The Witch's Heart

by Genevieve Gornichec

  “Pfft. If I have poor taste, then you have no taste at all.”

  “Why do you insult my wife like that?”

  “Saying you have no taste isn’t an insult to—”

  “Oh, but it is. You see, I taste her all the time. I’d bet you wish you could say the same.”

  Angrboda turned and raised her eyebrows at Loki, then looked at Skadi, whose face had turned a very bright red.

  “Don’t be lewd, Loki,” said Angrboda, taking that as the reason for her friend’s embarrassment.

  Skadi kept her eyes on Loki and said, a little too loudly, “How about you taste my fist down your throat?”

  “No, thank you,” said Loki as casually as someone refusing more drink. “Threatening me in front of the children, Skadi? What sort of goddess are you?”

  “Or, better yet, my hunting knife?” Skadi ignored him and took said knife—the length of her forearm and razor-sharp—out of its sheath at her belt and stuck it pointedly in the table. “How do you think that tastes, Trickster?”

  “Poor,” Loki said, eyeing the quivering knife cagily. “Not unlike your fist—or the rest of you, for that matter.”

  “Stop it, you two,” Angrboda called to them, but they did not heed her.

  “And that reminds me,” Skadi said, as Angrboda gathered the chopped-up rabbits into a bowl, “I don’t suppose you know of his double life in Asgard, do you?” She cast a look beside her at Hel, who was listening very intently to the entire exchange, her green eyes comically large.

  “Aye, I do,” Angrboda said, giving her friend a significant look. “I know all of it.”

  Skadi stared at her. “You . . . do?”

  “Is that not what I just said?” Angrboda turned to see Gerd staring at her as well. But Gerd quickly averted her gaze and occupied herself by moving all the rabbit gristle to a pot to dump outside later. Fenrir stuck his face in the pot and started eating the contents without missing a beat.

  “If you know, then how can you stand for it?” Skadi demanded, recovering from her surprise. Then, a few moments later, she stood slowly and asked, “Are you all right? You look pale.”

  “I’m fine,” Angrboda said breathlessly, one hand clutching the small bump of her stomach. “Don’t worry.”

  Across the table, Loki frowned and stood. “She hasn’t been sleeping well.”

  “She never sleeps well, or sleeps much at all, from what she’s told me. It’s no small wonder you haven’t noticed.”

  “For your information, I have noticed, and it troubles me.”

  “Oh, right. Because you’re a quality husband.”

  “Quiet, both of you. Please.” Angrboda suddenly felt a wave of dizziness and swayed. Seconds later her knees gave out, and Skadi sprang forward and caught her before she hit the ground. She couldn’t be made to stand, despite Skadi trying to heave her upright.

  Not again, Angrboda thought, squeezing her eyes shut as Skadi reached a hand under her knees and picked her up, cradled her like a child.

  “How can it be time already, with the baby so small?” Skadi asked, panic in her voice.

  Small, but alive. Angrboda kept her eyes closed as she felt the child twisting inside her. She was not panicked as she had been when she had thought Hel had died in her womb. Fenrir, like this child, had been very much alive when she’d gone into labor.

  “We didn’t think Fenrir would make it, either, and she only carried him for six months,” Loki said. He grabbed all the furs and blankets off the bed and put them in a pile on the floor in front of the fire.

  “It’s been less for this child,” Angrboda said weakly.

  “Put her there, Skadi. I’ll make her comfortable. Go fetch some water from the stream.” Loki gestured to the pile he’d just made as he rummaged in the back of the cave and produced two buckets and an armful of rags.

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” Skadi said, but she put Angrboda down anyway.

  Loki shoved the buckets at her when she straightened, and the two of them glared at each other for a solid thirty seconds.

  Angrboda tugged at Skadi’s tunic. “Do as he says. Please. There isn’t time.”

  Skadi looked down at her uncertainly but took the buckets and continued to glare at Loki. “I’m willing to allow that perhaps you’re not as useless as I thought.”

