The Strange Maid (22 page)

The pace is sedate; he must no longer be mad.

The berserker appears through the dark green with one hand up in peace; in the other he holds Unferth’s sword, blade down. “I’m well,” he calls with a deep, shocked-sounding voice.

I lower my seax with relief.

He’s young, my age, with dark skin and eyes and buzz-cut hair. His hands are massive and possibly he could wrestle Red Stripe and win. A red T-shirt is in bloody tatters from the cat-wight claws and my seax, but he seems mostly intact himself.

When he reaches the truck, he sets the sword down reverently, then raises his face and looks at me, displaying the berserker’s spear tattooed straight down his cheek. It bends as he twists his broad face into regret. “I am sorry, I was lost.”

I grit my teeth against the pain of my ribs. He will see no fear or sympathy from me, another child of Odin. “You seem to have found yourself, then.”

Something like a smile shifts over his luxurious mouth. It’s incongruous on his otherwise rectangular face: hard jaw, wide nose, broad cheeks, heavy brows. His eyes are mottled brown and slender. He certainly isn’t Asgardian. An Asgardian Islander, maybe, or with some of the old native blood, but the berserkers are supposed to be pure.

That’s when I recognize him. This is Soren Bearstar, the young man from Nebrasge who rescued Baldur the Beautiful. The berserker who forsook my mad god.

“Odd-eye,” I say, surprised. “The Sun’s Berserk.”

He has the grace to wince.

I crouch, then hop to the ground, hitting slightly too hard. He steadies me, but I catch myself against his chest. The whole left side of his shirt is plastered to him with blood. I offer my hand. “Sanctuary for the night, berserker?”

His sticky hand connects to mine and the last shine of sunset skims across his face. I see a golden rune in his pupil.

It says
hero.

FOURTEEN

IN THE GLOW
of my truck’s headlights I clean Soren Bearstar’s wounds. He stares up at the darkening sky as I pat alcohol onto the gouge in his ribs. It’s not as deep as I thought, and bled so much because of the berserker rage heating up his heart. I use Band-Aids to hold the worst part together and then wrap gauze all around his torso. He’s so wide I only have enough to go around three times.

“At least you’ll finally have a scar,” I mutter, eyeing the rest of his perfect body. Except for a few nicks and scratches, there’s nothing dramatic marked on him. “What kind of berserker has no scars until he’s eighteen?”

Soren pulls a new T-shirt over his head. “I won’t be eighteen until the middle of the summer.”

My hands find their way to my hips and I study him. He moves deliberately, even just putting on a shirt; he reaches for the alcohol and cotton pads, then meets my gaze. “May I?” He nods toward my left arm.

Awkwardly I roll up my sleeve, not wanting to lose the shirt. He doctors the three parallel claw marks drawn bright scarlet down my forearm. It stings, but he’s incredibly gentle. I lift my drooping braids to let him see the back of my neck. He cleans the cuts there, too, and my arms tremble from effort because it’s difficult to breathe with them raised and my ribs smarting.

At least I’m not cold, despite the frigid night. Soren’s like a walking radiator.

“Done,” he murmurs. “Except your ribs. I … I apologize. You’re lucky I didn’t crush them more.”

“A troll did that.” I turn and poke him in the chest. “A greater mountain troll, three weeks ago.”

Soren takes a step back from me. “You’re the survivor.”

“There were others.”

“Baldur and I heard a story about you—about the girl who charged an entire herd of trolls with nothing but a sword in her hand.”

It makes me smile. I was hardly charging at that point, but I prefer this version to the reality.

We drive to higher ground and make camp at the edge of a cliff. I haven’t seen any troll-sign, but to be safe I suggest we don’t build a fire. Soren nods and pulls three flat brown cardboard packages from his SUV. They’re self-heating MREs. I watch as he adds water to a chemical pouch and slides it back into the box. It silently but effectively warms up the beef ravioli. All three boxes are different flavors, and he lets me choose. I decide the stew will be the lesser evil, and he eats both other packets. Mine is thick and sticky, but I haven’t had a hot meal in over a week. I miss the sloppy oatmeal Unferth used to make, when it was the two of us.

Starlight and a soft sliver of moon keep the night dark, but as I eat, my eyes adjust to the layers of nighttime, to the distant peaks and darker valleys. To the undulating shadows of the ocean in the west. Ghost-gray clouds drift low, and the longer I rest the better my ribs and stinging cuts feel. I stretch out on my sleeping bag, and Soren does the same. We make a V with our heads together near the cliff, feet pointing at the trucks. The half of me nearer to him remains warm, though my outer arm and leg feel the ice still hanging in Vinland’s spring wind.

“What are you doing out here?” I finally ask him.

“Baldur and I are concerned about the troll herd.”

“Don’t you trust your brother berserkers to clear the island?”

It takes a moment before he answers. “Baldur feels guilty about the massacre.”

“Why?”

“He thinks it wouldn’t have happened if he had not been gone and forgotten himself.”

And so even Baldur believes the massacre is connected to his disappearance. I shake my head. “What does it mean, forgotten himself?”

“Ah, that … He didn’t remember his name or know anything about himself when he rose in the desert. We found him and he was mortal, memory-free without the apple of immortality from Idun’s garden.”

“I didn’t know death strips away your memories. Or is it resurrection that does it?”

“Either. My understanding it you need a guide for crossing between worlds if you want to retain yourself,” Soren says very sadly.

