Carefully I stand up. My neck aches, but so does the rest of me. The cracked ribs in my side throb and my shoulder is tight enough it might shatter if I knock into anything. I’m bruised everywhere, though most of my cuts are shallow. A berserker medic glued the worst of them closed last night, but my shower must’ve undone most of that good.
I glance out the curtained window. Everything in this neighborhood is the same taupe color. Row upon row of military housing, with identical front doors and thin walkways. Even the parked cars are all a variation of brown or white or silver. What’s truly strange, though, is the lack of people. Counting backward, I guess today is Thorsday, and so maybe children are in school. But the longer I search for signs of life, the more unnerved I become. There’s not even litter in the gutters to remind me of Odin.
A small pile of clothes waits stacked beside Unferth’s sword. The garnet in the pommel is a dull red this morning, like some life’s gone out of it.
My pulse throbs in my fingertips and I think of her. Your heart.
I put on the clothes left for me: a loose-fitting cotton dress with a sweater to go over it. The collar is so wide it falls off of my shoulder. I make it through most of a normal bathroom routine, aching on the outside, strangely numb and empty in my heart, until just after I spit out my tooth gel and notice my broken fingernails.
Clutching the sink’s edges, I lean into the mirror. There’s so little blood in my cheeks that what’s usually a scatter of freckles across my nose has erupted across my face. A thin cut slices from my left eyebrow back toward my ear, the skin around it alive with a vicious bruise. My hair is a wight’s nest of snarls, as I couldn’t bring myself to unknot all the intricate braids Unferth wove before I collapsed into bed. I hardly recognize my own eyes. A ring of blood stains the white of my left one, brightening the green iris until it nearly glows. Like hers. But no runes dance at the edges of my pupils. And my hair looks so awful I laugh. That laughter shakes up my entire body, punching at my cracked ribs until I have to grip the sink tighter, clench my jaw to keep from puking. Tears spill down my cheeks in two straight lines.
I press my fist against my chest, over my heart. I must keep myself together. The Alfather would expect me to be strong after battle.
But I hear the troll mother’s roar echo in my ears.
She’s still alive. I have to find her, destroy her, chisel her heart from her chest. Not for my riddle but as the blood price for Vinland. For Ned Unferth.
If I am a Valkyrie, it starts here with revenge.
Hands shaking, I dig into my mass of ashy hair to find the little pins Unferth used. One by one I pull them out and drop them into the sink. They ting against the porcelain. Each braid falls, flopping into my face or down my back, around my shoulders. With every gentle tug on my scalp another tear slips past my lashes.
I’ve no idea how long it takes to work out all the knots. My normally straight hair is kinked and ruined, and I wish I had scissors to cut it all off. But I twist it against the base of my skull and take the pins out of the sink. I close my eyes and try to drag up the memory of Ned’s fingers against my scalp, the scratch of pins and the tug as he set them into place. I’ll always have these pins, at least. Laughter pops up again, reflected like panic in my eyes.
I bare my teeth at myself in the mirror, watching for any wisp of this madness escaping through the cracks.
For the slightest moment I see the rune for need spelled out in my freckles.
The kitchen is at the end of the tight, poorly lit hallway. It’s cramped with white cabinets and appliances, with a wooden dining table filling the center so there’s barely any room to maneuver around it. But what it lacks in space it makes up for in friendliness. Creamy wallpaper with tiny yellow and pink flowers cheerfully displays a set of framed butterfly drawings, and the refrigerator is covered in rainbow alphabet magnets. The E and M hold up a Thorist prayer card in which a romantically drawn Thor holds a half-dozen small children in his massive arms.
Esma sits at the head of the table, half her attention on the year-old girl in a cherry-red high chair, the other half on the small muted TV crushed up on the counter between a coffee-maker and standing mixer.
Mother and daughter both have round brown eyes and tight curls that hug their heads. Esma’s skin is darker than the baby’s, glowing smooth and pretty in the warm light.
“Good morning,” I say, but it comes out scratchy, like a horrible radio signal.
