The Strange Maid

by Tessa Gratton

  We sit on two camp chairs unfolded from the trunk of his SUV. Mine creaks as I lean toward him. “You came hunting to appease Baldur’s conscience.”

  “It lit him up when I suggested it. He wants to be sure the troll mother is gone, that they’re all gone.”

  “I’ve seen signs of her periodically, and I’ll find her.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She’s my destiny. The Valkyrie of the Tree will prove herself with a stone heart.” I say the riddle up at the stratified stripes of the cliff across the lake. Green lines of moss highlight the jagged nature of it, and the top is flat, bare of trees. “Hers. Her heart. It’s my answer and my blood price, all wrapped into a tidy package.”

  He grunts.

  “What?”

  Those big shoulders shrug. “I don’t trust tidy packages. Especially not when they come from the gods.”

  “What do you trust?” I ask sourly.

  “Not a what, a who.”

  “Yourself?”

  “Hardly.” There’s even a tinge of sarcasm in his voice.

  I wait.

  He says, “Baldur, and … her.”

  “Not the Lokiskin girl? Who’s a berserker now?”

  “That’s Vider.” Soren stands up. He goes to the pebbles at the edge of the lake and sifts through them until he finds one round and the size of an eye. Rolling it between his palms he says, “I trust that she would mean to do her best for me, but she serves Odin now and chose it.”

  Offended on my god’s behalf, I throw a balled-up MRE wrapper at him. It unfolds in the air and floats down to the grass harmlessly. “There are trustworthy Odinists, berserker.”

  Soren glances at me over his shoulder. “Most of you are selfish, or mad, or racist.”

  I jump to my feet. “I’m only one of those things, and it doesn’t make me untrustworthy.” I slap dirt off my hands. “Coming?”

  He gets up more slowly. “Which one?”

  I slam back inside my truck.

  Two hours before sunset we find a shattered cluster of rock that looks like a dead troll. It can’t be her because there’s no bone jewelry or any trace of the ivory tusks. I walk into the forest about a kilometer off the road, trying to smell her or see if she really came this way. It brings me to the edge of a narrow, long lake, where I find a deep claw print with two little birds bathing in it. As the sun sets, we drag our equipment out to it and make camp. If she’s sleeping at the bottom of the lake, she’ll rise with the moon and we’ll be ready.

  I breathe carefully around the thrill of excitement and tell Soren to go ahead and build a small fire. She won’t be scared away by it. Maybe it will be a beacon.

  We eat and then wait, alert into the night.

  Soren spends the time rubbing down his sword with an oilcloth. Its well-worn sheath leans against his thigh. The lobed pommel is plain metal, but etched into the crossguard are runes and small knot-work animals. The hilt is wrapped with something smooth and gray, and its overall design is from the Viker era, not as old as Unferth’s but old enough.

  “Was it your father’s?” I ask. A side note to the story of Baldur’s rescue revolved around Soren’s infamous father, a berserker who lost control of his madness and murdered ten or so people in a mall.

  Soren flicks his fingers against the hilt as one would pet a touchy cat. “Yes.”

  I bite my tongue to keep from interrogating further. My own father had ashy hair like mine, long fingers that helped me paint ponies and long elegant trees. I remember a cold smear as he drew color down my nose. “My parents died when I was young, too.”

  “My mother is still alive, somewhere.” His hands pause in their work; his eyes remain locked on the blade. “But I don’t have a family at all anymore.”

  “Loyalty ties us together as well as blood,” I offer. It’s a Freyan proverb, and I hope he doesn’t recognize it as such.

  The tattoo on his cheek curves as he smiles, a spear that bends but doesn’t break. “And your sword?” he asks. “It looks incredibly old.”

  “Ah, a ring-sword.” It’s my turn to glance away. Odd-eye, and rag me, I think, curses the only words I can seem to apply to all this longing and the ache of missing Unferth. Especially hunting with a partner again, all day I’ve thought of Ned, as we approached the base of the Lonely Shadow, as I repeated his words to myself, as I drove with the weight of his sword across my lap.

