“Sanngriðr,” Freyja said softly, dangerously, “you are the one who has forsaken your vows. Or have you forgotten them already?”
“What? I have done nothing of the sort!” Sanngriðr declared, rolling to her feet and wiping away the dirt smudging her tunic. “I have been true to you!”
“Reapers do not take life unbidden, Sanngriðr,” Eir said, still caressing Piotr's face, still crying quiet tears between her words. “A life that ends before its time is energy, Light, wasted. Only when the soul is at the end of its days, only when the book of its days is about to close, may we step forward and collect it. Only then, if their flesh is stubborn, may we help cut them from the coil, slicing away the caul of their flesh. Only then.”
“I didn't collect their souls, stupid Eir,” Sanngriðr sneered. “I left their spirits in their flesh to rot.”
Eir jerked, rocking back on her heels and letting out a great, long moan, nearly a howl of pain. She flung herself forward over Piotr's body, sobbing uncontrollably.
Freyja frowned. “Sanngriðr. Stand before me.”
Sanngriðr strode past Eir, rolling her eyes at the woman's agony, and stood before Freyja, head held back, chest outthrust.
“Sanngriðr,” Freyja said, “I tire of this matter and I tire of you. So I have decided it—I am done. I am done with you, Sanngriðr. I am done with Eir, and I am done with Miðgarðr. The host-fields are filled with an uncountable number of warriors. Valhalla is, as well. We have no need of Miðgarðr's feeble offerings—greater warriors are to be found elsewhere, in other realms, in other, stronger worlds.”
Sanngriðr scowled. “I do not understand, Lady. What—”
“Henceforth, Eir, for your crime of dallying with a living human—for not only bearing him children, but for bearing him a boy and allowing your blood to be diluted in a male form—for this crime Miðgarðr is cut off from the Rainbow Bridge. No Reaper shall be allowed entrance or exit, unless they travel with my blessing, with my necklace. So cut off, Miðgarðr shall hang in the space without, at the mercy of the deep creatures, the dark ones, the Jötnar and Dvergar and Álfar. And worse. But, to prove I am not completely heartless, I will not leave the souls born to Miðgarðr bereft.”
Eir lifted her face, tracked dirty with tears and blood, to Freyja. “My Lady?”
“I leave the handling of the spirits of Miðgarðr in your family's capable hands, Eir,” Freyja said quietly, kneeling down and brushing a lock of hair off Eir's face.
“It is both my blessing and your curse: every year, for every drop of blood that has soiled your cloak, a hundred spirits must suffer in the not-realm born of your folly. Your children and your children's children and their spawn ever after must henceforth guide and guard these damned souls, ferrying them to the Light and the afterlife that even one such as I cannot reach.”
“But my Lady…my children are…”
“What mother, who bled to bring her babies into the world, would not bleed to bring them to life once more?” Freyja asked in a whisper. “Will you give up your flesh—your human life—for your children, knowing that you are condemning them and their children and all generations hence, to an existence of being the only Light in a great and vast plain of darkness? They will suffer for your transgressions, just as you suffered to bring them into the world.”
“How?” Eir demanded, wiping her face, expression cautious but growing lighter with hope. “How would they suffer? What is this curse?”
“They will live a short, painful life, Eir, burning up from the inside if they do not guide souls into the Light. Or they will live a longer life spent in the good work of guiding souls…but one that could cut off with no warning, their books closing early, for without the Rainbow Bridge to follow, it shall require a bit of their life force to send a spirit across the vast nothingness and into the Light. If they do neither, if they turn their face from their duty, if they allow too many spirits to gather, then the spirit realm will overrun the living world. Miðgarðr will be laid open for the Dark Ones to plunder and feast.”
“And if I do not?” Eir whispered. “If I do not give myself to you, if I do not wake my children from their death-sleep, what then?”
“Then their souls rot in their bodies,” Freyja said simply. “Miðgarðr is still cut off and shall soon fall prey to the Dark Ones between the worlds. And you go on living happily here. I will, of course, hang your son's body by his heels for all of Fólkvangr to see and bear witness to. I shall not have a Reaper of mine dallying with a creature from a lesser realm, Eir. It cannot be.”
