Two sides of a coin, the Valkyrie and the berserkers. The voices of Odin, and the hands of Odin.
I don’t fit with either. Like Soren Bearstar did not fit with his wild brothers, I do not fit with my cool sisters. He transformed himself into a servant of hope and light, but the difference between us is that I want Odin. I could not give my god of the hanged up if I tried.
There must be another way. A middle ground between Valkyrie and berserker, between voice and hand.
A tiny laugh strangles in my throat. The heart.
I want to be the heart, passionate and wild, but with a pulse. A rhythm to keep myself in check. Poetry and passion together.
Like Unferth’s story about Freya creating the trolls by tempering the fire of the earth with the fire of the sun.
Odd-eye.
In that story it was a magical charm the goddess put into a woman’s heart, and the wisest troll mothers, Unferth said, could use rune magic.
Magic like keeping her herd out under thin clouds? Safe from morning light?
Is it possible the troll mother who destroyed Vinland is that first mother? Could she live so long? If it’s her, that means my stone heart, the answer to my riddle, is no average troll heart, but the original, the magical charm Freya, the goddess of dreams, created.
We were destined to meet; I saw it in her eyes, I told Rathi. Choices and consequences.
We recognized each other. Stone heart. Your heart.
I have to get back to it. Find her.
“Signy?” Captain Darius says, concern painting his tone.
I raise my head and look at Darius. His dark eyes wait for me. “Captain, I have some questions about your hunt for the Vinland herd.”
“I will answer them, but first you should see something.” He pushes up from the bench and gestures for me to follow him outside.
Sunlight burns blue and white spots into my vision and I blink it away. I smell ocean and oil, hear distant gulls cry out, and the hum of machinery and propellers. We stand on black asphalt painted with bright yellow lines where armored trucks are parked, emblazoned with the band’s screaming-eagle emblem. It’s all harsh colors, no softness, like the berserkers themselves. But tiny dandelions and curled grass push through the cracks in the pavement.
Darius says, “We have one. One of the trolls.”
I gasp. “One of the Vinland herd?”
He nods toward the north end of the warehouse. “It did not fight us when we came, and so we captured it instead of killing it. All the rest are dead, or vanished off the island.”
A thrill courses through me. “Not the mother?”
“No.” He leads me silently to the only door at that far end and punches a code into the keypad beside it. A lock clicks, echoing up to the rafters, and we go in, closing the door behind us. Darius takes a large key from a box built into the wall that he forces open and leads me down a short hall to a second metal door. He unlocks it, then pushes his shoulder into it and sets his feet firm. It takes all his muscle before the door groans open.
This next hall is a prison built to hold berserkers. Lining the way are cells of solid steel, three to a side. One door is open and the metal is at least ten centimeters thick. It’s stainless steel and stone, locked together into a wall that must be nearly impossible to break.
The prison ends in another door with a large wheel lock sticking out. Darius says, “It’s easier with two,” before gripping it and throwing all his weight into it. The metal grates together and I hear pieces churning and clinking deep inside the wall. When finally it snaps unlocked, he strains to pull it open. A waft of cold, sweet-smelling air flows out.
My skin flares in a million itchy points and my stomach crawls up my throat, burning like screech. I know that smell, oh, how well I know it.
Troll.
UV light shines hard out of four spots set up in each corner, glaring at the monster.
Like a great boulder, it huddles in the center of the room, its neck and ankles chained to six-finger bolts dug into the ground. A meaty hand covers its head, as it protects its sensitive pig eyes.
My hands tremble and I splay my fingers rigidly. I walk to it.
Sweet Mother Frigg, have mercy.
In this light the troll’s skin shines blue and is marbled like polished granite. A long weeping scab trails purple down his shoulder, and there is a line of dark red lichen growing along his spine. His right arm only a broken stub.
Red Stripe. He’s alive.
“He’s not public knowledge,” Darius says calmly. “Though of course the General Berserk knows, and the Valkyrie of the Ice, and Baldur. Baldur has claimed the troll for himself, though there’s also an etin-physiology doctor who’s already put in a request to have any remains we recovered remanded into her custody.”
