Oh.
Oo-oo-oh. Right. That.
Loki is saying, “—me of any ill and I care not for your ‘dishonor.’ But for all my shame I never, never raised a hand against my love, my heart, and I would tear the same out from any who would accuse it!” We growl, trying to lunge forward again, metal biting into skin and drawing blood, and if he keeps this up—if we can’t calm down—then we might just bleed enough to break the iron.
(not yet not yet not yet, breathe, man, breathe, it won’t)
“I saw the marks!” Þrúðr says. The point of her sword is shaking, and if she screams, if she alerts her brothers . . . “We all did! Bites and burns that would appear on her neck and arms after you had called on her. If these were not your doing, then whose? And why would you allow it?”
Þrúðr’s eyes are wide and damp, full of uncomprehending pain. Time moves differently in Ásgarðr, age even more so, and I try to remind myself—remind my black and roiling heart—that Þrúðr is a girl. By modern standards, she’d barely be old enough to drink.
I pull myself back. Physically, one hand across my own chest, and inertia might not work that way, but narrative does, meaning I end up back on my tail with a thud.
“Jesus,” I say, hands running down my face, making the words come out in English. My words. “Is that . . . is that what the ásynjur thought? That L— That I used to . . . to beat Sigyn?” It explains a few things. More than a few, I guess.
“Didn’t you?” Þrúðr says, but the challenge in her voice is softer than it was. “The bites—”
“Were mine,” I say. “Jesus, I won’t—” I look up, meeting Þrúðr’s gaze. “The bites and the burns, yes. They were me. But it wasn’t . . . I loved Sigyn. And those things . . .” Jesus Christ. How do you explain kinky sex to a Viking teenager? “Sigyn would ask me to do them to her.”
The point of Þrúðr’s sword lowers, just a fraction, her expression flat with disbelief. “‘Asked’?”
“Yeah.”
“Why? Why would anyone . . .”
“She liked it. Um. When I bit her. It made her—” Jesus, am I blushing? I think I’m fucking blushing. I hope my skin is dark enough that Þrúðr can’t tell. “She liked it,” I repeat. My own sexual deviances are one thing, but these are the secrets of a dead woman.
Þrúðr blinks. “She liked it . . . when you bit her? Left marks and drew blood?”
I nod. “Some people do,” I say. “It’s not . . . It’s just a thing. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“Oh.” Something in my awkward, stuttering reluctance must be convincing, because Þrúðr looks away, sword lowered and shoulders hunched. She’s blushing, not meeting my eyes, and trying not to think about all the things she doesn’t know about being an adult woman.
Somewhere up above, leaves rustle as unseen figures dart among the branches.
Said leaves are still rustling sometime later, when Magni and Móði return. Þrúðr has spent that last little while in awkward, mind-churning silence, thinking awkward teenage thoughts. When he brothers return, it’s a chance to trade that for anger instead.
“All that time,” she snaps, “and nothing to show for it?”
Magni and Móði have come back empty-handed, not a deer or hare or bird in sight, and they bluster with excuses about the forest being “barren” and “cursed.” When I scoff, three heads turn my way.
“Something to say, jötunn?”
I loll my head and grin at Magni. “The forest’s neither cursed nor barren,” I say. “You’ve just been punk’d.”
“What?”
“Pranked,” I elaborate. “Tricked, fooled, played for suckers, fall—”
“Enough. Who has done this? If I find you have had hand in it . . .” He lets the threat hang. I shrug and pretend the thought of . . . that doesn’t set my feathers on end.
“Blah blah blah, you’re a big man, I get it. But I’m not sure they”—I point upward, into the trees—“do.”
The reaction is perfect, the Brat Pack instantly on alert, peering up into the branches. The now suspiciously silent branches.
“What trickery is this? Show yourselves, cowards!” Magni demands of the trees.
“Forget it,” I say. “They’re local kids, having a laugh by chasing off your game.”
Móði scowls at me, tasting of suspicion and confusion. “There are no children in the Myrkviðr. No one lives in this place.”
