The Ship of the Dead

  success would depend on me. Alas, me was my least favorite person to depend on.

  “But what about this giant?” I asked, anxious to change the subject. “He’s Baugi, right? How did you kill him?”

  Everybody looked at Halfborn.

  “Oh, come on!” Halfborn protested. “You guys helped a lot.”

  Hearthstone signed, Blitz and I slept through it.

  “T.J. and I tried to fight him,” Alex admitted. “But Baugi dropped a building on us.” She pointed down the shoreline. I hadn’t noticed it before, but one of the lovely blue cottages of Fläm had been scooped up from its spot on Main Street—which now had a gaping hole like a missing tooth—and slammed onto the beach, where the cottage had collapsed like a deflated bouncy house. What the locals made of this, I had no idea, but nobody seemed to be running around town in a panic.

  “By the time I got back to the ship,” Sam said, “the giant was only thirty seconds behind me. I had just enough energy left to explain what was happening. Halfborn took it from there.”

  The berserker glowered. “It wasn’t so much.”

  “Not so much?” Sam turned to me. “Baugi landed in the middle of town, turned into giant form, and started stomping around and yelling threats.”

  “He called Fläm a dirty hovel,” Halfborn grumbled. “Nobody says that about my hometown.”

  “Halfborn charged him,” Sam continued. “Baugi was like forty feet tall—”

  “Forty-five,” Alex corrected.

  “And he had this glamour cast over him, so he looked extra terrifying.”

  “Like Godzilla.” Alex considered. “Or maybe my dad. I have trouble telling them apart.”

  “But Halfborn just charged right in,” Sam continued, “yelling ‘For Fläm!’”

  “Not the best war cry,” Gunderson admitted. “Luckily for me, the giant wasn’t as strong as he looked.”

  Alex snorted. “He was plenty strong. You just went…well, berserk.” Alex cupped her hand like she was telling me a secret. “This guy is scary when he goes into full berserker mode. He literally hacked the giant’s feet out from under him. Then, when Baugi fell to his knees, Halfborn went to work on the rest of him.”

  Gunderson harrumphed. “Ah, now, Fierro, you wired off his head. It went flying”—he gestured into the fjord—“somewhere out there.”

  “Baugi was almost dead by that point,” Alex insisted. “He was in the process of falling over. That’s the only reason the head flew so far.”

  “Well,” Halfborn said, “he’s dead. That’s all that matters.”

  Mallory spat over the side of the boat. “And I missed the whole thing, because I was stuck inside the walnut.”

  “Yes,” Halfborn muttered. “Yes, you did.”

  Was it my imagination, or did Halfborn sound disappointed that Mallory had missed his moment of glory?

  “Once you’re in the walnut,” Mallory said, “you can’t get out until somebody lets you out. Sam didn’t remember I was in there for, like, twenty minutes—”

  “Oh, come on,” Sam said. “It was more like five.”

  “Felt longer.”

  “Mmm.” Halfborn nodded. “I imagine time goes slower when you’re inside a nut.”

  “Shut up, oaf,” Mallory growled.

  Halfborn grinned. “So are we making sail, or what? Time’s a-wasting!”

  The temperature dropped as we sailed into the sunset. Amidships, Sam did her evening prayer. Hearthstone and Blitzen sat at the prow, gazing in quiet awe at the fjord walls. Mallory went below to check on T.J. and cook up some dinner.

  I stood at the rudder next to Halfborn Gunderson, listening to the sail ripple in the wind and the magical oars swish through the water in perfect time.

  “I’m fine,” Halfborn said.

  “Hmm?” I glanced over. His face was blue in the evening shadows, like he’d painted it for combat (as he sometimes did).

  “You were going to ask if I was okay,” he said. “That’s why you’re standing here, right? I’m fine.”

  “Ah. Good.”

  “I’ll admit it was strange walking through the streets of Fläm, thinking about how I grew up there in a little hut with just my mom. Prettier place than I remembered. And I may have wondered what would’ve happened if I’d stayed there, gotten married, had a life.”

  “Right.”

  “And when Baugi insulted the place, I lost it. I wasn’t expecting to have any…you know, feelings about being home.”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s not like I expect anybody to write a ballad about me saving my hometown.” He tilted his head as if he could almost hear the melody. “I’m glad to be out of that place again. I don’t regret my choices when I was alive, even if I did leave my mom behind and never saw her again.”

  “Okay.”

  “And Mallory meeting her own mother…that didn’t raise any particular emotions in me. I’m just glad Mack found out the truth, even if she did run off on a wild train ride without telling us, and could’ve gotten herself killed, and I never would’ve known what happened to her. Oh, and you and Sam, too, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Halfborn hit the rudder handle. “But curse that vixen! What was she thinking?”

