“No. Wolves are interesting and people are scared of them. It’ll be exciting to have a son who’s a wolf. Maybe we can train him to eat people we don’t like.”
“Loki.”
“Boda.”
“You are not training our son to eat anyone.”
“I hear your nagging tone, but not the words you’re saying.”
“No eating people,” Angrboda repeated tiredly, leaning back against him.
Loki kissed her shoulder. “I can make no promises on our son’s behalf.”
* * *
• • •
It became apparent over the rest of the winter and spring that Fenrir was developing at a pace somewhere between that of an actual wolf pup and that of a typical child. He opened his eyes after only a few days, and they were the same color green as Loki’s, leaving no doubt as to his parentage. And he was weaned after only a few months, which was good news to Angrboda, because unlike Hel, Fenrir often bit her while he was nursing.
Angrboda came to understand that her daughter had been a rare case as children went. Indeed, Fenrir seemed entirely without empathy—which often put him at odds with his sister, who seemed to feel everything, although her resting expression was one of indifference.
When he was barely a year old, Fenrir’s head was only level with Loki’s knee. This led Angrboda to conclude that their son was not done growing by any stretch of the imagination. He already had a mouthful of sharp teeth and enjoyed gnawing on bones. Yet Angrboda wondered if he would ever be able to talk, and how such a thing could be possible. She also pondered Loki’s comment about “spontaneous shape-changing in the womb” on the night their son was born and wondered if he really had inherited his father’s shape-shifting nature, but thus far Fenrir had not exhibited any such abilities. He had simply been born a wolf.
By the time Fenrir was two, his head was nearly level with Angrboda’s hips, though he still had the appearance of an overgrown puppy. At this point he went off and came back with his own food, which he would not share with his mother and sister—which was fine with Angrboda, whose snares caught only so much game.
The one good thing that happened was that Fenrir began to talk, though not aloud as Hel had. Rather, his voice appeared in their heads; it was a small voice, a child’s voice, and it spoke little and about simple things, like food and the weather and the goats.
But from the first moment Angrboda heard the word “Mama”—his infantile voice in her head speaking with confidence—and turned to see Fenrir looking at her and wagging his tail, she had hope, and she smiled then and embraced her son. She had hope, despite the fact he’d often snap at her and Hel for what appeared to be no reason at all.
Fenrir seemed to at least be trying to control his animalistic urges and was frustrated when he couldn’t, which caused him to lash out further. Angrboda wished so badly that she could help him, but she didn’t know how. She wished that she had been—or at least remembered being—the witch who had mothered the wolves who chased the sun and moon, or that she could find this old woman and ask her for advice.
Instead she asked her husband for advice. But as Loki was still going back and forth between Asgard and Ironwood, he found his son’s ferocity entertaining rather than troublesome. He didn’t have to deal with Fenrir every single day.
“Forget your silly spells—you’ll be safe enough here with an attack wolf. This is going to be great,” he said one time. “I still think we should train him to eat people.”
“No,” said Angrboda.
“But he wants to eat people! He would love to eat people. Isn’t that right, Fenrir?”
Yes! Fenrir wagged his tail, his tongue lolling out of his mouth excitedly.
“See? Excellent,” said Loki. “We’ll just have to keep him away from the goats. Hel will be heartbroken if he eats one of them.”
“It doesn’t help that you named them all,” Angrboda muttered. “She’s so attached to them, now that they have names.”
Loki just grinned at that. He had taken to calling Angrboda’s goats by the names of the Aesir, which oftentimes did not correspond to the sexes of the goats. He did this for the sole purpose of narrating stories about them, only some of which were actually funny, in Angrboda’s opinion.
Unsurprisingly, Hel was as enamored of her father as she’d been the first time she saw him; Angrboda got the feeling sometimes that Hel was the only reason he even returned to Ironwood, although he swore up and down that this was not the case. Then again, there weren’t a whole lot of things Angrboda wasn’t willing to put up with just to see her daughter smile and to keep her within eyesight: Hel had taken to wandering past the clearing with the goats and Loki, and sometimes by herself, despite her mother’s protests. It was then that Angrboda showed all of them the boundaries of the enchantment that hid their home and implored them not to go past the borders of her spell. Fenrir and Hel seemed to understand. Loki just gave her a crooked smile.
Hel was now three and a half and as active as any child should be, though she seemed to tire easily and would fall short of breath when she overexerted herself. Once Loki made her laugh so hard that she couldn’t breathe and her fingertips began to turn blue, and only one of her mother’s calming potions would help her recover.
“You need to stop getting her so excited,” Angrboda snapped at him after that incident.
“You mean I need to stop being so funny?” Loki replied, unruffled. “Unlikely. But for our daughter’s sake, I’ll give it a try.”
Angrboda stitched Hel a pair of long, thick stockings to wear under her dresses—not to hide her legs, but rather to make sure the salve underneath did not rub off. By now Angrboda had perfected her recipe and the flesh on Hel’s legs was still growing with her, although it was bluish and dead. Angrboda did not know what to make of this at all and attributed it to her own clever witchery.
