by P. N. Elrod
Mist sheathed her own sword and stroked the runes engraved on the hilt. She had no right to pride of any kind. She had but one purpose in Midgard, and it had been her only reason for living after everything she had known was gone. The fact that she had permitted herself a relationship with a man after so many centuries was an aberration, a reckless act of defiance against her fate.
And yet Eric had roused her from the despair of one who waits for a redemption that will never come. He was not afraid of a woman who shared his strength in body and will. He’d taught her to laugh again. And when she looked into Eric’s face—the face of a true warrior of the Norse, broad and handsome and fearless—she could not help but love him.
“I’m headed for the shower,” Eric said, catching her glance and giving her a sly look in return. He padded toward her, remarkably graceful and light on his feet, his naked chest streaked with sweat. He lifted a tendril of her hair, rolling it between his fingers. “Care to join me? I’ll wash your back if you’ll wash mine.”
His meaning could not be clearer, and she was eager enough to join him in bed after his long absence. But she dodged aside when he bent to kiss her.
“There’s something I have to take care of first,” she said, smiling to take the sting out of her rejection. “I’ll join you in a few minutes.”
Eric let her go and winked. “I’ll be waiting.” He strode away, and Mist was left wondering what was wrong with her.
But of course she knew. Over the past few months, truly happy for the first time since her voluntary exile, she had begun to acknowledge just how much she had changed. Little by little she had accepted the unthinkable: she had truly become a part of this world … the one world that had survived Ragnarök’s ice and fire. Midgard, a place without magic or gods who intervened in the affairs of men.
Of course, Midgard’s very survival was a puzzle in itself. The prophecies had foretold destruction and renewal, the return of Baldr from Niflheimr, a new beginning for gods and mankind in a paradise of peace and plenty.
No such paradise had ever arisen, for Midgard had remained untouched by the chaos of war between the Aesir and Loki’s children. War and famine and sorrow continued unbroken, and the Aesir were forgotten. No one, not even the sons of Odhinn himself, would come to claim the treasure she guarded. It had become obsolete. Like her.
With a sigh Mist walked out of the exercise room, past the blacksmith shop that occupied a third of the warehouse flat, and into her small kitchen. She could hear Eric singing in the shower. Geisl jumped up on the kitchen table and chirruped, demanding his rightful share of affection. Stjarna bounded up beside him, green-gold eyes far too intelligent for any ordinary cat.
Mist picked Stjarna up and stroked his dense gray fur. Breeders called them Norwegian Forest Cats now; a thousand years ago they had been sacred to the Lady.
So much lost.
“Do you think it’s the same with the others?” she asked him. “Have they given up, too?”
Stjarna licked her hand sympathetically. He didn’t know any more than she did, and she’d lost contact with the other valkyrjur decades ago. Only two other survirors of the final battle lived in San Francisco, and Vídarr and Váli had abandoned the old ways soon after she’d settled here. Mist had despised them for it then. Now, settled in a life with a man she had come to love—a life where her only “enemies” were muggers, petty thieves, and the occasional gangbanger—she finally understood.
Setting Stjarna back on the table, she gave Geisl a brief pat and walked down the short hall to the second bedroom. The rune-wards that guarded the door had never been disturbed except by Mist herself. She released them with a word, lifted the key on its chain from around her neck, and unlocked the door.
Two dozen swords, axes, daggers, and knives, each lovingly forged by her own hand, hung in oak-and-glass display cases built into the walls. Mist locked the door behind her, passed by the swords and axes, and went directly to the knife case, which held eight weapons with hand-carved grips and edges sharp enough to slice flesh like tissue. Each knife was unique, but no one of them appeared substantially different from any other except in subtle elements of design and embellishment.
The one she chose, like the others, was perfectly balanced for a hand that would never wield it in battle, a fine object that might have found a home in some collector’s case among his or her other most valued possessions. But when Mist closed her fingers around the grip, it sang. Sang of a past she could scarcely remember. An axe age, a sword age. An age of heroism and blood and doom.