The baby slaps her palm against the high-chair tray and Esma turns to me, straightening her shoulders as if grateful for the interruption. “Good morning. Help yourself to cereal or toast, and there’s coffee in the carafe. I’ll finish up in just a moment.”
I pour coffee into a wide green mug that says SUMMERFEST ’97 ~ LOKI DID IT and join Esma at the table. I can do this; I can be calm. The baby stares at me, opening and closing her mouth around the spoon like a robot. I wrap my hands around the mug and avoid the TV. The news is on, and I don’t want to hear any reports from Vinland.
“Did you sleep all right?” Esma asks as she scoops the last bite of orange mush onto the baby spoon.
“Yes,” I say to my coffee. No need to speak of nightmares.
“This is Manda, and I’m so glad I had her with me last night or you’d have never gotten to sleep. The little goblin always gets a tish crazy when her da is in and out so fast.”
Because it’s polite, I look up. “Is Sagan gone again?”
Esma’s mouth curls down like a crescent moon and she shakes her head. “He flew before dawn to join a militia group in Mishigam hunting for Baldur.”
And here I’d forgotten the god of light was even missing.
After a stop at the infirmary to have my ribs wrapped, we go out to the Exchange. I’ve no money, and nothing even to my name but Unferth’s sword. Even the seax I couldn’t sell remains useless with my packed bags in the warning tower on Vinland. Esma insists on buying me clothes and tells me we’re all children of Asgard and what sort of woman would she be if she didn’t help? When she quotes The Charge of Thunder, I have to accept the charity. We give aid to those in need, and make of our strength an entire world.
I ask if we can find news of the troll herd. I try to say it lightly, when I want to rip the information out of the air: Where is the troll mother? Is she still breathing?
At the base commander’s office, we wait in a pale blue room with wilting flowers in the window. The ache in my muscles and tight cracked ribs force me not to pace but to sit still and find some measure of patience reciting lines from The Volsunga Saga to myself. Signy Volsung burned down her traitorous husband’s castle; she transformed herself into a wolf for battle. She did everything she needed to in order to protect her family, even lie and cast curses and seduce her own brother. Turning the words of her poem over my tongue calms me.
It’s nearly an hour before the commander’s lowliest retainer greets us and gives me his condolences. He tells me there’s a hospital in Halifax where refugees are being temporarily settled, but no, they can’t provide the manpower to send me anywhere. Not to the refugees, and definitely not back to Vinland. Even when I remind him of my name, of my history, he shakes his head regretfully and apologizes that he can’t accommodate me. Everyone but dependents and a handful of necessary personnel are deployed for the Baldur emergency. And because we’re so near Canadia, where trolls still roam wild, the national troll alert set off by the Cove massacre has locked down the base, not to mention the major highway between here and the city. They expect the lockdown to last at least as long as Baldur is missing and all the country’s resources are spread thin. I learn that the berserkers who mowed down the troll mother’s herd are called the Mad Eagles, and they alone remain on Vinland, tracking any stragglers or escapees from the herd. The berserkers will annihilate the trolls, I’m assured.
They won’t find her without me, I tell him, though he clearly thinks I’m addled from trauma.
But I’m worried they will find her. I
want to stand over her body as it calcifies and hack it into chunks of stone to get at her heart.
The commander only promises to send word to the Death Hall that I’m here and see if the council will help me return to the island to find the troll mother, but he won’t allow me to leave on my own.
By the time we return to Esma’s home, it’s too late to do anything drastic.
Esma lets me be for the evening, and I gather up Unferth’s sword from under the cot. The hilt is cold. I cover the garnet with my palm as if it will keep him from seeing me.
With it I go out into the narrow backyard. A chain-link fence separates it from the next and the next, every metal box the same for two hundred meters in either direction. I spend a few minutes warming my aching muscles and then raise the sword into the first offensive position. The sword is perfectly balanced and only slightly too heavy for me. I’ve never practiced with it before, never even thought to; it seemed too perfect and right in Unferth’s hand. Just as it seems perfect that I should use it now to strengthen myself for vengeance.
