Throne of Scars Read Free

expect me to do? Find the Horn? What if Stheno had it? What if the dragon had it? She had sent scouts, and none had returned from the portal.
    The Horn. It’s all about the Horn. I shook my head. Shannon wanted me to kill Dana, who betrayed us to Stheno and Euryale. She took the Horn for herself. She was the cause of all of the misery I witnessed in Aldheim. I frowned. I hated Dana. She had killed my brother, Ron, the day we arrived from the Tenth, our own world. But my brother had been an evil thing, always had, and so I wasn’t as angry as I should be. I once tried to kill Shannon for Ron. I had, nearly. But I had not been able to. Could I kill Dana? Perhaps. Perhaps not. After witnessing the horrors of the draugr, I was not nearly as mad as Shannon was at Dana. She had loved her when they had both been alive. Now she was dead, and perhaps it was her undead goal, and the dead could never ignore their goals. Perhaps she would hate herself later?
    Shannon. Hand of Hel. That dagger of Hel, Famine, she held it. She was a lich, or something like that, but that dagger made her almost unconquerable, and sometimes, when I saw her clutching it, I thought it was more than an aid.
    Perhaps it was a master.
    Did it make Shannon cruel? Did Hel wish to see her wreak havoc in Aldheim, even if she would one day return the Horn for the Nine? Would Hel laugh in her hard-won freedom, as the gods discovered the true extent of death and misery Hel left the Nine in?
    And Shannon, with her dagger, was to both save and destroy the Nine? Perhaps. Were not the dead marching below, to war against the living, no matter how cruel and arrogant the elves were, especially to the humans of Aldheim?
    Poor girl , I thought, rubbed my face and tugged at my beard again. She is fighting to remain human, she must be . Hand of Hel. I don’t know what that even means. Power? Slavery? Some of the dead were more powerful than others. She had killed Euryale, after all. Euryale had been a First Born , mightier than most living beings. Ittisana, the snake-headed minor gorgon ally of ours, the one gorgon kin we could trust visited her often.
    She said Shannon feasted with the draugr. And they served the dead blood. Blood of the elves.
    Blood. The girl I had seen weeping when she had killed for the first time sat with the dead, and drank blood. She feasted with her dead. Ittisana said that. And Ittisana had snakes for hair and that didn’t make me nearly as cold than Shannon’s undeath.
    I draped my robes around me as I thought about her. She had been warm, kind, loving, and weak in her belief in Dana. She had been damned brave. She still was. But not so warm, kind and loving. She looked human, though her undead state was clear as rain. Her left hand and arm was all bones, where the Bone Fetters had once held her. Now, her skin was pale, nearly white, her hair uncannily lustrous and thick, red as blood, and her mood was often cold. She could be horribly murderous, pragmatic after butchery, but perhaps such mood suited a Queen as well as a dead one? No matter if her throne was self-declared.
    I knew not. But I knew she had changed.
    She called herself a lich, a magical thing, living beyond death by Hel’s curse and here, in Aldheim she was to punish the elves for their treachery, for their haughty disdain for humans. She had so many goals she probably didn’t know what to do first.
    But she knew she wanted Himingborg.
    She had the best part, the key to the Holy Continent, the foothold to the Regent’s lands, and she wanted the city on the south shore as well. And that’s what the dead would try again that night.
    I shuddered and gazed at the mass that kept marching for the harbor.
    I heard a clacking sound as shadows moved near us.
    She had powerful allies. I turned to look at them. They were terrible, merciless, power-hungry creatures, and they accompanied us on the rampart. The ancient ones around Ittisana, Thak the fire giant, and me were also different from