“The þursar do,” I point out. Funny, isn’t it? Who gets included as a someone and who doesn’t.
Þrúðr looks back up into the trees, then smirks at her brothers. “You were outwitted by jötunn children?”
Magni growls at her, then back at the trees, raising his hammer as he shouts, “Monstrous whelps! I should smash you where you stand!”
“Yeah, well,” I say. “I guess if you really wanna find out just how monstrous the þursar can be, murdering their children certainly would be a fantastic start.”
“Quiet, jötunn. You go hungry with the rest of us.”
I shrug, closing my eyes and leaning back against my tree. Honestly, I’m ravenous, and another night on an empty stomach is as irritating for me as it is for Magni. But I’m not going to let him know that.
Instead, I listen as Þrúðr scolds him again and tells him to sit down and stay out of the way while she finds them food from her saddlebags. Stale bread and hard cheese, an apple and a few strips of jerky. They’re hardly going to starve, the big babies.
I try not to think about it and, in fact, am still trying not to think about it sometime later when I hear footsteps head my way. Þrúðr, who bends down beside me and offers the last of the bread.
“In exchange for what?” I ask. Þrúðr’s expression afterward makes me wish I hadn’t. Shit.
But she doesn’t pull away, and eventually I take the food. It’s floury and awful, and just enough to remind me how long ago my last decent meal really was. To think that, just the other day, I was eating an eight-course degustation at one of the finest restaurants in Miðgarðr.
“The children,” Þrúðr says, watching me eat. “Are they a danger?”
I shrug. “They’re just kids. Their parents? Maybe. But if we stick to the road and don’t look like we plan on staying long, they’ll leave us alone.” I hope.
“Móði thinks they may attack us in the night.”
“I’m sure Móði thinks a lot of things.” Few of which have much worth, if his track record is any indication.
A little crease appears between Þrúðr’s delicate, (literally) golden brows and she says, “Can’t you . . . speak with them? Tell them we mean them no harm? Parley for food, perhaps?”
I laugh, short and sharp and humorless. Honestly, it’s not the worst idea anyone’s ever had except: “One, I’m not convinced you do ‘mean them no harm,’ and two, you don’t know very much about the jötnar, do you?”
Þrúðr flushes and looks away. “They are our enemies, and have been since the days of Búri and Ymir. What more is there to know?” Her hands are curled into fists against the wool of her skirt.
“Just because we all have horns and feathers doesn’t mean we’re all the same,” I say. “The jötnar in this forest are þursar. I’m not, and they’d be able to tell just by looking at me.” Honestly, it’s probably one of the reasons the kids are following us. To the jötnar outside of Jötunheimr, my people are boogeymen and fairy tales.
“Meaning,” I continue, “that the locals are no more likely to listen to me than they are to you. Probably less.” The æsir are at least neighbors, of a sort. Meanwhile, I ran away from my people as a teenager, hooked up with the murderer of my great-great-great-whatever-grandfather, and spent a lifetime aiding and abetting the casual slaughter of my own species. Historic blood feuds are one thing, all that’s quite another.
“So you will not help us?” It occurs to me, as Þrúðr says this, that she might be over here trying to prove a point. To her idiot brothers.
I sigh,
roll my neck and shoulders, then let out a sound that’s halfway between the crack of a whip, the click of a camera shutter, and the cry of an eagle. It’s been a long time since I’ve done that. Well, technically I’ve never done it, and even Loki’s memories are hazy and faded, painted over by a lifetime of æsir dress-ups.
The noise startles Þrúðr and, from the sound and feel of our observers up above, it startles them, too. I don’t think I get the call quite right—by now I’d have an accent, if nothing else—but I hope they catch my meaning.
“What was—?” Þrúðr starts.
“Territory call,” I say, straining my Wyrdsight as far up and out as it will go. The range is minuscule, compared to what I’m used to back home. “Now everyone in earshot knows we’re just passing through.”
A moment later, I hear it: an answering cry, coming from the trees. Not from our observers, but farther away. The voice is an adult’s.
“Aa-aa-and there’s the answer,” I say.
