The Witch's Heart

by Genevieve Gornichec

  “She said my brothers were monsters,” Hel whispered, clutching her wolf figurine, running her little fingers fretfully over its worn, chewed features. “Am I a monster, too, Mama?”

  “Of course not. None of you are,” Angrboda said, and kissed her forehead, smoothing back her black hair. “Don’t you ever believe it.”

  Papa said it, too. He said himself that we were monsters, Fenrir said dismally.

  “He did not,” Hel snarled. “Papa would never say that.”

  I heard him—I heard him say it with my own ears! Fenrir whimpered. Mama, are you really scared of everything? Is that why we live here all by ourselves?

  Angrboda silently cursed her son’s heightened sense of hearing. If he could hear Sigyn plodding through the trees, of course he heard part of our conversation.

  And the worst part, at that.

  She chose her next words carefully, for all three of them were staring at her as if they were trusting her to hold their world together. “We live here because long ago, some people did some bad things to me.”

  Is it because of what you can do? Fenrir asked, for this night was the first time they had witnessed their mother doing that sort of magic. Like what you did to that woman?

  “What did you do to her, Mama?” Hel asked quietly.

  Angrboda took a deep breath. “I made her see something. Something terrible. Something no one should ever have to see. I could not allow her to come into our woods and speak of you three the way she did. So I chose to punish her in the worst way I could think of. It was . . . not right of me to do, but I did it because what she said made me so angry.”

  No. It wasn’t bad of you to do. Whatever she saw that made her so upset, she deserved it, Fenrir whispered. And Papa went with her because he thinks she’s right about us, didn’t he?

  “She’s wrong,” Angrboda said fiercely. “They’re both wrong. Don’t listen to them.”

  “Is she one of the bad people who hurt you before?” Hel’s finger once again moved to the scar on her mother’s chest. “Is that how you got this, Mama?”

  “It is,” Angrboda confirmed. “They stabbed out my heart and left it on the pyre where they burned me. Your papa returned it to me after he found it there.”

  He did? asked Fenrir. How?

  “He just handed it back to me. And I stuck it back in my chest, and now it beats, just like yours.” She smiled and smoothed the fur away from his face. “But where it counts, he gave me the three of you.”

  Hel sniffled and cuddled closer to her. “I want Papa.”

  Papa hates us, said Fenrir.

  “Shut up!” Hel cried, kicking her little dead legs in their stockings, her linen dress bunching up about her. “Shut up, shut up!”

  It took at least an hour to calm them down after that, but Angrboda finally succeeded in doing so, very late in the night. Hel refused to listen to a word her mother said, opting instead to cover her ears and sob. But after her brothers were asleep she seemed to cry herself out, and she slept as well, clinging to her mother.

  Angrboda gently disentangled herself from Hel and stood, went outside to where Gerd and Skadi lay awake, and sat between them. Skadi had grabbed a ceramic jug of ale from Angrboda’s stores and was taking sips of it from the small wooden cup she carried at her belt.

  When Skadi offered the jug to her, Angrboda took it gratefully and drank, then passed it to Gerd, who took a long swig.

  “What happened tonight?” Skadi asked, and Angrboda told them the same thing she had told the children, except in more adult words. As with her children, she didn’t describe the specifics of what she’d made Sigyn see.

  Skadi and Gerd listened, rapt, and Angrboda braced herself to field questions about the vision and her abilities—but to her surprise, the conversation took a different turn.

  “Sigyn said such things?” Skadi said, frowning. “That’s hard for me to believe.”

  “Do you truly think so well of her?” Angrboda asked tightly, and felt that same hollowness in her chest she’d felt when she saw Skadi display such tenderness toward Sigyn at the river.

  Skadi narrowed her eyes but didn’t look up from her cup. “There’s a reason I was upset when I found out Loki was married to you—it’s bad enough Sigyn’s married to him, but you, too? So, yes, you’re both my friends and you both deserve better.”

  Angrboda said nothing but decided to let the matter rest. Skadi already had more than enough reason to hate Loki—he’d been more or less responsible for her father’s death, after all.

  “What did you make her see, anyway?” Skadi asked after draining the last of her ale. Gerd passed the jug back to her to refill her cup.

  “It was the fate of her sons with Loki, and it was most unpleasant, as you could tell from the way she reacted to it,” Angrboda said. Her friends didn’t need to know that this vision was part of a larger, more terrible truth.

  Skadi let out a low whistle, and she seemed thoughtful. “You never did give me a straight answer when we first met and I asked you if you knew seid.”

  “Prophecies are hardly marketable goods, my friend,” said Angrboda.

  “You truly don’t get out much, do you?” Skadi asked. “Yours is a valuable skill. Make no mistake about that.”

  “Well, it’s a skill I’m loath to use,” Angrboda said shortly. It’s gotten me killed more than once, after all.

  Her friends only nodded, which surprised her. But she knew it must make sense to them that she’d be reluctant to use this particular form of witchery. She was glad they didn’t question her further—after all, she’d never spoken about her past to either of them before, and tonight was not the night to begin.

