The Strange Maid

by Tessa Gratton

  BOOKS BY TESSA GRATTON

  THE BLOOD JOURNALS

  Blood Magic

  The Blood Keeper

  THE UNITED STATES OF ASGARD

  The Lost Sun

  The Strange Maid

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2014 by Tessa Gratton

  Jacket art: photograph of girl copyright © by Lauren Bates/Flickr Select/Getty Images; photograph of glaciers copyright © by Ron Bambridge/OJO Images/Getty Images

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  “The Creation Story,” from The Woman Who Fell from the Sky by Joy Harjo, copyright © 1994 by Joy Harjo. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gratton, Tessa.

  The strange maid / Tessa Gratton. —First edition.

  pages cm. — (The United States of Asgard; bk. 2)

  Summary: “In order to become one of Odin Alfather’s Valkyrie, Signy Valborn must solve a riddle. With the help of Ned the Spiritless and Soren Bearstar, Signy embarks on a journey in search of her destiny.” —Provided by publisher

  ISBN 978-0-307-97751-9 (trade) — ISBN 978-0-307-97753-3 (ebook)

  [1. Fate and fatalism—Fiction. 2. Gods—Fiction. 3. Prophets—Fiction.

  4. Valkyries (Norse mythology)—Fiction. 5. Mythology, Norse—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.G77215bStr 2014 [Fic]—dc23 2013039568

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  To Catherine,

  the first of our next generation

  You’re strong, smart, and loud:

  my favorite things, and Signy’s, too.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Child Valkyrie

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The Valkyrie of the Tree

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I’m not afraid of love

  or its consequence of light.

  …

  It’s not easy to say this

  or anything when my entrails

  dangle between paradise

  and fear.

  —Joy Harjo

  Don’t you know people

  write songs about girls like you?

  —The Naked and Famous

  THE CHILD VALKYRIE

  I was born under a frenzied star, so our poets would say. Which meant only that I was wild and loud as a child, always running off, crying or laughing at nothing my parents could see.

  But when I was seven years old, I went truly mad.

  It was winter, a week after my birthday, and my parents had been dead for a month. Shot down far away from me, with nothing to protect them but prayers and hymnals, neither of which could stop bullets. A bruise ached on my chest over my heart where I pressed my fists every morning, every night, and all through the funeral service staring at the empty pyre, for we had no bodies to burn. I had to hold in the wail of grief beating through my blood because the god my family served did not scream.

  My adoptive parents, old friends of the family and fellow devotees of Freyr, the god of family, wealth, and joy, thought a trip to the New World Tree might help me. It might calm the fury that kept tears in my eyes when I demanded, “Why did they die? Why did our god let them die?”

  “You’ll see,” said my wish-father, wiping tears from my face even as they gathered in his. “The Tree will show you, for it connects life and death and all the nine worlds together.”

  The Tree’s garden was still and claustrophobic, a frozen park surrounded by high brick walls and a gate of wrought iron. A heart of nature in the center of Philadelphia. It is said that if you climb high enough among the branches you will find a road to Asgard, the home of the gods.

  Freyr’s home. He was responsible for their deaths. I would make him answer for it.

  I shucked off my coat and squeezed between two iron rails before my wish-family noticed, though my wish-brother, Rathi, caught the hem of my dress in his fingers and hissed my name. I ignored the clamor behind me; I was so hot, so burning with anger, my feet could melt the frost on the grass as I ran.

  The massive Tree rose out of the ground, forbidding as a giant’s tower, and thick snaking roots wove out in all directions, leaping and diving through the earth like sea monsters. Elf-lights strung through the layers of canopy cast a pale, broken glow as I toed off my shoes and dug my hands into the trunk’s ropy bark. I climbed.

  My fingernails broke and my feet scraped raw as I scrambled higher up the trunk. I had little time before the holy gardeners, the death priests, came after me, pulled me down, and threw me out.

  I reached the first branch and kept climbing. Higher, harder, until my entire world was narrow leaves and branches, the pinprick surprise of elf-lights wound through the darkness.

  The branches thinned; I found birds’ nests and squirrel hollows, old ribbons and popped balloons. Holiday streamers smeared like old trash. Dead memories that had drifted down from the sky to be caught in the leaves of the New World Tree.

  Wind blew, snarling my braids and shaking the limbs that I clutched. When I tilted my head to peer through the upper branches I saw only stars.

  There was no magical bridge. No gateway to heaven or Hel or the Alfather’s eternal battlefield. It was a lie. As Freyr the Satisfied was a lie.

  I gritted my teeth and rubbed my sticky face, but still could not bawl. I grabbed twigs and broke them; I ripped leaves off the Tree and threw them away. They tumbled and fluttered down. Only leaves.

  “What has this Tree ever done to you, little raven?”

  Surprise nearly spilled me after the leaves, but I caught myself in the web of branches. Below me a man stood on a thick branch, legs spread and arms akimbo, as if the branch were solid ground. He wore a black uniform like a berserk warrior, and though his beard was blond, sword-straight silver hair fell around his shoulders.