It gave her a certain sense of pride to do so, considering how long she’d been blaming herself for her daughter’s condition.
After Fenrir’s birth, Angrboda decided that it was high time to add a new potion to her repertoire: a contraceptive. She did not know what raising a wolf would be like, and with Hel and Fenrir so close in age, she had no desire to add a third child to the mix so soon. Loki seemed to agree with this, even though he made it perfectly clear that it didn’t affect him in the least—either way, they still lay together nearly every night when he stayed in Ironwood. Angrboda tried not to let his attitude bother her too much, and mostly failed.
Skadi warned her that such a potion would probably not sell as well as the healing salve and the hunger reducers she usually bartered. She explained what Angrboda already knew: that most women in the Nine Worlds were keen on having as many children as possible. But nevertheless Skadi agreed to trade the contraceptive potions, a few here and there to those who desired them.
“Are you certain you’re not the old witch from the stories?” Skadi had teased her the first time she laid eyes on Fenrir, when he was still just a smallish ball of fur. “Are you sure your wolf-children don’t chase the sun and moon?”
“I’m not,” Angrboda had replied. “Certain, that is. I’m not certain.”
As it happened, Skadi had an affinity for wolves, which became only more apparent as Fenrir got older. He was always the first to hear her approach and would bound up to meet her, and Angrboda even allowed him to go hunting with Skadi so long as they stayed within the boundaries of the charm, which both Skadi and Gerd now knew of. When they returned, Angrboda’s wolf-son would often start wrestling with the Huntress as he would with a fellow pup, and Skadi would laugh and oblige him; it turned out they were pretty evenly matched.
When such commotion would take place, Hel would look on with the same impassive expression she usually wore, and sometimes Angrboda would catch Skadi looking at Hel as if she were seeing someone familiar.
Every day Hel looks
more like her father, Angrboda often thought, for she was sure that Skadi was seeing the same thing. She wondered how often Skadi saw Loki in Asgard, wondered when her friend would make the connection between Loki and her daughter, between Loki and herself. And naturally, not for the first time, she wondered how her husband’s behavior in Asgard differed from his behavior in Ironwood.
“Have I not seen all these faces of yours?”
“I’m afraid you haven’t.”
In her mind’s eye she saw that smirk, saw the darkness lurking behind his eyes on that night—just one summer night among the many they’d spent together, and yet she remembered it vividly as the night that planted the seed of doubt in her: that look he’d given her after he’d called their marriage an “arrangement” and wondered how long they could “keep it up.” And he’d said these things to her with their infant daughter contentedly sleeping a few meters away.
Part of Angrboda had moved on from this conversation, had locked it in the back of her mind where she could access it at only the darkest of times. And yet another part still could not forgive him.
That was also the night she’d first told him of her dreams—the dreams that continued to plague her even now, though she still had not given in to the chanter, had not allowed herself to be drawn from her body. Each night she spent asleep brought the chanter on stronger, until she felt afraid to sleep at all, for fear that one day she would give in to his demands and allow herself to be taken.
And if she were to be taken, what would happen then? She did not want to find out. For the more the chanter tried to draw her out, the more familiar he felt, and the more heavily she suspected this person to be Odin in disguise.
And if that man wanted something from her, she was not going to give it up without a fight. Especially because she feared that no good would come of his having the dangerous knowledge he wanted her to access. Was she the only one who could access it, or the only one he didn’t fear putting in harm’s way to do so? Had he still been unable to get to it himself, in his travels with seid? Had Freyja and the Norns refused to help him, or was he simply not willing to put them at risk?
I refuse to do his dirty work. Her thrice-burned heart was set on this matter. Not after what the gods did to me.
It was on a sleepless night in early summer, around the time Hel was four and Fenrir was two and a half, that she forgot to take the contraceptive potion, and within a few days she had a sinking feeling that the damage had already been done. While she lay awake with Loki snoozing atop her one night, she recalled Skadi’s words from years ago about letting him use her, and she almost wanted to weep.
Instead she cast a glance to the bed, where Hel was sleeping. Fenrir was curled up on the ground—Hel refused to sleep in the bed with her brother if her mother was not present. Angrboda felt the urge to push Loki off her and crawl into bed with her children so that one of them would not have to sleep on the floor, but she did not want to wake any of them, so she remained where she was.
She ran a hand through Loki’s hair. He stirred but remained asleep, breathing on her neck with his forehead pressed against her cheek, drooling on her shoulder. Her hand traveled down to her stomach and rested there, on the loose skin and stretch marks that were the result of carrying her first two children, and wondered what sort of child she would bring into the worlds this time.
And to her distress, it was a question laced not with excitement, but with fear.
* * *
• • •
Loki left soon after, and Angrboda did not see him again for many turns of the moon. It was the longest he’d been absent from Ironwood since Hel was born. Angrboda saw that with each passing day, Hel grew more depressed, and Fenrir grew more skittish and took to staying inside.
For this, Angrboda found herself growing angrier with Loki. She, by herself, was fighting with her son’s fierceness, fighting with her daughter’s despair. And she could not even sleep, for in her dreams, she fought with the chanter.
