by Matt Larkin
The wave caught the ship. Tossed it like a stick, slapped it against four other ships. The whole world spun as wood and bone crunched beneath him. Their splintered ship tumbled end over end before being totally shredded.
The weight of his armor dragged him under.
In the darkness and chaos, something beyond enormous passed before him. Racing toward more Ás ships. With his enhanced strength, Tyr managed to swim toward the surface. Other warriors, those in full mail, pitched downward.
Frigg.
She was desperately swimming, clutching a babe in her arms, trying to reach another.
The thought of losing those innocents paralyzed him for a heartbeat. Two.
Rán spare them. Tyr surged forward, swimming for the struggling babe and caught her in his arms. He breached the surface a moment later. Geri. Her brother was paddling atop the waves nearby, sinking under again and again, but never quite giving in. Tyr swam to him and hefted one babe on each shoulder.
“Frigg!”
He spun.
“Here!” She was coughing, holding Thor close. She clung to a piece of driftwood.
In the distance, the creature breached the sea again.
Through so much mist, he still could not well make it out. A whale perhaps, albeit one several hundred feet long. And it would crash back down into the sea once again.
“Brace!”
Frigg followed his gaze.
A handful of other survivors had surfaced, though too few. So many had gone under. And still they were so far from land.
He pulled Geri and Freki close to his breast and turned away from the rumbling wave of death crashing toward them. Even werewolves would not survive this kind of beating for long.
“Hold your breath!” he shouted at the children. Eyes wide, they did so. Tyr dove under the water the instant before the wave hit.
It caught him and jerked him under, pulling him deeper into the net of Rán. So deep he could never hope to make the surface again, and certainly not with two suffocating babes in his arms.
But he would sooner die himself than leave them behind. He kicked, so twisted around he wasn’t sure which way was up. Something caught the back of his shirt and flung him forward with such force he spun end over end. A large fish blasted past him, catching him in the process and sending him spiraling upward once again.
Couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe. Water shot up his nose.
Just don’t let go of the children.
His head broke the surface again, and he was hacking, coughing. The fish splashed under again, rising a moment later with Frigg. It wasn’t a fish. A mermaid.
She turned back to him, dove like a dolphin and came up near him.
Flosshilde? He wanted to speak. Tried to, but only managed to choke on water. The mermaid caught him with one arm, grabbed Frigg with the other, and began to carry them away with powerful beats of her tail.
“The others,” Tyr managed to say.
“My two sisters are saving who they can.”
“Why?”
“Because you spared me, of course. Rán ordered her people to send the Lyngbakr to sink your fleet.”
Flosshilde had said the nixies didn’t serve Rán. The river mer and sea mer must be on poor terms.
He squeezed Geri, forcing her to spit up water. “Come on, girl.”
Had to stay awake. They all did.
36
Freyja guided him to some side chamber and helped him sit upon a bed made of roots. She returned a moment later with a wooden bowl of wine. Odin drank greedily before offering it to her. His fingers brushed hers, sending fresh jolts of vitality through him. Life was born here. It ought to be enough to bring him peace, even bliss.
The horrors the Well of Urd showed him would not leave his mind, though, and the wine merely blunted their impact. He had obviously seen bits of the past and … a future, perhaps. But the symbolic blended with the real, forming such a muddle he could not separate one from the next.
The word haunted him. Ragnarok. His very soul vibrated with it, knew it was coming. The world’s end.
All you build will turn to ash, your children shall die, and your dreams shall burn.
Was that merely the ghost’s curse upon him, or some dire prophecy? Had the Odling ghost … known? The runes on his skin, placed there by the ghost, matched ancient dvergar runes beneath Halfhaugr. What did it all mean?
“I don’t know what to believe in,” he said.
Freyja leaned closed. “I start to believe … Mundilfari’s theory.”
