It’s not Rome, of course, but his son, Rathi, standing with his hands in the pockets of a slick tailored coat, collar popped. His hair is a disaster of gold, twisted and tossed by the wind. With the last of the baby fat lost from his face, he’s as beautiful as Freyr the Satisfied himself: strong jaw, smooth, symmetrical face that invites confidence like a prince. I step forward, tossed by the rocking ferry, and he reaches out a hand. I grasp his arm.
He’s real. He’s here.
I stare up at him, and there it is, swimming in his black pupil, surrounded by bottle-green iris: prince.
Except in my memories his eyes are always the same rich earth color as his father’s.
“What’s wrong with your eyes?” I say.
Instead of an answer, he hugs me like I’m the only thing in the world. His arms tremble, his shoulders hunch so he can bury his face in my neck. I slide my hands under his coat, around his ribs, glad he didn’t go for mine. Here’s the familiar smell of his hair gel, the comforting warmth of his arms. His tears stick our cheeks together.
Rathi pulls back to look at me and I stroke under his eyes, wiping away his tears.
“Contacts,” he murmurs.
I twist my mouth. “What was wrong with your brown? Brown the color of Freyr’s earth? Brown the color of your father’s eyes?”
“Sig,” he says, ignoring my anger the way he ignores everything he doesn’t like.
I turn my back into him and we both face Vinland, a thin strip of black appearing on the horizon. Soon there will be mountain peaks and snowcaps, the dark green of trees and the ferocious gray of cliffs and shattered beaches. He presses a kiss to my hair. To the part between two thick braids. I remember running as kids through coarse grass with our hands linked, and our ankles knocking together under the Summerling kitchen table.
Rathi wraps his arms around me and it’s so comfortable I hate it. It was always his problem—or my problem with him. He made me comfortable; he let me relax, slow down, settle, stop pushing and fighting and raging. Last year I watched him perform in a traveling Chautauqua as part of his preaching apprenticeship. He glowed onstage and his words reminded me of warm hearths and bonfires, dancing with my parents, curling at the foot of his bed with licorice to scare each other with tales of giants and dragons. He brought back everything I’d been before the Tree and handed it to me, exactly when I needed it, when I’d fled the Death Halls and my Valkyrie sisters, when I was starving for somebody to say, Signy, you’re amazing, and that’s what Rathi Summerling did.
He’d forgiven me for abandoning him when I climbed the New World Tree, forgiven me for leaving Freyr the Satisfied and our long family histories, our future together we’d childishly whispered and giggled about for years. He’d forgiven me for becoming a daughter of Odin, and I didn’t want him to.
Now he murmurs, “I thought you were dead, too, and I was all alone.”
“Rag me,” I whisper.
Rathi waits, patient as his parents, patient as the earth. He’s always like a gift when I need it the most.
Sucking breath through my teeth, I take his cold hand and lead him to the top deck of the ferry, where the wind is harshest and I can’t hide anything. I sit him down on one of the rows of metal benches with flaking blue paint. “You’re not alone, Rathi. You won’t ever be as long as I am alive.” My voice is rough and unforgiving even as the skin around his lips pales, even as his hand digs into mine. “And I’m not alone, either.”
“Tell me,” he whispers, eyes unfocused. “Tell me what happened. Please.”
I do.
It’s a poem, but a dark one, a quiet one. This story I spin for the only living Summerling about how his parents died, about how all of them died, resembles the truth not at all. I wonder if Unferth would forgive me for lying.
THIRTEEN
TO KEEP RATHI out of the battlefield that was Jellyfish Cove, to keep him from finding his parents’ bones picked over, I ask him to go with me to the warning tower. I say I can’t face Unferth’s ghost alone.
The walk is muddy and rough, and Rathi slows me down, picking his way around snowmelt ponds and doing his best not to step in slush. With his arms out like a stork for balance, he almost makes me smile. The cuffs of his suit pants soak up plenty of cold water. His shoes slip against the frosty gorse and the splash is followed by a disgusted groan. He glares at nature and then stops bothering to avoid anything.