“I choose your mercy, I gladly give my life.” Eir shook her head. “But what of my son, Lady? I thank you for my daughters…but what of Piotr?”
Freyja sighed. “I am giving you eight of your children back and you quibble over the ninth?”
“I am a mother, Lady,” Eir whispered. “I could not call myself such if I did not.”
“Fine! Fine, foolish, greedy girl!” Freyja raged. “He has been here, has bled upon my sacred earth and been healed by your hair. You are spirit here, Eir, not flesh. His wound is closed, his heart still beats. He is now part spirit, part flesh, and all damned. Piotr cannot return to Miðgarðr now. Not as he is.”
“But Lady—” Eir protested.
“I am not done!” Freyja growled, holding up a hand. “Bestill my heart; you Reapers do like to interrupt today!” She scowled between Eir and Sanngriðr.
“Piotr cannot return to Miðgarðr, but he can aid his sisters. I shall create a space, a place, where he can watch over the souls that need yet to be gathered and sent across the deep, dark spaces into the Light. Those souls that shine brightest shall call to him; he will know your descendents and they can make use of him until such a time as I call them home. And this I shall not do, until every spirit has been sent on. Every single one and not before! I have said my piece. My word is my bond!”
“This is madness!” snarled Sanngriðr. “What sort of punishment is that? You bring her dead children back to life? You create a special place for her son to frolic about, where he can play with the dead as if he'd done nothing wrong? What sort of pain is this? What sort of suffering?”
“Hush, Sanngriðr,” Eir hissed. “For your own sake if not my own!”
“Let her words dig her grave,” Freyja said mildly. “She is doing splendidly.”
“Have done with me then!” demanded Sanngriðr. “If this is what you call punishment, then punish me, my Lady. Let me hear your decree for my ‘misdeeds.’”
“So be it. Sanngriðr,” Freyja said sternly. “For your crime of not only cutting short the lives of eight children, but of leaving their souls lost within their shells to rot, I condemn you to rot as well. May your flesh show the degradation in your heart. Only the forgiveness of Eir's brood will give you back your flesh, but even then…even then, it will rot again in due time. Your face will be the mirror of your soul, Sanngriðr. This is your punishment.”
The white drew down and filled the world once more.
Wendy blinked and just like that they were back in the basement of the Russian Hill home, the stained and ruined cloak puddle at their feet, and the draft moving through the open door. No time had passed, she could sense it. That entire interlude, as before, had happened between breaths.
“So…” Wendy said, “that's it? That's all?”
“That is all,” Piotr agreed, bending down and gathering up the cloak. He folded it reverently and set it back on its dusty shelf. “My mother gave up her life for my sisters. My sisters woke from their temporary death to find the house in shambles, blood on the floor and the hearthstone pried open. I was gone, and when Róta found villagers willing to venture with her into the woods, they discovered Kirill's body and my father breathing his last breaths.”
“So your sisters never found out what happened?” Wendy was confused. “Then how did they know to become Reapers?”
“Life ends, life goes on. Róta held my father's hand as he passed and when she opened her ey
es, Light filled the clearing. He stepped into the Light…and I stepped out of nothing. Freyja herself had come to leave Sanngriðr's soul and my own in the Never after she had cut Miðgarðr off from Fólkvangr and the other realms.”
“How did Róta take it?”
“She begged Freyja to take her instead. Sanngriðr murdered Róta's daughter, my niece, in the fray, as well. With no husband and no child, Róta felt that she had nothing to live for. She wanted to be dead too, to join them in the Light.”
“Oh…Piotr, I'm sorry, I'd forgotten about your niece,” Wendy said, reaching forward and fingering the silky cloth at hand. It was a small gown, just the right size for an infant, and slippery-smooth to the touch. She felt a tightness in her throat. “Freyja wouldn't help her too?”