Mist knew the magics. She knew the runes and spells and songs, though her skill was only enough to guard what she held in her hand. The chant she sang now came without thought, for she had sung it a hundred times. A thousand.
The knife shuddered in her fist. Then it began to grow, the blade widening, the grip lengthening inch by inch until it was as long as her arm, long enough to touch the floor and reach above her head.
Gungnir. The Swaying One, the spear that could not miss its mark. The magic weapon Odhinn had entrusted to her in the final moments of his life, as he and the Aesir had entrusted the other treasures to her sisters.
But Gungnir was hers to guard with her life. The rune-spells that protected it from enemy hands also hid its true shape, and would continue to do so until …
Mist closed her eyes. There was no “until.” The evil ones were no more than dust and ash. The old heroism was only a dream. Never again would she ride Gyllir on the battlefield and carry the bravest warriors to Valhöll. She was only an ordinary woman now, a forger of fine weapons, a teacher of lost arts.
It’s time. Time to bury the dead and begin to forget.
Realizing that she was gripping Gungnir’s shaft far too tightly for her own good, Mist relaxed her fingers, sang the spell, and watched the spear shrink to its former size. She hung it carefully back in the case, locked and warded the door, and went in search of Eric.
He was gone. A scribbled note lay on the kitchen table; he’d been called in to work and didn’t know when he’d be back. Sorry, the note read. See you tonight .
Shaking off her disappointment, Mist took a solitary shower, threw on a sweater, and went out to the garage. The sky was flawlessly blue, crisp and lovely, and Mist could smell the tart, briny scent of the bay half a mile to the east. Ordinarily she would take Muni into the city, but this time she had errands to run in South San Francisco, home of the only comprehensive ironworking supplier in the entire Bay Area.
Her Volvo was ancient and often unreliable, hardly the kind of transportation she had been accustomed to in her former life. It rumbled and complained like the great hound Garmr, chained at the gates of Gnipahellir until the final days.
But Garmr was gone, like Fenrisúlfr and Loki and the great serpent Jörmangandr, the giants and dwarves who had fought the Aesir and álfar. Not even shadows remained.
Hardly aware of the drive, Mist completed her errands, her trunk and backseat groaning under the weight of the supplies. When she returned to the warehouse, Eric was still gone. She unloaded the car, arranged the supplies neatly in the shop, and set herself to completing the custom sword she had been making for one of San Francisco’s more influential politicians, a man who had never fought a real battle in his entire life.
Mist paused to wipe the sweat from her forehead and stared into the glowing coals in the firepot. Even Eric, strong and skilled as he was, wore tailored suits and went to an office every day, his sphere one of endless documents, dull meetings, and deadening paperwork.
That was the world he lived in, the world she’d chosen for his sake. And hers.
Mist finished her work well after ten that night. Eric hadn’t returned or left a message on the cell phone he had insisted she buy several months ago. She found herself strangely restless in spite of her hard work at the forge. She fed the cats, put on her leather jacket, and left the house.
Dogpatch was far from quiet even at this time of night; it was becoming fash
ionable with young professionals who frequented the growing number of clubs, restaurants, and galleries tucked between warehouses and ancient Victorian cottages. It seemed even more crowded now that Christmas was coming; colored lights festooned the old houses and shops, and someone had set a decorated tree on the roof of the recording studio across the street. Mist bypassed the busier streets, heading north and west toward Potrero Hill and the Mission District.
It was a long walk to Golden Gate Park on the opposite side of the city. Mist reached it before midnight and entered the park from Arguello Boulevard. Unlike Dogpatch, the park was deserted except for the homeless and vagrants who spent their nights wrapped in tattered blankets under bushes, huddled against the damp winter chill. There would be no Christmas for them.
Christmas. Yule, as it had been known before the coming of the White Christ. The time when the barriers between the planes of gods and men were thinnest.
Mist shivered and laughed at herself. There were no barriers, and no one to cross them. The solstice was nothing but an excuse for celebration, an end to the darkness and the coming of a new year.
