by Eva Chase
The commander returned to the mouth of the passage. “You must have conditions of your own, from Odin.”
“You will cut off all relations with Surt,” I said. “Barricade any gateways to his realm—I can help you with that. Pass on what information you know of his army and his schemes. You didn’t really want to be his lackeys anyway, did you?”
“If we do that now, how can we trust that you’ll follow through on your end? You might defeat Surt tomorrow, and where does that leave us if you renege?”
I held up my hand, my heart starting to thud. I’d come down here knowing I might need to take things this far. I’d been prepared for it. But my body still balked for a moment before I could force out the words.
“I’ll take a blood oath. Like the one that bound Odin and Loki for all of their first lives. Neither I nor the one who swears with me will be able to back down from that.”
A hush fell over the dark elves gathered around me that felt more startled than before. The commander swallowed audibly. “A blood oath with a dark elf?”
“We failed you too long,” I said. “I think you’re owed this much.”
“Well… Come with me, then. It isn’t me you should be swearing to. I’ll tell them what I saw. If you’re truly willing to go through with this—you’ll have our loyalty, however much of it you require.”
24
Aria
I perched on the edge of the table, my feet braced against the bench as I resisted the urge to swing them impatiently. The faded mead smell of Valhalla seemed thicker than usual today, although maybe that was just because Odin was sitting on his golden throne where I’d first pictured him, before I’d known the real god.
“She said she would come,” I said, pressing my hands against the varnished wood to stop them from fidgeting too. “But she couldn’t just hop back here the way I can. She would have had to get to the portal in Surt’s fortress.” My gaze shot to the Allfather. “You did make sure Yggdrasil’s magic would open to her, didn’t you?”
He inclined his head, his eye glinting at my skepticism. “As I promised. I never closed it to her. A being of Asgard stays a being of Asgard.”
That was one small relief. I didn’t think Muninn had tried to return in however long it’d been since she and Odin had first gone their separate ways.
She’d been watching for me, or for anyone from Asgard, like before. I hadn’t gone far from the gate I’d entered Muspelheim through this time—just giving myself enough distance from the guarding dragon that I hadn’t been too worried it’d swoop down on me. Then I’d simply sat at the base of the cliff and spread out the cloth I’d brought on the dark rock. White silk, courtesy of Freya—a request for a truce, like the dark elves had shown us.
It had taken about half an hour for Muninn to notice, but she had come. And even though she’d grimaced when I’d told her Odin wanted to speak with her, to make amends, she’d stayed and listened.
“How do I know this isn’t a trap?” she’d demanded when I’d finished my plea. “All of you planning revenge for the hand I had in your capture?”
“I guess you can’t know for sure,” I’d said. “But how can we know you won’t pull some kind of memory trick on us either? We’re trusting you to come in good faith. I hope you can find a little trust for us too. If you don’t like the look of things, you can just leave.”
She’d hummed to herself and ruffled her dress, and then she’d said that she would give the Allfather a minute or two, no promises of more. “The gate to Asgard from here is with the others in the back of Surt’s fortress,” she’d said. “He’s given me free access to them, but I may need to wait until there’s no one around to see which I take.”
“Of course,” I’d said. “We’ll be waiting.”
And now here we were.
“Even if she doesn’t come, we can win this battle without her,” Hod said from where he was sitting on the bench next to me. He rested a reassuring hand on my calf. “The dark elves have given us a good starting point. Thor is seeing what he can make of his scheme with the giants.”
“Thor the Schemer,” Loki murmured from where he’d propped himself against the next table over. “I never thought I’d see that day.”
“You can’t claim all the wits in Asgard, trickster,” Freya said teasingly. She was standing on the other side of the throne from the hearth, looking as if she thought she might need to defend her husband from his former servant.
Loki grinned. “And I suppose I should be thankful for that.”
“How easily can we guard against these illusions of hers?” Tyr asked. He’d taken a sword off the walls, but he let it dangle at his side in a relaxed pose.
“She can’t work them on me,” Odin said. “I doubt she’d try with me here, but if she did, I’d break you free of them.”
“I’ll be paying attention to her emotional state,” Baldur said. He leaned back against the table where he was sitting next to Loki, his gaze on the hearth. “If I sense any malice, I’ll give warning.”
“What are you going to say to her?” I asked Odin. Frankly, I was more worried about him screwing this up than anything else. Muninn’s feelings about him ran so raw I could see the hurt and rage in her eyes whenever I so much as said his name. If he brought even a hint of his know-it-all arrogance to this conversation, we could kiss any hope of making peace goodbye.
“You’ll hear it when I say it to her,” the Allfather said evenly, which didn’t really comfort me. I shifted my weight, the squirming impulse wriggling deeper through my nerves.
A ripple of energy washed over us from the hearth like a faint breeze. My head jerked up. Odin shifted forward.
“A guest has arrived.”
He pulled himself to his feet and considered his spear. After a moment’s thought, he leaned it against his throne rather than keeping it in his hand. I guessed even he could figure out that facing Muninn unarmed was going to go over better. Something in his expression softened, more than I’d have thought was possible. Maybe he was really ready for this conversation after all.
