The Ship of the Dead

  The water churned and bubbled around me like I’d fallen into a Jacuzzi. Between my legs, the current felt almost solid, as if I was sitting astride a creature sculptured from the sea. Directly in front of me, a head rose from the waves—a strong neck of gray water, a mane of frost, a majestic snout spewing plumes of icy mist from its nostrils. I was riding a vatnavaettir—a water horse.

  My friends plunged into the water, too, each dropping right onto the back of a waiting horse spirit. The vatnavaettir whinnied and bucked as spears rained down around us.

  “Let’s move!” Sam swooped down with her blazing spear and settled onto the back of the lead water horse. “Toward the mouth of the bay!”

  The horses raced away from the Ship of the Dead. Giants and draugr screamed in outrage. Spears and arrows splashed in the water. Cannons boomed. Shells exploded near enough to spray us with water, but the vatnavaettir were faster and more maneuverable than any ship. They zigged and zagged, rocketing across the bay with incredible speed.

  Jack flew up beside me. “Hey, señor, did you see that one disembowelment I did?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It was amazing!”

  “And the way I cut off that jotun’s limbs?”

  “Right!”

  “I hope you were taking notes for Bragi’s epic.”

  “Absolutely!” I made a mental note to start taking more mental notes.

  A different equine figure zoomed above us—Stanley the eight-legged horse, checking that we were okay. He whinnied like Okay, guess we’re done here? Have a nice day!

  Then he shot toward the steel gray clouds.

  The water horse was surprisingly warm, like a living animal, which kept my legs and crotch from freezing completely in the frigid water. Still, I remembered Mallory’s and Halfborn’s stories about vatnavaettir dragging their victims to the bottom of the sea. How was Samirah controlling them? If the herd decided to take a dive, we were all dead.

  Yet we kept racing forward, toward the gap in the glaciers at the mouth of the bay. Already I could see the water beginning to refreeze, the ice floes thickening and hardening. Summer in Niflheim, which lasted about twelve minutes, was now over.

  Behind us, the boom of cannons carried over the water, but the ship Naglfar remained at its moorings. I could only hope, since we had their admiral in a walnut, the ship would be forced to stay there.

  We shot out of the bay into the frosty sea, our water horses picking us a path through the broken ice floes. Then we turned south toward the much safer, monster-infested open waters of Jotunheim.

  THREE DAYS is a long time to sail with an evil walnut.

  After the water horses dumped us—“They got bored,” Sam explained, which was far better than them drowning us—I summoned the Big Banana and we all climbed aboard. Hearthstone managed to invoke the fire rune kenaz, which saved us from freezing to death. We sailed west, trusting our magic ship to take us where we needed to go.

  The first twelve hours or so, we were all running on pure adrenaline and terror. We got into dry clothes. I healed Mallory’s foot. We ate. We didn’t talk much. We grunted and pointed at things we needed. No one slept. Sam chanted her prayers, which was amazing, since the rest of us probably couldn’t have formed simple sentences.

  Finally, when the gray sun sank and the world still hadn’t ended, we started to believe that Naglfar really wasn’t sailing after us. Loki would not be busting out of his tiny prison. Ragnarok wouldn’t be starting this summer, at least. We had survived.

  Mallory clutched the walnut. She refused to let go of it. She huddled against the prow, examining the sea with narrowed eyes, her red hair whipping in the wind. After about an hour of this, Halfborn Gunderson sat down next her. She didn’t kill him. He muttered to her for a long time, words I didn’t try to hear. She started to cry, expelling something from herself that sounded almost as bitter as Loki’s venom. Halfborn put his arm around her, looking not happy exactly, but content.

  The next day, Blitzen and Hearthstone went into nurturing mode, making sure everybody had food, everybody was warm enough, nobody was alone if they didn’t want to be. Hearth spent a lot of time listening to T.J. talk about war and slavery and what constituted an honorable challenge. Hearth was an excellent listener.

  Blitz sat with Alex Fierro all afternoon, showing her how to make a sweater vest out of chain mail. I wasn’t sure Alex needed a chain mail sweater vest, but the work seemed to calm them both.

  After her evening prayers, Samirah came up to me and offered me a date. (The kind you eat, of course.) We chewed our fruit and watched the strange constellations of Jotunheim blink above us.

  “You were amazing,” Sam said.

  I let that sink in. Samirah wasn’t big on doling out praise, any more than Mallory was big on doling out apologies.

  “Well, it wasn’t poetry,” I said at last. “More like pure panic.”

