by Eva Chase
“That still doesn’t answer why she would throw her lot in with them,” Thor grumbled. “She was the one who approached you, wasn’t she?” He eyed Loki.
“She was,” Loki said. “After we’d already determined the dark elves were involved and taken up the search. I’d expect she wanted to know how close we’d gotten and to steer us wrong if she could. She was allied with them before we ever encountered her.”
Aria sucked in a breath. “That ambush in the school—she brought us to that town, saying she’d seen the dark elves’ markings. Pretending she was helping us track them down. She led us right to the school. She was fighting with us against them, but I guess that was just for show. That was a fucking trap too. She arranged that attack with them.”
My back stiffened remembering that battle, the blasts of light I’d used to fell our attackers, the blood spilling under Thor’s hammer. The blows Hod had taken, so vicious he’d been left on his knees at the end. The dark elves had meant to kill us if they could that day.
Muninn didn’t just want us imprisoned, then. She’d have happily seen us dead.
Loki tapped his forefinger against his lips. “An excellent observation, pixie. She tried to have us slaughtered, and when that didn’t work and your insight helped us find the gate, she must have realized there was no more diverting us—unless she gave us what we were after.”
“Odin,” Hod said with a grimace.
“Or some semblance of him. Enough of one that we’d follow him into her prison.” The trickster let out a huff, glancing around the place again. “It is a rather boring one once you get used to it. Nothing but stillness and a landscape we’ve seen a million times.”
“Odin save us from whatever you’d find more interesting, Sly One,” Freya said with a roll of her eyes.
“This might not be all there is to it,” Hod muttered. “Who says she’s done with us at this?”
“She’ll have to be done with us if we break our way out,” Aria said. She raised her chin, determination brightening her gaze.
I could feel the turmoil churning inside our valkyrie’s mind without any effort at all: uncertainty at what this unfamiliar place might hold, a sharp pang of worry for the brother she’d left behind, frustration at feeling helpless. But she wasn’t letting those emotions bury her. Watching her, I summoned my own resolve. I could hold steady too. Not just for me, but for her as well. We were the ones who’d brought her here, who’d promised her we’d keep her safe.
I couldn’t let my fears for myself stop me from protecting this young woman who’d come into our lives like a burst of light and fire.
“Why don’t we take a fuller lay of the land, like we already started to?” I said. “There may be clues we can find that will speed up our escape. There might even be others she’s trapped here.” We hadn’t seen the other inhabitants of the real Asgard often in the last several centuries. So many of us had wandered off in various directions now that we had little to occupy ourselves with here, with the great war done. But to know it wasn’t just the six of us here alone would set my mind a little more at ease.
“We’ll have to be careful that anyone we meet is real and not conjured,” Hod said.
“All the same, we may as well have a look.” Thor strode forward toward his great hall just up ahead. “Let’s see how well she’s constructed the inside of my home.”
We followed him along the path. He flipped his hammer in his hand in a gesture that looked almost playful, but the light in his eyes was fierce. The Thunderer didn’t take well to being caged.
The sky overhead shone clear and blue, but with a false perfection that pressed down on me. My gaze slipped across the city toward the square contained deeper along its paths. The square where—
I clamped down on those thoughts before they could become fully conscious. A chill shuddered through my body all the same. Those were the last memories I wanted the raven scooping up and putting to her use.
The past was the past. It didn’t matter anymore. It shouldn’t.
Aria had fallen into step beside me. She glanced up at the shudder I hadn’t quite contained. “Baldur?” she said softly.
The concern in her voice, despite all the fears she was facing herself, squeezed my heart.
“We’ll get out,” I said, as much for myself as for her. “Nothing’s ever been able to trap the gods permanently yet.”
She gave me that look as if she were trying to sense my own emotions, the ones stirring farther under the surface. The look that made some part of me tense and giddy at the same time, both reveling in her attention and fleeing it. It might be a wonderful thing to be known by a woman with a spirit like hers, but I kept certain things locked away for a reason.