His theory? Outside Freyja told him Mundilfari believed soul mates, in the presence of Yggdrasil, could not hide from their feelings. Could he even believe in the existence of such naive concepts as soul mates? But he had seen Eostre’s parents, had almost felt the pull they held for each other. It was more than lust and deeper than even most people meant when they spoke of love. The absoluteness of their connection had been laid bare and undeniable before his psychic senses.
And why not? He rested within the birthplace of all life on Midgard, within the very Tree of Life, binding souls and worlds together.
In some distant age, a man and a woman had loved each other dearly, drawn together. Eostre’s parents.
Freyja stroked his cheek, her touch like the warmth of the sun, saving him from the mists of Niflheim, pulling him out of the dark and restoring him, body and soul. And as the thought came to him, all distance between them vanished without any conscious decision. She lay under him, and he was kissing her soft, warm lips. Wiggling beneath him, she pulled away her tunic. Her skin was incredibly fair, like cream, and Odin wanted to drink it all in. He planted kisses over her breasts and neck and abdomen, barely aware that she had helped him out of his own shirt.
All that mattered was one more kiss. Was finally, finally being reunited with his … his soul mate. She had been waiting for him for five thousand years. His arrival on Vanaheim had been urd all along, all to bring them together.
Like a fool he had run from destiny, tried to deny it. But urd had bound him from the day he was born.
Tears welled in her eyes as he entered her. Naught in his entire life had felt this right, this complete. He wanted to be deeper, deeper inside, to fuse their souls. Vibrant energy seeped up through the roots of Yggdrasil, coursing through them, driving them ever closer together and granting seeming endless stamina.
Somehow, in this place, he had found absolute bliss. With a prescient surety he knew the Vanr couples must petition for permission to come here, just for this. For an absolute togetherness, a merging of more than bodies. A joining of pneuma, of souls. And through that same prescient insight he knew something else …
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too … my Od …”
How could it be love so quickly, with a woman he’d known only a few days? But the Sight did not lie. Not about this. And the ancient Vanr had been right—here, soul mates could not deny each other. Here, the self-denials and social customs meant naught. There was only life, and life demanded be heard. If a soul had been split in two, it would do anything to be reunited.
At last they both found release, and through it, his body hummed, her pneuma pouring into him. Revealing a lifetime of empty lovers, of lost friends, of searching for meaning. No, not a lifetime. Freyja had spent more than a hundred lifetimes. Her experiences and insights and power slammed into Odin in a torrent of near incomprehensible sensations.
She clung to him a long time afterward, her breathing slowly returning to normal. She had seemed asleep on his chest, but she spoke after the comfortable silence had dragged on. “You saw your own father’s memories of yourself.”
“Yes.” So without doubt bits of his own seid had passed into her in an exchange. And, maybe, in time, she might make sense of his memories and powers. He no longer cared. If she were to learn his purpose here … Well, he was no longer certain of that purpose. Freyja was his reason for coming to Vanaheim; he just hadn’t known it.
He did not need to dwell on such things. Not when she began kissing him once again. Rousing him for more. In this place, he suspected they could have continued all through the night. And he intended to.
37
Tyr sat on the beach, blinking in the afternoon sunlight. There was no mist. There was no mist, not anywhere on these islands nor out for whole miles at sea.
Of the nigh unto a hundred longships that set out from Valland, fewer than half reached Vanaheim. Thanks to Flosshilde and her sisters, over a thousand Aesir seemed to have been rescued from those that sank. That meant … probably three or four thousand more had drowned, a feast for the minions of Rán. They would literally eat those they wished, while others would serve as hosts for more sea mer.
Flosshilde had delivered that news matter-of-factly, a chilling reminder she’d have done the same to Tyr and probably anyone else she met alone in the wilds. He had spared her life, though, and for that one kindness, she had had repaid him a thousandfold. That kindness done, the nixie had disappeared back into the sea.
