The Strange Maid

THE CHILD VALKYRIE

I was born under a frenzied star, so our poets would say. Which meant only that I was wild and loud as a child, always running off, crying or laughing at nothing my parents could see.

But when I was seven years old, I went truly mad.

It was winter, a week after my birthday, and my parents had been dead for a month. Shot down far away from me, with nothing to protect them but prayers and hymnals, neither of which could stop bullets. A bruise ached on my chest over my heart where I pressed my fists every morning, every night, and all through the funeral service staring at the empty pyre, for we had no bodies to burn. I had to hold in the wail of grief beating through my blood because the god my family served did not scream.

My adoptive parents, old friends of the family and fellow devotees of Freyr, the god of family, wealth, and joy, thought a trip to the New World Tree might help me. It might calm the fury that kept tears in my eyes when I demanded, “Why did they die? Why did our god let them die?”

“You’ll see,” said my wish-father, wiping tears from my face even as they gathered in his. “The Tree will show you, for it connects life and death and all the nine worlds together.”

The Tree’s garden was still and claustrophobic, a frozen park surrounded by high brick walls and a gate of wrought iron. A heart of nature in the center of Philadelphia. It is said that if you climb high enough among the branches you will find a road to Asgard, the home of the gods.

Freyr’s home. He was responsible for their deaths. I would make him answer for it.

I shucked off my coat and squeezed between two iron rails before my wish-family noticed, though my wish-brother, Rathi, caught the hem of my dress in his fingers and hissed my name. I ignored the clamor behind me; I was so hot, so burning with anger, my feet could melt the frost on the grass as I ran.

The massive Tree rose out of the ground, forbidding as a giant’s tower, and thick snaking roots wove out in all directions, leaping and diving through the earth like sea monsters. Elf-lights strung through the layers of canopy cast a pale, broken glow as I toed off my shoes and dug my hands into the trunk’s ropy bark. I climbed.

My fingernails broke and my feet scraped raw as I scrambled higher up the trunk. I had little time before the holy gardeners, the death priests, came after me, pulled me down, and threw me out.

I reached the first branch and kept climbing. Higher, harder, until my entire world was narrow leaves and branches, the pinprick surprise of elf-lights wound through the darkness.

The branches thinned; I found birds’ nests and squirrel hollows, old ribbons and popped balloons. Holiday streamers smeared like old trash. Dead memories that had drifted down from the sky to be caught in the leaves of the New World Tree.

Wind blew, snarling my braids and shaking the limbs that I clutched. When I tilted my head to peer through the upper branches I saw only stars.

There was no magical bridge. No gateway to heaven or Hel or the Alfather’s eternal battlefield. It was a lie. As Freyr the Satisfied was a lie.

I gritted my teeth and rubbed my sticky face, but still could not bawl. I grabbed twigs and broke them; I ripped leaves off the Tree and threw them away. They tumbled and fluttered down. Only leaves.

“What has this Tree ever done to you, little raven?”

Surprise nearly spilled me after the leaves, but I caught myself in the web of branches. Below me a man stood on a thick branch, legs spread and arms akimbo, as if the branch were solid ground. He wore a black uniform like a berserk warrior, and though his beard was blond, sword-straight silver hair fell around his shoulders.

One of his eyes shimmered like a pearl.

Odin! My mouth fell open. The Alfather. God of madness and sacrifice and war. The Alfather, who once, when the world was still new, climbed the Old World Tree and hung on its windswept branches for nine nights and nine days and stabbed a spear into his side until the Tree offered up its wisdom to him.

I struggled to speak. “The Tree is … a lie. There is no road to Asgard here.”

“So you tear it to pieces.” Odin peered at me with his pearly eye, blind with madness and wisdom. With it he could see through me and into my bruised heart, to my wails and screams that wanted to be free.

Anger flashed through me: he could have seen my parents’ hearts if he’d looked. “You didn’t save them, either,” I whispered.

The god of the hanged smiled and stepped up onto the next branch, which bent under the weight of his scuffed boots. “Easy things are never worthwhile,” he said, as if I’d asked a question.

