Black Ice

by Susan Krinard

  “Now I begin to understand why the locals have become so restless lately,” she said when Mist was finished. “I guess I must have sensed it, too, but I just couldn’t believe anything could happen after all this time.” She stared into her empty mug. “The Aesir alive. You, the daughter of Freya. Loki in Midgard, looking for us.”

  “So far,” Mist said, “he hasn’t had much success in that area. With all the irons he has in the fire, he’s overextended himself, and you know how vain he is.”

  Eir rolled her eyes. “Thank the Norns I didn’t have to deal with him much. But you have plenty of irons—or should I say swords—in the fire yourself. You can’t find Freya, and you say your own magic is unpredictable, even if you’ve beaten Laufeyson more than once.”

  Mist considered, a little guiltily, how much she hadn’t told Eir. “That’s why we have to have the Treasures for the Aesir,” she said. “Dainn’s off to find Sigrun, and we’ve had hints that Rota may be coming to us.”

  “Five,” Eir murmured. “And I’m not a fighter.”

  “We’ll need healers as much as fighters before this is finished.”

  “But the girl, Gabriella. You said she appears to have abilities of some kind.”

  “They’ve hardly been tested yet,” Mist said. “And her boon companion, Ryan, has equally unpredictable gifts that could put him in great danger.” She met Eir’s gaze. “Will you come?”

  There was a long moment of charged silence. “Well,” Eir said, gathering the mugs, “California has some pretty strict rules about bringing fruit and the like over the state line, at least the last time I was looking for somewhere to settle. But I won’t have to bring the trees themselves. They’ll all shrink back into seeds until I plant them again, and I have enough magic to conceal them.” She looked around the house. “I’ll be sorry to leave here. I’ve grown used to the high desert, the clean spareness of it. And I’ll miss the locals. I think they’ll miss me, too, even if I’m a guest in their country.”

  “You promised to tell me about these ’locals,’” Mist said.

  “I have to get the trees ready,” Eir said, getting up from the table, “and we’ll have plenty of time to talk when we’re on our way.”

  The scent came to Dainn before the sound of the heavy footsteps approaching his temporary sanctuary. He leaped to his feet.

  There were only two of them, but they were formidable. As Dainn prepared himself, the Jotunar reached their full height and size, broad and muscular and capable of crushing a human skull with only the slightest pressure of one viselike fist. The grass withered under their feet, rimed with ice and turning brittle as ancient bones.

  The small box resting inside Dainn’s jacket grew warm, and within it Gleipnir began to writhe like a serpent eager to strike. The beast, too, was stirring.

  Dainn held it back. He would let the Jotunar move first, and respond accordingly—with the magic that hummed in the air all around him.

  “Elf,” one of the Jotunar said, with slightly less of the usual sneering and posturing. “I see you’ve already got what our lord sent us to find.”

  So they could feel Gleipnir, too, Dainn thought. He inclined his head. “I give credit to your master for discovering the Treasure’s location. Or has he simply found a way to steal the information we have obtained?”

  The second frost giant clucked his tongue. “There are no provisions against theft in this game, Alfr. And though you may think yourself better than the rest of us, you would slaughter everything in your path to gain your ends.”

  “Yes,” Dainn said, preparing to bluff as much as necessary. “But I would prefer to let you leave alive.”

  The first Jotunn smiled with white, serrated teeth. “If the Sow’s bitch hadn’t saved you, Loki would have you in chains while he—”

  “You are not the Slanderer,” Dainn said, cold in every part of his body except where Gleipnir threatened to burn through the warded box and into his heart. “I have twice defeated your brothers. Three of them faced me and the Lady Mist with the arrogance so common to your breed, and there is nothing left of them now.”

  “Empty words,” the second Jotunar said, though he looked a little less confident. “Give us Gleipnir, and we will take you back to Loki alive.”