“Freyja couldn't,” Piotr corrected her, gripping his side and grimacing. “Mother was dead by then—her life forfeit. Freyja could not go back and undo what had been done—she could not stretch Mother's life further than had already been spent to bring back my sisters. And since Miðgarðr was cut off at that point…little Katusha's soul was lost. Or, as the case may be, Lost.”
Wendy, driven by whim, kissed the silky fabric, inhaled its musty, dusty scent. “Did you find her?”
“Da,” Piotr said, taking the tiny gown from Wendy and folding it, setting it back on the table of tunics.
“We found her in the room she died in, trying to get the attention of my other sisters. I took her under my wing and we found a safe spot to rest our heads while Róta took it upon herself to organize our sisters into…well, the Reapers. Freyja is stern but not heartless. She felt badly over missing Katusha; Freyja gave Róta our mother's cloak and Brísingamen as…a sort of penance, I suppose.”
Wendy was startled. “She gave away her fancy necklace again? Why?”
“Freyja knew it was safest here, locked away on Miðgarðr away from the antics of the other gods who liked to steal it from her. Who would think to look for it amid the humans? It was worse than useless to my sisters. The necklace could only be used once—to call Freyja to Miðgarðr, to tell her that we had sent every soul in the Never into the Light. A single use—Róta knew the cloak and necklace had to be protected. This she took upon herself and handed down the duty to every matriarch since.”
Wendy frowned. “Nana Moses didn't have a necklace on when I met her. She was just in a nightgown. Do you think she has it? Had it?”
Piotr stilled. “No. The necklace went missing many years ago. In fact…Wendy, now that I think of it, Brísingamen may be here, among these artifacts. We should look—your Dr. Kensington may be after Brísingamen. He demanded the key from the ruined woman-creature in the hospital; only Brísingamen and the cloak are worth risking everything over.”
“Good point,” Wendy said, turning around and eyeing the closest shelf. It was covered in rings of all shapes and sizes and small chests of overflowing chains. She sighed and set to work sorting through the tangled links. “So your sister built the Reapers…and you built the Riders? Were you trying to be sarcastic?”
Beside her, hands deep in his own box, Piotr grinned. “Da. I decided to steal the name before Sanngriðr could take it again. Over the years, we gathered souls to us. I found teenagers and children, she sought out the furious, the disenfranchised, and the truly evil. Sanngriðr was bound and determined to ruin everything as frequently as she could. She wanted to make us suffer for our transgressions.”
“That makes a sick sort of sense, I guess.”
“Eventually our family grew so large that the Light became a nuisance—we were beckoning the creatures from between the worlds and they gnawed on the thinner edges of reality around us. We had to spread out; we had to thin our ranks. Instead of every child being taken to deathbeds as an aid, a washer of limbs and listener of prayers, only the chosen children, the strongest and smartest and quickest were taken. And then, in time, only the chosen girls.”
“Why only girls?”
Piotr shrugged. “That I do not know. It happened in the space of only a few generations—around the time many of the main branch of the family had traveled on longships to a little green island amid a choppy sea.”
He smirked and moved on to the next box in the line. “The spirits were so many and so strong there that the Never had long since begun to weaken. The living could see the dead in spots and had found certain patterns could confuse the weak Shades, could turn away the Walker's bite. They'd taken to working the patterns into their very skins, to keep the Walkers from reaching through the thin spaces and feasting upon them.” He reached forward and tapped Wendy on the collarbone. “They are quite useful, da?”
“The Celtic knots,” Wendy said, impressed as she paused to finger her wrist tattoos. Her skin was so thin beneath her fingertips, Wendy worried that if she pressed too hard she might poke a hole in her essence. Her body must be nearly brain dead by now, burning up with the fever. Strangely, despite her promise to Eddie, Wendy found that she didn't care about the possibility of dying as much as she should. Some perverted part of her rejoiced at the idea of staying in the Never with Piotr. “You really did get around.”
“The Reapers got around,” Piotr corrected. His search through the jewelry done, he picked up a book off a stack near the door. He blew the dust off it and paged through the chapters, shaking his head when he found nothing.