A rustling caught my ears, so muted I wasn’t sure anyone else except Loki would have caught it. Then a small black shape burst from the hearth and soared toward the ceiling with a fluttering of feathers.
The raven circled beneath the rafters, peering down at us. When she’d glided over our heads a few times—enough to decide we didn’t have a bird cage at the ready to toss her into, presumably—she swooped down to land in front of the hearth. She stood up in her human form with the ashy opening at her back. It’d give her a quick escape route if she didn’t like what she heard in that minute or two she’d offered us.
“Odin,” she said in her softly hoarse voice, her shoulders slightly hunched in a defensive stance. Her large dark eyes shone starkly from her pale face. They didn’t leave him for an instant. The rest of us might as well not have been in the room.
“Muninn,” Odin said with a respectful dip of his grizzled head. “Thank you for coming. It’s been a long time since I saw you here.”
“And far too long before that,” she shot back.
“Yes.” He kept his head low, rubbing his mouth. “I failed to consider that you might want a life of your own beyond what you had serving me. It was an oversight unworthy of me, and I apologize for that.”
Muninn blinked, looking startled. Then her mouth tensed again. “And did you only just realize this oversight?”
“It’s only recently I’ve realized just how angry with me you were,” Odin said with a hint of irony. “But did you think I forgot about you the moment you set off on your own path? I have looked in on you over the years.”
She bristled. “You spied on me.”
“No!” He raised his hand. “You know my seat doesn’t allow me to peer through walls. I didn’t invade your privacy. I only caught a glimpse, now and then, when I wanted to be sure of how you were faring. But that was enough to catch a fragment or two of certain types of conversations.”
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br /> The raven woman was still tensed. Odin let out his breath. “For a long while, I saw you as little more than an extension of myself, and that was wrong. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t concerned at all with your well-being.”
“You had strange ways of showing that concern,” she shot back.
A knowing gleam came into his eye. “I never asked anything of you I wasn’t completely sure you were capable of handling.”
“It’s not just me. You’ve neglected so many of the realms—so many of the people in them—”
“I know,” he said. “I have many apologies to make. But we have already started to reach out. We’ll bring the strength of the gods back to all the realms.”
“I just spoke with the dark elves this morning,” Hod put in. He held up his hand, the one marked by a still-raw scratch of a knife that he hadn’t let his twin heal. “We’ll put things as right as we can. We all should have realized sooner.”
Muninn shifted on her feet. She looked from Hod to Odin. “Well, what now? You can’t give me back what was lost. How could you possibly make up for all the centuries I was under your thumb?”
The gleam in Odin’s eye shone brighter. “I can’t make up for them—I acknowledge that. But I can give you a little more time with what you most recently lost, and I promise you may make a home for yourself in Asgard or call on us as you need us like any of the gods, without any expectation of your service, from here on.”
“What I most recently lost?” the raven woman repeated.
He gave her a smile that looked almost gentle. “I may have missed some very obvious things, but I don’t think there’s any way I could miss this. I can’t summon a spirit for long after this much time detached from the world of the living, but Valhalla has enough power to grant them a brief additional respite.”
He lowered his tall frame into his throne, his hands gripping the golden arms. His eye closed. Muninn stared at him, her body rigid.
A faint hum carried through the hall. The hair on the back of my neck rose. I gripped the edge of the table, suppressing a shiver.
There, in front of the throne, three figures started to form. At first they were no more than shadowy impressions, but as Odin’s forehead furrowed and the hum rose to a higher pitch, their bodies sharpened. All three were men, one with the coloring of a dark elf but at least half a foot taller than any I’d seen before, one a burly guy with a sweep of light brown hair and soft features that contrasted with his square jaw, and one…
The last one, I recognized. His blond hair had been white when I’d seen him in what I’d assumed was one of Muninn’s memories, his face much more lined, but there was no mistaking the scar that cut jaggedly across the left side of his lean face.
In the moment I’d seen, they’d been cuddled together like lovers.
Muninn’s eyes had widened. Her hands clenched and opened again at her sides. When the three men had completely solidified, they seemed to come to life. They looked down at themselves and around, the big guy gaping, the dark elf letting out an amused chuckle. Their gazes all settled on the raven woman.
“Svend,” she said. “Gunnar. Jerrik. I—”
She cut herself off and simply threw herself at them. In an instant, they’d enveloped her in a joint embrace. My skin prickled with the feeling that us being here at all was a huge invasion of privacy.
For once, Odin was clearly thinking along the same lines as I was. “We’ll give you this time to yourselves,” he said quietly, and moved from his throne. All of us who’d assembled there filtered out of the hall of warriors as quickly as our feet would take us.
“How long will those temporary manifestations last?” Loki asked the Allfather when we’d come to a stop on the field outside.
Odin sighed. “Several minutes at least, I hope. It’s difficult to summon spirits that long dead back to life, however worthy they may have been. Valhalla’s power can only accomplish so much.”