  “Uh—”

  “The daughter of Frigg?” Halfborn’s laugh sounded a little hysterical. “No wonder she’s so…” He waved his hand, making signs that could’ve meant almost anything: Exasperating? Fantastic? Angry? Food processor?

  “Mmm,” I said.

  Halfborn patted my shoulder. “Thanks, Magnus. I’m glad we had this talk. You’re all right, for a healer.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  “Take the rudder, will you? Just stay in the middle of the fjord and watch out for krakens.”

  “Krakens?” I protested.

  Halfborn nodded absently and went below, maybe to check on dinner, or Mallory and T.J., or simply because I smelled bad.

  By full dark, we’d reached the open sea. I didn’t crash the ship or release any krakens, which was good. I did not want to be that guy.

  Samirah came aft and took over rudder duty from me. She was chewing Medjool dates with her usual expression of post-fast ecstasy. “How are you holding up?”

  I shrugged. “Considering the kind of day we’ve had? Good, I guess.”

  She raised her canteen and sloshed around Kvasir’s Mead. “You want to take charge of this? Smell it or sip it or something, just to test it?”

  The idea made me nauseous. “Keep it for now, please. I’ll wait until I absolutely have to drink it.”

  “Sensible. The effect might not be permanent.”

  “It’s not just that,” I said. “I’m afraid I’ll drink it and—and it won’t be enough. That I still won’t be able to beat Loki.”

  Sam looked like she wanted to give me a hug, though hugging a boy wasn’t something a good Muslima would ever do. “I wonder the same thing, Magnus. Not about you, but about me. Who knows if I’ll have the strength to face my father again? Who knows if any of us will?”

  “Is that supposed to boost my morale?”

  Sam laughed. “All we can do is try, Magnus. I choose to believe that our hardships make us stronger. Everything we’ve been through on this voyage—it matters. It increases our chances of victory.”

  I glanced toward the prow. Blitzen and Hearthstone had fallen asleep side by side in their sleeping bags at the base of the dragon figurehead. It seemed a strange place to sleep, given our adventure in Alfheim, but they both seemed at peace.

  “I hope you’re right, Sam,” I said. “Because some of it’s been pretty rough.”

  Sam sighed as if letting go of all the hunger, thirst, and curse words she’d kept inside while fasting. “I know. I think the hardest thing we can ever do is see someone for who they really are. Our parents. Our friends. Ourselves.”

  I wondered if she was thinking about Loki, or maybe herself. She could have been talking about any of us on the sh
ip. None of us were free of our pasts. During the voyage, we’d looked into some pretty harsh mirrors.

  My moment at the mirror was yet to come. When I faced Loki, I was sure he’d delight in magnifying my every fault, stripping bare my every fear and weakness. If he could, he would reduce me to a sniveling grease spot.

  We had until tomorrow to reach Naglfar, Frigg had said…or the next day at the latest. I found myself wavering, almost wishing we would miss the deadline so I wouldn’t have to face Loki one-on-one. But no. My friends were counting on me. For the sake of everybody I knew, everybody I didn’t know…I had to delay Ragnarok as long as possible. I had to give Sam and Amir a chance at a normal life, and Annabeth and Percy, and Percy’s baby sister, Estelle. They all deserved better than planetary destruction.

  I said good night to Sam, then spread my own sleeping bag out on the deck.

  I slept fitfully, dreaming of dragons and thralls, of falling down mountains and battling clay giants. Loki’s laughter echoed in my ears. Over and over, the deck turned into a gruesome patchwork of dead men’s keratin, enfolding me in a disgusting toenail cocoon.

  “Good morning,” said Blitzen, jolting me awake.

  The morning was bitter cold and steel gray. I sat up, breaking a sheet of ice that had formed on my sleeping bag. Off our starboard side, snowcapped mountains loomed even taller than the fjords of Norway. All around us, the sea was a broken-up puzzle of ice blocks. The deck was completely glazed in frost, turning our bright yellow warship the color of weak lemonade.

  Blitzen was the only other person on deck. He was bundled up, but he wasn’t wearing any sun protection, despite the fact that it was clearly daytime. That could only mean one thing.

  “We’re not in Midgard anymore,” I guessed.

  Blitzen smiled wearily, no humor in his eyes. “We’ve been in Jotunheim for hours now, kid. The others are below, trying to stay warm. You…well, being the son of the summer god, you’re more resistant to cold, but even you are going to start having trouble soon. Judging from how fast the temperature is dropping, we’re getting close to the borders of Niflheim.”

  I shivered instinctively. Niflheim, the primordial realm of ice: one of the few worlds I hadn’t yet visited, and one I wasn’t anxious to explore.

  “How will we know when we’re there?” I asked.

  The ship lurched with a juddering noise that loosened my joints. I staggered to my feet. The Big Banana was dead in the water. The surface of the sea had turned to solid ice in every direction.

