The Strange Maid

THIRTEEN

TO KEEP RATHI out of the battlefield that was Jellyfish Cove, to keep him from finding his parents’ bones picked over, I ask him to go with me to the warning tower. I say I can’t face Unferth’s ghost alone.

The walk is muddy and rough, and Rathi slows me down, picking his way around snowmelt ponds and doing his best not to step in slush. With his arms out like a stork for balance, he almost makes me smile. The cuffs of his suit pants soak up plenty of cold water. His shoes slip against the frosty gorse and the splash is followed by a disgusted groan. He glares at nature and then stops bothering to avoid anything.

Except for the front door knocking loose against the frame as the ocean wind blows, the tower appears as it always has: lonely. I steer clear of the holmgang ring and head quickly inside, barreling upstairs to my room. The air is silent, still, and cold. My breath frosts on my lips, is harsh in my ears.

Footsteps downstairs stop my heart, but I remember it’s Rathi. An iron poker scrapes against the hearth, echoing up to me as he begins a fire.

Grabbing my seax, I buckle it at my hip, and take a moment to arrange it so it doesn’t rub against the belt holding Unferth’s sword across my back. I dig into the backpack Unferth packed me weeks ago for the silver rings and cuffs Jesca and Rome gave me at Yule and clasp them over the sleeves of my thermal shirt. Then I stuff in my only other wool Valkyrie dress and swing the pack over my shoulder.

I don’t say goodbye to my room, but I think of the poetry I painted onto the balcony overhead. My mark.

Rathi’s put a pot of water to boil on the fire. I brace myself and go into Unferth’s room. It’s shaped like a slice of pie, with light from the single porthole window facing north. Nothing personalized.

Once I barged in on him shaving in the bathroom. I called, “Unferth? Are you decent?”

He leaned out of the small bathroom in only his sweatpants. “Rarely,” he said with a twisted smile. I pursed my lips to mask my reaction to his near nakedness.

“What do you want, little raven?” he asked, pulling back into the bathroom. I joined him, standing just outside, and watched as he scraped the razor over the last line of shaving cream beside his left ear. Unferth bent over the sink to splash water on his face. The long scattering of scars marred the right side of his back; I only saw because as he stretched they glinted strangely in the yellow bathroom light.

I reached out and touched his shoulder blade. Half-shocked he didn’t jerk away from my touch, I boldly stroked the twist of scars. “Troll?”

He took a second to glare at me in the tarnished mirror, water running off his face like rain. “Troll,” he confirmed. After screwing off the faucet, he did pull away from my hand, patting his face and chest with a thin towel he snatched from a ring in the wall.

I cupped my hands against my chest. “You must have been so young.”

“It was the first troll I ever met.”

He threw the sentence away, but I caught it and held my ground in the bathroom door. Unferth stopped so close I might’ve leaned in and pressed us together. My breath picked up pace and I remained still, curling my hands around the doorjamb.

“I’m not going to tell you more, little raven, not today.”

“Someday?”

“Someday.” Unferth’s voice dropped, as if he was making a wish, not a promise.

I’ll never know now. But, I think, as I take a deep breath and dive into his bathroom, searching for anything of his, at least he died as he lived.

Armed with three thin copper rings he used to wear and a pair of his gloves, I rejoin Rathi. He didn’t make tea but hot chocolate, since that’s all we kept here. Unferth liked it first thing in the morning, but I never had the patience to stir and stir so it heated without burning.

We sit at the worn old table and drink as spring wind rattles the shutters, until Rathi says, very quietly, “I wish they hadn’t been here. I wish we’d never come to Vinland but stayed in Cherokeen.”

“They loved it here. It was everything they wanted from life.”

He nods jerkily, like he doesn’t want to agree but has to. “Ardo will rebuild. I can’t run it, though. We’ll find somebody else.”

“Ardo?”

“Vassing. He heads Bliss Church in Mizizibi. I’m working on my mastership with him this summer. Or was going to be. It was an honor.”

“Jesca told me. She was so excited, and proud.” I reach across the table and touch the back of his hand.

“They’re saying …” Rathi trails off to look out the narrow window toward the sea. “That Vinland was a necessary sacrifice to balance the strands of fate and bring Baldur home. That the trolls came because the sun was lost. The troll mother wished to sow doubt and chaos, and that’s why they left those runemarks for Ragnarok.”

I sigh through my teeth. Chaos. Sacrifice.

“Do you believe it? Did the gods let this happen to our family?”

The idea gnaws at my throat. I remember the bloody runes, the clarity in the troll mother’s eyes. Her fury, and the broken bodies scattered at her feet. “No, I think it was fate. Every choice has consequences, and those consequences cause more consequences. They can become sacrifices in retrospect. Like my parents died and I ended up climbing the Tree. They didn’t know it would happen, but it’s still connected. Their death became the sacrifice that brought me to the Alfather’s attention.