“I see,” I whisper, imagining Red Stripe’s skull sliced open while they train bland UV lights onto him, keeping him lethargic but not calcified. Then they’ll cut him up and send his head to one facility, his torso to another, his arms and legs perhaps given out as trophies. It’s law that no dead troll be kept whole—they’re to be shattered and spread so there’s no chance of re-forming.
A part of me itches to take Unferth’s sword and drive it into Red Stripe’s heart. Because I can’t stop thinking of the troll mother’s gruesome meal. The memory of her fist cracking against my chest, her hot breath and tusks, the screams and fire.
Darius touches my shoulder. “Lady, are you well? I shouldn’t have brought you. It’s too soon.”
I close my eyes to remember rubbing Red Stripe’s ears, scratching dust from his tusks. The calm way he would hunker down at Unferth’s slightest touch.
“They can’t have him,” I murmur, stepping nearer Red Stripe. I touch his cool chest and draw a line toward the gash with its crystallized blood, like tiny chunks of amethyst growing out of him.
“My understanding is Baldur wishes to make him a sacrifice of some sort, so you don’t have to worry about him living long.”
“No.” I turn to put my back against Red Stripe, leaning into the hard marble of his bent chest. “I know this troll, and tamed him. That’s why he didn’t fight you. His name is Red Stripe; I captured him with Ned the Spiritless last year outside Montreal.”
Darius lowers his head slightly, thoughtfully. “I see. If it were up to me, lady, I would relinquish him to you immediately, but the gods have an interest now, and we’ll have to communicate properly and make requests.”
“I know a way to contact Baldur about him.”
His eyebrows lift, but he doesn’t question me. “Good.”
I walk to him, our gazes connected, and I look for a rune in his warm brown eyes. Darius is a decade my elder, I think, or twenty-five, young to be the leader of an entire berserk band. Maybe he has that little Frankish beard to appear more mature. There’s a tiny string of runes repeated in a line from his pupil to the darkest ring at the edge of his iris. It’s one of the runes in the binding rune scar on my palm: servant.
I call the Shipworm and leave messages for both Rathi and Soren. To Rathi that I’m well and with the Mad Eagles, and to Soren that I need to speak with him as soon as possible. I leave the private number for the warehouse.
Hopefully through Soren I can find a way to not only keep Red Stripe safe but maybe pull in resources for the hunt. Baldur might agree to help me get permission to have the Mad Eagles at my disposal, or a local militia unit. Anything that could help expand the search for her. I wonder how much to tell any of them about why I need to be there when she’s found.
Darius gives me a copy of his report, but there’s nothing useful inside, nothing I didn’t already assume. They made a thorough sweep and killed five more trolls, plus caught Red Stripe, but weren’t able to spend enough time, boots on the ground, to track the mother.
While I wait to hear from Soren, all I can do is keep myself busy with Red Stripe and learn what I can from the berserkers.
Most of them share duty shifts with soldier
s in Thor’s Army. They patrol the coast in heliplanes and man the front gates of the base, and fly regularly over the Canadian sea to watch for trouble out of troll country. They wait to be called up by the president or the Council of Valkyrie as peacekeepers overseas or as bodyguards stateside. Guarding is one of their only allowed duties on New Asgard soil because of prejudice against them—the fear of their berserking, that they might lose control at the drop of a flag.
After scrubbing dust and amethyst flakes from Red Stripe, after waking him and feeding him under the watchful eyes of Darius, I insist on helping with chores like unloading the crates of supplies that arrive around lunchtime and scouring the feast hall tables of spilled mead and pork sauce. Anything to keep myself busy.
Captain Darius gives me a berserker uniform and the smallest black coat he can find. I work out with a contingent of them: Sharkman, who makes himself my informal chaperone, and Thebes and Marcus and Carrigan and Brick. They’re interested in my troll-fighting techniques, and I show them how I steady the troll-spears with my weight, though it isn’t much suited to their rampaging style. The fact that they never did catch the troll mother burns their pride. Sharkman swears to me that if I ask, he’ll track her down; we’ll find her together. With the Mad Eagles at my side we could destroy her. I promise I’ll do what I can to see it happen.