  I push off the rough ground and grab up Unferth’s sword. Facing Soren, I unsheathe it with a slick motion. The short old blade catches the gentle orange of the flames.

  Soren meets me on his feet. He’s slightly taller than me, and I step near enough I have to tilt my chin to see the rune in his eyes. “It belonged to my friend who died in the troll attack,” I say, no prologue to soften it. “He told me once the blade was unhallowed and so could kill monsters. That it had killed monsters before. But he left it with me, and she killed him.” I hold it out as a horrible blaze of anxiety turns my blood into nausea or ice or both. “I loved him.”

  Soren touches the tiny garnet and nudges the loose ring welded to the pommel but doesn’t lift it out of my hands. “Does the sword have a name?”

  “I don’t know.” I don’t know. “I thought I had forever to ask that sort of thing.”

  He slides his hand to cover mine so we’re holding the blade together.

  “His name was Ned,” I whisper, “which was the plainest name for him. I called him Unferth.”

  “Ned the Spiritless,” Soren says.

  We’re alone under low, dark clouds so even the stars cannot see us. Wind blows hard off the lake, makes the trees dance. Soren steps closer. I do the same until the hilt touches both of our shoulders.

  He says, “Her name was Astrid.”

  “Astrid.” For the slightest moment I know everything there ever was to know about her. But she slips away and there’s only Soren staring back at me.

  “Some days my greatest fear is that I will die and nobody will remember her name,” he adds hoarsely.

  I stretch my hand out and find his fingers. “I will.”

  With every breath his hand seems to grow hotter, and he flexes it but doesn’t pull away.

  Soren takes a breath deeper than any three of mine, then blows it out in a continuous stream. When he finishes, his temperature has dropped noticeably. “I had hoped maybe Fate was finished with me,” he says.

  Is that bitch ever really finished with us? Unferth whispers in my ear.

  FIFTEEN

  THE TROLL MOTHER doesn’t appear. I take my frustration out on a few of the trees and hunt with my nose to the ground around and around the lake until I find four tiny broken branches at her shoulder height that maybe she crushed in passing. If so, she definitely is headed for Lonely Shadow. I feel like I’m grasping at shadows.

  We abandon the trucks as near the foot of the mountain as we can get, load up supplies, and hike the entire circumference together, hunting her. If we didn’t travel so slowly, searching through the forest and spreads of granite scree, it would be strenuous. But stretched over five days it’s only exercise. Though we find a few marks of lesser trolls again—grass woven into the low branches of a yellow birch, the carcass of a red fox pulled apart and skinned—there’s nothing to show she was ever here.

  In my dreams she and I grapple together, both of us as large as the mountain, crushing lakes and towns as we wrestle. Unferth’s sword melds with my arm and my bones turn to steel, her skin becomes iron and we start massive fires when we spark together, when we clash. Soren wakes me up several mornings before dawn. I’m stained with sweat, but he doesn’t ask why. He silently hauls me into stretches and boxing warm-ups until my sweat is just from hard work.

  Overall, he’s a quiet companion, speaking little but to point out the dark backs of caribou moving across a distant field or ask if I want the grilled chicken MRE for dinner. At night I tell him stories about the Vinland I knew, the Summerlings and Unferth, the festival, and even the massacre
itself. I talk about the Valkyrie, about how different they all are but that together they’re the voice of Odin. I tell him about climbing the Tree and meeting the god of the hanged, and he tells me of his own encounter with Odin, how everyone believes the boon he asked was to be allowed to serve Baldur as a berserker, but really he begged not to forget Astrid’s name. I learn his mom was born in Baja California and is a U.S. citizen, but her parents were Savaiian, that she was Lokiskin and met his dad while working where he was stationed. He learns how my parents met at a Freyan leadership camp but died far away in Guathemala.

  We discuss the riddle, and I tell him what the troll mother said, that it makes me chill with fear but also hope, because I’m certain we’ll meet again. Soren says there must be more to the riddle’s answer than only presenting a heart of stone to the Death Hall, that there will be a catch or a trick because Odin Alfather does nothing without a catch.

