The Strange Maid (2 page)

The branches thinned; I found birds’ nests and squirrel hollows, old ribbons and popped balloons. Holiday streamers smeared like old trash. Dead memories that had drifted down from the sky to be caught in the leaves of the New World Tree.

Wind blew, snarling my braids and shaking the limbs that I clutched. When I tilted my head to peer through the upper branches I saw only stars.

There was no magical bridge. No gateway to heaven or Hel or the Alfather’s eternal battlefield. It was a lie. As Freyr the Satisfied was a lie.

I gritted my teeth and rubbed my sticky face, but still could not bawl. I grabbed twigs and broke them; I ripped leaves off the Tree and threw them away. They tumbled and fluttered down. Only leaves.

“What has this Tree ever done to you, little raven?”

Surprise nearly spilled me after the leaves, but I caught myself in the web of branches. Below me a man stood on a thick branch, legs spread and arms akimbo, as if the branch were solid ground. He wore a black uniform like a berserk warrior, and though his beard was blond, sword-straight silver hair fell around his shoulders.

One of his eyes shimmered like a pearl.

Odin!
My mouth fell open. The Alfather. God of madness and sacrifice and war. The Alfather, who once, when the world was still new, climbed the Old World Tree and hung on its windswept branches for nine nights and nine days and stabbed a spear into his side until the Tree offered up its wisdom to him.

I struggled to speak. “The Tree is … a lie. There is no road to Asgard here.”

“So you tear it to pieces.” Odin peered at me with his pearly eye, blind with madness and wisdom. With it he could see through me and into my bruised heart, to my wails and screams that wanted to be free.

Anger flashed through me: he could have seen my parents’ hearts if he’d looked. “You didn’t save them, either,” I whispered.

The god of the hanged smiled and stepped up onto the next branch, which bent under the weight of his scuffed boots. “Easy things are never worthwhile,” he said, as if I’d asked a question.

“This isn’t easy!”

“True. But sacrifice,” he said, with his face near mine, all rough crags that made him old as a mountain, and the spinning vortex of his blind eye, “sacrifice is the most worthwhile thing in all the nine worlds.”

“My parents didn’t sacrifice, they
died
!” Fury felt good, and the heat of it dried my tears.

“Their death was the sacrifice required to bring you to me. For if they had not died, you would not be in this tree. And I have waited for one such as you.”

Waited? For me?

A black shadow landed hard beside my head, the leaves whispering like rain; it was a raven the size of a dog, with one twisted, empty eye socket and one luminous white eye. Memory—or Thought—one of Odin’s creatures I’d seen on TV—scored bark off the limb with her claws. She tilted her head and croaked my name.
“Signy!”

Her brother landed behind me and slapped his wings against my back and head. “Let go—let go—let go—” he cried.

I batted against the raven’s assault and slipped off my branch. The Alfather caught me. “Daughter,” he said.

His voice was hot, like the breath of my parents’ funeral pyre, raising elf-kisses on my arms and sweat on my spine. And I thought,
The Alfather’s weapons are more potent than prayers and hymnals.
I wrapped my arms around his neck.

Odin held me against him for a moment, let me sink into his scent of wood smoke and tinny blood. I could hear his heartbeat, a racing rhythm like hoofbeats.

He set me against the trunk of the Tree, then straddled the branch before me like a very large boy. He brushed teary strands of hair off my face with gentle, calloused fingers.

“You were waiting for
me
?” I whispered.

“So it seems” was his answer. The ravens clucked above us.

“What for?”

“To give you a new name, little raven.”

“I have a name. I’m Signy Loring.”

Memory cackled again, and her brother Thought with her. In their twin blind eyes a thing shifted: the past or the future, mischief or wisdom.

Odin tilted his head exactly like the ravens. “Is there any name in all the nine worlds that survives an encounter with the World Tree?”

The god of madness was riddling with me, and I had never been good at riddles. “Yours?” I guessed.

“Not mine.” He shook his head; his whirlwind eye spun.

I pressed my back into the trunk, letting its roughness be fire on my spine. “What good would a new name do me?”

The god of the hanged laughed. It was a wild laugh, a laugh like an avalanche, deeper than the World Snake’s gullet and wider than the space between stars. It shook my bones and stopped my pulse, but I held my chin up because I did not know what else to do.

“You climb my Tree, tear up its leaves, throw rage in my eye, and still you bargain with me! You are my darling Hrafnling reborn!” he crowed. Memory and Thought hopped to branches beside him. They chuckled rough and raw, ruffling their oily feathers.

Odin leaned nearer. “Be mine, little raven. My Valkyrie, my Death Chooser. Be my Valkyrie of the Tree from now until you die.”

I gasped. The Valkyrie were his handmaidens; mortal yet famous, powerful, and beautiful. They were never afraid. They would never die halfway around the world, never leave loved ones behind.

“A new name, a new destiny to better fit the desires and strengths with which you were born,” the Alfather tempted, offering his hand.

I gave him mine. “Yes!”

His face was as rugged as the bark of the Tree when he said, “So I name you—Signy Valborn.” He kissed my palm. “My Valkyrie, newly born into death.”

My hand pinched and burned. I snatched it back.

