And suddenly Thor reappeared in the clearing. He cast a brief look over his shoulder to make sure that the others had gone on, and then studied Angrboda with the same disconcerting lack of emotion that Tyr and Loki had before.
The bonds were starting to slip as she struggled. Thor saw this, and his expression hardened.
Angrboda didn’t notice the way he was looking at her, as though she were a wounded animal who needed to be killed for mercy. She was close, so close, to escaping, almost there—but then Thor moved toward her.
“You are different,” he said, more to himself than to her. “Different than the other giant-wives I’ve slain, so I’m not sure slaying you is the right thing to do. But my father says there’s no other way. You’re too dangerous to live.”
She looked up at him, wide-eyed, pleading, shouting. “Please, you—”
But Thor raised his hammer high and brought it down, silencing her with a swift blow to the head.
The last thing she saw was the brief look of uncertainty that flashed across his face just before the stroke fell and Mjolnir made fatal contact with her temple.
Crack.
At Angrboda’s voice being cut off so abruptly, Hel stopped crying and let out a horrified gasp—and even Loki hesitated, a look of shock frozen on his face. Fenrir ceased straining against Tyr’s iron grip and emitted a high-pitched, pitiful whine. Jormungand began to writhe so fiercely in the sack that he almost escaped, but Thor stormed over at the last moment and took the sack from Frey, who had been struggling with it in his absence.
“M-Mama?” Hel whispered, breaking the long silence that followed the sudden absence of her mother’s cries. Her breathing was shallow, her fingertips blue from exertion.
“Hush,” Loki whispered back. “You must calm down, Hel, or you’ll be ill. Your mama will be just f—”
But the child would not be stilled.
“What have they done to her? What have they done? Mama!” Hel wailed, over and over again. Her shrieks echoed through the empty, dead forest as they walked, and now not even Loki could silence her.
* * *
• • •
Angrboda slumped to her knees and fell forward onto her face.
It occurred to her that perhaps her bonds had been cut now that she was dead, but no—that was not so. She was cold. Very cold. And she wasn’t breathing, and she didn’t know if she could even move, but she could feel the ground beneath her. The dirt of the clearing where she lay, facedown. She felt something wet on the side of her head but felt no pain.
What’s going on? How am I—?
And then she knew. Sickened, she knew.
“Rise, Seeress,” she was commanded, “and tell me what you know.”
Her fingers clutched the dirt as she struggled to lift her head, her wild hair parting just enough for her to make out the man who towered over her.
The world around him was colorless, muted—as if she were seeing it through a fog—and completely and disturbingly silent save for the man’s voice. She was still just outside her home, but she knew she could not really be there. The trees of Ironwood looked even grayer now, as if all traces of color had been washed away. The leaves blew too slowly. And when she glanced over her shoulder, her physical body was still there, tied to the tree, unmoving.
The man was the only thing she saw with any definition; he was clear as day. In another world, a raven was perched on each shoulder, and he was flanked by a pair of wolves. But the creatures were back in the same world as the trees and the grass and the cave, and the man himself was the only one there with her. He had many names, but not one came to mind.
The two of them were the only ones in this place.
Angrboda rose to her knees and looked at him blankly, somehow seeing with her dead-white eyes. The man wore a traveling cloak, which hid any features of his body; his height was imposing, if not extraordinary. His long beard was gray with hints of red still remaining, and one cold blue eye was fixed on her from under the broad brim of his tall pointed hat.
The name came to her then: Odin.
He spoke again. Angrboda didn’t understand him—at least not on the surface. But something within her understood: He’d finally won. She was at the edge of the void now, staring down into the never-ending darkness.
His words pushed her over the edge and dragged her down, screaming, into the void. Her surroundings faded to black—even the man in front of her disappeared—and other images took their place. She was sinking. Falling.
“What do you see?” asked his voice from very far away, and against her will she began to speak—ancient words, sacred words.
And she told him everything.
* * *
• • •
Then she was back in Ironwood, slack against her loosened bonds. Crusted blood under her nose and on the side of her head, matting her hair. A cut on the opposite temple from where she’d been knocked off guard the first time. Burns around her wrists from her fetters. But no pain. Only the cold.
Alive. Still alive. Or as alive as she had always been: in a sense.
And for nine days and nine nights she remained tied to the tree.
She lingered there in the darkness, somewhere between consciousness and oblivion: somewhere where the emptiness was comforting and naught could harm her, for she didn’t have to think or feel a thing. Sometimes it seemed she could hear voices calling to her, but they were too far off and nearly indistinguishable and she didn’t care, for they spoke only her name and her name was of no interest to her.
Visions flashed before her eyes when she surfaced enough, just before she sank back down: Little Hel in Asgard, dressed in a fine green gown long enough to cover her legs and the thick stockings her mama had sewn for her. She was slouching near the outside of a hall. Her eyes darted this way and that, and she turned a pebble over in her hands without looking at it, picking at its surface with her short nails.
No nalbinding and no wolf toy to keep her hands busy, and her mind would not calm down.
