Descendant (8 page)

“Will . . . you be coming with me?” Mason asked haltingly, a pang of hopeful longing in her chest. But it was a faint hope—instantly quashed by her mother’s flat response. “I cannot,” she said. “I am Hel. My place is here.” “Right.” Mason turned away, brutally shoving aside thoughts of her father’s happiness. Her mother wasn’t her mother anymore. Her mother was Hel, and a goddess. That was what Loki had said, too. But Mason still didn’t understand it. “And that happened . . .
how
exactly?”

Hel sighed. “My daughter is full of questions, I see. I was not always as I am now. Not even here. There was a time when I was nothing but a shade in this place. Like all the rest. But I grew stronger.” She turned and placed one cool, long-fingered hand on Mason’s cheek. “Oh, Mason. How can I make you understand this? Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for the best. I only wanted to find a way, somehow, to make
you
safe in the world.”

“You sound as if you made a choice to leave me there.”

“A choice. A sacrifice . . .” Hel seemed disinclined to
elaborate and turned back to the path. She increased her pace up the winding way that led to the steep side of the craggy rock face in front of them. “When Loki offered power, I took it—took up the mantle of the goddess Hel—for
you
.”

“And why, then, are you in such a rush to get me out of here again?”

“Because you shouldn’t be here. You are a disruption. An imbalance. Anything that introduces an element of chaos into the delicate matrix of the realms of the gods is the province of those like Loki.” She frowned, as if disturbed by the very thought. “You could become an unwitting tool that he could use to bring about a terrible fate. It’s not that I
don’t
want you here, Mason. It’s that I
can’t
allow you to stay. Do you understand?”

She did. And she was trying desperately not to take it personally. “Okay . . .” She shrugged. “So we get to Valhalla and find this spear. And then you can get rid of me and carry on being a goddess. That’s great.”

“It’s not like—”

“Whatever.” Mason ignored her mother’s protest. “Look. I’m not stupid, and I’ve read enough to know that it’s never that easy. You don’t just walk into a magickal land and fetch a mystical object and walk back out again unchallenged. There’s always something standing by that wants to eat your face or rip your arms off or turn you into a newt.” Mason’s hand dropped to rest on the hilt of her sword. “So what’s it going to be? Because I’m not going anywhere until I know what’s waiting there to greet me with a big ugly hug.”

Hel’s spine was stiff with disapproval. It was abundantly clear that she wasn’t used to being challenged. Her deep sapphire eyes flashed dangerously for an instant. But then she seemed to pause, to take a breath—although Mason hadn’t been able to discern whether her mother actually
did
that—and her mouth bent into a soft, gentle smile. The expression changed her, and Mason felt suddenly as if the sun had broken through the bleak, ashen clouds overhead and poured its warmth down upon her. For a moment, she wavered and almost gave in to the desire to follow her mother anywhere. But she wrapped her hand tightly around the hilt of her rapier—so tightly that the coiled silver wire bit into her palm, and the pain brought a fresh welling of tears to her eyes and kept her focused. She saw her mother’s glance flick down to the sword. She stared at the elegant, silvery weapon for a long moment,
and then her eyes shifted back up to Mason’s face.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and her voice was actually soothing for the first time. “My dear girl. I know this isn’t easy for you. The truth of the matter is this: You are right. It never is easy. And there was a time when you would have had to fight your way through hordes of draugr just to even set foot on the path that leads to Asgard.”

The word “draugr” sent a cold wave of fear washing over Mason. Those were the gray-skinned monstrosities that had attacked her and Fennrys twice in New York City. And she could wave her bravado flag all she wanted, but if it came to facing down those things again, Mason knew she couldn’t do it.

Her mother must have seen the fear in her eyes. She put a hand on Mason’s shoulder. “That isn’t going to happen. Valhalla is . . . not the same as it once was. The great sadness of it is that it’s just not a place worth fighting to get to anymore. You’ll see what I mean.”

“Oh .”

“I’m sorry to disappoint.”

“That’s okay.” Mason looked down at her tattered fencing whites and then back up at her mother, trying her hardest to muster a smile. “I’m not really dressed for a great hall, anyway. . . .”