Probably they wished to be far away before Rán’s followers learned what they had done. When he freed Flosshilde, he’d told her she’d have to pay for her crimes when next he saw her. Now he snorted. This had not been what he meant. Had Rán sent her monstrous whale after the Aesir because of her husband’s alliance with the Vanir? Or because Loki and Sigyn had so offended him? If the latter, irony of it was, those two were not even among the Aesir these days.
Groaning with effort, he rose. Evening would not be so far off, and they had few supplies and many wounded, exhausted, frightened people. Perhaps here no dangers would haunt the night—though he could not say for certain. Either way, they needed a camp before darkness fell.
Nor could they hope to cross the bay once again and retrieve their remaining supplies. The monster whale remained.
For good or ill, the Aesir were now trapped on Vanaheim.
Everywhere Tyr walked, men and women and children lay bedraggled in the sand, moaning in the sweltering heat. Some few were gathering corpses. Those who had washed ashore. So many of the Aesir would never even see the lands they had crossed the world to find.
His first thought was to see to the Skaldun fleet. Some of their ships had gone down, but not, ancestors be praised, the ship Zisa and her sons had boarded.
Now, Tyr stuck close to the queen. Frigg drifted among the frightened, the wounded. A few she healed, though it clearly took much out of her. Others, she placated with a comforting word. Tyr followed a few feet behind, ever watching her.
Bedraggled and dripping seawater, Jarl Arnbjorn stormed toward the queen. Tyr’s hand was wrapped around Gramr before he knew what he was doing. Yet he somehow managed to keep from drawing her. Not yet.
“He’s dead!” The jarl spat at Frigg’s feet. “My son is dead!”
Fuck. His ship had made it to shore—crashed upon it, in fact. The young man must have been lost in the attack.
Hurried steps carried Tyr toward the pair.
“You brought this on us, you and Odin both!” Arnbjorn shook his fist in her direction.
Gramr leapt into Tyr’s hand as he stepped between them. Frigg’s own hand pulled his arm back down. The queen had not enough fear for her own good. Like her husband.
“You question Odin’s authority?”
“I question yours!”
Tyr’s fingers tightened around the hilt until it hurt. Frigg’s grip on his wrist grew stiff. A warning.
“I speak for Odin.”
“He is not here, and the decision to take everyone across the sea was yours alone, queen.”
Frigg drew a deep breath, then guided Tyr to the side with one hand. “I do not have to explain my decisions to you, jarl.”
Arnbjorn sneered. “You do and you will. I demand a Thing to hold you to account for these deaths.” He swept his hand out over the beach, as if to place all the burden of the dead upon their queen.
“You demand?” Tyr spat at the jarl’s feet. “Perhaps I should champion the queen right now!”
“No.” Frigg spoke softly, but her words silenced both Tyr and Arnbjorn. “No. The jarl has requested a formal meeting. So be it. Grieve your losses and sleep on it. In the morn the council of jarls will meet. And I suggest you choose your words with care, Arnbjorn. Odin will return, and he will know who has been loyal and who has not.”
Arnbjorn shook his head like she was a child. “If the king returns at all, he will learn you disobeyed his command and brought us here. And we paid for it with blood.” He held up a finger. “In the morn, the jarls will vote to have you step down. This I promise you.”
38
The air around Odin rippled as if a pebble had been cast into still water. Those ripples washed over him, and though he felt naught, before his eyes his skin changed. His aged flesh was replaced with the body of a young man, one unmarred by runes.
Freyja’s hands slid over his back in slow caresses that made it hard to concentrate on her instructions. It had, after all, taken days of practice. Days lurking in the World Tree as a second home. One more right than any he had ever felt.
“I’m cured?”
Freyja chuckled, then jabbed him in the ribs.
Startled, he dropped his concentration. Instantly, another ripple passed over him, returning his flesh to its normal appearance.
“Glamour is only an illusion, not a real change. The most powerful wielders can use it to appear as someone else, even become invisible. It is not actual shapeshifting, though. It is a Manifest Art most spirits can perform. Even a wraith.”