Suddenly a ball rolled around the corner of the building, and Hel gasped and jumped away into the shadows. A young beardless man came running over to fetch it. Hel could hear his friends shouting a little ways away. He had a stick in his hand, and he was blond and bright-eyed. When he bent to pick up the ball and saw her, he smiled. “Oh! Hello there.”
Hel just swallowed, and her small shoulders shook.
He cocked his head at her, concerned. “Are you all right?”
Hel was silent.
“Are you new here?” he asked. “What’s your name? I don’t think we’ve met.”
“Oi, come on!” one of the other young men called. “What’s taking so long? Did you wander into the wolf’s gaping jaws?” The others laughed.
Hel bristled at the mention of her brother—and in such mocking tones. No one talked about her family like that. Were she not so terrified of everything in this strange world of the gods, she would march over and punch those stupid boys in the face. But at least their words, however scornful, meant that Fenrir was still here.
That was more than she could say for her other baby brother. She had no idea what they’d done with Jormungand.
“Coming!” the young man called over his shoulder. He tossed the ball in the air once and caught it, then turned to leave.
“Hel,” said Hel. When the boy turned to ask what she meant, she stammered, “M-my name. It’s Hel.”
“It’s good to meet you, little Hel,” he said with a dazzling smile.
“Come on, Baldur!” cried another one of his friends, and then a few others yelled his name. “We want to finish this round before nightfall! You’ll make us lose!”
Baldur took something out of his pocket—a golden apple—and tossed it to Hel. She dropped the stone and caught the apple in surprise, and he grinned at her and said, “Welcome to Asgard.”
Just then her father came around the side of the hall and said, “Hel? There you are.” His eyes flitted between her and Baldur before resting on the latter and narrowing. “Run along. She doesn’t have time to play with you.”
Baldur’s eyes narrowed in return, but only slightly; he knew not to argue with his father’s blood brother. He nodded once, gave Hel another fleeting smile, and dashed back around the corner to rejoin his friends.
Hel turned to Loki as he knelt before her, and her small, shrill voice was shaky as she gestured angrily with the apple. “Papa! We were having a conversation.”
“Were you? It seemed a little one-sided to me,” Loki said. He took the apple from her and threw it aside, and when she made an indignant sound, he said, “It won’t do you any good anyway.”
Hel stuck out her lower lip.
Loki smiled thinly. “I didn’t expect to be having to talk about boys with you for another ten winters yet, at least. Then again, you did have a full vocabulary before your second . . .” But despite his playful tone, he seemed shaken. Almost as much as his daughter was.
The Aesir had been in talks for hours now and had finally dismissed him to make their final judgment in private. He was reckoned among the gods only when it suited them—and in this instance, it did not.
Hel sniveled, sensing his distress. She had never seen her father like this before: so on edge, so close to breaking. He was able to keep up his mask of nonchalance in front of the gods, of course. But in front of his only daughter, it was finally starting to crumble.
“Papa,” said Hel, “what’s going to happen to me? Why won’t they let me see my brothers? Where’s Mama?” She swallowed and screwed up her reddening face, preparing to wail. “I want Mama! What did they do to her?”
“Listen to me,” he said, taking her by the shoulders, looking her in the eye. It was so much harder to lie that way, but lie he must. “Mama is fine. Your brothers are fine. Everything is going to be all right.”
“Do you promise?”
“I promise. I just need you to be brave. Be brave and keep your chin up. So long as you do that, you’ll always remember who you are. And so will everyone else.”
Hel sniffled. “Who I am?”
“Yes. Who you are. Sometimes it’s all you have, so you should never let anyone make you feel ashamed of it.” Loki tapped two fingers under her chin, lifted it. “There, now. You look just like your mama.” His voice faltered on the last two words.
In front of the gods, his straight face betrayed only what was expected of him, and only when appropriate: the exact amount of anger that a man was justified to have when others decided the fates of his kin. But it was different for him because he knew that he could not do a thing. His anger was a show, covering something he could never, would never, let them see.
She could not bear this vision anymore. In her physical body she felt something wet freeze on her face and despaired, for tears meant she truly was still alive. This, above even the theft of her children, seemed to her to be the greatest injustice: that they had not managed to destroy her and put her out of her misery.
She wished so badly that all her sorrows would be over, that all her tears would be spent. But the witch was not so lucky.
Hel was somewhere dark now, her green dress torn and stained, her little dead legs wobbly—she was afraid to peel off her stockings and look at the flesh beneath, for she felt a bit odd, even more so than usual.
The man on the eight-legged horse had left her there, and his form was vanishing into the fog. She did not miss him. Even if she were all alone down here, she would rather be alone than with him. She hated him. His people had taken her and her brothers away from her mama, and he himself had taken her away from her papa.
The ground shifted beneath her and she yelped and hopped away and looked around in panic. There was nothing in sight save for yet more fog in the distance—the bridges they’d crossed were so far away, but perhaps if she continued forward she could reach the far-off, jagged cliffs, perhaps find a cave in which to find shelter for the night—but was it night?
