The Strange Maid (18 page)

I lean over Rome, one arm pressed to my ribs. I touch his cold cheek. His eyes are closed already, and his lips are pressed tightly together.

I open my mouth to say his name.

But nothing comes out.

Is this what my mother and father looked like, piled one atop the other in that faraway jungle? This is not how Freyans are supposed to die.

What will I tell Rathi?
My throat is raw and burning, tears fall onto my cheeks only to dry tight against my skin in the heat from the fires. With a shaking finger I draw the rune
peace
onto their faces.

I lurch up to keep after the troll mother and her stone heart. There’s nothing I can do for them, but if there’s any chance, any at all, that Ned is still alive, that I can catch her and dig out her heart, I have to go.

Scarlet binding runes mark the alley she took. They waver in my hazy vision and at first I think I imagine them:
final destiny,
which means
Ragnarok,
the last battle of the gods. And
lost sun.

But I stumble into one wall, and the rune
lost
smears under my hand. The runes are painted on my town in blood.

Here on the cobblestones is Unferth’s sword, the sword he didn’t have to keep himself alive.

And now I defile the blade by leaning on it, but I have to, I need the solid strength of it to pick carefully through the alley and out of town. Over heather and scraggly, muddy moorland to the festival. All I know is my harsh breathing, the painful pump of blood behind my eyes. Broken bones in my side, my shoulder a starburst of fire, bruises rising like dough over every part of me.

Posters with my face in the Valkyrie paint are strewn haphazardly; Lady Serena’s booth is tossed on its side, spilling glass and pillow feathers like intestines. Game stalls lean precariously against each other. Even the stuffed animal prizes are singed.

The feast hall is nothing but a charred ruin. Outside it is one of the retainer’s spears, shattered halfway down the shaft. The wide spearhead bends because it was only decorative, not a true weapon. Why didn’t they know? I find George near it, his chest crushed. Maybe he was too desperate to care.

Red Stripe’s shed is leveled. I pick through the remains, heedless of injury. The smoldering wood burns my fingertips, and every breath I take poisons my lungs. Troll chains lie half-buried under sod and thick rafters. The can of paint we used to draw black and green runes on Red Stripe’s back has exploded in a viscous mess. A broken piece of the long broom jabs into my calf. Then there are the chunks of stone smoothly curved on one side like skin but jagged on the inside. A troll died here.

I leave.

The ceaseless wind scours my eyes, chaps my lips. But my blood runs hot and fast, groaning in my head as loud as the ocean. My breath rattles, and my tongue is as dry as a tundra.

Nobody would need hunter training to read the troll-sign screaming at me from the land: boulders scoured by claws, and pine trees shattered halfway up the trunks. Wide swaths of moor are marked by the herd. Their sweet stink, more potent and ripe than Red Stripe ever was, clings to the grass. Weak white sunshine filters through low clouds. I walk and walk, a dragging step at a time, one hand wrapped tightly around the hilt of Unferth’s sword. We’re fused together now.

I pass into a dense pine forest. Crows flap overhead. Moor wolves howl far away. My fingers are still numb, my ribs cracking with every breath. But the trees are destroyed, the ground cover flattened. They’ve left me a perfect trail.

My feet go numb, too, and my leggings soak up freezing water. When my eyes drift closed, I clench my jaw, grip Unferth’s sword, and walk on.

My ruined dress clings damply to me, and my breath is frost. There may be wolves stalking in my wake, I may go through a mass of caribou, but I’ll never know, because all I see is the meter of earth in front of me and Unferth’s body going limp. He has to be alive. It’s impossible that he’s dead. He only passed out, and she took him because … because …

The eight-legged beat of Sleipnir’s hooves drives me, pulsing in my head and heart and the palms of my hands.

I have to find him.

Alfather, please don’t take him away, too.

The trees drop off suddenly. A long flat moor pulls away south, gray and gold except for the single tree with branches only on one side. Around it is the herd of trolls like massive boulders, lolling about three bonfires. The sky remains cast over by thick gray clouds, but even without the sun piercing through they should be crouched in caves, sheltered. If anything I thought I knew about trolls is true, this makes no sense. Unferth said the wisest mothers could use rune magic to protect their sons, hide them, but is this one truly so powerful? She must be.

In the pale light, I can truly see them. They’re all the colors of limestone and shale, even some with flares of orange and yellow lichen growing thickly down their backs.

I stop. The mother isn’t here.

Her sons sit like lumps, healthy and whole and enjoying their feast. Piles of bones, broken and sucked dry, are flung around their camp. There are caribou antlers and the carcass of a gray dog sprawled with its face broken in.

It isn’t only animals they’re eating.

Tattered clothes stripped off a few of the bodies give it away.

And one mess of a dark red sweater turns my heart to stone.

I think of him in that sweater, bulky sleeves rolled back to show off wiry forearms. He was so dangerous and sharp and young.

I scream his name.

The trolls hear, and their bulbous forms shift and grate as they get to their feet one by one. I count seventeen of them left. I raise the sword and hold it high.