That evening at dinner I paint runes onto the thumbnail of every berserker present. I look into their eyes and draw for them the blessing I see. I sleep with Sharkman (torch) near the round hearth in the center of the warehouse; he holds me close and intimately, stroking my nightmares away. There’s a tattoo on his chest: eight horizontal spears in a line down his sternum. He’ll add a ninth, he says, when I am in my proper throne.
The troll mother wakes me at dawn with a roar, tusks pressed to my cheeks, hot breath rolling over me. My eyes snap open, suddenly and sharply, my heart pounding. I slip free of Sharkman and gather Unferth’s sword from where it hangs on the throne by the fire. With it I run to the guardhouse, where the berserker Brick slumps in the chair with earphones tucked into his ears. He sits up at my approach, but I go straight to the chain-link gate, shut tight overnight. I curl my fingers through the links and peer out into the army base. The airfield is slowly waking up; a handful of men in flight suits crawl all over the heliplanes whose rotary blades droop like spider legs.
“All right?” Brick says through a yawn. I hear the tinny song beating from his abandoned earphones.
A small SUV turns the corner onto the road leading directly for us. It’s shiny and dark blue, cleaned of all the salt spray and Vinland mud. He drives slowly—it must be exactly the on-base speed limit—along the low gray fence surrounding the airfield and stops ten meters back from me and the guardhouse.
Soren turns off the engine and climbs out. He glances briefly at Brick, who’s clamoring out of the little wooden house, then keeps his gaze on me through the gate.
“Good morning,” I say.
“I didn’t think you’d be waiting.” The sun behind him turns his buzzed black hair into a trim halo and makes it tough to see his tattoo.
“Odinists only, boy,” Brick says.
I sigh. “Then let me out to speak with him.”
“Valkyrie …”
“Brick. Soren Bearstar is a hero of Asgard and my friend. I recognize his worth, and I will not speak to him through a chain-link fence.”
Making his reluctance known by dragging his feet, Brick levers the gate lock open and we slide it aside. “Come on,” I say, waving my hand for Soren to follow. He does as Brick gets on his radio to warn Captain Darius what I’ve done.
I lead Soren away from the warehouse to the edge of the camp where the asphalt meets star-shaped pylons and the wide, cold sea. Mist and low clouds obscure the sun. “You could have called, saved yourself that,” I say, nudging his wrist.
“It wouldn’t have mattered. That’s how they treat me.”
“Odd-eye, Soren, you’re such a martyr. You should be devoted to the god of sacrifice.”
The little jerk of his shoulder is all the answer I get. The wind scours salt against the concrete pylons, rushing past my face. “The Mad Eagles have Red Stripe, the runt troll Ned and I captured last winter. I want him, but the captain says Baldur has put a claim on him already. You need to explain to Baldur that Red Stripe is mine.”
Soren eyes me sideways. “Explain to Baldur.”
“Well.”
“I’ll call him. See what he says.”
“Tell him Red Stripe lost an arm and is ridiculously tame.”
“A pet. You have a troll for a pet, even after all of this.”
I scrape the toe of my boot against the pylon, scraping off a few little flakes of concrete. “Also I’d like to see about having the Mad Eagles—or at least some of them—assigned to me. A Valkyrie usually has a small band of berserkers, and even though I’m not technically on the council, maybe Baldur could help get around that.”
“I’m starting to think it isn’t my help you want so much as whose help I can get you.”
I offer Soren my best smile. “Can’t it be both?”
“There was a report in Vertmont last night of a sighting of a greater mountain troll mother.” He says it so casually I’m halfway to answering I don’t care about Vertmont before the meaning sinks in.
I clutch his arm. “Last night. Vertmont. The north part? That’s … near Montreal.”
“I have the bags from your truck in the backseat.”
The urge to throw my arms around him, to kiss him or drag him into an impromptu dance, is nearly irresistible. But all I do is hold out my hand. “Take me, Bearstar,” I say, pitching my voice low and flirty.