  “Well, I think you have bigger problems than that now,” said Skadi. “Not only have you given Sigyn reason to hate you, but now she knows what you’re capable of. She knows of your gift of foresight. And if she goes to the Aesir with what she knows, that will get Odin’s attention most of all.”

  Angrboda’s stomach twisted horribly at the mention of the god’s name, which suddenly brought back images of the chanter and her visions and the end of all things.

  But more important, she realized the severity of the mistake she had made tonight.

  If her visions weren’t a coincidence and her sons truly were the creatures of prophecy fighting against the gods during the final battle she’d foreseen, Odin would surely want them dead to ensure his own victory.

  I’ve as good as killed them.

  I shouldn’t have done this. I shouldn’t have done any of this. It was all a mistake. The memory of Sigyn’s wails had satisfied her for only a moment—and now the very thought of her own actions earlier that night made Angrboda sick.

  “How long do you think we have?” Angrboda whispered.

  “Well,” said Skadi, shifting, “that depends entirely on how long your husband and his other wife can keep their mouths shut.”

  Angrboda pressed her lips together. “So not long at all.”

  “I’m not sure,” said Skadi. “For all that Loki is a slippery little weasel who will do whatever he can to save his own skin, I know he loves those children—if only because he’s kept their nature a secret this long, even from Sigyn. If he suspected they could be in danger and cared about them enough not to breathe a word to anyone . . .”

  “Perhaps that is his form of love. How annoying.” Gerd sighed. “But that other wife of his. That Sigyn . . .”

  Angrboda let out a strangled cry. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper. I should’ve at least tried to be civil to her. This is all my fault, all my fault. And now my children are doomed.”

  “She was not being civil to you,” Gerd said, suddenly fierce. “You lost your temper because she looked you dead in the eye and told you that your children were monsters. Had I your power, I would have done the same as you. I would have done worse.”
r />   “Believe me,” said Angrboda darkly. “I wanted to.”

  Skadi shook her head in disbelief. “Sigyn is a good woman, and she was not herself tonight. I blame Loki for that—if he would’ve prepared her for this, I feel that things would’ve gone much differently. I think she would have been curious about your boys, and I think she would have been glad to know you and your children both if given the chance. I don’t think she meant it, Angrboda. I truly don’t.”

  “But she said it, and what’s worse, my children heard it,” Angrboda said bleakly, neglecting to mention the part when Loki himself had called them monsters as well. “Was I wrong to not tell them the world may not accept them the way they are?”

  Neither responded.

  “The way things were was normal for them,” Angrboda said, tears pricking her eyes. “And that was how I had intended it to remain. Myself, Loki, you two, and these woods—that’s all they’ve ever known. Should I have told them right from the beginning how different they truly were? Or was I right to let them think there was nothing wrong with them?”

  Gerd put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed, at a loss for words. Skadi put an arm around her back, and Angrboda leaned into her and couldn’t stop shaking until she was so exhausted that she simply fell into a dreamless sleep, with her last conscious thoughts being of Hel, Fenrir, and Jormungand and how much time they had left together.

  I will stop this, she thought before she slipped under. I will do whatever it takes.

  * * *

  • • •

  At the end of autumn, Angrboda collected her pouches of enchanted stones and recast the spell that hid her home. She strengthened it, and she poured every part of herself into it, willing it to work with every fiber of her being.

  After much deliberation, she tweaked the particulars slightly. When she had first created the spell, one could find her cave only if one had been there, and thus there were only three people who could visit her: Loki, Skadi, and Gerd. But now she changed it so that, besides herself and her children, only Skadi and Gerd would be able to return.

  She did not tell the children about this, for they were still distressed about their father, and she felt no need to upset them further. And yet Loki’s absence seemed only to reinforce what they thought to be his opinion of them: that they were monsters. Angrboda knew that she could not win by telling them she was keeping him away, or by allowing him to stay with them and keep up his act. It had gone on long enough.

  For whether or not Loki had truly meant what he’d said, the fact was that he’d said it—and for Angrboda, it was enough to know that such a thought existed somewhere, if only in the back of his mind. This, to her, was intolerable.

  Intolerable, and devastating.

  The children became yet more distant from her with each passing week. Hel would spend days just sitting outside with the goats, working furiously at her nalbinding and hiding whatever she was making whenever Angrboda came near. Fenrir, now almost four, would slink off into the woods from sunrise to sunset, and Angrboda would reprimand him for being gone so long and scaring her, but he would only look at her blankly.

  And Jormungand, who was by now a little over a year old, spent more and more of his time curled up in front of the fire as the days got colder. By now he was twice as long as his mother was tall, and as thick as her waist. He still did not speak, not even in the few jumbled syllables of before; he seemed to have given up. And no amount of coaxing from Angrboda would elicit any sort of response from him besides the occasional hiss.

  Fenrir felt threatened by his brother’s enormous size, and they often snapped at each other, but not as playfully as they once had. One time, Angrboda had to use her magic to pry them apart, on an occasion when Jormungand had wrapped himself around Fenrir and Fenrir had his fangs buried in his brother’s tail. Hel looked on, ever impassive, and not without a flicker of grim amusement in her large green eyes at the spectacle, at the blood.

