movements were clumsy and staggered, each step requiring an energy of which he had been depleted. But he stood on graceless feet, his inky hair draping over a bleeding scowl, and fought back to buy her more time.
So, she did the only thing she could do for him—she ran.
The mist was a thick fog concealing anything more than a few feet in front of her face as she broke through the hazy wall surrounding them. She took a few practiced strides before finding her footing among the thick ropes of roots sprawling the earth and sprinted between the trees, dodging pale trunks only seconds after they came into sight.
She ran until her hair and dress were damp with dew and her heart was beating blood faster than she was conditioned to tolerate. When her lungs demanded she pause, she claimed one of the countless ash trees and sucked the air down, her chest starved. The wood was deadly quiet inside the obscurity of the mist, the sounds of her labored breaths exaggerated by the silence.
Another sound broke the quiet, a hiss before a splintering thud. Her reprieve was shortened by an arrow piercing the flesh of the trunk beside her. Ailsa stared at the arrow, her eyes widening with dread, and darted in the opposite direction.
Voices muffled close behind her, following her every turn and outmatching her pace. She willed her legs to run faster but they screamed their refusal, her bones eventually turning to stone and weighing down her strides. Her foot caught on a reaching root, and Ailsa tumbled through the fog.
She landed hard on her stomach, her palms and cheek grazing a web of tangled roots. The dagger in her hand clattered somewhere beneath the haze. Ignoring the burning pain from the scratches marring her skin, she pushed off the ground and continued to scramble. The voices nearly upon her now.
Her dress snagged as she crawled, and she looked back to see one of the Vanir soldiers, his armor the same color as the god who stabbed Vali, but his face was hidden behind a silver veil. He stabbed the fabric of her gown with his sword and pinned her to the earth while a second soldier appeared from his shadow. This one with an arrow cocked in her direction.
“What do you want?” She kept her voice from trembling.
“Come,” he only said.
Her palm slipped over something cold, as if the forest itself had slid her only weapon right beneath her fingertips. “What did you do to them?”
“The elves?” He scoffed, finding her concern humorous. “They will die. As you will if you do not listen, mortal. You do not belong here. This mist will swallow you whole and never let you out.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she spat. The soldier reached down to snatch her arm but met the sharp edge of her blade instead.
He staggered back with a cry of surprise, tripping over the meshwork of roots. Ailsa used his distraction to pull her skirt through the sword pinning down her dress just as the second soldier set loose his arrow, nipping the exposed skin on her shoulder. She shrieked as it cut deep.
“That was a warning,” the archer warned. “The next one will not miss.”
Ailsa clutched her shoulder and pinched the skin back in place, feeling warm blood seep between her fingers. “Kill me, then. Either way, you won’t take me back alive.”
The first soldier was back on his feet and pulling his sword from the earth. “Or I’ll just cut off your limbs so you cannot flee or fight. I like that option better.”
“I’m not sure,” the second said, his arrow not dropping from the aim on her heart. “She made a compelling request.”
The fog stirred behind them as they argued her fate, spitting out a single male who charged with a longsword carved high above his head. With a wild cry that shook the foundations of the Tree, the steel-eyed fae cut through the first soldier. The Vanir fell where he stood.
The second had time to release the arrow formerly intended for Ailsa, and it sank into the elfin’s side. He staggered from the shot and mist curled around his legs.
“Sorrin!” she cried. Her hands scrambled for her dagger as she stood. The arrow did not wound the elfin greatly, for he was already recoiling his fighting arm to strike down the archer.
But Sorrin was too far, his charge would never meet the soldier where he stood. The second arrow left its quiver, and Ailsa could only watch as the Vanir pulled it against the taut bowstring. The soldier waited until Sorrin was coming straight for him, a clear view of his chest, before releasing the tension in the string.
A visceral scream tore through her body as she watched the arrow sink into the space above his heart. The anger boiled her blood hot, the runes marking her skin itched as her rage burned impossibly higher. She gripped the smooth hilt of the dagger against her palm—and let the power do her bidding.
She was on the soldier in a blink, her blade sheathed into the side of his throat. He uttered a choking cough as the hilt burned hot beneath her palm, the skin around its neck necrotizing and sloughing into ash. His arms went limp, the bow clattered to the ground as his knees buckled beneath the weight of his body. She pushed him off her blade, horrified at the sight of the Vanir withering away before her eyes, a deed committed by her own hands and the strange power breaking through her temper.
As the soldier slumped to the earth in a procession of clinking mail, a painful wheeze slipped beside her. The sound distracted her from what she had done and quenched the fire in her bones. The runes turned black once more.
“Sorrin!” She ran to his body now lying across the uneven terrain. The arrow still jutting from his chest. His eyes rolled lazily across her face as she placed his head in her lap, stroking his cheek with a bloody thumb.