  But the frost giant didn’t wait for the answer he knew must be forthcoming. He sent a blast of ice-laden wind directly into Dainn’s chest, knocking him backward. Slivers of ice pierced Dainn’s jacket but didn’t penetrate it; the Jotunar were holding back. They wanted him in one piece.

  Singing the Runes of growth and life, Dainn retreated to stand against the trunk of the tree and turned to place his hands against the bark. He heard the Jotunar lunging toward him and loosed the spell. Small branches and a whirlwind of leaves rained down on the Jotunar, leaving them nearly buried and spitting twigs and curses.

  But they were on their feet again within seconds. Dainn crouched to scoop up handfuls of earth and threw it directly in front of the charging Jotunar. The dirt swelled into a rampart, and the Jotunar slammed into it.

  Before he could prepare the next spell, the box under his jacket grew unbearably hot, catching fire and burning its way through his jacket. Ash streamed from the charred fabric, and Gleipnir wriggled inside his shirt to lash at his skin.

  He doubled over in pain, recovering just in time to rouse the worms and small insects sheltered under the soil. They swarmed over the Jotunar, who slapped at themselves and howled until their own bodies froze the creatures into tiny crystalline statues.

  With a silent apology for the sacrifice he had demanded of them, Dainn caught his breath. Gleipnir had wound itself around his chest, binding his ribs so tightly that he could barely breathe.

  Before the Jotunar could move again, he dodged behind the tree and set off at a pace only the swiftest Jotunar could ever hope to match.

  But Gleipnir slowed him, and in a matter of minutes his lungs had constricted to the point where he could no longer breathe. He stopped, leaning over to brace his hands on his knees, and lost awareness for the few crucial moments that it took for the Jotunar to attack.

  But these were not the same two giants. They were smaller, light and swift, and they took Dainn down before he could defend himself. He rolled out from under the one who had pinned him to the ground and grabbed another handful of earth.

  He felt nothing. No life, no magic. It was only dirt he touched, dead to his senses.

  Gleipnir. Gleipnir had stolen something more than his breath. He threw the dirt into the Jotunn’s face and scrambled to his feet, panting for air. The big Jotunar had joined their smaller cousins, and the odds were deadly. Gleipnir could be killing him, and yet Dainn knew he had to survive long enough to deliver it to Mist.

  In the handful of seconds before the four Jotunar brought him down again, he closed his eyes and called on the beast. For once in his life, he prayed it would still be there.

  He remembered little of what came after. His body moved with lethal precision, employing every martial art he had ever learned but backed with strength and endurance even his well-trained physique had never possessed.

  Only the viciousness was missing, and he was able to keep a calm, cool head as the giants fell one by one, their ice and frost and bitter storm winds dashing against him without effect.

  When it was over, there was a blackened circle of dead grass around him. The Jotunar lay insensible at the perimeter, injured but alive. Dainn called the beast home, and it slunk back to him without any resistance.

  And the pain of Gleipnir was gone. It had coiled itself against his skin, but it no longer threatened to eat through his flesh. He could breathe freely again.

  He left the giants where they lay. He knew they’d do no harm to the local populace; they would have to report back to Loki or face an even worse punishment than they’d suffer for their failure.

  There was just enough time for him to catch a bus to the airport. The security machines were incapable of detecting Gleipnir, and he c
arried it aboard without difficulty.

  As he sat in the window seat overlooking the ocean, he permitted himself to think of Mist. She would be back in San Francisco by now. He had no doubt that she had retrieved Eir and the Apples of Idunn. She would not allow herself to fail.

  He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. He couldn’t tell Mist the whole truth of his success until he fully grasped what had happened. He had been “tested” again, much more brutally than before, and it had been as if he’d returned to the years before Freya had called him, when centuries of discipline and training had finally conquered the thing inside him. He had borrowed the beast’s strength but had never permitted it to possess his mind.

  The small spells he had attempted since his victory had worked as they ordinarily would. But he still didn’t understand Gleipnir’s effects on him, first burning into his flesh and seeming to impede his magic, and then—after he had restored the beast to its cage—turning quiescent and harmless.