Except for the front door knocking loose against the frame as the ocean wind blows, the tower appears as it always has: lonely. I steer clear of the holmgang ring and head quickly inside, barreling upstairs to my room. The air is silent, still, and cold. My breath frosts on my lips, is harsh in my ears.
Footsteps downstairs stop my heart, but I remember it’s Rathi. An iron poker scrapes against the hearth, echoing up to me as he begins a fire.
Grabbing my seax, I buckle it at my hip, and take a moment to arrange it so it doesn’t rub against the belt holding Unferth’s sword across my back. I dig into the backpack Unferth packed me weeks ago for the silver rings and cuffs Jesca and Rome gave me at Yule and clasp them over the sleeves of my thermal shirt. Then I stuff in my only other wool Valkyrie dress and swing the pack over my shoulder.
I don’t say goodbye to my room, but I think of the poetry I painted onto the balcony overhead. My mark.
Rathi’s put a pot of water to boil on the fire. I brace myself and go into Unferth’s room. It’s shaped like a slice of pie, with light from the single porthole window facing north. Nothing personalized.
Once I barged in on him shaving in the bathroom. I called, “Unferth? Are you decent?”
He leaned out of the small bathroom in only his sweatpants. “Rarely,” he said with a twisted smile. I pursed my lips to mask my reaction to his near nakedness.
“What do you want, little raven?” he asked, pulling back into the bathroom. I joined him, standing just outside, and watched as he scraped the razor over the last line of shaving cream beside his left ear. Unferth bent over the sink to splash water on his face. The long scattering of scars marred the right side of his back; I only saw because as he stretched they glinted strangely in the yellow bathroom light.
I reached out and touched his shoulder blade. Half-shocked he didn’t jerk away from my touch, I boldly stroked the twist of scars. “Troll?”
He took a second to glare at me in the tarnished mirror, water running off his face like rain. “Troll,” he confirmed. After screwing off the faucet, he did pull away from my hand, patting his face and chest with a thin towel he snatched from a ring in the wall.
I cupped my hands against my chest. “You must have been so young.”
“It was the first troll I ever met.”
He threw the sentence away, but I caught it and held my ground in the bathroom door. Unferth stopped so close I might’ve leaned in and pressed us together. My breath picked up pace and I remained still, curling my hands around the doorjamb.
“I’m not going to tell you more, little raven, not today.”
“Someday?”
“Someday.” Unferth’s voice dropped, as if he was making a wish, not a promise.
I’ll never know now. But, I think, as I take a deep breath and dive into his bathroom, searching for anything of his, at least he died as he lived.
Armed with three thin copper rings he used to wear and a pair of his gloves, I rejoin Rathi. He didn’t make tea but hot chocolate, since that’s all we kept here. Unferth liked it first thing in the morning, but I never had the patience to stir and stir so it heated without burning.
We sit at the worn old table and drink as spring wind rattles the shutters, until Rathi says, very quietly, “I wish they hadn’t been here. I wish we’d never come to Vinland but stayed in Cherokeen.”
“They loved it here. It was everything they wanted from life.”
He nods jerkily, like he doesn’t want to agree but has to. “Ardo will rebuild. I can’t run it, though. We’ll find somebody else.”
&nb
sp; “Ardo?”
“Vassing. He heads Bliss Church in Mizizibi. I’m working on my mastership with him this summer. Or was going to be. It was an honor.”
“Jesca told me. She was so excited, and proud.” I reach across the table and touch the back of his hand.
“They’re saying …” Rathi trails off to look out the narrow window toward the sea. “That Vinland was a necessary sacrifice to balance the strands of fate and bring Baldur home. That the trolls came because the sun was lost. The troll mother wished to sow doubt and chaos, and that’s why they left those runemarks for Ragnarok.”
I sigh through my teeth. Chaos. Sacrifice.
“Do you believe it? Did the gods let this happen to our family?”
The idea gnaws at my throat. I remember the bloody runes, the clarity in the troll mother’s eyes. Her fury, and the broken bodies scattered at her feet. “No, I think it was fate. Every choice has consequences, and those consequences cause more consequences. They can become sacrifices in retrospect. Like my parents died and I ended up climbing the Tree. They didn’t know it would happen, but it’s still connected. Their death became the sacrifice that brought me to the Alfather’s attention.