I lift it slowly, move into defensive forms. The pain in my side is a fire urging me on, pushing tears into my eyes, but when it becomes a vise I can’t breathe through I stretch out onto the lawn to stare up at the sky as it slowly darkens.
The troll mother must be moving now that the stars give her permission. I will tear her to pieces, and when I prove myself to the Valkyrie it will be through violence and death, a confrontation with a monster, not some symbolic riddle solving. It will be on my terms. Raw, vicious, legendary terms.
And I won’t wait for her to come to me again.
Esma calls me for dinner and I don’t respond. She puts her daughter to bed and sits beside me for a while, but the cold night wind chases her inside. She brings me an old green pea-coat and I tuck it under my chin, squeezing myself into a ball as if I can hold myself together.
At dawn, I’ve chosen my favorites of the clothing Esma bought for me, just what I can wear. Jeans, a thermal shirt, a dark purple hoodie, and the pea jacket. And my own tired mud boots. I strap Unferth’s sword across my back and pin up my braids.
I begin coffee for Esma and then go to the refrigerator. With the alphabet magnets I spell out THANK YOU in bright colors.
I reach the gates of the base just as they’re opening to allow in a convoy of armored trucks. With my chin high I slip out and march along the gravel shoulder of the highway as if it’s exactly where I belong. When a voice yells at me, orders me to return, I disregard it.
But the last truck in the convoy stops and three soldiers pile out. They all have hammer patches sewn to the shoulders of their dun uniforms. This is Thor’s Army. The first soldier holds a hand out and says, “Let’s get you back inside, honey.”
I keep walking, and his two companions spread out to flank me. Beyond them are the rolling hills of New Scotland for me to focus on; the pale green and grayish gold of early spring. There’s no troll-sign here.
When the first soldier tells me to unsheathe my sword and put it on the road, I curl my mouth with Unferth’s own disdain. “I need to be on Vinland, and I will find a boat to take me there in Port Hali.”
“There’s a troll alert. This highway is closed.”
“I don’t care.” As I begin to notice details of his face, his dark eyes and the shape of his nose, I force myself to ignore them. I don’t want to know him. “I can make it.”
“It’s thirty kilometers to Hali,” the soldier says quietly. Not without sympathy.
That tenderness infuriates me. “Take me, then.”
“It isn’t going to happen. You’ll have to wait. Maybe we can put a call somewhere? Is your family here on base?”
“My family is destroyed! On Vinland!” Desperation makes me add, “I am the Valkyrie of the Tree and you will obey me, soldier.”
“There is no Valkyrie of the Tree,” the soldier says as he reaches for Unferth’s sword, and it’s probably only his surprise that lets me punch him in the face.
The others are on me instantly and I kick to the side, then spin and try to block them. But they throw me onto the road hard enough to knock the breath from me. I shut my eyes against white-hot pain in my ribs and swallow bile. My hand throbs but isn’t broken, and gravel cuts into my right cheek. “I have to go!” I yell.
“Nobody’s going anywhere, girl,” one of them says. They drag me up, don’t wait for me to find my feet, and haul me into their truck. The moment one reaches for Unferth’s sword again, I snap my head around and say, “If you touch that, I will kill you.”
They take it anyway, just before tossing me into their brig.
TWELVE
BEING IN PRISON at least gives my ribs a chance to heal.
For days I lay on the pallet, breathing slowly to soothe the pain, staring at the pipes that cross the ceiling like a road map. I close my eyes and the stone walls of the prison shake; trolls pull away from it, forming out of concrete and metal, tiny yellow eyes glaring at me. They roar in my dreams. Sweat burns my eyes and I throw myself up to pace, to tear at the bars until I’m wasted again by the vise of my ribs.
I’m given ink when I ask for it, though, and I scrawl poetry in spirals and uneven lines all over the walls of the brig. Everything I remember about Rome and Jesca Summerling, about the first light on the ice Yule morning, the laughter and electric joy of the festival. What must be memorialized. A sprawling epic poem with bridges and returns, melodrama and as many rhymes for home as I can find.