  I ask him why he dedicated himself to Baldur, and he only shrugs and says, “When you meet him, you’ll know.”

  “A lot of people meet him and don’t change their dedication to him.”

  “I …” Soren drags the pause out, not to avoid me, I think, but because he’s never put it into words before. “Baldur is the first god I’ve ever believed in.” He’s quick to add, “I know they all exist—there’s nothing to believe in that way—but I mean that I know he cares what happens to me, and that he’s good. He believes in me, and none of the rest of them do.”

  Hanging behind his words is the question: Does Odin believe in you?

  It’s such a light word, a gentle word: to have confidence in, to trust in. I put my fingers over my heart. “When my parents died, I felt this desperate longing, this growth in my heart that made me want to scream and drag others behind me until they felt that scream in their own hearts. I still feel it, and so does the Alfather. He recognized it in me, and instead of saying I was too wild or wrong he embraced it. He’s the god who not only lets me need to feel the troll mother’s blood between my fingers; he encourages it. The god of the hanged understands how violence is part of life. Creation itself is an act of violence, and everything I do is violent.”

  Even your way of kissing, Unferth whispers.

  “So I believe in that. And Odin does, too. We want the same thing. That makes us allies.”

  “Dangerous ones,” Soren says.

  “Danger is necessary to life.”

  “If you can contain it, control it.”

  “Ride it; use it! Dance with it! You can’t control life, Soren. That’s what people try to do with troll walls and seat belts; it’s what the Valkyrie do with their rules and costumes, but you can’t. Horrible things still happen. Trolls attack; people die. People who shouldn’t.” My throat tightens and I realize I was near yelling.

  Soren doesn’t try to comfort me. The tiny fire casts him in bronze and earthy tones, like he’s a statue. A calcified hill troll.

  I look away. I want Unferth here so badly to argue on Soren’s side, to cut me down with a well-placed barb, to twist what I say into a riddle so I’ll spend hours delving deeper into myself. That’s what he did. He drove me deeper.

  Ned Unferth believed in me.

  It’s no use. The day we reach the trailhead, and there’s the lightning-scoured spruce as proof we’ve gone all the way around, I take my backpack off and fling it to the ground with a cry. I pick up a rock and throw it as hard as I can toward the mountain. It clatters through branches and lands softly, rolling several paces. I throw another and another.

  Soren puts a hand on my shoulder and I drop the last rock. Sunlight pounds down on us, warm enough to actually feel. “How am I supposed to find her? Where am I supposed to go next?” I yell, tossing out my arms.

  “The funerals are tomorrow night,” Soren says.

  “What?”

  “It’s seven days since we met, which was a Moonsday, so the funerals are tomorrow night. Back at your Cove.”

  I blow a hard breath. I don’t want to go. I don’t want to watch the town burn again, even if it’s in pyres.

  But a Valkyrie does not balk at death.

  We arrive as the sun is falling. There are media vans and death priests everywhere. I recognize logos from Freyan volunteer organizations from all up the eastern coast of the States. Soren is even more interested than I am in avoiding anybody with a camera. Men and women come from across the country; half of Congress is here, kings and princes, representatives from every priesthood, reporters, and the far-flung families of the dead. Baldur the Beautiful is here, Freyr the Satisfied with his endless entourage, and two Valkyrie: Siri of the Ice, whose region we’re in, and Precia, the Valkyrie of the South, where Rome and Jesca Summerling were born.

  I’m glad I packed my last wool dress from the tower. It’s dark green and falls to my knees. A red apron ties over it, cinching my waist and pinned at my shoulders with abalone shells. Chains of fake gold line the collar and wrists. I pull on Jesca’s silver rings and wear both my seax and Unferth’s sword. I braid tiny ropes to either side of my face and let the rest of my hair fall down my back. I use ash to darken my eyes with thick lines, like a mask, and dab it onto my mouth, too.

  It’s as if I think all this preparation and costume will help me look my sisters in the eye. They surely know what I’ve done, since even Soren had heard the story, and maybe that commander on the military base did get around to calling one of the Death Halls.