She crossed Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and headed toward the Arboretum. Fog began to settle over the nearest trees, turning the park into a ghostly realm of indistinct shapes and ominous silence.
The fog . Mist stopped, lifting her head to test the air. Fog like this came in the summer, when warm Pacific wind blew over the colder waters along the coast. A sudden, bitter chill nipped at Mist’s hands and face. There was nothing natural about this cold, or the icy vapor that stretched frigid fingers along the ground at her feet, slithering and hissing like the World Serpent bent on devouring everything in its path.
Disbelief shook Mist with jaws of iron. She knew the smell of the vapor and what it portended. But the jötunar , the frost giants, were as extinct as the great sloths or woolly mammoths that had walked the North American plains.
It wasn’t possible. She must be going mad. Too many years alone. Empty years, centuries, millennia, protecting a weapon that would never be used again.
A low, screeching howl pulled Mist out of her bitter reverie. A face emerged from the vapor, rising two heads above Mist’s generous height. Broad, heavy, filled with anger and fell purpose.
The cold eyes fixed on hers. The mouth, with its rows of teeth filed to points like daggers, gaped in a grin.
“ Heil , Odhinn’s girl,” the jötunn said, his voice deep enough to shake the very ground under Mist’s feet. “Or can it be that I am mistaken? Is this what the valkyrjur have become, mountless and dressed as thralls?”
Recovering her senses, Mist reached slowly inside her jacket for the knife she carried against her hip. It was too late now to draw the runes and burn them, and she had no song prepared that would work against a jötunn . She had never imagined she would need it.
“How are you called, giant?” she asked in the Old Tongue.
“I am Hrimgrimir,” the jötunn said. “I know you, Mist, once Chooser of the Dead.”
Mist shook her head, trying to dislodge the nightmare that had seized her mind and senses. Hrimgrimir was the frost giant who guarded the mouth of Niflheimr. His mistress, Hel herself, had perished at Ragnarök. Like the others, he should no longer exist.
“From whence have you come, Frost-Shrouded?” she asked. “From what dream of venom and darkness?”
Hrimgrimir laughed. “No dream, Sow’s bitch.” He blew out a foul, gusty breath. “A pity that you chose her side. You might have lived to see the new age.” He reared out of the vapor, huge hands curled, his power and giant-magic swirling round about him like the sleet he wore like ice-forged armor. “You will tell me where it is before you die.”
Mist felt his assault in body and soul, and her fingers slipped on the grip of her knife. She staggered back, pulled it out, and rubbed the runes engraved with such painstaking care by Odhinn himself. Like Gungnir, the knife began to stretch, to broaden, to become what it was meant to be.
“My kitten will silence your boasts,” she said into the howling wind that beat against her. She lifted Kettlingr and took a step forward, body bent, legs tensed to leap. A great ice-rimed hand swung toward her like a mallet meant to crush and shatter.
She struck in turn, swinging Kettlingr upward as the hand descended. The jötunn howled. Hot black blood splattered over her as her rune-kissed blade sank into flesh.
Mist jumped back, ready for another attack. It never came. The vapor fell like a curtain in front of her, a writhing wall of white maggots sheathed in ice. She swung again, but her sword whistled through empty air. The vapor began to recede as quickly as it had come, crackling angrily and leaving a crystalline film on the grass.
Shaken, Mist let the battle-fever drain from muscle and nerve and bone. A cold sweat bathed her forehead and glued her shirt to her back.
This was no nightmare. A jötunn had returned from the dead, bringing with him an evil no child of Mist’s adopted city could imagine.
Wiping her moist hand on the leg of her jeans, Mist sang Kettlingr back to its former size and sheathed the knife. The shock was nearly gone, yet the sense of unreality remained. Where had Hrimgrimir come from? No jötunn could walk the earth unnoticed for long. If there was no Jötunheimr, where could such a creature have found refuge from the final battle? Had she been drawn to the park tonight because she had felt his presence? Why had he tried to kill her?
Because no giant can meet a servant of the Aesir without enmity . But it was more than that. He’d known who she was. He’d been waiting for her .
