“Do you ever get the feeling she’s like a little adult in her head?” Loki asked Angrboda one night at the beginning of winter as they watched their daughter sleep.
“How so?” Angrboda asked.
“She seems frustrated all the time. Like she already wants to be independent and is mad that she’s too little.”
“Perhaps that’s normal for babies. Even for one like ours.”
“She also stopped biting you since that time she made you bleed when she was nursing. And she cried because she was sorry she hurt you. Now she only chews on that wolf I made her. It’s like she knew. And she stays still when you put that green stuff on her legs—what sort of baby stays still?”
By midwinter, Hel was sitting up by herself, as her parents discovered one night when they finished making love in front of the fire and turned to find her sitting up in her pile of furs. Hel was staring at them like they had both lost their minds, dangling her drool-saturated wolf figurine from her mouth in confusion. Loki and Angrboda looked at each other, then back at Hel, who gave a pointed burble.
By the end of winter, Hel was crawling, and they spent half their days chasing her around the cave. They took to keeping her in the sling when they ventured outside so she wouldn’t crawl away and get lost in the thick, gnarled foliage—which, to Angrboda’s pleasure, was once again greener this spring than it had been the year before.
It was near the end of spring that Angrboda discovered she was again with child, and this time, she didn’t have to wait until six months into her pregnancy to share the news with Loki. It received a lukewarm reception from him, but she was too preoccupied with Hel to think much about it.
“When,” said Skadi, when she came by at the beginning of summer and once again noticed Angrboda’s condition regardless of its subtlety, “do I get to cut off your husband’s balls and feed them to your goats?”
“I should like to have a few more children by him yet,” Angrboda replied primly as she arranged her clay pots of potions in a box for Skadi. “Then he’s all yours.”
Skadi hoisted Hel, now a year old, onto her lap. “Honestly, are you sure you’re not just conceiving these children yourself?”
“He was here during the winter.”
“Prove it,” said Skadi, ever suspicious.
“Her first word was ‘Dada,’ ” Angrboda said, nodding at her daughter. Hel had perked up at “Dada” and looked toward the door, then seemed disappointed when Loki didn’t enter.
“Huh,” said Skadi. She looked angry all of a sudden and held Hel closer, for she’d grown quite fond of the child during her visits. “This poor little girl. Maybe I should stick around until he gets here and then cut his balls off. Shouldn’t I, little one?”
“I’d rather you didn’t.” Angrboda passed the box over to her. “I know how he is, that’s all. We’re fine without him.”
“I wish you had conceived this child yourself,” Skadi muttered, reluctantly trading Hel for the box of potions. “It’s one thing to be without a father entirely and to not know what one is missing—which, in your situation, wouldn’t be much—but to have one who only shows up at his own pleasure? And with Hel so attached to him!”
“Hel knows this is the way things are. We’re fine.”
Skadi got up and started toward the door, then stopped and turned. “Will you promise me something?”
“That depends.”
“Promise me,” said Skadi, carefully, “that you’re not just letting him come around to use you and then leave.”
Angrboda frowned and her heart rate jumped a bit at her friend’s words; it seemed old anxieties died hard. “Do you really think I would do that?”
“It seems to me you would, because you already do.”
“That is not the case,” Angrboda said, her tone icy. “I promise.”
Skadi shook her head, glowering. “It’s not something I wanted to touch upon—I knew it would make you angry. But perhaps you should consider directing your anger at this husband of yours and not at me.”
“He wasn’t the one who suggested what Gerd did on the day she and I met each other, and what you suggested just now.”
“He’s the one who’s doing this to you, if it’s as you say,” Skadi snapped. “Is he truly your husband, or are you just his plaything?”
“You have officially worn out your welcome for today, my friend,” Angrboda said coldly and shifted Hel in her arms. “You don’t know how it is between us. Those are matters for a husband and wife to know, and no one else’s business.”
“Those matters become my business when they compromise your well-being,” Skadi shot back, and then added acidly, “my friend.”
“My well-being is not being compromised. As such, it is not your business.”
“I apologize for my concern, then. Obviously I had nothing to worry about.” Skadi straightened, and her voice took on a businesslike quality. “Thank you for your hospitality. I shall be back soon with the goods you requested. Have more of the potions ready by then.”
Then Skadi left and slammed the door behind her. Hel glanced up and gave her mother a deadpan look, such that Angrboda was reminded utterly of herself.
“Mah,” Hel said. It was a sound she had learned from the goats, but she somehow managed to make it sound disapproving.
“What?” Angrboda said, defensive.
“Mah, mah, mah.”
“She was out of line!”
Hel stuck the wolf figurine back in her mouth and said no more on the subject. Angrboda got the feeling that she’d just lost an argument to an infant, and oddly enough she wasn’t even surprised about it.
This child was Loki’s, too, after all.
* * *
• • •
It was not until midautumn that Angrboda exchanged more than just civil pleasantries with Skadi, when the latter started coming by more frequently with winter supplies. Skadi looked more troubled every time they met, until Angrboda finally had to ask why, exactly, this was.