  Loki stared at Skadi dead on, with an intensity that Angrboda had never before seen from the likes of him. Even Skadi recoiled just the slightest bit.

  “And I’m willing,” Loki said with utmost seriousness, “to take your concession and file it away with the rest of the things I don’t care about, what with my wife about to give birth.” When Skadi opened her mouth to reply, he said coldly, “You really don’t want to get into it with me right now.”

  Skadi turned her back on him and stomped out without another word. When Loki turned to Gerd, the girl said quickly, “I’ll take the children outside.” Hel had started to cry and was clinging to Gerd’s leg, and Fenrir was skulking behind Gerd and giving a high-pitched whine.

  “Keep them occupied, and keep them out of here,” Loki called after her as she ushered them out the door. A few minutes later, Hel came sprinting back in to throw her arms around her father, wailing. He hugged her for a moment before turning her back around and saying, “Why don’t you go tell Gerd about your goats and the silly things they do? Mama will be fine.”

  “She will be,” Skadi said as she came in after Hel, holding two buckets of water. She dumped them into the cauldron over the fire, set the buckets aside, and crouched down to Hel’s level, smoothing the worry from her face to give the child a reassuring smile. “And I’d like to hear about those goats, too. Will you come outside with me and let your mama and papa have some time alone?”

  * * *

  • • •

  The labor was over before nightfall, but at that point, Angrboda didn’t even have the strength to sit up. Instead she fell back against the blankets Loki had piled up behind her and asked heavily, chest heaving, “So? What is it?”

  “I’m not sure,” Loki said as he stared down at whatever it was Angrboda had just pushed from her body. There was minimal mess and no afterbirth, but that didn’t seem to be what was troubling him.

  “How . . . are you not sure?” Angrboda asked, struggling to sit up straighter and get a better view of her newest child.

  “Well, it’s sort of in a sac of some kind— What the—?” And then he yelped and scooted back, his eyes wide.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  Her question was answered when she felt something slither up her leg and, as she lacked the energy to jerk away, she found that a small snake was peering at her over her knee—peering with the same green eyes of his father, brother, and sister, bright against the dark green of his scales. When Angrboda laughed in surprise, the snake squeaked and toppled onto her lap.

  The snake was nearly the length of Angrboda’s arm, but the width of only two of her fingers. Like Fenrir, he was larger than the newborn animal whose shape he took, but smaller than Hel had been. Angrboda picked him out of her lap and cuddled him, and his forked tongue grazed her cheek. He had but one tooth, which he had used to rip his way out of the sac in which he’d been delivered.

  “First a half-dead baby girl, then a wolf, now a snake,” Loki said. “It seems as though our children are getting progressively less normal. The next one will just be a quivering blob with eyes at this rate.”

  “What do baby snakes eat?” Angrboda wondered aloud.

  “I have no idea.” Loki moved over to sit beside his wife, and they both looked down at their snake-baby, who was now looking at Loki and flicking his tongue curiously. Like Fenrir, he had intelligent eyes.

  Eyes that were familiar not only because they were his father’s, but also because Angrboda had seen them before.

  In her vision of the end of the
worlds. The great serpent coming up out of the waves . . . She looked down at the tiny creature in her lap, peering up at her with such innocence. No. It can’t be. It can’t . . .

  “Boda?” Loki asked, rubbing the small of her back. “Are you all right?”

  Angrboda snapped out of her reverie. Ridiculous. What am I thinking?

  “Yes, of course,” she said. She plastered a smile on her face. “What shall we call this one? It’s your turn to come up with a name.”

  Loki thought for a moment and held his arm out. The snake slithered up it as clumsily as a baby taking its first steps.

  “Jormungand,” Loki said.

  “We are not calling our son ‘awesomely powerful magical stick.’ ”

  “Yes, we are. It’s a great name. That’s how you make names, Boda. Just stick a bunch of words together until it means something. Besides, his name doesn’t need to be as depressing as your own. Isn’t that right, Jormungand?” The snake nuzzled his chin and Loki grinned, triumphant. “See?”