“Which was?”
“‘Get the fuck out of our forest,’ more or less.” I omit the part wherein I was called a featherless traitor. “Sorry, kid. I tried.”
Þrúðr nods, one hand reaching out as if to touch. “Thank you,” she says. “For trying.”
She’s just so earnest, so naïve and so sincere, and if there’s one thing that kills me every time, it’s that. So I sigh and say, “Look. For what it’s worth, I don’t sleep like you lot do. So I’ll keep an eye out until dawn.”
“Thank you, it’s—I would appreciate it if you did.” She gives something of a conspiratorial grin and whispers, “My brothers mean well, but I think they fall asleep during their watches.”
I return her grin, holding up my thumb and foreclaw in the universal gesture of “maybe just a little.” Then I wink, and Þrúðr laughs and goes to stand. As she does, she says, “I . . . I am sorry about before. What I said about—”
I cut her off with a wave of my hand. “Forget about it. It’s . . . It was a long time ago.”
I don’t watch her reaction, just listen to her footsteps and the rustle of her skirts as she walks away, and maybe—just maybe, if I’m feeling very, very honest—I may admit to feeling something very similar to a twinge of guilt.
(“she makes her own choices”)
So sayeth the poison that drips from my blackest heart. Still . . .
Tomorrow we should reach our destination. I guess I have until then to reconsider.
Stomach growling, I curl into a chain-wrapped feather ball, close my eyes, and pretend to sleep.
Chapter 8
When Þrúðr Þórsdóttir had been very young, Váli Lokason pushed her into a river.
She’d been sitting on the edge when it’d happened, studying the shine of her hair in the water. The only warning she’d had was the sound of wicked laughter, and a single flash of red across the corner of her eye.
The next thing she knew, she’d been wet, some very startled salmon brushing cold scales against her cheeks. By the time she’d struggled to the surface, Váli had been nowhere to be found.
But she’d known he’d been the culprit.
Váli had always been an odd boy, as perhaps befitting his heritage. Long-limbed and gawky, with a mess of loose copper curls twisting too far below his chin to be seemly. Váli’s brother, Nari, had been the luckier of the pair, blessed with his father’s handsome looks and his mother’s gentle heart. But where Nari was kind and pleasing, even to Þrúðr’s eyes, Váli was rough in both personality and in features. A wild and feral thing, more jötunn than áss.
Eventually, Þrúðr had pulled herself from the river and up onto the rocks. Had stripped out of her hangaroc and dried her shift beneath the sun.
There, alone, with only Sól’s gaze on her, she’d cried. Just a little. Cried, and considered telling father of the prank.
She’d considered it, but she hadn’t. Because what would that have made her? Eldest of Thor, unable even to handle the least of Loki’s smirking brats? And were it not but for her sex—but for mother’s disapproving gaze—Þrúðr would have pummeled Váli into the ground for daring to put a hand on her.
She’d dreamed of it, at the time.
Particularly when, next she saw him, Váli had sniffed the air and mentioned fish.
Þrúðr had wanted to kill him. Instead, she’d plotted. An elaborate revenge, or so she’d thought. To extend a hand of friendship to her foe, only to snatch it from him at the cruelest time. It would not take much to have all of Ásgarðr laughing at the folly of one of Loki’s house, would take less still to have them side with her against its demise.
Váli had no friends, only a brother. And Þrúðr was Thor’s daughter, as radiant and beautiful as her mother. There was no plan of hers that could fail. Not in this.
And so she’d gone into the woods behind Loki’s house, to the one place in Ásgarðr where few æsir dared to tread. And there, as she rounded one crumbling side of the ugly little cottage, Þrúðr stopped.
For there was Loki’s wife, Sigyn, hanging linen out to dry. A young daughter standing by her side.
Even from a distance, even dressed in shift and hangaroc, Þrúðr had not failed to know Váli’s plain, unpretty face.
Þrúðr had fled before they’d seen her. Or tried to, rounding back around the house with such shock she’d barreled into her uncle without knowing. Loki had caught her in his thin hands and stared at her with eyes that burnt like poison, even then.
