The Strange Maid

TWELVE

BEING IN PRISON at least gives my ribs a chance to heal.

For days I lay on the pallet, breathing slowly to soothe the pain, staring at the pipes that cross the ceiling like a road map. I close my eyes and the stone walls of the prison shake; trolls pull away from it, forming out of concrete and metal, tiny yellow eyes glaring at me. They roar in my dreams. Sweat burns my eyes and I throw myself up to pace, to tear at the bars until I’m wasted again by the vise of my ribs.

I’m given ink when I ask for it, though, and I scrawl poetry in spirals and uneven lines all over the walls of the brig. Everything I remember about Rome and Jesca Summerling, about the first light on the ice Yule morning, the laughter and electric joy of the festival. What must be memorialized. A sprawling epic poem with bridges and returns, melodrama and as many rhymes for home as I can find.

Every night the troll mother reaches huge hands for me. I toss and yell, sweaty and wild. I wander the nightmare battlefield hours and days, witnessing the slow putrid rot of bodies after the spirit is gone to heaven or the Valhol.

Once Elisa of the Prairie showed me the decaying carcass of a dead bison. She said, Remember, when you one day preside over a national sacrifice, over a great funeral, this is what happens when death is not followed by fire. This is the deepest face of death, the heart of it. She cried as she spoke and let her tears drop onto the dry prairie dirt.

I thought I understood death better than Elisa, the rawness of it, the filth. But I never thought the bodies slowly rotting would be men and women I loved.

And in my nightmares, the body I study as the rats come, as the maggots tumble from his tongueless mouth, is Unferth’s own.

There’s no poetry left in me now, he whispers in my dreams.

It makes me want to tear at my hair and face, dig into my eyeballs until I find runes under my skin. All the desperation, all the terror and nausea, I force into poetry. I draw the troll mother’s claws and a spiral of tusks. I write down the side: the mother of her own destruction.

I cannot drag my thoughts away from her.

And so I write, too, until my fingers cramp, about Valtheow the Dark, who faced the most ferocious troll mother of our histories with the berserker Beowulf at her side. There was a line she said: I make myself a mirror to understand the beast.

Unferth whispers in my head, Tell me, Signy, why you love her most of all.

I draw the scar from my palm, the binding rune that he linked linguistically to Valtheow: the servant of death and the death-born, both Strange Maids. She became a monster to fight Grendel’s mother.

But that Valtheow had a poet named Unferth at her side, and mine is dead.

Nine days after Baldur the Beautiful disappeared, a young berserker and a Lokiskin orphan find the god of light. After days of celebration the country rises from its crisis, and apparently there’s no reason for them to hold me prisoner any longer.

It takes several days for me to make my way to Halifax, then on to Port Hali. Walking and hitching rides, relying on the kindness of elated strangers who are happy to share a meal or water with me, to raise a toast because Baldur lives. I have to smile and watch the newsreels, listen again and again to the same information on the radio: a disgruntled Einherjar stole Baldur’s ashes, and the god of light woke in a desert, where he was found by Soren Bearstar, a berserker boy a few months older than me.

For his boon Soren asked to serve Baldur instead of Odin, and for the first time in our history there’s a berserker unbound from the Alfather. His girlfriend, Vider Lokisdottir, asked to be given the berserker madness, and so there is a woman berserker for the first time since Luta Bearsdottir died.

“It all ties together with a nice little bow,” I say when I hear it, earning me an uncomfortable look from the driver of the longship carrier truck that is currently my ride.

With nothing but the clothes Esma bought me, Unferth’s sword, and the pins holding my braids up, I scour the Port Hali docks until I find a ferry captain who remembers me. He lets me on board for the first voyage to Vinland since the massacre and says most of the refugees are at a hospital in Halifax. They’ll be trickling back soon enough, once the death priests sailing with us purify the bodies and town. The captain’s also heard some Freyan preacher from down south has declared the restoration of Jellyfish Cove and the Viker Festival to be an official act of worship, so the military cleanup and death priests won’t be our only company before long.