  “I’d say we’re here.” Blitz sighed. “Let’s hope Hearthstone can summon some magical fire. Otherwise we’re all going to freeze to death within the hour.”

  I HAVE DIED many painful deaths. I’ve been impaled, decapitated, burned, drowned, crushed, and thrown off the terrace of floor 103.

  I prefer all of those to hypothermia.

  After only a few minutes, my lungs felt like I was breathing glass dust. We got all hands on deck—another nautical term I finally understood—to deal with the ice problem, but we had little success. I sent Jack out to break up the floe in front of us, while Halfborn and T.J. used poleaxes to chip away at the port and starboard sides. Sam flew ahead with a rope and tried to tug us along. Alex turned into a walrus and pushed from behind. I was too cold to make any jokes about how nice she looked with tusks, whiskers, and flippers.

  Hearthstone summoned a new rune:

  He explained this was kenaz: the torch, the fire of life. Instead of disappearing in a flash, like most runes did, kenaz continued to burn above the foredeck—a floating bend of fire five feet high, melting the frost on the deck and rigging. Kenaz kept us warm enough to avoid instant death, but Blitz fretted that sustaining the rune for an extended period would also burn up Hearth’s energy. A few months ago, expending so much energy would have killed him. Now he was stronger. Still, I worried, too.

  I found a pair of binoculars in the supplies and scanned the mountains for any promise of shelter or harbor. I saw nothing but sheer rock.

  I didn’t realize my fingers were turning blue until Blitz pointed it out. I summoned a little Frey-warmth into my hands, but the effort made me dizzy. Using the power of summer here was like trying to remember everything that had happened on my first day of elementary school. I knew summer still existed, somewhere, but it was so distant, so vague, I could barely conjure a memory of it.

  “B-blitz, y-you don’t look affected,” I noted.

  He scratched the ice from his beard. “Dwarves do well in the cold. You and I will be the last ones to freeze to death. But that’s not much comfort.”

  Mallory, Blitz, and I tried using oars to push away the ice as Halfborn and T.J. broke it up. We alternated duties, going belowdecks two or three at a time to warm up, though below wasn’t much warmer. We would have made faster time just getting out and walking, but Walrus Alex reported that the ice had some nasty thin spots. Also, we had nowhere to shelter. At least the ship offered supplies and some cover from the wind.

  My arms started to go numb. I got so used to shivering I couldn’t tell whether it had started to snow or my vision was blurred. The fiery rune was the only thing keeping us alive, but its light and heat slowly faded. Hearthstone sat cross-legged beneath the kenaz, his eyes closed in intense concentration. Beads of sweat dripped from his brow and froze as soon as they splattered on the deck.

  After a while, even Jack started to act glum. He no longer seemed interested in serenading us or joking about doing icebreaker activities.

  “And this is the nicest part of Niflheim,” he grumbled. “You should see the cold regions!”

  I’m not sure how much time passed. It seemed impossible that there had been any life before this one: breaking ice, pushing ice, shivering, dying.

  Then, at the prow, Mallory croaked, “Hey! Look!”

  In front of us, the swirling snow thinned. Only a few hundred yards ahead, jutting from the main line of cliffs, was a jagged peninsula like the blade of a corroded ax. A thin line of black-gravel beach hugged the base. And toward the top of the cliff…were those fires flickering?

  We turned the ship in that direction, but we didn’t make it far. The ice thickened, cementing our hull in place. Above Hearth’s head, the kenaz rune guttered weakly. We all gathered on the deck, solemn and silent. Every blanket and extra piece of clothing in the hold had been wrapped around us.

  “W-walk for it,” Blitz suggested. Even he was starting to stutter. “We pair up for warmth. G-get across the ice to the shore. Maybe we find shelter.”

  It wasn’t so much a “survival plan” as a plan for dying in a different place, but we grimly went to work. We shouldered all the supplies we couldn’t live without—some food, water, the canteen of Kvasir’s Mead, our weapons. Then we climbed onto the ice and I folded the Big Banana into a handkerchief, because dragging the ship along behind us would’ve been, well, a drag.

  Jack volunteered to float in front of us and test the ice with his blade. I wasn’t sure whether that would make things more or less dangerous for us, but he refused to go back into pendant form, because the aftereffects of his extra exertion would’ve killed me. (He’s thoughtful that way.)

  As we paired up, somebody’s arm curled around my waist. Alex Fierro wedged herself next to me, wrapping a blanket around our heads and shoulders. I looked at her in amazement. A pink wool scarf covered her head and mouth, so all I could see were her two-toned eyes and some wisps of green hair.

  “Sh-shut up,” she stammered. “You’re w-warm and s-summery.”