Every night the troll mother reaches huge hands for me. I toss and yell, sweaty and wild. I wander the nightmare battlefield hours and days, witnessing the slow putrid rot of bodies after the spirit is gone to heaven or the Valhol.
Once Elisa of the Prairie showed me the decaying carcass of a dead bison. She said, Remember, when you one day preside over a national sacrifice, over a great funeral, this is what happens when death is not followed by fire. This is the deepest face of death, the heart of it. She cried as she spoke and let her tears drop onto the dry prairie dirt.
I thought I understood death better than Elisa, the rawness of it, the filth. But I never thought the bodies slowly rotting would be men and women I loved.
And in my nightmares, the body I study as the rats come, as the maggots tumble from his tongueless mouth, is Unferth’s own.
There’s no poetry left in me now, he whispers in my dreams.
It makes me want to tear at my hair and face, dig into my eyeballs until I find runes under my skin. All the desperation, all the terror and nausea, I force into poetry. I draw the troll mother’s claws and a spiral of tusks. I write down the side: the mother of her own destruction.
I cannot drag my thoughts away from her.
And so I write, too, until my fingers cramp, about Valtheow the Dark, who faced the most ferocious troll mother of our histories with the berserker Beowulf at her side. There was a line she said: I make myself a mirror to understand the beast.
Unferth whispers in my head, Tell me, Signy, why you love her most of all.
I draw the scar from my palm, the binding rune that he linked linguistically to Valtheow: the servant of death and the death-born, both Strange Maids. She became a monster to fight Grendel’s mother.
But that Valtheow had a poet named Unferth at her side, and mine is dead.
Nine days after Baldur the Beautiful disappeared, a young berserker and a Lokiskin orphan find the god of light. After days of celebration the country rises from its crisis, and apparently there’s no reason for them to hold me prisoner any longer.
It takes several days for me to make my way to Halifax, then on to Port Hali. Walking and hitching rides, relying on the kindness of elated strangers who are happy to share a meal or water with me, to raise a toast because Baldur lives. I have to smile and watch the newsreels, listen again and again to the same information on the radio: a disgruntled Einherjar stole Baldur’s ashes, and the god of light woke in a desert, where he was found by Soren Bearstar, a berserker boy a
few months older than me.
For his boon Soren asked to serve Baldur instead of Odin, and for the first time in our history there’s a berserker unbound from the Alfather. His girlfriend, Vider Lokisdottir, asked to be given the berserker madness, and so there is a woman berserker for the first time since Luta Bearsdottir died.
“It all ties together with a nice little bow,” I say when I hear it, earning me an uncomfortable look from the driver of the longship carrier truck that is currently my ride.
With nothing but the clothes Esma bought me, Unferth’s sword, and the pins holding my braids up, I scour the Port Hali docks until I find a ferry captain who remembers me. He lets me on board for the first voyage to Vinland since the massacre and says most of the refugees are at a hospital in Halifax. They’ll be trickling back soon enough, once the death priests sailing with us purify the bodies and town. The captain’s also heard some Freyan preacher from down south has declared the restoration of Jellyfish Cove and the Viker Festival to be an official act of worship, so the military cleanup and death priests won’t be our only company before long.
It hardly concerns me. I only need to get to the truck, parked near the ferry ports at the south edge of the Cove. There are protein bars, bottled water, camping gear, and weaponry in the bed, all I need to hunt the troll mother from there back to Canadia if I have to. There’s been no word of her, though the Mad Eagles officially cleared the island, wasting a handful of her straggling sons. She’s either crossed back over the channel or gone to ground. I’ll find her either way.
At the prow of the ferry, I grip the metal rail as salt water splashes my boots and coat. I stare out over the steely ocean, lips chapped, shivering, and I think of her moon-bright face, her claws, her teeth.
“Signy?”
Rome Summerling calls my name, tentative like a ghost, and I stop breathing. I turn, hands sticking to the half-frozen rail.