Free Freya the Huntress (Europa #2: A Dark Fantasy) by Joseph Robert Lewis

where the blade had slipped. It had no claws because its fingers and toes had been removed at the knuckles, and the small stumps on its hands and feet were black and yellow where the wounds had been closed with fire.
    The top halves of its ears had been hacked off at jagged angles, and the rest of its face had been shaved in the same manner as its body—badly. Its eyes were gone, sliced out to leave the sockets dark and empty, and crusted with blood and flies. And around its short snout was a crude leather muzzle, wrapped over and over again around the thing’s jaws to hide its nose and mouth completely.
    Stripped of its fur and claws and ears, blinded and bloodied, the thing before her did not look like either a beast or a man, but a mangled corpse.
    It shivered and whined again.
    “What did you do?” Freya whispered.
    “What I had to.” The man’s voice shook. “I took away all the unnatural bits. Cut out the poison. That’s what you have to do, so I did it.”
    The creature reached out to paw with a severed limb at the dirt blackened with its own blood.
    “He was your brother.” Freya swallowed.
    The man nodded. “That’s right. You understand. I couldn’t kill him, not my own brother. I had to save him. I had to do what no one else could do. I had to—”
    “He was bitten,” Freya said. “He was changing. He was in pain. He was afraid.”
    “Yes.”
    “So you shackled him to the wall.”
    “Yes.”
    “And you mutilated him.”
    “I… no, no!”
    “Maimed him.”
    “No!”
    “Tortured him. Your own brother.”
    “No, no, no! I had to—”
    Freya slit the man’s throat and watched him slump to the floor, choking on his own blood. He reached out toward the muzzled creature across the room, and died. The huntress wiped her knife on his clothes and put it away, and then stepped outside to grab her spear and bring it back in. She leveled her weapon at the blind monster in the shadows and said, “I’m sorry, but it’s over now.”
    And she ran her spear through its heart.
    When she left the mill, she said nothing to the others, and they asked nothing of her. She handed the miller’s steel knife to Erik, whose tired eyes said all that he would ever say on the matter, and Wren just bit her lip and looked at the ground. Freya led the way back to the road and set out west again, with the others trailing behind. They walked all afternoon, pausing only once when a chorus of howls rose in the distance behind them.

Chapter 7. Guards
    “That’s it,” Wren said. “That’s Rekavik. If there is a vala left in the west, Skadi or otherwise, she’ll be in there.”
    On the western rim of the world the sun sat blazing in cold silence, and Freya looked down on a city beside a sea painted with bright splashes of blood and gold. The city sprawled across a broad peninsula jutting out into the sparkling bay where chunks of blue-white ice bobbed on the waves. From end to end it was three times the size of Hengavik, and much of it was twice as tall. The houses were all built of the shoreline stone, the same iron gray color as the rumbling clouds overhead, and each home looked to have an arching roof of turf supported by the bones of whales, bears, and deer, and each one so high that Freya guessed they held hanging attics of food stores and rope beds.
    A heavy stone seawall ran along the water’s edge, as thick as a tall man and half again as high. The outer face of the wall was slimed with weeds and algae, but the top was pale and smooth, and the wall broke only twice that she could see for two iron doors that stood above the ancient stone quays reaching out into the bay. A few men stood on the quays casting fishing lines and nets over the dark, icy waters.
    Another, taller wall ran across the south side of the city, cutting the small peninsula off from the rest of Ysland. This wall was three or four times the height of a man, and newer, and clumsier. The stones had been jumbled every which way and mortared in