“Tell no one,” he’d said, voice a serpent’s hiss. “And you will be even.”
Þrúðr had nodded, too stunned to do otherwise, and Loki’s dark fingers had unwound from her shoulders. “Go,” he’d said, and she had. Running from the house without so much as a backward glance.
Not a glance, but nor could she fail to hear a delighted scream, voice not quite that of the boy she thought she knew.
“Papa!” it had called.
“Valdís!” had been the response.
Then the sound of three voices, laughing with unselfconscious joy.
True to her word, Þrúðr had never told a soul. True to his father’s, Váli had never touched her again.
Not until Myrkviðr.
“Where are our horses?”
The morning of their third day. The forest was an awful place, dark and dank, full of rustling leaves and the vicious stares of scurrying spies, always slightly out of sight.
Þrúðr was sore from sleeping on uneven roots, and from the horses, and hungry from the meal they hadn’t had last night, thanks to the pranks of wicked jötnar.
And now this.
“Oh, right. I traded them to the þursar. In the night. While you slept.”
Loki—Lain—was leaning against the trunk of his tree, corpse-bloat smile bright against the gloom and smeared with fat and blood from the haunch of meat grasped in his claw. Raw and bloodied, and definitely not horse.
Magni turned, blinking. “What?” he snarled. Þrúðr could feel the rage in him, rising like the storm.
“Traded the horses,” Lain repeated. “For food.” He held up the meat-stripped bone in his hand before putting one end between his too-sharp teeth and biting down to get the marrow.
“Liar!” Magni stepped forward, hands clenching at his sides. “Tell me the truth, jötunn.”
Half risen from her bedroll, Þrúðr shared a questioning glance with Móði. He shook his head in response, catching her meaning; he had taken first watch, and the horses had been present when he’d handed over to his brother.
Lain was testing them. Testing Magni. Þrúðr felt the realization strike her like the lightning of her birthright, like the breaking of the storm that had been brewing since the thing bearing Loki’s name had stepped onto the Bifröst. They’d known he would do this. Þrúðr had known, had tried to warn her brothers, back in Ásgarðr. Tried to prepare them. She’d tried, and she’d failed.
Just as Magni would now fail.
“You beast!” he was roaring, o
ne hand grasped around Lain’s collar as he hauled the jötunn to his feet. “They were ours! Why would you do this?”
Lain grinned his blood-sick grin. “I was hungry,” he said. “Some local kids came down and offered me food in the night. I gave them your horse in return. Yours and Móði’s.”
Magni roared, slamming Lain back against the gnarled wood of the tree. From the other side of the camp, Þrúðr heard the remaining two horses shift and stamp.
Lain had kept her horse, as well as his own.
“Thief!” Magni shook Lain by the collar, the jötunn limp and unresisting in his hands, feathers flickering like wildfire. “They were not yours to ‘trade’! You have stolen from us, I will—”
“You will what?” There was something in Lain’s voice. A kind of jagged edge, similar to the one he’d had the night before, when Þrúðr had accused him of dishonor on his wife. “What will you do, Magni, son of Thor?” Lain was saying. “What did you do, when thieves crept into your camp at night? When their breath ghosted across the pale skin of your siblings, and their sharp blades danced against your neck?”
“Enough!” Magni’s fingers uncurled from Lain’s collar, and he took a half step backward. But the jötunn wasn’t done.
“The whole forest heard you, Magni. The way the very ground shook with your snores. You were supposed to be on watch. You failed. You failed, and it was only my blind eyes that saw the þursar drop down from the trees. Saw them dare each other to cut the curls from off your head while you slept. They have trophies, Magni. And not just of you.” Lain’s milk-blank gaze flicked to Þrúðr, and she couldn’t help the gasp that escaped her lips, nor the way her hands flew up to run across her hair. Over the braid and—
And—
And there. Right at the end. A single missing lock.
“Hnnuuurggh!”
Þrúðr’s eyes had squeezed shut, but she heard her brother’s roar. And the sound his fist made when it slammed into their monster’s jaw.
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