“It looked to me as though she was glad to have them at all,” Freya said. A soft smile played across the goddess’s lips, reminding me that she presided over love as well as war.
A lump had filled my throat. “I think that was the right thing,” I said. “To show her—to show her you understood, and that you want her to be happy.”
Odin’s gaze settled on me for a long moment—long enough that it started to weigh on me. “Perhaps I have needed some reminding to extend the same courtesy to you, my patchwork valkyrie,” he said. “I should apologize for that as well.”
The apology took me by surprise, but not so much that I forgot myself. “And maybe to your sons and the other gods here as well,” I suggested.
He sputtered a chuckle. “You aren’t one to back down, are you? We will see how the confrontations ahead of us play out. There will be time enough for more discussions once Surt has been put down. But I am ready to have those discussions.”
He glanced at Loki, whose jaw tightened. The trickster god offered a nod of acknowledgment.
It was closer to an hour before Muninn emerged from Valhalla, so I guessed Odin’s and the hall’s magic had worked better than he’d expected. Or maybe the raven woman had taken some time to herself before rejoining us. A hint of redness lined her eyes and her cheeks were flushed, but her posture was more relaxed than I’d ever seen her before.
“Let’s set the realms right,” she said. “If you’re going to stop Surt from wrecking even more havoc, you need to strike tomorrow afternoon.”
25
Aria
The mountainside Muninn had us stop on gave a direct view of Surt’s fortress from a distance. She peered at the roughly carved landscape around us and nodded.
“I don’t think any of the patrols should catch you here. This isn’t along any of their routes. You can wait without any interference until you’re ready to jump in.”
“Are you sure he’s gone?” Hod asked. “The dark elves I spoke with said they’d never seen him leave the fortress. He always seemed to be on guard, watching for a fight.”
Muninn’s thin lips curled. “For a couple of hours every other afternoon, that Surt is an illusion drawn from their memories. I created a construct of him as part of our arrangement, so that he could go surveying the territories in Midgard where he might begin his invasion. He wanted to give the appearance of being constantly on guard.”
“There are still guards,” I pointed out. Even from across the wide plain between us and the uneven walls, I could make out the figures perched along it and stationed outside the buildings beyond the walls.
The raven woman shrugged. “You’re never going to find it unguarded. But most of those ‘soldiers’ have plenty of training and no real battle experience. They’ll look to him first before they realize they need to come up with their own plan of defense. If you can sow the destruction you’re planning as quickly as you say, you should be able to take out the draugr before they’ve called many of them up—or started much of any counterattack, really.”
“The giants will distract them first,” Thor said. “We rush in while they’re busy fending off that horde.”
“If they show up,” Loki said with an arch of his eyebrow.
Thor glowered at him good-naturedly. “They’re coming. You should have seen how stirred up they were by the time I was done with my call to action.” A little of the light glamor Baldur had cast on him still shone in his hair. I’d never seen him look quite so relieved as when he’d strapped Mjolnir back onto his belt, though.
“We have seven target spots,” I said. “Should we look over the map again, now that you all have the fortress to compare?”
“It can’t hurt to be as prepared as possible,” Baldur said.
Hod pulled out the folded paper he’d been carrying. The dark elves had given it to him: a sketch of the fortress layout with markings to indicate the support walls of the caves they’d helped dig out and expand beneath the surface. They’d confirmed that was where Surt had been stashing his army of the undead—thousand
s of them now, in vast rows of caverns. If we broke through in just the right spots, we could bring the rocky ceiling toppling down on them all, leaving them as sitting ducks.
Freya and Tyr studied the map again too, even though their job was going to be protecting our backs while the five of us did the heavy work with our combined powers. Odin hadn’t been wrong, not really. If this worked, it’d be mainly because of the five of us. He just hadn’t been completely right either. It might not work at all if it hadn’t been for the other ways we’d contributed. If Hod hadn’t reached out to the dark elves. If Thor hadn’t riled up the giants.
The ledge we were standing on trembled beneath my feet. I tensed where I was crouched. Thor smiled.
“Here they come.”
A moment later, the first charge of the giants moved into my line of sight on the plain below. They rushed forward, their heavy feet thundering over the ground, hollering and brandishing their weapons.
Loki rolled his eyes. “You’d think over the ages they might have finally picked up a tiny bit of subtlety.”
“The guards are moving,” I said. “What if they start bringing the draugr out?”
“Then we send those ones crackling back into the peace of death on the surface,” the trickster said.
“We just need all their attention on the giants,” Freya said. “The ones by the buildings are heading to the walls now. They’re gathering together at the front to watch the approach, just as we expected. Let’s go! We can come at them first from the side—they won’t know what’s hit them until we’re already halfway through.”
She didn’t need to say more than that. We were already pushing off the ledge. Only Muninn hung back, her pale face tight with anxiety for a second before she shifted into her raven form. She flew higher up the mountain, where we’d decided she’d stay and watch to report back to Odin as needed. “Just like old times,” she’d said when we’d discussed it, but without too much bitterness.