  “I take back what I said on the day we met. You bring me sorrow,” Angrboda said. “And I also take back when I said you have a way with words.”

  “I have a way with giving my snake-babies really great names, if that’s what you’d prefer to say about me now.”

  “I’d prefer to say a lot of things about you,” Angrboda muttered.

  “Maybe he likes meat.” Loki reached into the nearby bowl and took out a chunk of rabbit, and Jormungand eyed it curiously before unhinging his jaw to swallow it right out of Loki’s hand. The piece was too big for him, so Loki grabbed Skadi’s hunting knife off the table and chopped it up into smaller bits, then held them out to his son again.

  This time Jormungand was able to eat the meat, though it took him some time to swallow. Then he slithered back onto his mother’s lap and curled up. Once Loki had shoved the soiled blankets aside and helped Angrboda onto the bed, he told Gerd and Skadi to bring the children back in.

  The two women took their leave shortly after, despite Angrboda’s attempts to make them stay the night.

  “You have a new child,” Gerd said, waving her hand. “We don’t want to impose.” Skadi looked hesitant, though, and gave Angrboda a meaningful look when Loki’s back was turned. Angrboda looked back at her as if to say, It’s fine—you can go. So Skadi went.

  Hel seemed unperturbed that her second brother was an animal—she was perhaps too full and tired to care, as her dinner had consisted of dried meat from the stores, and Skadi had let her eat her fill of that and goat’s milk. Fenrir had caught a few rabbits for himself for dinner, and for his part, he seemed disappointed that Jormungand was not another wolf for him to play with.

  Later on, when she and the children had piled onto the bed, Hel snuggled close to Angrboda and ran her finger over the scar on her chest as she had done when she was a tiny baby, but she did not take her eyes off the snake curled up on her mother’s stomach. Clutched in her other hand was the wolf figurine Loki had made her when she was a baby; it was worn and grooved with teeth marks from her gnawing on it, but she loved it all the same and took to hiding it around the cave for safekeeping. Angrboda would often find it stuffed under a pile of furs when she was cleaning out the bedding.

  She whispered, “Mama, why did he choose to be a snake?”

  “Maybe someday soon he’ll be able to tell you,” Angrboda whispered back, then kissed her forehead. A flash of the great serpent from her vision appeared in her mind like a bolt of lightning, and she pushed it aside just as quickly.

  She knew there would soon come a time when she would have to process what she’d seen—both the serpent and the wolf, for wasn’t it too great a coincidence that she now had not one but two sons who took the forms of the creatures in her vision?—and would have to come to terms with what it all meant for her and her little family.

  But tonight, she just wanted to be happy.

  Loki was the last to get into bed, as he had been tending the fire, making sure it would last. He lay pressed against Angrboda, facing her and the children, his elbow bent and his head propped up on his hand.

  “He’s endearing,” Loki said, eyeing Jormungand. “In his way. I wonder if he’ll talk, like Fenrir. I wonder if he’ll grow massive fangs and eat people. That would be great, wouldn’t it?”

  Angrboda once again forced down thoughts of her vision and instead rolled her eyes. “What’s your obsession with eating people?”

  “I have a lot of enemies. Which is why I think it would be convenient to have sons who can swallow them whole. And that’s the end of that problem.”

  “Sometimes,” Angrboda said dryly, “I wish all our problems were solved as easily in reality as they are in your head.”

  “You and me both,” Loki agreed, pulling the furs over them, and soon all were asleep.

  * * *

  • • •

  Loki did not leave much that winter, and Angrboda was grateful for that; the season was long and harsh. They spent most days huddled in bed with the children, not willing to waste too much energy on moving about—though the children didn’t seem to understand this. Hel was still wary of Fenrir after he’d bitten her arm, but that did not stop them from running around the cave together, shrieking with delight, and of course Loki would only encourage them to tire themselves out. On the warmer days Jormungand would slither along with them.

