by Eva Chase
Why? What else where they doing down in the tunnels they were digging? It had to be part of Surt’s plan.
I was about to edge even closer when a dark shape dropped onto a spike of rock several feet away from me with a ruffle of black feathers. My body went rigid at the sight of the raven, my gaze twitching away from it and back. How had I not heard her sneaking up on me?
Muninn must be up to her old tricks again.
I tensed to lunge at her, and her form expanded, her feathers rippling away into strewn black hair and a loose black dress that made her pale limbs look gawkishly thin. The spear of stone she was perched on was barely wide enough for both of her human feet to fit on, but she managed to keep her balance there without any hint of a struggle. Her wide dark eyes were fixed on me.
“Hello, valkyrie,” she said in her softly hoarse voice. “Has Odin sent you to play his raven now? His eyes and ears where he can’t be?”
“Odin doesn’t even know I’m here,” I snapped. Maybe that hadn’t been the smartest thing to admit, but I couldn’t take the words back after they’d tumbled out. I adjusted my weight on the ledge. If I sprang fast enough, could I grab her and hope to hold her?
But even if I could, what would I do with her then? I could transport myself back to Valhalla in an instant, but I couldn’t take her with me. Maybe if she’d been dead and I’d summoned her like a warrior of old… but I’d never tried that before, so probably this wasn’t the best time to experiment.
Odin’s former raven of memory wasn’t our greatest enemy here. I wanted to know what she might reveal about Surt more than I wanted her dead for the way she’d tortured us. Although if she happened to die after I found out something useful, I wasn’t going to cry about it.
“What do you want?” I said. “Did you figure you’d harass me a little more before you sound the alarm?”
“No,” Muninn said. “I don’t think Surt needs to know about this. I don’t belong to him, you know. I had no need for a new master.”
“You’re doing him an awful lot of favors for someone who’s not working for him.”
She shrugged, her dress moving in a way that recalled ruffled feathers. “We work together, when it suits me. It suited me to see Odin brought down. It suited me to try to stop you from freeing him. That’s done now. I’ve never had any particular grudge against you personally. You didn’t choose to be a part of this either, did you?”
The cock of her head and the gleam in her eyes were oddly sympathetic. A prickling spread along the base of my wings. I wanted to fly away from her, and I wanted to fly at her and smack that hint of a smile off her face, but I wasn’t sure I’d like the results of either act.
“You haven’t answered my first question,” I said. “What do you want?”
“You’ve looked around here,” she said. “You’ve seen the devastation. Muspelheim wasn’t pretty even when I first found myself here, you know, but things have gotten worse. The heat rises; the air grows drier; the magma flows faster. Barely anyone survives outside Surt’s fortress.”
“And they did before?” I said skeptically. I couldn’t imagine this realm had ever been anyone’s dream home.
“Some managed to make a bit of a life for themselves,” Muninn said. Her gaze slipped away from me for a second, a shadow of melancholy passing over her face. Then her eyes jerked back to me. “No thanks to the gods.”
“Do you really think letting this giant blaze his way across Asgard and Midgard is going to fix anything?”
“I don’t know. It would at least be something different.” She shifted closer to the cliffside on her precarious perch. “You’re close with the gods who brought you to them. I saw that. But can you think beyond what they’ve told you? Can you consider that there may be other sides to the story?”
A sputter of a laugh escaped me. “Other sides? I don’t think there’s any way you can justify mass murder and the raising of those corpses into some kind of undead army.”
“I’m not attempting to justify it,” the raven woman said. “I simply mean to point out—have you heard the stories of the olden times? Did they tell you who crafted Thor’s treasured hammer or Odin’s great spear?”
I’d seen the end result of Loki’s bargaining for those weapons in painful clarity in the memories she’d stirred up. “The dark elves,” I said. “So what? That was ages ago, and it’s not as if they did it out of the kindness of their hearts.”
“They wanted to impress the gods. They often did. You’ll find many of the treasures of Asgard came from them, sometimes freely given. Relations between the gods and the dark elves used to be those of tentative allies, and the elves were always more eager for that alliance. You might ask yourself why they turned in a different direction now. No one enters a war for the fun of it.”
“If you know why they’re doing this, why don’t you just tell me?”
Her lips curled in a faint grimace. “Would you believe it from me? I think not. Better you seek the dark elves out yourselves, hear the tales from their own lips. I only have scraps as it is.”
Go to the dark elves and have a little chat about why they’d tried to kill me, threatened to kill my little brother, and had killed who knew how many people? Sure, that sounded like it’d be a lovely visit.
But the raven woman’s comments niggled at me. I hadn’t heard the gods discuss why the dark elves might have allied with Surt. I’d just assumed there’d always been animosity between Asgard and Nidavellir. If Muninn was right…
“Why are you telling me any of this?” I asked abruptly. “What does it matter to you what I think?”
Muninn gave another of her dress-ruffling shrugs and started to straighten up. “All I’ve ever really wanted was for something to change. It doesn’t matter to me that much how. Perhaps all it’ll take is one new spark in the mix.”