“I was only along for the ride—training spirits as I went in the art of keeping souls safe. The keeper of the cloak and necklace, usually the next in line to become the matriarch, would travel, and I generally would travel with her. Instinctively, I followed the main line of descendents, those who kept the necklace.”
“Which eventually led you here, to protecting the Lost and training the Riders how to survive and scavenge,” Wendy said, following his example and beginning to clean and examine the items around her. The jewelry boxes had been a bust for Brísingamen, but that didn't mean some savvy Reaper hadn't hidden it between layers of tunics or rolls of parchment. “How?”
“I found many different dead warriors on my travels and trained with them, promising to pass their secrets along to my Riders. I spent only a generation here, a generation there, before the longships came again and I boarded. I traveled the world this way, catching rides with the fierce sailors until eventually I found myself on unfamiliar shores, surrounded by leather-clad natives.”
“America…or what would become America?” Wendy guessed. This shelf offered nothing that seemed to scream “special” to her. “Wow, Piotr. Just…wow.”
“And now, I am here, in this burial chamber of my past, looking at the detritus of my life.” Piotr ran his hand along the table by the door. “The space is so thin here, so tattered. If you wave an arm you could nearly poke through.”
“I think…I think there was a creature here,” Wendy said. “I think this place was where that thing that took over the lady in the hospital punched through.”
“This is not a surprise to me,” Piotr said. He blinked, startled, and picked up a necklace off the same section he'd found the cloak. Wendy didn't need to ask if it was Brísingamen—it glowed with a faint silvery aura that sent shivers down her spine.
“The puzzle pieces fit now,” Piotr continued, pocketing the necklace as he gave Wendy a long, meaningful look. “Sanngriðr has been stalking the naturals she could locate, mostly Seers, finding ways to lure them to spaces in the Never both powerful and thin.”
“Then she uses one of her Walkers or her own abilities to off the Seer,” Wendy continued grimly, blowing the dust off the second shelf as she walked along and pausing to examine the artifacts lined like soldiers in neat rows, “punching a big ol’ hole in the Never and the spaces between.”
“Or, in this case, the living lands and the space between,” Piotr replied, rubbing under his ribs and stepping away from the shelf. “A creature slips through and seeks out a ghost, or a living person, to inhabit. They…” he broke off, clutching his chest and cursing.
“I'm ti
red of being quiet about this,” Wendy snapped, furiously sorting through the totems in front of her. “We need to deal with your…web issue.” Nothing stood out. She moved to the next pile.
“It hurts, Wendy, this is no lie,” Piotr said, forcing himself to straighten and continue dusting off the shelf, examining the items beneath each mound of dust, “but I have said nothing because there is nothing to be said. The web, the seed, it will not kill me. I know this now; my memories have only confirmed this. I will ache and suffer, yes, but I cannot be destroyed. So long as the Never exists, so shall I walk on. In a way it is a terrible blessing—the webs…I can feel their connection. I can feel how they are gathering life from all over the city, how they are gathering will. All they need is to release it.”
“Great. Lots of power there,” Wendy grumbled, “like a spirit nuke just hanging out over the city, dangling over our heads, waiting to bust an even bigger hole between the worlds. Fabulous. Just. Frickin. Fabulous.”
“Come,” Piotr said, stumbling to his feet but refusing Wendy's offer of aid. He reached out and took his mother's cloak in his arms, holding the crusted, dusty thing to his nose and inhaling deeply.
“Come, Wendy. We have what they want…at least, what Sanngriðr desires. It is time we took this battle to her.”
In the hallway of the townhome, Wendy paused, grabbing Piotr's arm. “Wait. I don't…I don't know if I can do this.”
“Do what, Wendy? Battle Sanngriðr? Remember, for all her fierceness, the Lady Walker is simply Sanngriðr showing her true face—rotten and mealy, falling apart. We will force her to stop her sabotage. We will bribe her with the cloak if we must. She doesn't want to be here. If she is gone we can do the Good Work in peace, as we were supposed to.”
“No…I mean…I don't think that…wait. Stop, okay, just…stop.” Wendy sank to the floor and, finding a clear spot to rest her face, laid her forehead against the cool wooden floor of the entryway.
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