Hel reached out with her other hand so that she held Mason by both shoulders. Her grip was firm, but surprisingly gentle, and Mason felt an electric tingling running all over her body. Dark, sparkling energy engulfed her in a wave. After a moment, the sensation faded and her mother lifted away her hands, her fingers combing through Mason’s suddenly shining, tangle-free hair as she did. It fell in a silken curtain that Mason could see in her peripheral vision on either side of her face. In the weird, stormy light, it looked almost as if the dark fall of strands was shot through with indigo highlights. When Mason looked down, she saw that her destroyed fencing whites were gone. Instead, she found herself wearing her favorite pair of dark jeans and boots and the sleek, shimmery top that she’d been wearing the last time she’d gone over to Fennrys’s for an evening of surreptitious swordplay and moonlit strolling through the after-hours High Line park in Manhattan.

Thinking about that moment now, Mason understood why her mother had chosen those clothes. Because what she’d been wearing when Fennrys had looked at her the way he
had that night really had made her feel like a princess. “Dressed for a great hall,” like she’d said . . . Her black tooled-leather baldric—the gift Fenn had given her to go with the silver, swept-hilt rapier—still hung across her body, the blue jewel in the silver buckle winking at her. She lifted a hand to the buckle and saw that her hands, torn and bloodied from escaping Rory’s car, were whole again; her long, pale fingers clean and unmarked, her nails unbroken.

Mason felt the tightness in her chest loosen a little.

“Now,” Hel said quietly. “Will you come with me?” She gestured back toward the path.

Mason nodded, and they began to climb once more, up toward Valhalla, the home of her ancestors’ gods.

They reached another bend in the path, and the ground beneath Mason’s feet shuddered—the movement coinciding with another now-familiar distant wail of pain. Loki. Mason remembered reading in her myth classes that the ancient Norse had used the bound god’s convulsions deep below the earth as an explanation for the cause of earthquakes. It didn’t seem like such a far-fetched theory to her anymore.

“Just how often does he get subjected to the snake spit?” she asked her mother as they stepped out of the mouth of the cavern they’d been traveling up through.

The ghost of a frown swept over Hel’s face. Shadows stirred in her deep blue gaze, and Mason tried to read what she was thinking. It was impossible. “I know it’s hard for you to understand what goes on here, Mason. It was hard, at first, for me too. But there is a very good reason that monster is kept in the state he’s in.”

“Imprisoned and tortured? You’re okay with that?”

“Imprisoned, yes. Absolutely.” Hel’s voice was firm. “And as for what you call torture . . . I know it seems cruel, but it keeps Loki weak. Distracted. The pain directs his energies elsewhere, energies that otherwise would be wholly dedicated to finding an avenue of escape. That cannot happen.” Hel turned and lifted a hand, laying it gently on Mason’s cheek. “I so loved the world when I walked upon it. I would do anything to preserve it. Even if it means keeping that treacherous beast chained and hurting in the darkness. Even if it means sending you back into the world . . . when all I want to do is keep you by my side and never let you go again.”

The warmth of her mother’s sad smile almost made up for the fact that her hand, where it lay along Mason’s
cheek, was ice-cold.

“But,” she said, “here we are.”

She turned and led Mason around a last sharp bend of the cavern path that led to where an arching hole in the mountain opened up onto a wide rock shelf. Hel gestured Mason forward and she stepped through into the open air and marveled at the vista that spread before her. It was the most breathtaking landscape she had ever seen. In the far distance, a range of high, sharp-peaked mountains rose, purple in the fading light of what seemed to Mason like late afternoon, although she couldn’t see the sun and didn’t know exactly where the light was coming from. Snowcaps shimmered silvery white on top while below, situated at the center of a lush green vale several miles wide, the golden roofs of a cluster of buildings surrounded by a high, palisaded wall sparked blinding fire. The largest structure of all was a huge, long hall, with a roof tiled with what looked like thousands of gold and silver scales—warriors’ shields—and its gables curved upward like the fore and aft of a great dragon-prowed ship. Mason knew, instinctively, what this place was. Asgard.

Valhalla.

Home . . .