Wasn’t it always night in Niflheim? That’s where they said they were taking her, even though she wasn’t dead. Even though she was only a small girl, and so very scared. Even though her papa had been yelling for her and holding on to her for as long as he could before the one-eyed man had ripped her from his grasp and shouted something, and her papa had shouted back, but she didn’t know what they had said because she’d been screaming.
Something grabbed her foot and she shrieked. An entire skeleton was dragging itself out of the ground, and more of them beyond it. The fog started to form into shadowy shapes, getting closer, circling her.
There was no way out.
Hel batted the thing away from her foot and stood, screeched. The skeleton was made of dirt, animated by the shades, for there were no bodies in Niflheim: only souls. And the rest of the shadowy figures were closing in, their dark hands reaching for her—the ground roiled like the sea during a storm, dead things churning below the dirt. Rising.
Rising to get her. Monsters in the endless night.
And then suddenly two solid forms joined the fray: one prowling toward her on the ground, the other circling in the air. She saw the wolf Garm’s slavering maw as he approached, felt the blast of air from Nidhogg’s wings as the dragon landed.
They rounded on her, the monsters and the dead. The dragon’s nostrils flared. The wolf growled. The shades reached for her, and she squeezed her eyes shut, held her hands out to bat at them, but her fingers slipped right through their smoky forms and they just kept coming. She could not fight them, but she could feel their ghostly touch and it made her skin crawl. Why could she feel them and not the other way around? It wasn’t fair. Her knees started to buckle.
“Get away from me!” she cried, spinning frantically, her hands still outstretched. “Get away, get away, GET AWAY!”
A burst of air erupted from all around her in a circle, knocking the dead things back.
Hel stood there, trembling. When she finally opened her eyes, the dead were all back on their feet, though they had withdrawn into a small ring around her. Even Nidhogg and Garm had stopped their advance. They looked confused and perhaps even a little frightened.
Garm wiped his snout with a paw and lowered his head, and Nidhogg’s nostrils flared again, his orange eyes burning. He was wary.
They were all wary of her now.
Maybe she had just done sorcery. Maybe her mama and that awful woman with the gold necklace weren’t the only ones who could do it—maybe Hel could, too. She looked down at her palms, and then back at the hosts of Niflheim.
And she lifted her chin.
* * *
• • •
The last thing Angrboda remembered was what she’d told Odin. The prophecy. The end.
She saw it again and again, and she could not look away.
Baldur, son of Odin, shining god of Asgard, is slain by a sprig of mistletoe sharpened to a deadly point, shot right through the heart by his own brother, and thus begins the end.
Loki, bound in torment—for what? She sees not.
Three years of winter with no summer in between. In Midgard, the bonds of kinship and social order begin to break. Wars erupt over dwindling resources. Many are slaughtered in this savage sword age of men.
A loud sound echoes through all the worlds and the bonds holding back the forces of chaos break. Loki is free, and so are his sons.
The wolves that chase the sun and moon finally catch their quarry, and the worlds go dark and all the stars go out.
Garm barks loudly at Hel’s gate. Yggdrasil trembles.
The gods march to battle against the giants. Loki crews a ship of the dead. The gods and giants fight and kill each other. The Midgard Serpent makes for Thor, the Great Wolf for Odin. All four fall.
Surt approaches from the south with his fiery sword and sets all aflame.
A green new world rises from the ashes, and the dragon Nidhogg circles overhead.
The witch saw no more as she sank back down.
PART II
Time passed as she lingered between life and death. An eternity could have gone by and she would not have known; the end of the worlds could have come to pass and it would have meant little to her, for she knew what was going to happen now. All of it. She hadn’t been able to look away this time.
I saw my sons die.
She’d told it all to Odin, and now it seemed to her that perhaps her time as Angrboda was over and done—that she would pass out of this role just as she had done with Gullveig. And what then? A true death, she hoped. She’d foreseen so much death already. Why should she remain alive to watch it all unfold?
I’ll stay here forever.
Nothing mattered anymore. Not without her children.
It’s not fair to them. They didn’t do anything to deserve this. This isn’t the way things are supposed to be.
Something tingled at the very edge of her consciousness: small but sharp, like a pinprick.
Oh, but maybe it is, said a voice, so soft that it seemed to be echoing from the deepest recesses of her mind. It was achingly familiar, like something out of a dream she’d forgotten long ago. The question is, what are you going to do about it?
Nothing. I can’t do anything. I’m no one. I’m nothing. Just a sad old witch who’s had everything taken from her. Betrayed by her husband. Deprived of her children. Forsaken by all.
Not all, the voice replied. You know this. Even now, she calls you back. Do you hear her?
“Angrboda,” a different voice shouted, but it was muffled, as if she were hearing it from underwater. “Angrboda, are you here? Are you—no. No!”
The pinprick in the back of her mind turned into a pull—not a forcible one, not like Odin’s pull when he’d dragged her out and forced her down, but a gentle touch that steered her in the general direction of consciousness.
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