The ache in his voice finds my own pinched grief. So Unferth has forgotten me. I realize I’m rubbing my hand against my chest. I stop, let my fingers spread over my heart. “Who is we?” I ask suddenly. “I thought you were alone until after you had him, until you met the little girl berserker?”

The dead silence that exudes from my left, the flare of heat, makes me roll over to stare at him. “You didn’t tell the true story.”

Even in the pale starlight I see his jaw work hard as he clenches and unclenches it. He sits in one smooth motion. “I … can you just pretend you didn’t hear that?”

“Never.” I laugh and sit, too. “Tell me, Soren Bearstar, I’ll keep your secret with you.”

“I … can’t. I’m not supposed to.” He chews the words like even they are difficult. I wait, hugging my knees to my chest. To keep myself from pushing him harder, I draw
hero
against the toe of my boot. With a twist, I transform it into a binding rune with his name: bear star, hope’s hero.

Hear the bear star be born, the seether fall into darkness.

The cliff seems to tilt below me like a ship going out with the tide. I say the line of poetry out loud, one careful word at a time.

“What?” Soren’s dark eyes glint as he turns them to me.

“A poem I wrote the morning Baldur vanished. About trolls and my faith and … you. And a seether.”

Heat sears out from him but Soren shuts his eyes, flattens his hands against air. He reins it in, lowering his hands to the earth slowly. “Yes,” he whispers.

“It’s a riddle, and you can’t tell me the answer,” I whisper back.

His head jerks one nod.

The seether fall into darkness.
Death strips memories away. “She’s not dead?”

“No. It’s just that … nobody can remember her.”

“They tore her name out of the world,” I say. “Like Kara Neverborn.”

“Who?”

“Exactly. She was the last Valkyrie of the Tree.”

“I didn’t … didn’t know she had a name.”

Focusing on a different story seems to calm him, and so I keep on. “Kara, the last Valkyrie of the Tree, the most beautiful of all Odin’s handmaidens, lived a hundred and fifty years ago. Her triumph and her downfall came during the Thralls’ War.”

Precia of the South told me this tale the first night I stayed with her, and every time I stayed with her. It was a lesson for me, and, I always suspected, one she kept close to her own heart.

I close my eyes to recall her words, to recall the sorrow in her voice.

“Long in New Asgard the kings and jarls had argued, some claiming our traditions of conquering and thralldom were wrong, that a way of life, a tradition, does not equal truth. Odin’s men laughed, saying,
Once defeated, a man’s destiny is enslavement, and his children’s.
But Thor Thunderer said,
If a man wins freedom with his sword, or even the Alfather’s favorite weapon of words, who is to say his fate is not changed?
We warred over it, all of New Asgard sundered in two.

“The Ninth Valkyrie agreed with the Thunderer, with change and choice. When the Shenandoah Army and the Army of the Potomac faced each other at Gettysburg, she saw the hot, sticky death, the heroes falling, the lost and losing, and she cried,
Why does my Alfather allow this slaughter? There is no glory here!
On the third day of the battle, she defied Odin’s wishes by raising her sword to fight with the Potomac Army, bolstering their will and courage with hard, hopeful words. The ground trembled at Cemetery Ridge for the final charge, and Kara Neverborn screamed as she ran against Odin’s army. She spread her arms and her swan-shift flew out to either side, reaching out like massive wings. Her eyes marked the dead like a Death Chooser of old.

“General Leeson lost that day and the rebel army was broken. The war dragged on, but from the moment the Ninth Valkyrie stepped into the fray, just as her ancient sisters had done, picking a side to win and a side to lose, it was over. Even the Alfather reluctantly bowed to history, to the collective will of New Asgard. But no one living saw Kara again.”

I lean nearer to Soren and lower my voice. “For her betrayal, the Alfather ripped her out of the Middle World. The trail of her blood became the Red River, and all the history of her family vanished. Kara had a surname once, but she became the Neverborn. No one knows her name but for her sister Valkyrie.”

Soren says, “So they remember the price of defying him.”

“No, because he loves her, wherever she is, and couldn’t destroy the long poem of Valkyrie names by removing hers completely.”

His expression hardens. “The Alfather doesn’t love.”

“Just because he doesn’t love you, he must not love at all?” I laugh, and hear Unferth’s voice murmur,
You’ve met someone more self-absorbed than you, little raven.

“There’s no evidence he loves anyone.”

“He loves
us.
”

Soren regards me, brow low in a frown, hooding his eyes. “Us.”

“The Valkyrie.”

“You’re … the Child Valkyrie. The Valkyrie of the Tree, who ran away because she couldn’t solve her riddle.”

I flop back down onto my sleeping bag. “Yes.”

“
And
the girl who faced the herd of trolls.”

“Yes.”

“And you think the Alfather loves you?”

Staring up at the bare glitter of stars, I say, “Yes. I know he loves me. And he never has betrayed one of us, if we did not betray him first. In all the stories and poems, I defy you to find an example otherwise.”

I hear the shuffle as he lies back down, too. He says, “That isn’t how Odin treats the berserkers. He should love us as much.”

“Maybe he does, and you just don’t see it.”

“No one who loves would give the berserking as a gift. It makes us outsiders, apart from the world.”

That familiar pinch of loneliness responds to his words. “At least you have each other, your fellow berserkers.”

“I don’t. Not since I chose Baldur.”

“But you still have your madness, the frenzy. It connects you back through generations of ancestors. You’re a berserker still, Soren. You chose to give up on the Alfather’s ways, but he didn’t give up on you.”