She shook her head to dispel the subtle voice that whispered that last word inside her head. It had sounded a little bit like Loki, but she knew that it had to be just her imagination playing tricks on her.

The cave they had just come out of was a little ways up one of the lesser mountains that ringed the valley plain. Mason took another step forward so she could better take in the view. She walked to the very edge of a steep descending staircase cut into the side of the mountain and peered over a rocky outcropping to look straight down. Directly below where she stood, she could see the green plain that stretched out toward the Asgardian halls. . . . At least, Mason imagined it
would
be a green plain, when it wasn’t covered in fighting men and blood and body parts.

“I thought you said I wouldn’t have to fight anyone!” she said, drawing back from the edge of the rock shelf, horrified. There were so many men fighting, and it wasn’t just on one front. The fighting actually completely encircled the cluster of buildings that was their destination. They didn’t have a hope of reaching it . . .

Beside her, Mason heard her mother laugh for the first
time.

“What?”

“Those are Odin’s Einherjar. The Lone Warriors.”

“None of those guys is
alone
,” Mason said. “There are a bazillion of them. And
they
are what’s standing between us and the hall.” She couldn’t even tell if there were two sides to the battle. It just seemed to her that, once a warrior had dispatched the man in front of him, he just turned to the next nearest and repeated the process. Friend and foe seemed utterly indistinguishable to her. It was chaos.

“They will not lift a hand against you,” her mother said, and started forth. “You must trust me.”

Mason didn’t, but she didn’t say so out loud. She was admittedly running out of options. As her mother began their descent down the steeply sloping path that led down to the battlefield and Asgard beyond, Mason fell in beside her.

“Why are they fighting?” she asked as they got closer and closer to the edge of the terrible melee.

Her mother answered, “Because they are fighters. It is simply what they do. They are Odin’s personal war band, chosen in ages past by his Valkyries to die glorious deaths and join him here to await the ending of days. Ragnarok.”

“Right. The thing we’re all trying to avoid have happen by maintaining the status quo. Get me out of here, keep Loki bound and snaked . . . And hey, I’m all for the world
not
ending. It just makes me wonder”—she waved a hand at the Einherjar—“what’s in it for
these
guys if it doesn’t?”

“This is the honored Viking’s promised reward. A glorious death, followed by endless days filled with battle, endless nights replete with mead and meat. The possibility, one day, of something even greater.” Hel gazed at the spectacle, her expression hard to read. Mason wasn’t sure whether she was actually endorsing the idea of Ragnarok, or just offering the Norse perspective on it, but she sincerely hoped it was the latter.

“Sounds like it’d be an excruciating bore after about three days,” Mason said.

At least, she thought, it would be the way
they
were doing it. The closer they got to the warriors, the more it seemed to Mason that they were kind of just . . . going through the motions. But of course, she wasn’t blind to the irony of her offhand dismissal of their pastime. Especially where she herself was concerned. After all, she’d done very little else
but
fight and practice for the last several years—and with a similar kind of mindless determination.
She had approached fencing with a kind of zealous tunnel vision. And yet, in all the time she had fought and practiced to be the best, honing her skills, her strength, her speed, she had never even approached the kind of finesse as she had over the last few weeks working with Fennrys. He’d instilled in her a kind of genius instinct with a blade. Made her one with her weapon.

She was no longer just a product of technique and grim determination. When she fought with Fenn, she fought with
joy
. Mason felt a brief surge of panicked despair at the thought of never experiencing that sensation again.

No.
She slammed the door on that thought with all her mental might.
I’m going home.

And Fenn is fine.
He
had
to be.

Yes, she’d seen him hurt, terribly. A hole torn in his shoulder. But it wasn’t as if she hadn’t done the very same thing to him herself—accidentally stabbed him in the very same shoulder—only a few days earlier, and he’d recovered from
that
just fine. Fennrys was tougher than anyone she’d ever met. A bullet hole and a tumble off a train? That was like most people getting a hangnail.

Mason took a few deep breaths to calm herself down and shake her panic.

Her footsteps slowed as they approached the leading edge of the battle.

“You must go first,” her mother said, nudging her forward.