The air trembles around me, and a gentle thrum replaces the hoofbeats in my head like constant thunder kilometers away. “Where are you, Mother?” I scream, so raw it burns in my throat. I take one step, then another, the weight of the sword dragging me faster into the valley.
So many of the ancient Valkyrie died young.
Tears streak down my face and I know I should stop but I can’t.

There, in the tall pine trees sloping up the opposite mountain. Their triangle tops shudder and tilt as she barges through. Easily recognized even from this distance by her dangling breasts and iron nose ring. She roars, but not at me.

Wind pushes at me from all sides and the growling is so loud the force of it would shove me down onto my knees.

Heliplanes.

Three of them swoop down ahead of me, their massive rotary blades making the thunder. From their black bellies men spill out, leaping down ropes and landing hard onto the moorland.

These men scream and pull axes and swords loose. They’ve no guns or armor like a militia or Thor’s Army but wear only black coats and pants and boots. Their heads are free of helmets.

Though they are only men, and the trolls each three times larger, they run toward the trolls and the collision of battle, of blade against stone skin, of fist and bone, seems silent under the roar of the heliplanes.

I stumble on, determined to be there. The heliplanes are landing, more men pouring out. I can hear it now, the clash of trolls and men, and smell the burning meat, the smoke from their fires.

A man is thrown into the air, hard and fast. He hits the grass with a cry and skids toward me. Purplish blood covers his face and his grimace is ferocious. There on his cheek is a dark tattoo: the spear of Odin, marking him a berserker.

These are men who carry the Alfather’s battle-rage inside their hearts, the madness that burns away self and doubt and terror until all that’s left is the fight.
The purpose.

The berserker near me leaps to his feet and hurls himself back into battle. I want to run after him. I need to be there. I need to be the one to kill her!

But my legs don’t listen to me. My breath is shallow, cut off by fierce pain. I can’t keep going. I sink down with Unferth’s sword and stare.

Trolls begin to fall under the onslaught of power and god-blessed strength. One is spiked by three swords and crashes hard enough to shake the moor. Another loses his head by well-swung double axes. One of the berserkers has his arm torn off in a spray of blood but rushes his opponent again, as if he feels no pain.

Whether from the arrival of the heliplanes or Freyr’s blessing, the clouds overhead begin to disperse. Thin spears of sun appear, and two of the trolls run, while another is caught in the light and trapped while his legs solidify. The stone crawls up his chest and he lifts his arms to shield his head, but not before an enterprising berserk stabs straight through the monster’s throat.

It is not long after that.

The heliplanes have all landed, and now there’s only yelling and cries of pain. Steel on stone. Breaking rock. The tumble of boulders that is the death knell of a troll. Nine trolls are dead, purple ichor melting into the dirt. Four are trapped in stone, all but one cracked beyond regeneration. The rest escape, running off into the mountains. Including the troll mother. She looks over her wide white shoulder at me as she charges away and for a moment there’s a cracking magic between us that makes me whimper as it squeezes my broken ribs.

Then she’s gone. But I feel my heartbeat hard as an earthquake, loud in my ears as if it beats in a cavity as humongous as hers.

The battlefield is quiet.

She was responsible for killing two of the berserkers herself. The third dead berserker is young, maybe twenty, with wide-open eyes. I get up, half-stumbling to him, needing to close his eyes. Another berserker whirls when he hears my boots on the grass and catches me around the waist, pulling me back.

I open my mouth and nothing—nothing!—comes out. My words fail me still, so I push with all my might against this man’s black-clad chest. My fingers squish in the blood-soaked material. He says, “Stop struggling, girl,” then
“Balls”
as he grabs Unferth’s sword by the blade to keep it away from him.

More arms come around me from behind, gentler but just as strong, and a new voice murmurs, “There, maidling, there.” Jesca sometimes called me that. The fight pours out of me and I let go of everything but the sword. My eyes close and my knees fold. I don’t breathe and there is a pause so long and quiet because my heart stops, too.

All I know is the sword in my hand.

ELEVEN

WE FACE EACH
other in a forest of thin white trees. Her eyes, like chunks of aquamarine, loom large. Smoke trails like a curtain around us, dropping flakes of ash into my hair and onto the mother’s great sloping shoulders.

I stare at the crystal flecks of her irises, so human-seeming, but luminous.

She stares back. She shifts her head slightly, studying one of my eyes, and I know she is looking for a rune. Like a Valkyrie would do.

I shove at her cold stone chest and wake with my hands pushed out, flailing off the narrow cot.

Morning light brightens the room, highlighting the hammer of Thor hanging against a peach-colored wall, just beside the door. Crafted from two railroad nails, it’s homemade, with blue yarn wound around the center like the god’s eye. A wallpaper trim of smiling stars and moons and short-handled hammers lines the ceiling. Sunshine courses through the open window, along with a breeze to rattle the billy goat mobile dangling over the empty crib in the corner. The bells on their plastic tails tinkle gently.

As I sit up, gasping for breath, the cot below me creaks. I was brought to this small home on the North Ice military base late last night by a heliplane pilot named Sagan. His wife is called Esma, and she offered their baby daughter’s room immediately, as well as a bath, clean clothes, and sanctuary as long as I need it.

Carefully I stand up. My neck aches, but so does the rest of me. The cracked rib in my side throbs 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.