  There must be a reason, a connection. There were so many such connections, and thus far he understood so few of them. There was still no obvious explanation for his failure at Lefty O’Doul Bridge.

  The only thing he was certain of was that the herbs must have allowed him to keep the beast under control. What would happen if the concoction ran out? “Would you like a drink, sir?” the Italian flight attendant asked. He opened his eyes, and she favored him with a bright, curious smile.

  “My thanks, but no.”

  “You will let me know you require anything,” she said, her voice dropping to a purr.

  “Yes.”

  She went on to the next passenger, and Dainn closed his eyes again. He wasn’t Loki. He remained untempted by the interest with which mortal women, and sometimes men, favored him. The one he did want was not and had never been mortal.

  And soon she would have no choice but to acknowledge it.

  The sun was no more than a crimson streak on the western horizon, glowing coals of a dying fire that had never touched the cold. Mist imagined that feeble flame sinking behind the San Francisco skyline, plummeting into the frigid ocean, bubbling and steaming and vanishing into the unseasonable winter fog.

  The rocks overlooking the arroyo that ran across the edge of Eir’s property were cold as well, and the harsh wind sent red dust rolling along the bottom of the canyon like hands intent on stripping the earth to its bare bones. Mist almost thought she saw ghostly figures dancing along the dry streambed.

  Eir came up behind Mist. “Ready,” she said.

  They walked back down to the Jeep. Eir threw her duffle into the back and climbed onto the passenger seat.

  “The apples?” Mist asked.

  “Here,” Eir said, withdrawing a small pouch from within her flannel shirt. “The seeds.” She glanced back toward the house. The trees were gone, vanished as if they had never been.

  “Perhaps they will grow here again someday,” Eir said with deep sadness. “When I return.”

  She didn’t have to say what both of them were thinking: she might never come back at all.

  “You look worried,” Eir remarked as Mist sat in her own seat, staring at the road and the false rock face that seemed to block them in.

  “I’ve been gone a day and a half,” Mist said, “but San Francisco could be in rubble and I wouldn’t know it.”

  “I think we’d have known somehow,” Eir said, her voice husky and warm. “Be glad Loki never showed up here. Though I think if he had, he would have found it difficult to get past my—”

  Something yipped in the dark. Mist recognized the sound as the piercing cry of a coyote.

  Eir held up her hand sharply. “Wait,” she whispered. She climbed out of the Jeep and circled it slowly. “It might not be so easy to leave after all.”

  17

  Mist joined her. The fine hairs rose on the back of her neck. “Loki?” she asked.

  “Just stay very still,” Eir said. She reached inside the pocket of her jeans and withdrew a handful of something that looked like a mixture of red dirt and acrid-smelling herbs. Lifting her hand, she opened her fingers and let the mixture fly away.

  All at once she and Mist were not alone. Everywhere Mist looked figures appeared, outlined by the powder as it scattered against the wind. Mist could barely make them out, but some seemed to have the shape of lizards, some of rabbits, some of birds, and some vaguely humanoid—tall and thin, short and round. They were visible one moment and gone the next, as if they were made of air.

  “Ordinarily I might say they were coming to bid me farewell,” Eir said. “Sometimes I would give an Apple to the earth, and they would give me something precious in return. I have respected them, and they have helped me.”

  “Then these are ‘the locals,’” Mist said warily.

  “That’s only what I call them. For the native peoples who lived and still live in this area, they have very special names. But I don’t speak them aloud.”

  Native peoples, Mist thought. She knew next to nothing about the religious beliefs of the indigenous inhabitants of this land of stone and canyon and scrub, but what she saw now was no product of her imagination, no more so than Asgard and the Aesir were mere tales of men huddled around a fire as their only defense against a dangerous world.

  “Until now,” Mist said, rubbing windblown grit from her mouth, “I never even thought about how other spirits and gods might be affected by the war with Loki.”

  “Because you didn’t care?” Eir asked, an unusually sharp note in her voice.