“You conceived in the spring, did you not?” Skadi said.
“Late spring, yes. And?”
“And are you sure the child is alive in there? You don’t look much bigger than you did a few months ago.”
“I can feel his heart beating. He’s alive.”
“So you know it’s a boy, then?”
Angrboda just shrugged.
Loki showed up again at the beginning of winter, right before the first heavy snowfall, and expressed the same sort of confusion Skadi had. He was soon distracted by Hel, though, and said no more to Angrboda about it.
At this point, Angrboda was completely convinced that Hel understood every single word uttered to her. And when Hel spoke these days, it was not in random syllables but in complete sentences—the first of which was, of course, an inquiry as to her father’s whereabouts. This led Angrboda to give her a simplified explanation about Asgard and the Aesir, to which Hel responded by sticking her wolf figurine back in her mouth and, quite literally, chewing it over.
Angrboda had a feeling that Hel had asked simply for the sake of asking—she always talked absently to her daughter, mostly for lack of anyone else to talk to, so Hel must have known all about where Loki was. But after the child had asked her directly, Angrboda started speaking to Hel more and more, and Hel, for her part, just gave her an unblinking stare. There was a certain satisfaction to this silence, though, as if Hel were pleased that her mother was speaking to her as she would a grown-up.
This changed whenever her father came around, at which point Hel instantly reverted back into a toddler, clinging and wailing at Loki’s heels. Such behavior drove Angrboda mad, and it tried her patience further that they were all cooped up together for the winter.
For the first time, she wished he would just leave.
“She’s getting too big for that sling,” Ang
rboda told Loki one day when he was carrying Hel around in it for absolutely no reason other than because he wanted to. “She hasn’t let me carry her in it since she started walking.”
“That’s because she likes me better. Right, Hel?”
Hel nodded enthusiastically.
“There you have it.”
Angrboda gave her daughter a look. Hel blinked innocently and chewed on her wolf figurine. It now seemed the only time Angrboda even got to touch the baby was when she nursed her, which was less and less now, as Hel had long been nibbling on whatever Angrboda ate. And now Hel had taken to whining at her father for food at mealtimes.
“Stop feeding her that,” Angrboda snapped at Loki as he made for the pot of honey she kept hidden in one of her chests. She knew exactly what he was up to, for Hel had refused her rabbit stew—as she often did when she knew she could get away with it, which was when Loki showed up with fresh apples and oatcakes he’d brought on his way from Asgard.
“But she loves it!” Loki protested as he sat back down at the table and set the clay honeypot down next to his own dinner. He extracted a linen-wrapped bundle of oatcakes from his haversack and plopped them into a shallow wooden bowl for Hel. Beside him, Hel licked her lips, her little dead feet swinging merrily from the bench as she watched him dribble the cakes with honey.
“She’ll eat little else if you keep feeding her such things,” Angrboda said. “And she gets so excited afterward that she doesn’t sleep.”
Hel leered at her mother and munched on a slice of apple Loki had cut up for her. Then she eagerly observed her father preparing her special dinner, and her eyes grew enormous with delight when Loki set the bowl down in front of her. By the time she had finished, her face, hands, and body were sticky with honey.
“Come now, don’t you ever feed her?” Loki teased his wife.
Later on, Angrboda was the one who had to wash sticky layers of honey from an excitable toddler, who screeched for so long that she began to turn blue. It had happened several times before that Hel would overexert herself in this way when she became furious or agitated, but she bounced back fairly quickly and showed no other signs of illness, so Angrboda did not worry too much about it.
Late one winter night, when Loki had put Hel in her little nest of furs on the bed—as now, when he was around, he was the only one allowed to put her to sleep—he came over to where Angrboda was sitting on her chair in front of the fire. He sat on her lap as a child would, and when she rolled her eyes, he looked concerned that she wasn’t playing along with whatever it was he had in mind.
“Are you angry with me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You should put her to sleep when I tell you to put her to sleep.”
“Oh, is that all?”
“Is that all? It’s important!”
“She wasn’t tired!”
“She wasn’t tired because you keep pestering her and getting her excited. We have a routine. You’re ruining it. You don’t listen to me.”
Loki’s voice grew cold. “If I wanted to be nagged, I would go back to Asgard and spend five minutes with any given person.”
“Then go back to Asgard, if it’s so much like here. Though I fail to see how that’s even remotely possible, Asgard being the center of the universe and Ironwood being a half-dead forest at the edge of nowhere.”
He stood. “I don’t need this from you.”
“So everyone else is allowed to criticize you, but when I do it, it’s unacceptable?”
“Yes,” Loki said matter-of-factly, and with that he slunk back into bed and curled up around Hel, obviously having no intention of leaving.
Angrboda sat seething in her chair for a while longer before slipping into a restless sleep.
* * *
• • •
She awoke to Loki shaking her frantically, and the first words that came to her mind upon seeing his expression were “Is something wrong with Hel?”
Loki pointed. “Your dress is all soggy.”