  It was at that point Angrboda realized, with complete and utter dismay, that her children had taken their father’s words to heart. And she felt as though the age-old wound of her heart had broken open, engulfing her in darkness, and she resisted the urge to rip her heart from her chest and cast it into the fire, for all the good it would do her.

  But to do so would be to give up, and her children needed her now more than ever.

  “I see you still cover your hair. Does this mean you still consider yourself married to him, then?” Skadi said to her one frosty morning when she came by with her reindeer. The animal was laden with winter stores, which she traded Angrboda for her hunger potions: always an invaluable commodity during the cold months.

  “It’s more out of habit than anything,” said Angrboda, though she did not know how true that was. “Plus it keeps the hair from my face.”

  “Right,” said Skadi. “Habit. Please tell me you will make a habit of allowing me to murder him in his sleep?”

  “He is a rather heavy sleeper, surprisingly enough.”

  “So does that mean I can—?”

  “No, you may not.”

  Skadi looked disgruntled by this answer. By way of a sort-of apology, Angrboda offered her lunch. Skadi accepted.

  “They may soon be too much for you to control,” Skadi said when they broached the subject of her children. “When they were smaller, surely it was easier, but your sons have grown bigger each time I’ve seen them.”

  “It’s not their size,” Angrboda responded as quietly as she could. “It’s about what happened, that night by the river. They’ve not been the same since.”

  Skadi put her hands on Angrboda’s shoulders and lowered her voice. “As far as I know, neither your slimy husband nor Sigyn herself has breathed a word to anyone about that night. But still, be wary. The gods do not play fair. I know this firsthand.”

  “I understand. Thank you, my friend. I have taken precautions,” Angrboda said, and told her of the enhanced protective charm.

  Skadi nodded, then shifted, all of a sudden looking a little uncomfortable—like there was more she wanted to say but it was not her place. But then she merely nodded again and said, “I’ll pass the word on to Gerd, that she will still be able to find you as well. And if you need help—if your sons become too much—”

  “We shall cross that bridge when we come to it,” Angrboda replied. Skadi seemed dissatisfied with this answer but said no more on the subject.

  One day, when Angrboda was sewing a new pair of stockings for Hel, her daughter rushed into the cave, weeping inconsolably. When Angrboda could finally get her to speak, she sobbed, “They’re eating my goats, Mama! They’re eating my goats!”

  “Who is eating your goats, Hel?”

  Hel looked at Angrboda like her head had just fallen off and rolled away. “My brothers!”

  By the time Angrboda and Hel exited the cave, three of the goats had been eaten and the rest had scattered off into the foothills of the mountains and into the gnarled trees of Ironwood. Angrboda doubted they would be coming back.

  She looked to Fenrir and Jormungand. The first was gnawing the meat off a leg bone, and the other was swallowing a last massive chunk of goat.

  Hel sniffled and clutched at her mother’s dress. Angrboda knelt down and put an arm around her, then looked again to her sons. “Why would you do this?”

  Because it’s nearly winter and there’s not enough food, and we’re hungry, Fenrir said, with the innocence of a child. But there was a derisive edge to his tone. We’ll chase the rest of them down later for food for you, Mama.

  “Those goats were not food,” Angrboda said coldly. “They were your sister’s beloved pets, and we used them for milk.”

  You’ve butchered them before, Fenrir observed. Why can’t we?

  Angrboda balled her fists and willed herself to calm down. She was used to such back talk from Hel, but it was becoming increasingly
common from her middle child. “We butcher them in moderation. I understand you’re growing quickly and have hunger to match, but can you not hunt in the woods as you always have?”

  Fenrir spit the bone at her feet and stood. His eyes were level with her chin when she was standing, but as she was still kneeling beside Hel, he peered down his short snout at her dangerously. He still had the look of an overgrown pup.

  There was barely any food in these woods to begin with, he said, and Jormungand hissed in agreement and rehinged his jaw. There’s nothing here except us and some rabbits, and the boundaries of your spell—

  “Have been extended, which you know. That’s no excuse,” she said, standing. Hel buried her face in her mother’s dress and Angrboda stroked her hair, not taking her eyes off her sons. “And Skadi has offered more than once to bring larger game for you to supplement what’s in the woods. There will always be more food for you. You need only ask.”

  Fenrir said nothing. He simply brushed past Angrboda and Hel and skulked back into the cave, Jormungand slinking behind him. Hel looked up at her with a blank, broken expression, and Angrboda held her close and led her inside.

  It was then that she realized that her two sons had finally kindled some brotherly camaraderie, over the slaughter of the goats: Jormungand and Fenrir slept by the fire together that night. Even though the bed was getting too small for all of them, Angrboda still hated to see her sons sleeping on the floor. Hel seemed glad of her brothers’ absence and clutched her mother and her wolf figurine as she slept.

  And when Angrboda finally fell asleep, she had the worst dream of all.

  * * *

  • • •

  The gods’ council was pure chaos, and for once, Loki wanted no part of it.

  His wife was front and center, standing before the Aesir with an air of determination as she spoke of what had happened that night at the river. And he stood to the side, leaning against the wall of the chamber, arms folded, his face cast in shadow.