Before I could push for more answers, she leapt off the cliff, contracting back into her raven form in the same moment. She flapped away with a hoarse caw. I moved to spring after her, and the rattle of claws against rock drew my gaze upward.
The dragon was lounging along the cliff-top just a short distance farther along. If I took after Muninn now, it’d spot me for sure.
My hands clenched into fists, but that niggling of uncertainty dug right down to my heart. Maybe this wasn’t the place I’d get the rest of the answers I needed. What else could my gods tell me that they hadn’t yet?
7
Aria
“There are a bunch of buildings,” I said, adding some shapes to the rough layout of Surt’s fortress I’d drawn. The rough pencil rasped against the faded strip of paper that Baldur had scrounged up. The gods might have had a perfectly modern house down in Midgard, but up here they were still kind of stuck in the old ways. Maybe I’d have to encourage a little updating of supplies. “I’d guess the biggest one in the middle is the one Surt rules from, but I didn’t actually see him, as far as I know.”
“And where were these excavations you witnessed happening?” Loki said as he leaned against the table in Valhalla where I’d spread the paper.
“Over here.” I tapped the spot by my sketched wall and added a dark circle there. “I’ve got no idea what they’re doing down there other than clearing out a larger space.”
“He needs somewhere to keep that army,” Thor rumbled with a frown. “Perhaps he creates more room as he adds to their number.”
“Odin might have seen something,” I said. “Or he could look from that high seat now and check things out. If he feels like telling us what he thinks is going on, that is.” I still had my doubts about that. If he’d been able to watch the fortress at all, how could he have completely missed that activity? He’d probably just decided we didn’t need to know about it.
Loki rubbed his narrow chin. “I do believe there’s quite a network of existing underground tunnels throughout Muspelheim. Cooler and more protected than walking around in the open above ground.”
“You speak from personal experie
nce?” Hod asked, his tone dry. He was propped against the table opposite ours, since he couldn’t see my drawing anyway.
“I have made a point of traveling nearly everywhere in the realms, both of my own accord and because the Allfather decided to drag me,” the trickster said. “All the better for us.”
“If we just attack his fortress, he could escape, then,” I said. “Take off through the tunnels. We can’t tear apart the whole realm, even with our combined power.”
“Could we cut off the tunnels first, cause cave-ins or the like, before the main attack?” Baldur asked.
I blinked at him, startled to hear those words from him in that nonchalant tone. His tone was normal, but I couldn’t remember hearing the god of light and harmony talking military strategy that blatantly before.
But then, he was also the god of justice. Sometimes justice required a sword.
“We’d need to know exactly where they all were,” Loki said. “Leave one avenue open to him, and he’d slip through our fingers. He’s proven himself awfully tricky for a giant. Not to mention the issue of the gates he’s apparently built that fortress around. He could leap from there through any of them.”
“He wouldn’t be able to move an entire army through a gate at any speed,” Hod said. “As long as we destroy his manpower, it doesn’t matter that much how quickly we catch him.”
“That’s true,” Thor said. “Cut off his might, and it’s just a matter of tracking him down for the final blow.”
Their comments stirred up my thoughts with the subject I hadn’t yet mentioned. This was as good a time as any, wasn’t it?
“Something else happened while I was in Muspelheim this morning,” I said.
Hod’s head snapped toward me in an instant.
Loki gave me an evaluating look. “Nothing too horrifying, I assume,” he said lightly. “Seeing as you appear to have returned to us with all your parts intact. Why didn’t you mention it earlier?”
I set down the pencil, fighting the urge to squirm in my discomfort. “I wasn’t sure whether I should mention it at all. It was just— Muninn approached me. Just to talk.”
Thor snorted. “That feathered fiend. She was looking to wrap you up in another tangle of memory, probably.”
“That’s what I thought at first,” I said. “But the way she was talking… I’m not sure what her motives were. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t say anything useful. She brought up the dark elves and how they used to be kind of allies of Asgard. Now they’ve turned against you—they’re helping a guy who wants to destroy you. Why would they do that?”
“The dark elves have always been shaky allies at best,” Thor said.
“That’s pretty different from becoming an outright enemy.”
“They’ve had plenty of time for resentments to fester,” Loki said. “But I take it you believe it would help us to know which specific resentments are afflicting them?”
“I’ve just been thinking…” I made a face at the attempt at a map I’d drawn. “They’re doing a lot of work for Surt. He’s got other people guarding his fortress, but the dark elves are the only ones we’ve seen gathering humans for his draugr army, right?”
“They’ve always lived the closest to Midgard of all the realms’ dwellers other than us,” Baldur said.
“So it makes sense then,” I said. “We wanted to close off all their access points, but maybe that’s not really practical, or effective. They know we’re looking for them now. They’ll be sneakier. What if we could figure out why they’ve turned against you… and turn them back?”
“Then Surt loses his army supplies and all the other work they may have been doing for him, just like that.” Loki snapped his fingers, a smile stretching across his face. “A truly cunning plan, pixie. I applaud you.”