  One of his eyes shimmered like a pearl.

  Odin! My mouth fell open. The Alfather. God of madness and sacrifice and war. The Alfather, who once, when the world was still new, climbed the Old World Tree and hung on its windswept branches for ni
ne nights and nine days and stabbed a spear into his side until the Tree offered up its wisdom to him.

  I struggled to speak. “The Tree is … a lie. There is no road to Asgard here.”

  “So you tear it to pieces.” Odin peered at me with his pearly eye, blind with madness and wisdom. With it he could see through me and into my bruised heart, to my wails and screams that wanted to be free.

  Anger flashed through me: he could have seen my parents’ hearts if he’d looked. “You didn’t save them, either,” I whispered.

  The god of the hanged smiled and stepped up onto the next branch, which bent under the weight of his scuffed boots. “Easy things are never worthwhile,” he said, as if I’d asked a question.

  “This isn’t easy!”

  “True. But sacrifice,” he said, with his face near mine, all rough crags that made him old as a mountain, and the spinning vortex of his blind eye, “sacrifice is the most worthwhile thing in all the nine worlds.”

  “My parents didn’t sacrifice; they died!” Fury felt good, and the heat of it dried my tears.

  “Their death was the sacrifice required to bring you to me. For if they had not died, you would not be in this Tree. And I have waited for one such as you.”

  Waited? For me?

  A black shadow landed hard beside my head, the leaves whispering like rain; it was a raven the size of a dog, with one twisted, empty eye socket and one luminous white eye. Memory, or Thought—one of Odin’s creatures I’d seen on TV—scored bark off the limb with her claws. She tilted her head and croaked my name. “Signy!”

  Her brother landed behind me and slapped his wings against my back and head. “Let go—let go—let go—” he cried.

  I batted against the raven’s assault and slipped off my branch. The Alfather caught me. “Daughter,” he said.

  His voice was hot, like the breath of my parents’ funeral pyre, raising elf-kisses on my arms and sweat on my spine. And I thought, The Alfather’s weapons are more potent than prayers and hymnals. I wrapped my arms around his neck.

  Odin held me against him for a moment, let me sink into his scent of wood smoke and tinny blood. I could hear his heartbeat, a racing rhythm like hoofbeats.

  He set me against the trunk of the Tree, then straddled the branch before me like a very large boy. He brushed teary strands of hair off my face with gentle, callused fingers.

  “You were waiting for me?” I whispered.

  “So it seems” was his answer. The ravens clucked above us.

  “What for?”

  “To give you a new name, little raven.”

  “I have a name. I’m Signy Loring.”

  Memory cackled again, and her brother Thought with her. In their twin blind eyes a thing shifted: the past or the future, mischief or wisdom.

  Odin tilted his head exactly like the ravens. “Is there any name in all the nine worlds that survives an encounter with the World Tree?”

  The god of madness was riddling with me, and I had never been good at riddles. “Yours?” I guessed.

  “Not mine.” He shook his head; his whirlwind eye spun.

  I pressed my back into the trunk, letting its roughness be fire on my spine. “What good would a new name do me?”

  The god of the hanged laughed. It was a wild laugh, a laugh like an avalanche, deeper than the World Snake’s gullet and wider than the space between stars. It shook my bones and stopped my pulse, but I held my chin up because I did not know what else to do.

  “You climb my Tree, tear up its leaves, throw rage in my eye, and still you bargain with me! You are my darling Hrafnling reborn!” he crowed. Memory and Thought hopped to branches beside him. They chuckled rough and raw, ruffling their oily feathers.

  Odin leaned nearer. “Be mine, little raven. My Valkyrie, my Death Chooser. Be my Valkyrie of the Tree from now until you die.”

  I gasped. The Valkyrie were his handmaidens; mortal yet famous, powerful, and beautiful. They were never afraid. They would never die halfway around the world, never leave loved ones behind.

  “A new name, a new destiny to better fit the desires and strengths with which you were born,” the Alfather tempted, offering his hand.

  I gave him mine. “Yes!”

  His face was as rugged as the bark of the Tree when he said, “So I name you—Signy Valborn.” He kissed my palm. “My Valkyrie, newly born into death.”

  My hand pinched and burned. I snatched it back.

  Pink and raw against my skin was a binding rune, built of other runes woven together to create a new meaning. I could not read it, for I did not know the runes then. But it seemed to flicker with fire as I studied it, to shift and wiggle. Tiny tendrils of pain shot up my fingers and down my wrist, twining through my blood.

  Wind whipped up around us, bending the leaves and branches into a frenzy. Through it I heard the Tree whispering. While the Alfather held tight to my shoulders and his ravens cackled and screamed, the Tree hissed its ancient secrets in my ears—the secret wisdom, the ancient runes, folding into my memory and cutting through my bones like hot barbed wire.