I didn’t ever want her to regret knowing me. That consideration came first.
She slipped her hand around mine, almost hesitantly, as if she thought I might pull away. The contact sent a warm tingle up my arm. I’d touched her before—to heal her wounds, mostly—but this overture felt more personal, more intimate. I gently twined my fingers with hers, and her smile, crooked but brilliant, almost made me forget where we were.
Then she raised her voice, sweet even if it was a bit thin, and started to sing.
It was one of the Beatles songs we’d played together a few days ago, her lending vocals to my guitar. A steady melody to match the resolute march of our feet. The lyrics were mostly nonsense, but the rhythm buoyed my spirits the way music always did. I couldn’t lose myself in this, but I could wrap the tune around me like a shield.
I let my own voice roll out to join hers. Loki glanced back at us with an amused smirk. Hod shook his head, but a hint of a smile touched his lips. For a few minutes, our singing filled the empty space around us, as if to tell Muninn that no matter where she’d taken us, no matter what she had in store, we would not be shaken.
We ran out of lyrics just as we reached the door to Thor’s hall. The thunder god shoved it open, and we all trailed in behind him, Aria and I at the back of the group. Her thumb skimmed the side of my hand, and suddenly I was thinking of how good it might feel if it traveled farther. If I took her right into my arms and lost myself in her brilliant defiance.
“I actually feel better now,” she said with a halting laugh. “Too bad you don’t have all your instruments here.”
“I’d rather listen to your voice anyway,” I said honestly.
Her cheeks turned faintly pink. She gripped my hand tighter—and then dropped it at something she saw through one of the arched stone doorways in the hall. She spoke louder to address all of us. “Hey—do you think it’s safe to stop for lunch?”
Thor’s grand dining table was laid with bread and cheese and steaming drumsticks, jugs of mead and bowls of fruit. My mouth watered as the scents filled my nose. Odd that I hadn’t noticed the smell until just a minute ago. That fact made my steps slow.
Thor advanced right up to the table and set down his hands on its end with a thud. “One way to find out,” he said. “The raven had better not be spoiling my reputation for hospitality.”
“Nephew,” Loki said with a note of exasperation, but the thunder god had already snatched up one of the drumsticks.
He raised it to his mouth, and the second his teeth touched it, ready to tear into the gleaming flesh, the meat and bone disintegrated the way my father had in the courtyard. One second solid, the next a pile of dust. Thor grimaced and wiped his streaked fingers on his shirt.
Aria’s face had fallen. She scooped a plum out of the fruit bowl, turned it in her hand, and tried it. It crumbled against her lips as the drumstick had.
“Not much of a lunch to be had here,” Loki said.
Aria swiped her hand across her mouth. The tension she’d found a brief release from had tightened her features again.
“Does that mean all the food in this place is garbage?” she said. “There’s nothing at all here to eat?”
I hadn’t felt all that hungry before, but at that question, a jab sho
t through my gut.
Had Muninn sent us here not just to stop us from finding Odin, but to starve us as well? The violent death she’d tried to arrange for us hadn’t worked. This one would come on slower… but we couldn’t fight our way out of it.
3
Aria
The ashy texture stayed on my fingers even after I tried to rub it off. My stomach hadn’t twinged until I’d seen the food, but now it had tied into a huge knot. If Muninn hadn’t conjured a single thing we could actually eat, we wouldn’t last long in this place, would we?
The alarm that had been blaring in my head since we’d first realized this wasn’t Asgard, that had only quieted momentarily when I’d distracted myself singing with Baldur, rang through my nerves again. I spun around, itching to release my wings, as if they’d help anything.
“Is anyone here?” I asked Thor.
He shook his head from where he was standing in the doorway. I’d seen his broad face both jovial and ferocious, but the morose look he had on now was something new. A few dark auburn strands had slipped free from his short ponytail. They shifted against his square jaw as he worked it.