“You will tell me where it is before you die.”
Mist stared blindly at the trail of blackened grass Hrimgrimir had left in the wake of his retreat. All the assumptions she had made that morning crumbled like bones scoured by the relentless assault of time and nature. Odhinn had been right. The ancient evil had come for the Swaying One.
She fought off a wave of panic and forced herself to concentrate. Hrimgrimir had threatened her, but he’d given up and fled in the middle of the duel. And what use would a lone survivor, evil or not, have for Gungnir when there were no battles left to fight?
“You might have lived to see the new age.”
Whatever he’d meant, a “new age” didn’t sound like something one jötunn could create on his own.
Moving quickly, Mist followed the giant’s trail, her boots crunching on the frozen grass. The park was still silent save for the wind in the treetops and the distant roar of a motorcycle on Lincoln Way. The fine hairs on the back of her neck stood as rigid as a newly forged blade. She had gone only a few hundred feet when the track disappeared completely. No trace of the jötunn remained.
And yet, as she stood still and opened her senses to the unseen, the feeling of something out of place began to grow again. Something different this time. Something that froze her blood as surely as the jötunn’s cruel wind.
From her jacket pocket she withdrew the small piece of driftwood she always carried, though she had never thought to use it for such a purpose. She was a valkyrja, not a sorceress . The magic might fail, or even turn against her.
Still, she had to try. She unsheathed the knife, held the driftwood against the trunk of the nearest tree, and began to carve. The runes sizzled as she cut them into the wood: , Thurisaz, Ansuz. As she completed the last, the wood twitched in her hand as if it were alive and seeking freedom.
She couldn’t grant it life, only fulfillment in the flames. She sheathed the knife, withdrew a lighter from her other pocket, and set fire to the driftwood.
In three breaths it was consumed. The runes, drawn in crimson strokes, hung disembodied in the air. Then they, too, faded, and Mist felt their power seep through her skin and pierce her heart.
Without hesitation she turned onto a narrow, dusty path that wandered among a dense grove of Monterey pines. Her search brought her to a heap of discarded clothing spread over the pine needles, half hidden under a clump of thick shrubbery.
Mist curs
ed. The magic had turned against her, mocking her meager skill. She’d wasted too much time already. She was about to leave when the pile of ragged garments heaved, and a hand, lean and pale, reached out from a tattered sleeve. She gripped her knife. A low groan emerged from the stinking mound. She smelled blood, plentiful but no longer fresh.
Against her better judgment, she knelt beside the man. She expected an indigent, perhaps injured by some thug who found beating up helpless vagrants a source of amusement. But the hand, encrusted with filth as it was, appeared unmarked by the daily struggle for food and shelter. It was long-fingered and elegant, more accustomed to lifting golden goblets of mead than sifting through rubbish in a Dumpster.
She started at the thought. Mead had been the most favored beverage of gods and heroes and elves. And dwarves, and giants, and all the others who had fought for the dark at Ragnarök.
But this one was no giant or dwarf. Hesitantly she touched then pulled aside the blankets. A tall, lean form emerged, dressed in shirt and trousers too short and wide for his body. He lay on his belly, legs sprawled, cheek pressed against the damp earth.
And his face …
Mist had seen its like countless times in Valhöll, laughing among the Aesir and the warriors, fairer to look upon than the sun. It had always been accepted that the most beautiful of all creatures were the ljólsálfar , the light-elves of Álfheimr, allies of the gods.
This man was not so beautiful. His face was a mask of gore and mud, one eye swollen shut and his nose broken. Yet his features could not be mistaken.
A jötunn had come to Midgard. Now one of the álfar had come as well, risen against all reason from the final death. It couldn’t be coincidence.
Mist touched the álfr’s shoulder. “Can you hear me?” she asked in the Old Tongue.
The elf stirred, his fingers digging into the soil. He made a sound that might have been a word, rough and raw. Mist had no water to give him, no spell to ease his pain. Álfar healed quickly; she had no choice but to let nature take its course.