Angrboda stared down at her lap for a few moments before saying, in a small voice, “He’s still so small . . .” But even as she said it, she could feel the contractions and wondered how they hadn’t awoken her before Loki had.
She lowered herself onto the ground slowly—she could hear Loki doing something, but she couldn’t hear his footsteps. She heard the door open and close and wondered if he’d left, but she found that she truly didn’t care what he was up to unless he awoke Hel, which would only make things worse.
If Angrboda couldn’t calm herself down, she had no hope of calming her toddler.
This isn’t like before, she thought, recalling with trepidation the last time she had awoken to find herself in premature labor. He’s still alive in there.
And he wants out.
Loki had gone outside to fetch a bucket of snow to melt over the fire, and he left again and returned to her side with a pile of fabrics and blankets from one of her storage chests. He must have taken that time to pull himself together, for she was now startled by his composure.
He put the blankets behind her so she could lie back on them, and the two of them looked at each other. Angrboda’s breathing became labored and the contractions became more intense, and Loki’s expression grew pained as he dabbed at her face with a cool cloth.
“He’s probably not going to make it,” Loki said very quietly, putting his hand on her stomach. “He probably could if he was bigger, but . . .”
“Don’t say such things,” Angrboda snapped. “Not right now. Hand me a scrap of cloth from that pile.”
Loki obliged and sat down at her feet again, hiking her dress up to her waist. “I’m just being realistic. I’ve been where you are, remember, although I suppose it might’ve been a bit different for me as a horse.” He forced a smile, put his hands on her knees and squeezed, and peered down. “This may be over sooner than you think—are you pushing already?”
Angrboda had been in labor for nearly a day before Hel finally decided to make an appearance, but she didn’t mention as much, as she had stuffed a rag into her mouth to muffle her screaming. Periodically Loki would glance past her to ensure that Hel was still asleep, before looking back to Angrboda and offering what small comforts touches and words could provide—she eventually placed her hands over his and scratched up his skin as her fingers clenched. He didn’t say a word, didn’t so much as flinch.
Within the hour, their second child was born.
She knew something was wrong just by the look on Loki’s face as he picked up the creature she had just delivered: a grayish wolf with its eyes closed. It was nearly the size Hel had been when she was born—far bigger than the average wolf born in a litter.
“He’s a wolf,” Loki said unnecessarily as he cut the cord with a knife. He then held said wolf in a blanket like he wasn’t sure what to do, and a dozen different emotions flashed across his face, one right after another.
Angrboda did not stop to identify them—she held her arms out, having eyes only for her son. Loki handed over the blankets with a slow, stiff motion. He now looked just tired and dazed and more than a little uncertain. For her part, Angrboda dried off the pup and put him to her chest, and he made a small squeaking sound and immediately started nursing.
“Well,” Loki said as he looked on, scooting over to sit beside her. “Do you find this odd? I find this odd. Why is he a wolf?”
“We’re odd. He’s odd. Does this displease you?” Angrboda asked evenly, not looking up.
“Not in the least. I’m just . . . confused.”
“I was arguably more confused when you showed up here as a mare and gave birth to a horse with eight legs.”
Loki had nothing to say to that.
He was saved from having to say anything, because there was a small grunt from the corner of the cave as Hel ho
isted herself down from the bed, then toddled over to where they sat by the fire.
“Hel, come see your new brother,” Loki said, throwing a blanket over Angrboda’s bottom half and hoisting Hel into his lap. “He’s like the toy I made you, see?”
Hel seemed intrigued as she sucked on her wolf figurine. Loki smoothed the sleep-tousled ringlets of hair away from her face.
“What’s his name?” Hel asked, after she decided that she’d spent a sufficient amount of time staring at her baby brother. The fact that he was a wolf did not seem to faze her in the least.
Then again, her legs were composed of dead flesh. Angrboda recalled that even before Hel could talk, it took quite a lot to surprise her.
“Fenrir,” said Angrboda.
“ ‘Fen-dweller’?” said Loki, making a face. “But why, though?”
“I just like the way it sounds. Don’t you?”
“I mean, I suppose . . .”
“Fuzzy ears,” said Hel, reaching over to touch her brother’s face with her grubby little hand, with a gentleness the average toddler would not have used. “And wet nose. Why he decide to look like that?”
Her parents just looked at each other. Eventually Loki put Hel back to sleep, and by then it was dawn and Fenrir was asleep as well, nuzzled into Angrboda’s chest. Loki tossed the soiled blankets outside and sat down right behind her with his legs on either side of her. He then leaned his head on her shoulder, ran his hands up and down her upper arms, and said nothing.
“Hel was right,” Angrboda told him quietly. “Even if he didn’t decide it—he’s a wolf, aye, but moreover, he’s a giant like we are, only in wolf form. I wonder if he had any control over it.”
“Spontaneous shape-changing in the womb?” Loki said, putting his arms around her and smirking. “I suppose we’ve reached a new level of oddness. But did you not say once that you might have birthed wolves before, and you don’t remember?”
“Indeed, I wonder.” Angrboda turned as much as she could and looked at him. “Are you displeased?”
The Witch's Heart Page 10