  Then they would all collapse in bed again and Loki would tell them stories as Angrboda dozed. She had slept more this winter than she had in recent memory and knew that this was due largely to the presence of her husband and children, who were never more than a few feet away at any given time. It helped steel her mind against the chanter, whom she could still feel on the periphery of her dreams—he seemed to be keeping his distance ever since he’d almost sent her over the edge.

  As a result she’d only dipped her head into the vision before she’d pulled away. She hadn’t completely submerged, gotten all the details, seen the bitter end. And she preferred to keep it that way.

  Sometimes, when Loki and Angrboda were sure the children were sound asleep, they slipped away to lie by the fire. Most of the time they were too sluggish to do anything but curl up together and say nothing for a few hours, listening to the snow blowing and the wind howling outside, listening to the fire crackling and feeling its warmth on their hands and faces.

  There was nothing special about such interactions, but she treasured them all the same. Time had meant little to Angrboda before the children and Loki; but the four of them had given her a new appreciation for those small secret moments that might have seemed ordinary to others but meant more to her every time she noticed them.

  Jormungand spent most of the winter hanging about his mother’s neck or curled up on her chest, leeching her warmth and not doing much else; when he was not with her or in front of the fire, he was lethargic. He didn’t eat much, but when spring rolled around, he became active and started growing immensely. He also caught food on his own in the woods, which were greener than ever before that spring.

  By the beginning of summer, he was as long as his father was tall—which is to say, rather long indeed—and nearly as thick as Angrboda’s neck. She suspected he could swallow a person whole if he really tried, though to her relief, he didn’t.

  She kept an eye out, though—Hel would be his easiest target. Now five, Hel was still very small. Her wavy black hair tumbled down to her waist, and her green eyes were enormous in her tiny pale face. She was helpful enough when working the garden with Angrboda but otherwise would take to pacing the clearing out of boredom, turning her wolf toy over and over in her hands.

  Jormungand had not started to talk yet, but as he was only six months old, Angrboda was not exactly worried. He sometimes made sounds in her head, but just syllables—not even “Mama,” which had been Fenrir’s first word. And he and Fenrir—whose big puppy head was now level wi
th Angrboda’s elbow—often snapped and hissed and growled at each other, but in a playful way, as brothers do.

  Loki, of course, only egged them on. He had not been absent for more than a month since winter’s end. Angrboda was glad of this.

  The chanter still kept his distance. She’d done her best to forget the horrors she’d seen in her vision that night, but she found she could not lock the knowledge away as cleanly as she wished to—both her sons’ resemblance to the creatures she’d seen and the image of her husband’s torture were always closest to the surface. But even that was pushed from her thoughts when he appeared, grinning, at the mouth of the cave with a new story to tell. The children always rushed to him, and seeing his face and seeing them happy made her feel content.

  One day, when Loki and Hel were sprawled out on their stomachs in the grass of the clearing, she caught a snippet of their conversation as she was making dinner, with Jormungand curled around her waist with his head on her shoulder. He was getting too heavy to carry around, but she didn’t mind.

  “I don’t know, Hel,” she heard Loki say. “I think Frigg has the longest beard.”

  “No, Papa. She’s a girl goat. She can’t have the longest beard,” Hel replied, with all the certainty of a five-year-old. “Odin has the longest beard, see? You said he was the wisest of all goats. That means he has the longest beard, too.”

  “I don’t think so. Frigg’s is longer. Girl goats have beards and horns, too, just like boy goats do.”

  “Well, in that case, I think Thor has the longest beard.”

  “I still think it’s Frigg.”

  “Well, you’re wrong. Why do girl goats have beards and horns?”

  “I’m not sure, but that’s the reason I mixed up their names when I named them. Remember?”

  “Mama said it was because you do dumb things.”

  “Oh, she did, did she?”

  “Yes. She said you did it on purpose because you’re an idiot.”

  “Why are you poisoning my daughter’s mind with your wicked lies?” Loki called back into the cave.