  “Maybe there’s not much difference,” Sam said. “Besides, just take the compliment, Chase.”

  “Okay. Thank you.” I stood next to her, watching the horizon. It felt nice just to be with a friend, enjoying the stars, not worrying about dying in the next five minutes.

  “You did great, too,” I said. “You stood up to Loki and defeated him.”

  Sam smiled. “Yeah. I had a lot of thanks to give in my prayers tonight.”

  I nodded. I wondered if I should be thanking someone, too—I mean, apart from my friends on the boat, of course. Sigyn, maybe, for her silent support, her passive resistance against her husband. If the gods put Loki back in his cave, I wondered if Sigyn would be going with him.

  Maybe Uncle Randolph deserved a thank-you, too, for leaving me those notes about Kvasir’s Mead. He’d tried to do something right at the end, no matter how spectacularly he’d betrayed me.

  Thinking about Randolph reminded me of the voices from Helheim, tempting me to join them in the darkness. I locked that memory away. I wasn’t feeling strong enough to face it just yet.

  Sam pointed toward Alex, who was trying on her new sweater vest. “You should go talk to her, Magnus. That was kind of a bombshell you dropped during the flyting.”

  “You mean…oh.” My stomach curled with embarrassment, like it was trying to hide behind my right lung. In front of my eight closest friends and several thousand enemies, I’d announced how much I’d enjoyed a private kiss from Alex.

  Sam chuckled. “She probably won’t be too mad. Go. Get it over with.”

  Easy for Sam to say. She knew exactly where she stood in her relationship with Amir. She was happily engaged and never had to worry about secret kisses under blankets because she was a good Muslim girl and would never do such a thing. I, alas, was not a good Muslim girl.

  I walked over to Alex. Blitzen saw me coming, nodded to me nervously, and fled.

  “What do you think, Magnus?” Alex spread her arms, showing off her glittering new fashion statement.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, not many people can pull off the plaid chain mail sweater vest, but yeah.”

  “It’s not plaid,” Alex said. “It’s more a cuadros, like diamonds. Checkered.”

  “Okay.”

  “So…” She crossed her arms and sighed, examining me like What are we going to do with you? It was a look I’d gotten from teachers, coaches, social workers, police, and a few of my closest relatives. “That declaration of yours back on Naglfar—that was all very sudden, Magnus.”

  “I…uh. Yeah. I wasn’t really thinking.”

  “Clearly. Where did that even come from?”

  “Well, you did kiss me.”

  “I mean, you can’t surprise somebody like that. Suddenly I’m the greatest thing that ever happened to you?”

  “I—I didn’t exactly say—” I stopped myself. “Look, if you want me to take it back…”

  I couldn’t form a complete thought. And I couldn’t see any way to extract myself from this conversation with my dignity intact. I wondered if I was suffering withdrawal symptoms from Kvasi
r’s Mead, paying the price for my successful performance on Naglfar.

  “I’m going to need some time,” Alex said. “I mean, I’m flattered, but this is all so out of the blue….”

  “Uh.”

  “I don’t just date any einherji with a pretty face and a nice haircut.”

  “No. Yeah. Pretty face?”

  “I appreciate the offer. Really. But let’s put this on hold and I’ll get back to you.” She held up her hands. “A little space, Chase.”

  She strode off, glancing back once with a smirk that made my toes curl up in my woolen socks.

  Hearthstone appeared at my side, his expression inscrutable as always. His scarf, for reasons unknown, had changed to a cuadros, red and white checkers. We watched Alex walking away.

  “What just happened?” I asked him.

  There are no words for it in sign language, he said.

  On our third morning at sea, T.J. called from the halyard, “Hey! Land!”

  I thought the expression was land, ho! But maybe they did things differently in the Civil War. We all jostled to the prow of the Big Banana. A vast flat landscape of red and gold spread across the horizon, as if we were sailing straight toward the Sahara desert.

  “That’s not Boston,” I noted.

  “That’s not even Midgard.” Halfborn frowned. “If our ship followed the currents Naglfar would have taken, that means—”

  “We’re landing at Vigridr,” Mallory offered. “The Last Battlefield. This is the place where we’ll all die someday.”

  Strangely, nobody screamed Turn this boat around!

  We stood transfixed as the Big Banana took us in, aiming for one of a jillion docks that jutted into the surf. At the end of the pier, a group of figures stood waiting—men and women, all resplendent in glittering armor and colorful cloaks. The gods had turned out to welcome us.