I grant you power …
Odin tried not to acknowledge Audr, though the wraith had more easily allowed him access to these blessings. He grunted, and turned to fold Freyja’s hands in his own. “You are an astounding teacher.”
She smiled. “The sex helps.”
“What?”
“I’m literally passing bits of myself into you. Meaning I only clarify truths your soul has already absorbed.”
Odin nodded. “Well, then I’m ready for another lesson.”
The days had run together. Odin knew he and Freyja had spent several days in Yggdrasil, making love and speaking of dreams, and of the blessings the apples had given them. She was training him to use a hint of Audr’s power to glamour himself. And she was right—every time she climaxed in his arms, his understanding of her powers grew as much as any verbal lesson could grant.
Eventually, though, they agreed they had to return to Sessrumnir. Before that, he wanted to speak with Idunn.
“I’ll meet you back at the hall,” Freyja said, then kissed him on the cheek.
Odin smiled, more fully than he ever remembered smiling. With small effort, he summoned the glamour he’d been practicing, disguising himself as he had looked in days not so long past: a man in his prime, with long blond hair and a clean shave. Maybe he couldn’t go back, but within Yggdrasil, energy flowed into him with such ease he could maintain the illusion with half a thought.
“Take care, my love.”
He climbed up through the Tree toward where he knew Idunn’s chamber must lie. Freyja had told him the other Vanr woman had returned some days back. Somehow, Odin had never been able to quite make the climb to reach her. Other things had always seemed more important. But Idunn had been the one to bring him to Vanaheim, after all.
The Vanr spun when he entered her chamber, her red dress sparkling, though her eyes were narrowed. “Finally decided to come up for air?”
Odin shrugged. Discretion was not only impossible in a place like this, it had suddenly begun to seem pointless. Why deny what came naturally? Why pretend that he and Freyja did not love one another, or did not enjoy the same pleasures of the flesh as everyone else? Such pretensions were beneath him now. “I finally see what you meant, about human standards melting away over the course of time.”
“I was speaking of centuries. Though certainly we have tarried here longer than I planned.”
“Oh
?”
“Do you even know how long you’ve been in Vanaheim?”
He shrugged. He had lost track.
“We’re approaching a moon here, Odin.”
He grunted. That was longer than he had thought. He might have guessed they had spent maybe three days in Yggdrasil. Now it seemed more like to have been more like ten or twelve. Already, his body and soul called out for Freyja, urged him to chase after her.
Idunn sighed and waved it away. “Clearly your time has been well spent at any rate. You’ve mastered the glamour.”
“Hmm. That’s how you turned yourself invisible when the varulfur attacked, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Now, have you learned what you wanted to know on Vanaheim? Your people are waiting.”
His people. Shit, the Aesir were probably at each other’s throats by now. They waited for him to return, to bring them a plan of attack. Except, he no longer wanted to attack. “This land is beautiful, wonderful.”
Idunn folded her arms. “Of course it is. That’s what this has always been about.”
“I mean … I like you. And your mother, Eostre, Gefjon. And Freyja, gods, Idunn, I love her.”
She rolled her eyes. “Do you know how many men have thought they … Never mind that. The Aesir are vulnerable out there. Your people are in danger. Do you think I want to see my people hurt? You think you like these people you just met? We’re talking about my friends, my mother, my husband. My lovers. We’re plotting to take their home from them. But we’re doing this, doing all of it, because you swore you could make the world a better place for all of humanity. That was what my grandmother wanted.”
Odin looked away. It was the truth. He had sworn his oath, and he could not break that. “I saw her, Idunn. In the Well of Urd, I saw your grandmother and your grandfather, too. I saw them fighting Hel. She is after me.” He rubbed his face. “I cannot say why. And still, she plans to take this world. I saw … ice or flame. Ice or flame take the world. There was spring, a land of warmth and light like Vanaheim. And it fell. A war is coming, a war unlike anyone alive has ever seen.”