“We’ll figure out something. We’ll get out of here before it matters, Ari,” he said.
Something about the way he said my name made me wonder if I was the one who had to worry the most. The gods had at least some immortality on their side. Thor could put away a whole roast cow in one sitting, I’d bet, but how often did they need to eat?
Probably a lot less often than I did.
The itching dug deeper. A way out. We had to get out.
My mind leapt to the only place in the real Asgard I’d ever seen: the inside of Odin’s abandoned hall of warriors, Valhalla. At the back of its huge hearth lay a doorway that lead onto the branching path of Yggdrasil, the tree that connected Asgard to all the other realms. A thin hope wound through my chest. I grasped onto it.
“What about Yggdrasil?” I said. “We should see what Muninn’s done with that, right? Maybe there’s some way we can use it, or your memories of it, to leave.”
“It might be overly optimistic to anticipate a loophole that large,” Loki said, “but it can’t hurt to take a look. All part of the grand tour.”
He said it with his usual flippant tone and a flash of a grin, but he hung back to wait for me as the others headed down the hall. His hand came to rest lightly on my back between my shoulder blades, as if he knew the itch I was feeling.
Loki’s touch could be hot enough to spark flames under my skin—I’d gotten to experience that sensation to great effect a few mornings ago when we’d ended up in bed together—but he knew how to be careful too. The gentleness in that brush of his fingertips managed to heat me up anyway.
In theory, that hook-up had been a casual one-time thing. In practice… if I didn’t die of starvation in here, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to stop myself from going back for seconds. The trickster had already made it clear he was up for another round.
I just had to remember that no matter how appealing his company could be, he was also a trickster. I got the impression none of the other gods trusted him completely, and they’d known him a lot longer than I had.
We hustled back across the courtyard we’d arrived in to the gilded hall at the other side. Stepping through Valhalla’s broad doors, I felt abruptly more grounded, more present, than I had before.
Because Muninn had been able to draw on my memories as well as those of the gods when constructing the inside. The vacant tables, the spears and swords hung on the walls, the glitter of gold all around, the lingering smell of mead—it was all the way I’d seen it when I’d first arrived here using my valkyrie powers. If I’d been a proper valkyrie, back in the old days, I guessed this would have been my home.
Everything was the same, including the huge golden throne at the far end of the hall and the gaping fireplace beside it. I jogged past the tables to that and came to a halt.
There was no door in the back of the hearth the way there should have been. Not even the faintest hint of one. I ducked and crunched over the strewn coals anyway to shove at the scorched stone back, but the bricks didn’t budge.
“She didn’t even want to pretend to leave a way open,” Hod said. “I wonder if we could have made use of it if she had.”
“Move, Ari,” Thor said, his voice lower than usual. I clambered out and stepped back against one of the wooden benches.
“We don’t need a doorway to get through.” The thunder god’s brown eyes flashed. His lips pulling back over clenched teeth, he heaved his arm and hurled his hammer at the fireplace.
Mjolnir slammed into the stones. They shattered with an ear-splitting crash. The hammer rebounded into Thor’s hand, its metal surface gleaming. My heart leapt at the sight of the gaping blackness beyond the hole he’d broken open—for the two seconds before the stones jumped from the floor of the hearth and smoothed back into place.
“Damn it!” Thor growled out a few more curses in a language that wasn’t English and whipped Mjolnir forward with so much force my hair fluttered in the stirred breeze. The entire hearth burst in a shower of clattering stone shards. They jittered on the floor as soon as they’d hit it and sprang back up before the hammer’s handle had even found Thor’s palm.
Thor whirled around. “Muninn!” he bellowed. “Come and face us! This is a coward’s war you’re waging.” He flung the hammer at the tables. They smashed with a rain of splinters and melded back into place just as the hearth had. A growl escaped Thor’s throat. He hauled his hammer arm back again, the red flush of battle rage spreading from his cheeks down his neck.