  ALONG THE abandoned shore, which was built up with the universe’s longest boardwalk, stretched thousands of empty kiosks and miles of stanchions for queuing, with signs pointing this way and that:

  JOTUNS →

  ← AESIR

  WILL CALL →

  ← SCHOOL GROUPS

  Our dock featured a large red sign with a stylized bird and a big number five. Underneath, in English and in runes, the sign read: REMEMBER, YOU PARKED AT RAVEN FIVE! HAVE A NICE RAGNAROK! I supposed our parking situation could have been worse. We could’ve docked at Bunny Rabbit Twelve or Ferret One.

  I recognized many of the gods in our greeting party. Frigg stood in her cloud-white dress and glowing war helm, her bag of knitting supplies under one arm. She smiled kindly at Mallory. “My daughter, I knew you would succeed!”

  I wasn’t sure if she meant that in an I-could-tell-your-future way or an I-had-faith-in-you way, but I thought it was nice of her to say regardless.

  Heimdall, the guardian of the Rainbow Bridge, grinned at me, his stark white eyes like frozen milk. “I saw you coming from five miles away, Magnus! That yellow boat. WOW.”

  Thor looked like he’d just woken up. His red hair was flat on one side, his face creased with pillow marks. His hammer, Mjolnir, hung at his belt, attached to his breeches with a bike chain. He scratched his hairy abs under his Metallica T-shirt and farted amiably. “I hear you insulted Loki into a little two-inch-tall man? Good work!”

  His wife, Sif, with the flowing golden hair, rushed to embrace Alex Fierro. “My dear, you look lovely. Is that a new sweater vest?”

  A big man I’d never seen before, with dark skin, a glistening bald scalp, and black leather armor, offered his left hand to Thomas Jefferson Jr. The god’s right hand was missing, the wrist covered in a gold cap. “My son. You’ve done well.”

  T.J.’s mouth fell open. “Dad?”

  “Take my hand.”

  “I—”

  “I challenge you to take my hand,” the god Tyr amended.

  “I accept!” T.J. said, and let himself be hauled onto the dock.

  Odin was wearing a three-piece suit in charcoal gray chain mail that I guessed was custom-made by Blitzen himself. The All-Father’s beard was neatly trimmed. His eye patch gleamed like stainless steel. His ravens, Thought and Memory, perched on his shoulders, their black feathers complementing his jacket beautifully.

  “Hearthstone,” he said. “Well done with the rune magic, lad. Those visualization tricks I taught you must have really paid off!”

  Hearth smiled weakly.

  From the back of the crowd, two other gods pushed forward. I’d never seen them together before, but now it was obvious how alike the twin brother and sister were. Freya, goddess of love and wealth, shone in her golden gown, the scent of roses wafting around her. “Oh, Blitzen, my beautiful boy!”

  She cried red-gold tears, shedding about forty thousand dollars’ worth all over the dock as she embraced her son.

  Next to her stood my dad, Frey, god of summer. In his battered jeans, flannel shirt, and boots, his blond hair and beard wild and unkempt, he looked like he’d just come back from a three-day hike.

  “Magnus,” he said, as if we’d just seen each other five minutes ago.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  He reached over hesitantly and patted my arm. “Good job. Really.”

  In runestone form, Jack buzzed and tugged until I let him off my neck chain. He expanded into sword form, glowing purple with irritation. “Hi, Jack,” he said, mimicking Frey’s deep voice. “How you doing, Jack, old buddy?”

  Frey winced. “Hello, Sumarbrander. I didn’t mean to ignore you.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Well, Magnus here is going to get Bragi to write an epic poem about me!”

  Frey raised an eyebrow. “You are?”

  “Uh—”

  “That’s right!” Jack huffed. “Frey never got Bragi to write an epic poem about me! The only thing he ever gave me was a stupid Hallmark Sword’s Day card.”

  Added to my mental notes: there was such a thing as Sword’s Day. I silently cursed the greeting-card industry.

  My father smiled, a little sadly. “You’re right, Jack. A good sword deserves a good friend.” Frey squeezed my shoulder. “And it looks like you’ve found one.”

  I appreciated the heartwarming sentiment. On the other hand, I was afraid my dad had just turned my rash promise about finding Bragi into a divinely ordained decree.

  “Friends!” Odin called. “Let us retire to our feasting tent on the field of Vigridr! I have reserved tent Lindworm Seven! That’s Lindworm Seven. If you get lost, follow the mauve arrows. Once there”—his expression turned brooding—“we will discuss the fate of all living things.”

  I’m telling you, you can’t even get a meal with these gods without discussing the fate of all living things.