  We join the mourners, and one look at either of us parts the next section of the crowd until a path arrows us toward the pavilion. It’s set up in the valley beside the razed festival site, a gilded stage hung with prayer flags and flowers flown in from some tropical greenhouse. It clashes dreadfully with the moor, especially as the sun sets and our island goes hard and harsh with shadows, but the pavilion lights up in a blaze. There are fourteen pyres arranged so that when lit they will become a circle of fire like Freya’s brisinga necklace. My stomach twists at the pomp. This is the part of being a Valkyrie I always hated. The decorations, the ceremony, the gilded prettiness of everything. I would prefer to light the fires and scream. Make a sacrifice, yell gruesome poetry, to remind the mourners death is all we truly have in common.

  Rathi speaks at the podium in a red three-piece suit, pink starburst tie pinned with a horse brooch, his hair perfectly slicked back and his false green eyes bright. He welcomes everyone in a shining voice. Behind him stands Siri of the Ice, her thin lips in a line when she sees me; she flicks her fingers lightly against Precia’s elbow. There’s Baldur the Beautiful, nearly impossible to look at in person, a golden beach bum in jeans and a loose white coat, tears caught like stars in his night-purple eyes. And my parents’ own Freyr the Satisfied, taller than his cousin-god, in old-fashioned finery: purple velvet jacket and hose to show off his well-shaped legs, fur boots, a six-hundred-year-old sword crusted with gems, and an actual crown. There are congressmen and the president’s lawspeaker, a death priest in a silver raven mask, five wolf-guards with their faces tattooed black, attendants in gray and green cowls holding incense and torches at every corner of the pavilion.

  The crowd waits in a half circle, the first fifty rows in wooden folding chairs, the rest arrayed among the fourteen pyres. I reach the end of one aisle, Soren at my side.

  “Signy!” cries Peachtree the clown from across the crescent of empty moor between dais and crowd. She waves an arm as Rathi falls silent and everyone turns to me. I keep my eyes on Peachtree, on the two sequins melted onto her cheek from the fires of the attack.

  Murmuring breaks out and Rathi steps around the podium. “Signy,” he says, only loud enough for those of us near to hear. He holds out his hand for me to take, to pull me up with him, but I shake my head.

  “I am only here to grieve,” I call loudly. “To dance with the song of crackling flames.”

  My wish-brother hesitates and then nods. He goes back to his welcome speech and ends with Rome Summerling’s favorite prayer. When he looks at me I mouth the words wi
th him. It loosens the pain curled tight around his eyes.

  Into the silence after his invocation, drums beat a sedate, gloomy rhythm, and a team of flautists raise the hairs on my neck with their ghostly accompaniment.

  Precia and Siri step forward to opposite ends of the pavilion. The Valkyrie of the Ice is tall and lean, in a white feather cape and an impractical skirt of chain mail. Beside her the young Valkyrie of the South wears a leather and fur coat, her dark hair coiffed and her eyes dangerous. They are both so elegant, so powerful in every smooth gesture, and together they lift their voices in a song of mourning.

  It’s controlled, synchronized. Not a word out of place, not a gesture unpracticed. So unlike the wild splash of death, the frenetic beating of my heart as I struggled and fought to save my family. Not desperate, not thick and bloody.

  This is only a performance.

  Such a lowly thing for a Valkyrie to do, Ned told me when I painted myself up for the festival.

  I feel so empty.

  We don’t even have his body to burn.

  The Valkyrie fall silent and put their arms around each other like sisters.

  Freyr the Satisfied holds out his hands. He draws Rathi forward with him, and from here I can see the shudder as my brother closes his eyes. The god is lovely and tall, as they all must be, and charisma flares in the corner of his smile, in the light way he flirts with the audience even as his words are sad. He offers condolences, and those of his twin sister, Freya the Witch, who promised him our island would never be forgotten in any of the strands of fate.

  Freyr then tells us a story of meeting Rome Summerling once, over a decade ago; his words blur in my ears, but everyone around me laughs, gently at first, then uproariously. Even Rathi smiles widely and puts his hands together over his heart to bow to the god of joy.