“Don’t,” I said, even though my chest had clenched in sympathy. There were a lot of things I’d have liked to smash right now too. “Don’t let her goad you into wasting energy.”
“Don’t tell me what I can’t do,” Thor roared, spinning toward me.
I flinched at the fury in his voice, the wildness in his eyes—and his expression immediately faltered. His arm came down, the hammer dangling at his side. The fiery rage faded from his eyes as they softened.
“Ari. I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“It’s okay,” I said. I knew he hadn’t planned to attack me. His regret at that brief outburst showed as clearly as it had when he’d blocked one of my strikes a little too hard in our sparring. I forced my fingers to unclench from the side of the bench where they’d clamped themselves and stepped toward him. “We’re all frustrated. But obviously I was wrong. There’s no way out in here.”
He looked down at the hammer. “If I could just…”
Loki squeezed the broader god’s shoulder. “I’m afraid we’re not going to batter our way out of this one, old friend. At least not quite like that.”
Thor made a vague grumbling sound. There was still something haunted in his gaze when he met my eyes again.
I pushed myself forward toward the entrance. “Let’s go, then. If that didn’t work, then we try something else.” As long as we kept trying, then I didn’t have to think about what would happen if nothing worked.
The sun, if it even was the real sun, beamed down on us as we came out of the hall. Freya shielded her eyes, peering up at it. The vast sky didn’t hold a single cloud.
“A prison without a ceiling,” she said. “And all of us with the power to propel ourselves into flight. That seems a careless choice, don’t you think?”
Loki’s sly grin returned. “Shall we test the boundaries of this Asgard?”
“Not all of us,” she suggested. “But those who come to flying most naturally?”
She tugged her falcon cloak from the folds of her dress and flung it around her shoulders, contracting into the shape of a bird of prey as it hit her skin. Loki hopped into the air and glanced back at me.
“Are you coming, pixie?”
I hunched my shoulders, and my wings sprouted with the usual prickly burning through my back. The racerback tank I’d chosen exactly for that reason gave them free rein t
o unfurl. The silver-white feathers glinted at the edges of my vision.
A week or two ago, the weight of those appendages on my wiry frame had felt oppressive. Now, with a single flap and the rush of air over them, they sent a giddy tremor through me. They gave me more freedom, not less. Even if they also represented what I was now and therefore all the things I’d lost to become a valkyrie. My life, to begin with. A future in the world of fellow human beings. Petey.
No, I wasn’t thinking about that now. I hadn’t completely lost Petey, not unless I let Muninn and her prison win.
Loki loped up toward the sky, heading toward the high walls he’d said his wager had helped build. Freya-as-falcon swooped after him. I sprang into the air, and my wings swept me on upward. The cooler wind buffeted my face when I turned it toward the sun.
Maybe it could be this simple. Just fly out into whatever realm Muninn had constructed her cage of memories in. Shatter the illusion by breaking through its outer limits.
I soared higher, as if I could dive into the fathomless blue overhead like an ocean. The wind washed over me with the smells of metal and stone and the apple orchard to the south and… a faint aftertaste of ash that lingered on my tongue.
Ash?
Before I could wonder much about that, Loki gave a shout. The trickster had stopped against what looked like the open expanse of the sky. But as I drew up beside him with a few more flaps of my wings, I felt it too. An invisible pressure holding us down.
I strained my wings, but I couldn’t propel myself any higher. Scowling at the air above us, I swung a punch at it. The impact sent a spear of pain radiating down my arm as if I’d hit my funny bone hard.
Okay, not doing that again.
Freya’s falcon was circling beside us, unable to go any higher either. “Not that I have much hope,” Loki said, and beckoned me to follow him gliding farther across the city. Here and there, we tried to fly higher, only to be pressed back down. My skin started to crawl at the sensation of that vague unseen ceiling.