“This isn’t easy!”

“True. But sacrifice,” he said, with his face near mine, all rough crags that made him old as a mountain, and the spinning vortex of his blind eye, “sacrifice is the most worthwhile thing in all the nine worlds.”

“My parents didn’t sacrifice; they died!” Fury felt good, and the heat of it dried my tears.

“Their death was the sacrifice required to bring you to me. For if they had not died, you would not be in this Tree. And I have waited for one such as you.”

Waited? For me?

A black shadow landed hard beside my head, the leaves whispering like rain; it was a raven the size of a dog, with one twisted, empty eye socket and one luminous white eye. Memory, or Thought—one of Odin’s creatures I’d seen on TV—scored bark off the limb with her claws. She tilted her head and croaked my name. “Signy!”

Her brother landed behind me and slapped his wings against my back and head. “Let go—let go—let go—” he cried.

I batted against the raven’s assault and slipped off my branch. The Alfather caught me. “Daughter,” he said.

His voice was hot, like the breath of my parents’ funeral pyre, raising elf-kisses on my arms and sweat on my spine. And I thought, The Alfather’s weapons are more potent than prayers and hymnals. I wrapped my arms around his neck.

Odin held me against him for a moment, let me sink into his scent of wood smoke and tinny blood. I could hear his heartbeat, a racing rhythm like hoofbeats.

He set me against the trunk of the Tree, then straddled the branch before me like a very large boy. He brushed teary strands of hair off my face with gentle, callused fingers.

“You were waiting for me?” I whispered.

“So it seems” was his answer. The ravens clucked above us.

“What for?”

“To give you a new name, little raven.”

“I have a name. I’m Signy Loring.”

Memory cackled again, and her brother Thought with her. In their twin blind eyes a thing shifted: the past or the future, mischief or wisdom.

Odin tilted his head exactly like the ravens. “Is there any name in all the nine worlds that survives an encounter with the World Tree?”

The god of madness was riddling with me, and I had never been good at riddles. “Yours?” I guessed.

“Not mine.” He shook his head; his whirlwind eye spun.

I pressed my back into the trunk, letting its roughness be fire on my spine. “What good would a new name do me?”

The god of the hanged laughed. It was a wild laugh, a laugh like an avalanche, deeper than the World Snake’s gullet and wider than the space between stars. It shook my bones and stopped my pulse, but I held my chin up because I did not know what else to do.

“You climb my Tree, tear up its leaves, throw rage in my eye, and still you bargain with me! You are my darling Hrafnling reborn!” he crowed. Memory and Thought hopped to branches beside him. They chuckled rough and raw, ruffling their oily feathers.

Odin leaned nearer. “Be mine, little raven. My Valkyrie, my Death Chooser. Be my Valkyrie of the Tree from now until you die.”

I gasped. The Valkyrie were his handmaidens; mortal yet famous, powerful, and beautiful. They were never afraid. They would never die halfway around the world, never leave loved ones behind.

“A new name, a new destiny to better fit the desires and strengths with which you were born,” the Alfather tempted, offering his hand.

I gave him mine. “Yes!”

His face was as rugged as the bark of the Tree when he said, “So I name you—Signy Valborn.” He kissed my palm. “My Valkyrie, newly born into death.”

My hand pinched and burned. I snatched it back.

Pink and raw against my skin was a binding rune, built of other runes woven together to create a new meaning. I could not read it, for I did not know the runes then. But it seemed to flicker with fire as I studied it, to shift and wiggle. Tiny tendrils of pain shot up my fingers and down my wrist, twining through my blood.

Wind whipped up around us, bending the leaves and branches into a frenzy. Through it I heard the Tree whispering. While the Alfather held tight to my shoulders and his ravens cackled and screamed, the Tree hissed its ancient secrets in my ears—the secret wisdom, the ancient runes, folding into my memory and cutting through my bones like hot barbed wire.

Before I fell down through the branches of the New World Tree, I heard his booming laugh. “Welcome, Valkyrie of the Tree!”