“The same can be said about the troll mother. We were destined to meet; I saw it in her eyes.” I shake my head. Your heart, she said. “She’s the answer to my riddle, and I feel that we’d have come together sooner or later. It was here, because of … choices we all made. Me to spend the winter here, and your parents to move here. Maybe the troll mother chose this time because of Baldur, and so his disappearance and the massacre are connected. Maybe she had no reason at all. Maybe chaos was her reason. Who knows how many choices and consequences brought us all to that moment, when I could see the answer to my riddle. It was Fate.”
“So it’s all about you, Signy.” His voice is hollow; he leans away from me.
My guts go cold and I shove the hot chocolate away from me. “That’s not—not what I mean. Only that it’s connected. The Tree, Baldur, trolls, the riddle. Knotted together in Fate’s weave.”
He stands, hands pressed to the table, to loom over me. “You like thinking that. You like to believe it all has meaning, some grand meaning, so there’s what? A good reason they died? If they were meant to die, you didn’t do anything wrong! You just did what you were fated to do.”
I don’t know how to respond, and so I only stare at him. The silence between us turns stuffy.
Rathi’s shoulders slump. “I shouldn’t attack you. They loved you. I love you. It’s just, they always followed your news, wanted to hear from you, but you never wrote or called. You were a skit daughter, Sig, and they didn’t care. Last year, after you left me, my dad said, ‘Signy’s too big for us, son.’ And I hated you because I wanted them to think I was big enough to match you.”
My skin crawls with regret and I hug myself, knowing there’s only one way to make this feeling go away. “I swear to you, Rathi Summerling, I won’t let their sacrifice be in vain.”
“That’s something Odinists are good for.”
Because Rathi doesn’t want to look at me at the moment, I grab my bag and tell him to use the tower. It’ll make a good base of operations for the Freyan rebuilding process, and I certainly won’t be returning. He runs a hand through his hair, leaving furrows in the gel, and pulls his face down, but doesn’t argue.
I trek back to town to get the truck, throw my hiking bag into the passenger seat, and take off.
I begin hunting at the meadow where the Mad Eagles found us, where they cut through so many trolls and the mother escaped. All the broken pieces of stone have been collected, sent off to some lab for study or smuggled into a black market or put on display in a roadside museum. I walk the length of it, hand sweating on the pommel of Unferth’s sword as I remember the shudder of wind and roaring and sticky sweet smell of their breath.
In the west, I find sign of a single troll shoving through the tree line. And a chunk of iron with a hole bored through: a piece of her great bone-and-iron collar.
The troll mother fled this way, alone by the looks of it.
I drive to high ground over access roads that are mostly mud and slush. With binoculars I study the shadowy pattern of broken trees, tracing her path for a half kilometer before she came out again onto stony moor and I can’t see obvious sign. This island is over a hundred thousand square kilometers. Pocked with giant lakes, mountains, and moors, it could take years to explore on foot, and the roads barely cover ten percent of it. I’ve set myself an impossible task.
But I won’t give up so fast. The Mad Eagles searched with heliplanes; they couldn’t see the smaller signs from the air, like mismatched lichen patterns or smoke stains, that I’ll be able to find if I’m methodical and on the ground.
So the tedious driving begins. The truck crawls down the coastal road and I peer carefully to either side, every half kilometer getting out to walk the edges and go into the stunted pines a little bit. The caribou haven’t come back to this northern finger of the island yet—whether from the cold or the recent trolls and military heliplanes, I couldn’t say. I don’t know much about the non-troll fauna of Vinland except that there are arctic hares and foxes, lemmings, squirrels, and little brown bats, but no snakes. And that I need to be on the lookout for wolf scat. Rome told me some of the wild dogs out here were descended from dire wolves within two or three generations.
Birds flit everywhere during the day, and much of the grass is pushing up new shoots. The evergreens leak sap, and the creeks run hard with snowmelt. There are ponds and lakes everywhere, winking in the sun, a few with ice still staining the edges. If my heart wasn’t so sore this would be lovely. If I wasn’t so alone.