My skin warmed at his praise, but Hod looked skeptical. “They’ve already gone this far,” he said. “They’ve killed innocents and carted off their bodies to Surt. We’ve got no reason to think we’ve got anything we’d be willing to offer that would move them.”
“It is difficult to appeal to someone’s better nature if they don’t appear to have one,” Baldur put in.
“We should at least find that out, shouldn’t we?” I said. “You don’t know. I mean, come on, you all thought Loki had done horrible things for the sake of being evil, and it turned out he had other reasons. We obviously can’t assume we know everything just from how it looks.”
“A lesson you’d have thought this bunch would have learned by now,” Loki said, a hint of acid in his tone.
The other three still hesitated. Thor ran a hand over his dark auburn hair. “That’s a fair point. We don’t know, so we should find out. It could be there’s more to the situation than we realize.”
Loki lifted his hands. “The voice of reason coming to us from the Thunderer! Who could have predicted that?”
Hod scowled at him, but he inclined his head in agreement. “All right. We’ll be better off if we understand our enemies better. I won’t argue against that.”
“We might not even have to reach out to them at all,” I said. “We can start by discussing it with Odin and seeing what he knows—”
“Discussing what?” a low voice carried from down the hall.
I jerked around. The Allfather had just stepped into Valhalla, the peak of his broad-brimmed hat nearly brushing the doorframe overhead. He made his way toward us with steady steps, the base of his spear tapping along against the wooden floor in time. It touched the ground so lightly he couldn’t have been using it for any support. The sound felt more like a warning than anything else.
“Aria had a thought about the dark elves,” Baldur started, but I set my hand over his to stop him. It was my idea; I should be the one to try to convince Odin.
“We should find out why they’re helping Surt with his war,” I said. “And then we can either win them back to our side or convince them they’re better off if they stay out of it. Either one would leave him without his main helpers.”
Odin raised the eyebrow over his good eye. “And what inspired this line of thinking?”
I braced myself against the bench. “I spoke to Muninn. In Muspelheim. I think… if we found the right angle, we might even be able to win her back to our side.” Even though the thought of fighting alongside her again made my skin crawl, I couldn’t deny that she must have all kinds of useful inside info about our main enemy.
Odin let out a dismissive chuckle. “She’s made her allegiances more than clear. As for the dark elves, they’ve been jealous of our power since the beginning. Now they’ve finally been given a way to act on those feelings. There’s nothing more complicated to it than that, and nothing we could offer them except our defeat.”
“I think the valkyrie’s point has some merit,” Loki said quietly. “They did fashion that spear of yours. They’ve given us enough gifts over the ages.”
“I’ve seen no reason to think the dark elves might be swayed,” Odin said firmly.
Frustration prickled up my back. “You’ve seen a lot with all the traveling around I’ve heard you do, and with that high seat of yours,” I said. “Even I can tell that things are getting worse in the other realms. You told us yourself that only this one and Midgard have stayed balanced—that’s why Surt wants them. Why haven’t we done anything about that? Why are the realms failing at all?”
“A lot of questions from one only so recently with us,” Odin said dryly, but his single-eyed gaze felt heavy on me. “All things run down eventually. You should know that as well as anyone, being so recently mortal.”
The reminder of my death made my shoulders stiffen, but I pushed myself off the bench so I could at least come closer to meeting him face to face. “That’s a bullshit answer. ‘All things run down.’ Sure, but Asgard isn’t. Midgard isn’t. So what’s different with the others?”
“If Nidavellir is failing as well, that could have pushed the dark elves to take more drastic action,” Hod said, eyeing his f
ather warily.
Odin made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “Our course is clear. Our enemies threaten us, and we must cut them off at the knees before they can. All this rambling only gives them more time to build their strength. Do you forget what they did to me?”
“Of course not,” I said, struck by a sudden thought. “Why did they just keep you locked up? Why didn’t they kill you while they had you? It seems like it would have made life a whole lot easier for them, if all they want is to destroy everyone here.”
Odin’s lips curled with what looked like disgust. “Surt was afraid that if he ended my life, I might be reborn in Asgard as before, outside his grasp, before he was ready to carry out the rest of his plans.”
“Oh.” I couldn’t help asking, “Would you have been?”
“I don’t know,” the Allfather said darkly. “None of us knows our fate after this. Which is all the more reason we should follow the signs and recognize a day of reckoning is approaching, whether we like it or not.”
“No,” I said, taking a step toward him. Thor said my name like a plea and a warning combined, but I ignored him. They were too used to taking orders from Odin, but I didn’t have that problem. “This is how you get your way with everything, isn’t it? You act as if the future is set in stone, there’s nothing anyone can do but accept the hand that’s been dealt to us at face value and tackle it like that. Sounds like a really easy way to avoid responsibility for your choices to me.”
“I only say what is,” Odin said in a voice almost as thunderous as Thor’s could be.
“Right,” I said. “But you know what? If we’d thought like that when you were off in that cage of Surt’s, you’d probably still be there, because we’d have given up and left you to the elves. So maybe that should be your hint that it’s time to try a different way of looking at things. If you just—”
Odin cut me off with a smack of his spear against the floor. “I know what comes. We won’t—”