  Before I fell down through the branches of the New World Tree, I heard his booming laugh. “Welcome, Valkyrie of the Tree!”

  ONE

  I TELL HIM my name and brace for the inevitable rejection.

  The pawnbroker blinks slowly, his long false eyelashes like raven wings. Dull fluorescent lights do his hard face no favors, and he’s sweating in his flannel button-up, utterly masculine and disapproving in every way but those lashes. He glances again at the knife waiting on the counter between us, then gives me a long look before saying, “You don’t look like a Valkyrie.”

  Rag you, I want to spit at him, but he’s my last resort if I want a private room for shelter from the storm rolling in over Lake Mishigam even as we speak. It’ll be sleet and frigid wind, and I’ll be ragged myself if I go back to the Lokiskin orphan house tonight. I’d been managing my anonymity nicely until one of the girls saw the binding rune on my palm this morning. They’ve certainly been gossiping about Signy Valborn, failed Valkyrie, all afternoon.

  Couldn’t you solve a simple riddle? the oldest of them mocked, glad to discover some power over me.

  May your guts knot like birthday ribbons, I snapped at her before storming out.

  I could show the rune scar to this broker now, too, but the idea of having to prove my word offends me. I only say, “Believe me or not, this blade is worth more than your life.”

  I flash as bright a smile as I can to soften the accusation.

  He grunts. “If that’s so, why not sell it to a dealer or weaponsmith?”

  I don’t answer.

  “You thought I wouldn’t want the registration,” he guesses.

  “Your kind usually don’t.” I wave my fingers at his false lashes. He’s Lokiskin, by their proof: gender-blending is a telltale sign of the Shifter’s patronage. So is a less-than-ethical business practice.

  “I run a legit business, little girl.”

  I sneer at the metal shelving and clusters of pawned goods for sale. Televisions and game consoles, old VHS tapes, fancy dishes, furniture, lawn equipment, dusty books, altar candles and mismatched rune sets, bear and horse idols and mead horns. And behind the counter in locked glass cases: jewelry, daggers, swords, spears, and guns. None of them as fine as the knife I’ve offered.

  “I didn’t steal it,” I say.

  We both study my seax. The single-edge broken-back knife is twice as long as my hand, with Odin’s runes etched along the spine, a hilt of smooth troll ivory, and a star of tiny death-colored emeralds embedded at the bolster. The brown leather scabbard sits beside it on the counter, tooled with my surname, Valborn, in runic calligraphy.

  “Even if you are who you say you are,” the broker says gently, “you should’ve known to bring registration for a piece like this.”

  It’s the tone that stiffens my spine. “I wouldn’t have this much trouble selling it in Kansa or Tejas!”

  “Then
scoot on down to Kansa or Tejas with your unregistered weapon. I won’t have it in the shadow of the holy Death Hall.”

  It’s just behind my teeth to spit out, It was a gift from the Valkyrie who rules from that very Death Hall, but what’s the point? I snatch the seax and snap it into the scabbard, curse his mother Loki, and shove back out into the icy street.

  The scabbard fits through my belt, snuggled comfortably against my ribs, and a knot in my shoulders relaxes just to have it back where it belongs. I wonder bitterly if I chose this shop so near the temple of the Valkyrie of the Lakes because some part of me knew I could pretend to have tried to pawn it but not truly worry that I’d lose it.

  I caress the ivory hilt, then shut my old red coat around myself. It’s bulky from stuffed pockets and makes me look twice as wide as I am. Though worn these days and ragged at the hem, other than my boots it’s the last vestige of my former glory. Soon I’ll have to trade it for something without a torn lining.

  I braid my long hair with stiff fingers and wind it around my neck like a scarf before hunching into the wind off the lake.

  Skyscrapers do little to block the cold. Their windows reflect the steely clouds and remind me Chicagland is closed to me. Cars crawl past as the evening drops, and my shoulders knock into hurrying commuters. If they knew that I’m what’s left of that boisterous, vivid little girl, the Child Valkyrie, if they noticed my rune scar, would they think the same thing? How hard is it to solve a single riddle? Would they study me with the same pity as was in the eyes of that cursed Lokiskin?

  They think the riddle is the source of all my problems, when really it was just the final straw.

  The dark orange and brown of autumn trees from the distant lakefront park snatch my attention. Splashes of violence between modern steel office buildings. I cross Roosevelt toward the L station; I can see the distant dome of the Death Hall against the gray sky.

  My feet slow.

  I could stay warm in the hall’s public sanctuary tonight, tucked in among the mourners and lost warriors, the devout Odinists and poets who seek out the Death Hall to pray.

  The smell of mint and evergreen and wax would lull me; the candlelight, the creak of pews send me to sleep. There used to be green cushions tied to the seats that would make a soft bed. The death priests would allow it, and the wolf-guards, even if they came close, might not recognize my new thin lips and short fingernails, or my eyes, because they’re bigger now that I’ve lost the round pink cheeks of girlhood. I’d be home.