  “Because I never met any during all my centuries in Midgard,” Mist said, scanning the area again. “I didn’t realize that any of them had survived.”

  “They have here,” Eir said. “But they have no desire to rule anything, only to guard this land.” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “I’m trying to understand,” she gasped, as if she were speaking to someone Mist couldn’t hear.

  The voice of the coyote rose again, eerily sustained.

  “Is that one of the locals, too?” Mist asked, resting her hand on Kettlingr’s grip.

  “Coyote,” she said. “Not a coyote, but the. One of the most powerful spirits. A trickster, like—”

  Mist drew the knife. “Like Loki?” she asked.

  “The difference is that the native peoples don’t consider him evil,” Eir said, dropping her hands. “He was here at the beginning of time, so he is wise. He can solve great problems and bring answers to the hardest questions.” She smiled without humor. “It’s just that you can’t count on him.”

  “You can always count on Loki to do whatever benefits himself, no matter who suffers,” Mist said.

  Eir bent to lay her palm on the earth. “But tricksters have always been essential to mankind,” she said.

  “Loki, essential?”

  Eir seemed not to notice her sarcasm. “Perhaps, in some way, all such spirits are bound together.”

  “So is your Coyote joining up with Loki?” Mist said, grimly aware that things might be much worse than she’d assumed.

  “I don’t know,” Eir said, squeezing her eyes shut. “I can’t believe—” She flinched.

  “What’s happening?” Mist demanded.

  “Loki is here. He’s trying … to—” She gasped. “There is a struggle going on. A terrible one.”

  “Will your locals help us?”

  Eir straightened, blinking back tears. “It has never been the way of the spirits of this land to interfere in the doings of outsiders. But now one of them is under attack. And if they understand what may be at stake, everything that lives in this place—even the stones and the wind and the earth itself—will carry the message.”

  “Loki won’t abide any competition. Even if they don’t fight now, they’ll have to sooner or later.”

  Eir didn’t get a chance to answer. The coyote’s howls and yips were closer than ever, just over a slight ridge a few hundred feet to the south. Mist could feel Loki now, but she was also aware of an emptines
s where before there had been movement and life.

  “Are your spirits still here?” she asked.

  “They’ve gone, but whether it’s to help Coyote or save themselves, I don’t know.”

  Mist sang Kettlingr to its full size. She’d been ready to fight with every means open to her, but she could feel the wrongness of using Galdr and Rune-magic here. It would be like a introducing a lethal virus into a healthy body.

  “Please, Mist,” Eir said, “try not to disrupt the balance here more than you must.”

  Balance? Mist thought with an inward laugh. Loki had tipped the balance when he’d first invaded this world.

  She stopped laughing when a coyote the size of a large wolf descended the ridge with teeth bared and hackles raised.

  Loki, and not Loki. Mist understood now what Eir had meant about a struggle. Two beings were wrestling for control under the coyote’s thick winter pelt.

  And Loki was winning. There was an immense power in the spirit that Loki could draw on if he was victorious. He must have known about Coyote and planned to save his own magical strength for more vital battles to come.

  If she managed to kill Loki after he gained complete control of his fellow trickster, Mist thought, Coyote could die as well.

  “Listen to me!” Mist called out. “You spirits of this earth! Help me now, or I will have to bring my own magic into your country. Save your own, or watch him swallowed by one who will strike you down without mercy!”

  Silence answered her, broken only by the coyote’s yip of amusement. Slitted eyes glowed red and green. The darkness turned bitter, the kind of cold that could only arise from one source.

  Jotunar were coming.

  “Spirits of this land!” Mist shouted, trying again. “I will bargain with you. Aid us now, and we will help you when you most need it!”

  Eir moaned and sifted the earth through her fingers. She began to sing, a wild, strange song that caught the rhythm of ancient times. Ancient magic, very different from that of the Vanir, but just as potent.

  “What do you want of us?” Mist asked the darkness.