  The feast tent was set up in the middle of the field of Vigridr, which was a long way from the docks, since (according to Samirah) Vigridr stretched three hundred miles in every direction. Fortunately, Odin had arranged for a small fleet of golf carts.

  The landscape was mostly grasslands of red and gold, with the occasional river, hill, and stand of trees, just for variety. The pavilion itself was made of cured leather, the sides open, the main hearth blazing, and the tables laden with food. It made me think of pictures I’d seen from old travel magazines, of people having luxury safari banquets on the African savannah. My mom used to love travel magazines.

  The gods sat at the thanes’ table, as one might expect. Valkyries hurried around serving everyone, though they got distracted when they saw Samirah and came over to give her hugs and gossip.

  Once everyone was settled and the mead was poured, Odin pronounced in a grave voice: “Bring forth the walnut!”

  Mallory rose. With a quick glance at Frigg, who nodded encouragement, Mallory walked to a freestanding stone pedestal in front of the hearth. She set down the walnut then returned to her seat.

  The gods all leaned forward. Thor glowered. Tyr laced his left-hand fingers with the nonexistent digits on his right hand. Frey stroked his blond beard.
>
  Freya pouted. “I don’t like walnuts, even if they are a great source of omega-three fatty acids.”

  “This walnut has no nutritional value, sister,” Frey said. “It holds Loki.”

  “Yes, I know.” She frowned. “I was just saying, in general…”

  “Is Loki quite secure?” Tyr asked. “He won’t pop out and challenge me to personal combat?”

  The god sounded wistful, as if he’d been dreaming about that possibility.

  “The walnut will hold him,” Frigg said. “At least until we return him to his chains.”

  “Bah!” Thor raised his hammer. “I say I should just smash him right now! Save us all a lot of trouble.”

  “Honey,” said Sif, “we’ve talked about this.”

  “Indeed,” said Odin, his ravens squawking on the high back of his throne. “My noble son Thor, we’ve been over this approximately eight thousand six hundred and thirty times. I’m not sure you’re using strategies for active listening. We cannot change our foretold destinies.”

  Thor huffed. “Well, what’s the use of being a god, then? I’ve got a perfectly good hammer and this nut is just begging to be cracked! Why not CRACK it?”

  That sounded like a pretty reasonable plan to me, but I didn’t say so. I was not in the habit of disagreeing with Odin the All-Father, who controlled my afterlife and my minibar privileges at the Hotel Valhalla.

  “Maybe…” I said, self-conscious as all eyes turned toward me. “I dunno….We could come up with a more secure place to keep him, at least? Like—I’m just thinking aloud here—a maximum-security prison with actual guards? And chains that aren’t made from the intestines of his sons? Or, you know, we could just avoid the intestine thing altogether….”

  Odin chuckled, like I was a puppy that had learned a new trick. “Magnus Chase, you and your friends have acted bravely and nobly. Now you must leave matters to the gods. We cannot change Loki’s punishment in any meaningful way. We can only restore it to what it was, so that the great sequence of events leading to Ragnarok will be held in check. At least for now.”

  “Hmph.” Thor quaffed his mead. “We keep delaying Ragnarok. Why not just get it over with? I could use a good fight!”

  “Well, my son,” said Frigg, “we are delaying Ragnarok because it will destroy the cosmos as we know it, and because most of us will die. You included.”

  “Besides,” Heimdall added, “we just now got the ability to take quality selfies on our cell phones. Can you imagine how much better the tech will be in a few more centuries? I can’t wait to VR-stream the apocalypse to my millions of followers on the cyber-cloud!”

  With a pensive expression, Tyr pointed to a nearby copse of golden trees. “I will die right over there…killed by Garm, the guard dog of Hel, but not before I smite his head in. I can’t wait for that day. I dream of Garm’s fangs ripping into my stomach.”

  Thor nodded sympathetically, like Yes, good times!

  I scanned the horizon. I, too, was destined to die here at Ragnarok, assuming I didn’t get killed in some dangerous quest before then. I didn’t know the exact location, but we might be having lunch in the very spot where I would be impaled, or Halfborn would fall with a sword in his gut, or Alex…I couldn’t think about it. Suddenly I wanted to be anywhere but here.

  Samirah coughed for attention. “Lord Odin,” she said, “what are your plans for Loki, then, since his original bonds were cut?”

  Odin smiled. “Not to worry, my brave Valkyrie. Loki will be returned to the cave of punishment. We will put new enchantments upon the place to hide its