“The same can be said about the troll mother. We were destined to meet; I saw it in her eyes.” I shake my head. Your heart, she said. “She’s the answer to my riddle, and I feel that we’d have come together sooner or later. It was here, because of … choices we all made. Me to spend the winter here, and your parents to move here. Maybe the troll mother chose this time because of Baldur, and so his disappearance and the massacre are connected. Maybe she had no reason at all. Maybe chaos was her reason. Who knows how many choices and consequences brought us all to that moment, when I could see the answer to my riddle. It was Fate.”

“So it’s all about you, Signy.” His voice is hollow; he leans away from me.

My guts go cold and I shove the hot chocolate away from me. “That’s not—not what I mean. Only that it’s connected. The Tree, Baldur, trolls, the riddle. Knotted together in Fate’s weave.”

He stands, hands pressed to the table, to loom over me. “You like thinking that. You like to believe it all has meaning, some grand meaning, so there’s what? A good reason they died? If they were meant to die, you didn’t do anything wrong! You just did what you were fated to do.”

I don’t know how to respond, and so I only stare at him. The silence between us turns stuffy.

Rathi’s shoulders slump. “I shouldn’t attack you. They loved you. I love you. It’s just, they always followed your news, wanted to hear from you, but you never wrote or called. You were a skit daughter, Sig, and they didn’t care. Last year, after you left me, my dad said, ‘Signy’s too big for us, son.’ And I hated you because I wanted them to think I was big enough to match you.”

My skin crawls with regret and I hug myself, knowing there’s only one way to make this feeling go away. “I swear to you, Rathi Summerling, I won’t let their sacrifice be in vain.”

“That’s something Odinists are good for.”

Because Rathi doesn’t want to look at me at the moment, I grab my bag and tell him to use the tower. It’ll make a good base of operations for the Freyan rebuilding process, and I certainly won’t be returning. He runs a hand through his hair, leaving furrows in the gel, and pulls his face down, but doesn’t argue.

I trek back to town to get the truck, throw my hiking bag into the passenger seat, and take off.

I begin hunting at the meadow where the Mad Eagles found us, where they cut through so many trolls and the mother escaped. All the broken pieces of stone have been collected, sent off to some lab for study or smuggled into a black market or put on display in a roadside museum. I walk the length of it, hand sweating on the pommel of Unferth’s sword as I remember the shudder of wind and roaring and sticky sweet smell of their breath.

In the west, I find sign of a single troll shoving through the tree line. And a chunk of iron with a hole bored through: a piece of her great bone-and-iron collar.

The troll mother fled this way, alone by the looks of it.

I drive to high ground over access roads that are mostly mud and slush. With binoculars I study the shadowy pattern of broken trees, tracing her path for a half kilometer before she came out again onto stony moor and I can’t see obvious sign. This island is over a hundred thousand square kilometers. Pocked with giant lakes, mountains, and moors, it could take years to explore on foot, and the roads barely cover ten percent of it. I’ve set myself an impossible task.

But I won’t give up so fast. The Mad Eagles searched with heliplanes; they couldn’t see the smaller signs from the air, like mismatched lichen patterns or smoke stains, that I’ll be able to find if I’m methodical and on the ground.

So the tedious driving begins. The truck crawls down the coastal road and I peer carefully to either side, every half kilometer getting out to walk the edges and go into the stunted pines a little bit. The caribou haven’t come back to this northern finger of the island yet—whether from the cold or the recent trolls and military heliplanes, I couldn’t say. I don’t know much about the non-troll fauna of Vinland except that there are arctic hares and foxes, lemmings, squirrels, and little brown bats, but no snakes. And that I need to be on the lookout for wolf scat. Rome told me some of the wild dogs out here were descended from dire wolves within two or three generations.

Birds flit everywhere during the day, and much of the grass is pushing up new shoots. The evergreens leak sap, and the creeks run hard with snowmelt. There are ponds and lakes everywhere, winking in the sun, a few with ice still staining the edges. If my heart wasn’t so sore this would be lovely. If I wasn’t so alone.

At night I sleep in the truck, curled in blankets and trying desperately not to think of Unferth. He mutters in my head sometimes, rules for troll hunting, reminders not to neglect to look up high or take into account rockslides. I whisper back to him poetry and riddles I make up on the spot. I want to ask him what she meant when she said Your heart back to me, as if she’d been looking for me, too. But most of all I walk long and hard; I don’t let myself rest, so when the sun falls I’m exhausted.

It doesn’t stop the dreams. The troll mother hunts me as I hunt her. She moves gracefully even in the daylight, circling me like a shadow, near enough so at nightfall she can creep closer to watch me sleep. Her moon-bright face stares at me all night, and she sinks into the earth itself when the sun rises. I wake repeatedly, scanning the forest in terror, and take to parking in open spaces. It feels as though the entire world hangs from the tension between us.

The second day, and again on the fifth, I do find sign of her: an ashy clawed handprint smeared down the side of a cliff near Plum Point. It’s the nearest place to Canadia, and a ferry runs twice daily over the summer. The town has about fifty permanent residents, none of whom have seen her. There are no additional prints on the muddy gray beach, though I scour it for hours. I wonder if she stood there at the base of the rocks considering a return to Canadia, if I’m going to have to buy a ticket on the next ferry. But there right along the highway, I find a row of baby pines has been bent clear in half as if she turned inland again. Why?