And she was fighting with her body as well; her lack of rest fatigued her, and it seemed that, as when she was carrying Fenrir, this new child inside her did not want to grow as a normal child should. Even four and five months into her pregnancy, she still vomited up most of the food she ate. Fenrir did not ask questions about this, but Hel was frightened by her mother’s sickness, so Angrboda tried her best to hide it.
Once again, though, she could not hide her condition from Skadi—who was of course still coming by to trade, and gradually more just to talk. Skadi admitted she did not much care for children, but Angrboda’s were quite the exception. In addition to allowing Fenrir to tag along on her hunts, Skadi had taken Hel out into the woods multiple times and shown her how to set up a snare.
“Ready to go, little one?” Skadi always asked before they left, and Hel would only nod with the faintest smile as she pulled on the child-sized haversack Skadi had brought her on their first outing. Skadi had become something like a second mother to her during Loki’s long absences and was the only one who could get away with calling her such a thing as “little one”; a tiny child though she might be, Hel did not like to be reminded of this fact, and she seethed whenever Angrboda attempted to call her anything diminutive.
Going “trapping” with Skadi made Hel feel like a grown-up, even though Angrboda doubted the girl enjoyed it.
“Just like my father taught me,” Skadi said to Angrboda one night when they returned with two rabbits and a squirrel, which Hel refused to even touch. “She may balk at the idea of killing animals—”
“She’s a child yet,” said Angrboda. “Animals are her precious friends. She doesn’t mind eating meat, but she doesn’t wish to think about where it came from.” Hel still turned away in disgust every time her mother had to skin a rabbit for dinner.
“That’s true, but they’re also food,” Skadi replied.
“If she had the choice, Hel would subsist entirely on the oatcakes her father brings her,” Angrboda muttered before she could stop herself; she knew better than to mention him in Skadi’s presence. Fenrir and Hel might not know Loki as anything other than “Papa,” but she was nervous about the day when one of them would blurt their father’s name during one of Skadi’s visits. Angrboda had a feeling that warning them against it would only bring that day sooner, as she wouldn’t put it past either of Loki’s children to purposely disobey her. Her insistence that they stay within the boundaries of her protection charm seemed to be the only warning of hers they took seriously—and that may have been only because Skadi was also very strict about it when she took them into the woods.
Angrboda shifted, wishing she hadn’t mentioned Loki, albeit not by name. Luckily, Skadi only rolled her eyes and for once didn’t press the matter of Angrboda’s husband.
“Be that as it may,” said the Huntress, “the reality is that trapping is a useful skill if one doesn’t wish to hunt. Besides, you let no part of the animal go to waste. It’s given you the gift of its life, and you cherish that. Hel is too small to understand this, but she will someday.”
Angrboda conceded this point.
“Something else troubles you,” Skadi observed several moments later.
“Is it that obvious?”
“How long has he been gone this time?”
“Since the beginning of summer,” Angrboda said with a sigh. Apparently they were going to have this conversation today after all.
“What is he doing?”
Angrboda looked at her cup of goat’s milk and wondered how long she would be able to keep it down. “Whatever he likes.”
“I still mean to kill this man,” Skadi said heatedly, her fist tightening around her cup. “One day I shall.”
“You will do no such thing.”
“I can’t promise that,” Skadi said, and gave her a stern look as she finished her ale; she left soon after without many other words passing between them.
* * *
• • •
Then one rainy night in the middle of autumn, when the children were sleeping and Angrboda sat on her chair in front of the fire to unbraid and comb out her hair after a long day, she heard the door open and shut. She set her jaw, pulled her fur mantle closer about her, and leaned forward to put another log on the fire, determined not to give him a warm greeting.
He did not deserve as much.
“An entire season has passed since I saw you last,” she said.
“Why’s there green stuff on the table?” he asked her as he slung his cloak across the bench. Both of them spoke in hushed tones, as the children were asleep.
Angrboda’s expression darkened as she stood and walked over to him. He looked the same as ever. “I must have forgotten to clean it up. I made it this morning. Fenrir was snapping at the goats and scaring them, and when Hel shouted at him, he bit her forearm and would not let go. It took me the rest of the afternoon to get her to stop crying.”
“Oh,” said Loki, turning to look toward the bed. “Is she all right?”
“No. She’s not. The bite is deep and it will leave scars, ones far worse than yours. She was hysterical for an hour and then she passed out. Her face and fingertips had turned blue. I thought she might actually die. You know how easily she tires . . .”
Loki sat down on the bench and leaned against the table, setting his elbows upon it and resting his ankle on the opposite knee. “Pays to have a witch for a mother, I suppose. And for a wife as well.”
Angrboda scowled and scooped up his cloak to let it dry near the fire, muttering, “Wife indeed.”
“What is it now?” Loki pulled her into his lap when she returned, and she just gave him a withering look. “Are you angry with me again?”
“You were gone too long this time.”
“Sigyn had another child. I couldn’t get away so soon after. I brought you a present.” From some invisible pocket, he pulled out a string of polished amber beads. “I thought you could wear them between your brooches, if you had any—I could bring you some next time, too, if you wanted to make yourself an apron dress to wear them with.”
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