It hardly concerns me. I only need to get to the truck, parked near the ferry ports at the south edge of the Cove. There are protein bars, bottled water, camping gear, and weaponry in the bed, all I need to hunt the troll mother from there back to Canadia if I have to. There’s been no word of her, though the Mad Eagles officially cleared the island, wasting a handful of her straggling sons. She’s either crossed back over the channel or gone to ground. I’ll find her either way.

At the prow of the ferry, I grip the metal rail as salt water splashes my boots and coat. I stare out over the steely ocean, lips chapped, shivering, and I think of her moon-bright face, her claws, her teeth.

“Signy?”

Rome Summerling calls my name, tentative like a ghost, and I stop breathing. I turn, hands sticking to the half-frozen rail.

It’s not Rome, of course, but his son, Rathi, standing with his hands in the pockets of a slick tailored coat, collar popped. His hair is a disaster of gold, twisted and tossed by the wind. With the last of the baby fat lost from his face, he’s as beautiful as Freyr the Satisfied himself: strong jaw, smooth, symmetrical face that invites confidence like a prince. I step forward, tossed by the rocking ferry, and he reaches out a hand. I grasp his arm.

He’s real. He’s here.

I stare up at him, and there it is, swimming in his black pupil, surrounded by bottle-green iris: prince.

Except in my memories his eyes are always the same rich earth color as his father’s.

“What’s wrong with your eyes?” I say.

Instead of an answer, he hugs me like I’m the only thing in the world. His arms tremble, his shoulders hunch so he can bury his face in my neck. I slide my hands under his coat, around his ribs, glad he didn’t go for mine. Here’s the familiar smell of his hair gel, the comforting warmth of his arms. His tears stick our cheeks together.

Rathi pulls back to look at me and I stroke under his eyes, wiping away his tears.

“Contacts,” he murmurs.

I twist my mouth. “What was wrong with your brown? Brown the color of Freyr’s earth? Brown the color of your father’s eyes?”

“Sig,” he says, ignoring my anger the way he ignores everything he doesn’t like.

I turn my back into him and we both face Vinland, a thin strip of black appearing on the horizon. Soon there will be mountain peaks and snowcaps, the dark green of trees and the ferocious gray of cliffs and shattered beaches. He presses a kiss to my hair. To the part between two thick braids. I remember running as kids through coarse grass with our hands linked, and our ankles knocking together under the Summerling kitchen table.

Rathi wraps his arms around me and it’s so comfortable I hate it. It was always his problem—or my problem with him. He made me comfortable; he let me relax, slow down, settle, stop pushing and fighting and raging. Last year I watched him perform in a traveling Chautauqua as part of his preaching apprenticeship. He glowed onstage and his words reminded me of warm hearths and bonfires, dancing with my parents, curling at the foot of his bed with licorice to scare each other with tales of giants and dragons. He brought back everything I’d been before the Tree and handed it to me, exactly when I needed it, when I’d fled the Death Halls and my Valkyrie sisters, when I was starving for somebody to say, Signy, you’re amazing, and that’s what Rathi Summerling did.

He’d forgiven me for abandoning him when I climbed the New World Tree, forgiven me for leaving Freyr the Satisfied and our long family histories, our future together we’d childishly whispered and giggled about for years. He’d forgiven me for becoming a daughter of Odin, and I didn’t want him to.

Now he murmurs, “I thought you were dead, too, and I was all alone.”

“Rag me,” I whisper.

Rathi waits, patient as his parents, patient as the earth. He’s always like a gift when I need it the most.

Sucking breath through my teeth, I take his cold hand and lead him to the top deck of the ferry, where the wind is harshest and I can’t hide anything. I sit him down on one of the rows of metal benches with flaking blue paint. “You’re not alone, Rathi. You won’t ever be as long as I am alive.” My voice is rough and unforgiving even as the skin around his lips pales, even as his hand digs into mine. “And I’m not alone, either.”

“Tell me,” he whispers, eyes unfocused. “Tell me what happened. Please.”

I do.

It’s a poem, but a dark one, a quiet one. This story I spin for the only living Summerling about how his parents died, about how all of them died, resembles the truth not at all. I wonder if Unferth would forgive me for lying.