Pink and raw against my skin was a binding rune, built of other runes woven together to create a new meaning. I could not read it, for I did not know the runes then. But it seemed to flicker with fire as I studied it, to shift and wiggle. Tiny tendrils of pain shot up my fingers and down my wrist, twining through my blood.

Wind whipped up around us, bending the leaves and branches into a frenzy. Through it I heard the Tree whispering. While the Alfather held tight to my shoulders and his ravens cackled and screamed, the Tree hissed its ancient secrets in my ears—the secret wisdom, the ancient runes, folding into my memory and cutting through my bones like hot barbed wire.

Before I fell down through the branches of the New World Tree, I heard his booming laugh. “Welcome, Valkyrie of the Tree!”

ONE

I TELL HIM
my name and brace for the inevitable rejection.

The pawnbroker blinks slowly, his long false eyelashes like raven wings. Dull fluorescent lights do his hard face no favors, and he’s sweating in his flannel button-up, utterly masculine and disapproving in every way but those lashes. He glances again at the knife waiting on the counter between us, then gives me a long look before saying, “You don’t look like a Valkyrie.”

Rag you,
I want to spit at him, but he’s my last resort if I want a private room for shelter from the storm rolling in over Lake Mishigam even as we speak. It’ll be sleet and frigid wind, and I’ll be ragged myself if I go back to the Lokiskin orphan house tonight. I’d been managing my anonymity nicely until one of the girls saw the binding rune on my palm this morning. They’ve certainly been gossiping about Signy Valborn, failed Valkyrie, all afternoon.

Couldn’t you solve a simple riddle?
the oldest of them mocked, glad to discover some power over me.

May your guts knot like birthday ribbons,
I snapped at her before storming out.

I could show the rune scar to this broker now, too, but the idea of having to prove my word offends me. I only say, “Believe me or not, this blade is worth more than your life.”

I flash as bright a smile as I can to soften the accusation.

He grunts. “If that’s so, why not sell it to a dealer or weaponsmith?”

I don’t answer.

“You thought I wouldn’t want the registration,” he guesses.

“Your kind usually don’t.” I wave my fingers at his false lashes. He’s Lokiskin, by their proof: gender-blending is a telltale sign of the Shifter’s patronage. So is a less-than-ethical business practice.

“I run a legit business, little girl.”

I sneer at the metal shelving and clusters of pawned goods for sale. Televisions and game consoles, old VHS tapes, fancy dishes, furniture, lawn equipment, dusty books, altar candles and mismatched rune sets, bear and horse idols and mead horns. And behind the counter in locked glass cases: jewelry, daggers, swords, spears, and guns. None of them as fine as the knife I’ve offered.

“I didn’t steal it,” I say.

We both study my seax. The single-edge broken-back knife is twice as long as my hand, with Odin’s runes etched along the spine, a hilt of smooth troll ivory, and a star of tiny death-colored emeralds embedded at the bolster. The brown leather scabbard sits beside it on the counter, tooled with my surname,
Valborn,
in runic calligraphy.

“Even if you are who you say you are,” the broker says gently, “you should’ve known to bring registration for a piece like this.”

It’s the tone that stiffens my spine. “I wouldn’t have this much trouble selling it in Kansa or Tejas!”

“Then scoot on down to Kansa or Tejas with your unregistered weapon. I won’t have it in the shadow of the holy Death Hall.”

It’s just behind my teeth to spit out,
It was a gift from the Valkyrie who rules from that very Death Hall,
but what’s the point? I snatch the seax and snap it into the scabbard, curse his mother Loki, and shove back out into the icy street.

The scabbard fits through my belt, snuggled comfortably against my ribs, and a knot in my shoulders relaxes just to have it back where it belongs. I wonder bitterly if I chose this shop so near the temple of the Valkyrie of the Lakes because some part of me knew I could pretend to have tried to pawn it but not truly worry that I’d lose it.

I caress the ivory hilt, then shut my old red coat around myself. It’s bulky from stuffed pockets and makes me look twice as wide as I am. Though worn these days and ragged at the hem, other than my boots it’s the last vestige of my former glory. Soon I’ll have to trade it for something without a torn lining.

I braid my long hair with stiff fingers and wind it around my neck like a scarf before hunching into the wind off the lake.

Skyscrapers do little to block the cold. Their windows reflect the steely clouds and remind me Chicagland is closed to me. Cars crawl past as the evening drops, and my shoulders knock into hurrying commuters. If they knew that I’m what’s left of that boisterous, vivid little girl, the Child Valkyrie, if they noticed my rune scar, would they think the same thing?
How hard is it to solve a single riddle?
Would they study me with the same pity as was in the eyes of that cursed Lokiskin?

They all think the riddle is the source of all my problems, when really it was just the final straw.

The dark orange and brown of autumn trees from the distant lakefront park snatch my attention. Splashes of violence between modern steel office buildings. I cross Roosevelt toward the L station; I can see the distant dome of the Death Hall against the gray sky.

My feet slow.

I could stay warm in the hall’s public sanctuary all night, tucked in among the mourners and lost warriors, the devout Odinists and poets who seek out the Death Hall to pray.