  Jack led the way across the ice. Behind him, Blitzen did his best to prop up Hearthstone, who stumbled along with the rune of kenaz above him, though its heat was now more like a candle’s than a bonfire’s.

  Sam and Mallory followed, then T.J. and Halfborn, and finally Alex and me. We trudged across the frozen sea, making our way toward that outcropping of rock, but our destination seemed to get farther away with every step. Could the cliff be a mirage? Maybe distance was fluid
on the borders of Niflheim and Jotunheim. Once, in the hall of Utgard-Loki, Alex and I had rolled a bowling ball all the way to the White Mountains in New Hampshire, so I supposed anything was possible.

  I couldn’t feel my face anymore. My feet had turned to one-gallon boxes of squishy ice cream. I thought how sad it would be to come as far as we had, facing so many gods, giants, and monsters, only to keel over and freeze to death in the middle of nowhere.

  I clung to Alex. She clung to me. Her breath rattled. I wished she still had her walrus blubber, because she was all skin and bone, as wiry as her garrote. I wanted to chide her, Eat, eat! You’re wasting away.

  I appreciated her warmth, though. Under any other circumstances, she would’ve killed me for getting this close. Also, I would’ve freaked out from so much physical contact. I considered it a personal triumph that I’d learned to hug my friends once in a while, but I wasn’t usually good with closeness. The need for warmth, and maybe the fact that this was Alex, made it okay somehow. I concentrated on her scent, a sort of citrusy fragrance that made me think of orange groves in a sunny valley in Mexico—not that I’d ever been to a place like that, but it smelled nice.

  “Guava juice,” Alex croaked.

  “Wh-what?” I asked.

  “Roof d-deck. B-back B-bay. That was nice.”

  She’s clinging to good memories, I realized. Trying to stay alive.

  “Y-yeah,” I agreed.

  “York,” she said. “Mr. Ch-chippy. You d-didn’t know what t-takeaway meant.”

  “I hate you,” I said. “Keep t-talking.”

  Her laugh sounded more like a smoker’s cough. “Wh-when you returned from Alfheim. The look—the look on your f-face when I t-took b-back m-my pink glasses.”

  “B-but you were glad to see me?”

  “Eh. Y-you have some entertainment v-value.”

  Struggling to walk on the ice, our heads so close together, I could almost imagine Alex and I were a clay warrior with two faces, a twin being. The thought was comforting.

  Maybe fifty yards from the cliff, the kenaz rune sputtered out. Hearth stumbled against Blitz. The temperature plummeted further, which I didn’t think was possible. My lungs expelled their last bit of warmth. They screamed when I tried to inhale.

  “Keep going!” Blitz yelled back to us hoarsely. “I am not dying in this outfit!”

  We obliged, marching step by step toward the narrow gravel beach, where at least we could die on solid ground.

  Blitz and Hearth were almost at the shore when Alex stopped abruptly.

  I didn’t have any energy left either, but I thought I should try to sound encouraging. “We—we have to k-keep going.” I looked over. We were nose-to-nose under the blankets. Her eyes glinted, amber and brown. Her scarf had dipped below her chin. Her breath was like limes.

  Then, before I even knew what was happening, she kissed me. She could have bitten off my mouth and I would have been less surprised. Her lips were cracked and rough from the cold. Her nose fit perfectly next to mine. Our faces aligned, our breath mixed. Then she pulled away.

  “I wasn’t going to die without doing that,” she said.

  The world of primordial ice must not have frozen me completely, because my chest burned like a coal furnace.

  “Well?” She frowned. “Stop gaping and let’s move.”

  We trudged toward the shore. My mind wasn’t working properly. I wondered if Alex had kissed me just to inspire me to keep going, or to distract me from our imminent deaths. It didn’t seem possible she’d actually wanted to kiss me. Whatever the case, that kiss was the only reason I made it to shore.

  Our friends were already there, huddled against the rocks. They hadn’t seemed to notice the kiss between Alex and me. Why would they? Everyone was too busy freezing to death.

  “I—I have g-gunpowder,” T.J. stuttered. “C-could make a f-fire?”

  Unfortunately, we had nothing to burn except our clothes, and we needed those.

  Blitz looked miserably at the cliff face, which was sheer and unforgiving.

  “I—I’ll try to shape the rock,” he said. “Maybe I can dig us a cave.”

  I’d seen Blitz mold solid rock before, but it took a lot of energy and concentration. Even then, he’d only been making simple handholds. I didn’t see how he’d have the strength to dig an entire cave. Nor was that going to save us. But I appreciated his stubborn optimism.

  He’d just dug his fingers into the stone when the entire cliff rumbled. A line of blazing light etched the shape of a door, twenty feet square, that swung inward with a deep grinding noise.

  In the opening stood a giantess as terrible and beautiful as the Niflheim