Soren glowers down at me until I laugh. This is it; we’re going after her, and nothing can muffle the violent thrill spiking around my heart.
SEVENTEEN
LONG SALT IS a walled town in Vertmont kingstate, situated along the North River about forty kilometers southwest of the ruins of Montreal. We arrive midmorning the day after leaving the Mad Eagles. Pain stabs the back of my eyes, since I woke up again and again last night, despite the completely decent hotel room Soren bought for us with a fancy credit card he sheepishly admitted had been supplied by Baldur the Beautiful.
In my dreams the troll mother raked her claws across my eyes, her tusks hooked into my ribs as she buried her face in my chest, tearing me apart, until all that remained was my bright, beating heart. Soren dragged me up after midnight to run laps around the hotel parking lot until the sun rose. We piled into the SUV then, with Styrofoam cups of bad lobby coffee, and I leaned my head against the window, eyes shut, while Soren kept me barely awake with stories of the Berserker Wars. He’s no poet, and his voice faded into the gentle rumble of the engine more often than not, but he knows more grim details about the five-year back-and-forth between berserkers and the last of the frost giants. He almost manages to distract me from all my worries about whether this troll mother they saw in Vertmont is my troll mother.
The walls of Long Salt are four meters tall and at least one thick, meant to deter most types of trolls or at least slow down a greater mountain herd. We roll slowly through, though there’s no guard, into a charming town that bustles with life. Early spring flowers burst from long boxes lining the main street, and colorful prayer flags flutter from the tall light posts. A handful of temples raise the only skyline, their white steeples reaching toward the perfect cotton-ball clouds. Children run through the school yard, mothers push strollers along the sidewalks, and every block has its own crossroads shrine strung with plastic beads and incense sticks.
As we reach the whitewashed downtown with its antiques stores and coffee shops, a long banner stretches across the road, bright yellow with green and pink daisies, that reads: WELCOME TO LONG SALT GARDEN FESTIVAL.
There’s nothing here to indicate the presence of trolls. With the national troll alert so recent, it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t have reacted even more strongly than u
sual.
“You’re sure this is where the report came from?” I ask.
“It was an anonymous caller who claimed to be fishing out by the old locks and saw her rooting around near the northern wall of town.”
“Who’d he call? The militia?”
“The Mjolnir Institute.”
I don’t know much about the institute except that it’s funded through efforts of Thor Thunderer and tracks all kinds of troll information. They aren’t the first responders in an attack, and so it’s odd this tipster would’ve called them. But I heard about it so fast probably because it went through Thor’s institute and straight to Baldur’s ear.
We stop for brunch at a bistro with outdoor seating, and Soren does his best to hunker down and not draw attention while I flirt with our waitress for information. I pretend to be interested in the history of the town and ask about the garden festival, about how the population did during Baldur’s disappearance, and with the troll alert if she thinks they’ll get as many out-of-town guests as usual. I bring up trolls at least three times, giving her ample opportunity to tell me about any actual sightings, but the nearest she offers is an anecdote about a place out by the river the kids call Troll Spot, where they can look toward the system of locks and some drowned cities called the Lost Villages. They go up there to smoke leaf and make out, and pretend to see trolls in the water. Since the anonymous fisherman mentioned the locks, too, I guess it’s our best bet. I give Soren a sidelong glance and say to the waitress, “A good make-out spot, you say? How do we get there?”
Soren, bless him, ducks his face, which is as good as a blush.
Full of caffeine and sandwiches, we get back into the SUV and follow her directions out the east gate, then north on a dirt road through a lovely forest. Spring leaves turn the light chartreuse as the road climbs over a slight hill and stops. The land slopes away toward the river, a quick-moving, wide-banked waterway here, glinting brown in the sun. Soren stops the car and we climb out, armed with troll-spears and our swords. The view north stretches over flat fields and groves of green trees, and to the east the river narrows and we can see the concrete rectangles of abandoned locks. Farther east the horizon slides into a haze of clouds, but it must be where the Lost Villages were.