At night I sleep in the truck, curled in blankets and trying desperately not to think of Unferth. He mutters in my head sometimes, rules for troll hunting, reminders not to neglect to look up high or take into account rockslides. I whisper back to him poetry and riddles I make up on the spot. I want to ask him what she meant when she said Your heart back to me, as if she’d been looking for me, too. But most of all I walk long and hard; I don’t let myself rest, so when the sun falls I’m exhausted.
It doesn’t stop the dreams. The troll mother hunts me as I hunt her. She moves gracefully even in the daylight, circling me like a shadow, near enough so at nightfall she can creep closer to watch me sleep. Her moon-bright face stares at me all night, and she sinks into the earth itself when the sun rises. I wake repeatedly, scanning the forest in terror, and take to parking in open spaces. It feels as though the entire world hangs from the tension between us.
The second day, and again on the fifth, I do find sign of her: an ashy clawed handprint smeared down the side of a cliff near Plum Point. It’s the nearest place to Canadia, and a ferry runs twice daily over the summer. The town has about fifty permanent residents, none of whom have seen her. There are no additional prints on the muddy gray beach, though I scour it for hours. I wonder if she stood there at the base of the rocks considering a return to Canadia, if I’m going to have to buy a ticket on the next ferry. But there right along the highway, I find a row of baby pines has been bent clear in half as if she turned inland again. Why?
Three times at the end of my first week I see sign of lesser trolls, which makes no sense, as they’ve never been on Vinland before. Cat wights and iron eaters tend to follow human populations, and Vinland has never had much of one. But the bright orange scat of the iron eaters is unmistakable, and cat wights mark their territory with an acrid scent as well as by braiding tiny fences in the grass.
Eight days into my hunt, I stop abruptly an hour before sunset, because there’s another car on the road. A small SUV, shiny and new under a layer of Vinland mud. New Scotland plates and nothing else to distinguish it other than being out on this gritty access road halfway down the western coast of a nearly uninhabited island. Frowning, I unsheathe Unferth’s sword and approach on foot.
Before I get to the SUV, a shrill scream darts from
the valley to my left, like a jaguar or panther in the movies. It’s returned by another, and then more and more, pitching up like monkeys worked into a frenzy. Lesser trolls.
I hesitate for the briefest second before diving between the trees.
Needles and twigs whip my face and I ignore them, sword at the ready, boots skidding over fallen pinecones and the wet ground. The screaming draws me to a surprising grove of aspen, glowing like bones in the late evening light. A huge crack shatters the air as a man breaks off a thick tree branch. He swings it like a bat at a cluster of furry, dark cat wights, roaring loudly.
At least thirty wights harry him, three on his back, cackling gleefully as he swats at their cousins. Claws rip his shirt, tear at his short dark hair, and he opens his mouth to rage. He kicks and spins, catches them with his aspen-tree club. One splats against another tree; there’s the slick pop of breaking bones, screams, and more wild laughing. They die fast, but more come, all huge eyes and tiny claws, matted fur and fangs and curling cat tails.
I slice one down the spine with Unferth’s sword and stomp at another. Some turn to me, and I unsheathe my seax to wield a blade in each hand. A cat wight tears at my leg and I brain it with the pommel of the sword. I turn and scream at two more, swinging Unferth’s sword, slicing with my seax.
Fire burns across the back of my neck, my hair pulls, and I bend, rolling hard against the ground to crush the thing clinging to my shoulder, then back to my feet with a groan. I taste blood-black earth, and my old cracked ribs suddenly dig at my lungs.
Thank Fate the surviving wights begin to disperse. They flee south, and I lower my weapons. With a shaking hand I wipe pinkish blood off the seax blade onto my jeans and sheath it. I press my hand to my ribs, let the tip of Unferth’s sword brush the flattened grass.
The man’s labored breathing makes me turn my head just as he rushes me.
I curse in shock, raise my arm, but he hits me and the sword flies off. I smash into the ground with a scream and kick up with both feet. I catch him in the chest and he grunts but grabs my ankles and throws me.