Three times at the end of my first week I see sign of lesser trolls, which makes no sense, as they’ve never been on Vinland before. Cat wights and iron eaters tend to follow human populations, and Vinland has never had much of one. But the bright orange scat of the iron eaters is unmistakable, and cat wights mark their territory with an acrid scent as well as by braiding tiny fences in the grass.

Eight days into my hunt, I stop abruptly an hour before sunset, because there’s another car on the road. A small SUV, shiny and new under a layer of Vinland mud. New Scotland plates and nothing else to distinguish it other than being out on this gritty access road halfway down the western coast of a nearly uninhabited island. Frowning, I unsheathe Unferth’s sword and approach on foot.

Before I get to the SUV, a shrill scream darts from the valley to my left, like a jaguar or panther in the movies. It’s returned by another, and then more and more, pitching up like monkeys worked into a frenzy. Lesser trolls.

I hesitate for the briefest second before diving between the trees.

Needles and twigs whip my face and I ignore them, sword at the ready, boots skidding over fallen pinecones and the wet ground. The screaming draws me to a surprising grove of aspen, glowing like bones in the late evening light. A huge crack shatters the air as a man breaks off a thick tree branch. He swings it like a bat at a cluster of furry, dark cat wights, roaring loudly.

At least thirty wights harry him, three on his back, cackling gleefully as he swats at their cousins. Claws rip his shirt, tear at his short dark hair, and he opens his mouth to rage. He kicks and spins, catches them with his aspen-tree club. One splats against another tree; there’s the slick pop of breaking bones, screams, and more wild laughing. They die fast, but more come, all huge eyes and tiny claws, matted fur and fangs and curling cat tails.

I slice one down the spine with Unferth’s sword and stomp at another. Some turn to me, and I unsheathe my seax to wield a blade in each hand. A cat wight tears at my leg and I brain it with the pommel of the sword. I turn and scream at two more, swinging Unferth’s sword, slicing with my seax.

Fire burns across the back of my neck, my hair pulls, and I bend, rolling hard against the ground to crush the thing clinging to my shoulder, then back to my feet with a groan. I taste blood-black earth, and my old cracked ribs suddenly dig at my lungs.

Thank Fate the surviving wights begin to disperse. They flee south, and I lower my weapons. With a shaking hand I wipe pinkish blood off the seax blade onto my jeans and sheath it. I press my hand to my ribs, let the tip of Unferth’s sword brush the flattened grass.

The man’s labored breathing makes me turn my head just as he rushes me.

I curse in shock, raise my arm, but he hits me and the sword flies off. I smash into the ground with a scream and kick up with both feet. I catch him in the chest and he grunts but grabs my ankles and throws me.

My shoulder slams into the ground first and I roll, hitting rocks hidden beneath the moss and grass. The incline drives me down, skidding and rolling. I spit blood and my eyes are full of grit, but I climb up just as he swings the branch at me. I duck, unsheathing my seax to strike out as I spin away. The blade rips through his shirt and cuts his side. He staggers back slowly, as if he’s surprised but not hurt.

I run.

Up the hill, tearing between the trees, gasping and scrambling until I reach the truck. I climb into the bed, tripping over the canvas-covered supplies and onto the roof of the cab.

I breathe deeply, carefully, and tears spring to my eyes from the wretched pain in my side.

There’s no sign of him.

Silence from the forest but for a gentle wind that blows through it. I could get into the cab and drive away, return later, but the berserker could be hurt. I cut him, certainly, and the cat wights probably bit and scratched.

Seax gripped tight in my sweaty hand, I spit blood and grit off my lips, then call out, “Berserker! I am Signy Valborn. Get ahold of yourself and come speak to me.”

Nothing but the echo of my voice and the whoosh of wind through the valley.

“Are you one of the Mad Eagles?” I yell.

Still there is no response.

I wait, legs spread for balance, seax at the ready, and scan the shadows spilling down the forested hill. Twilight approaches and I don’t want to be here if this is the cat wights’ territory. But I don’t want to leave the berserker, either. Besides being injured, who knows what he’s seen?

I count to one hundred, lengthening my breaths, pressing my side with my free hand. I count again. My head is beginning to ache, and just as I decide to hop down out of the cold evening air, I hear him coming.

The pace is sedate; he must no longer be mad.

The berserker appears through the dark green with one hand up in peace; in the other he holds Unferth’s sword, blade down. “I’m well,” he calls with a deep, shocked-sounding voice.

I lower my seax with relief.

He’s young, my age, with dark skin and eyes and buzz-cut hair. His hands are massive and possibly he could wrestle Red Stripe and win. A red T-shirt is in bloody tatters from the cat-wight claws and my seax, but he seems mostly intact himself.

When he reaches the truck, he sets the sword down reverently, then raises his face and looks at me, displaying the berserker’s spear tattooed straight down his cheek. It bends as he twists his broad face into regret. “I am sorry; I was lost.”

I grit my teeth against the pain of my ribs. He will see no fear or sympathy from me, another child of Odin. “You seem to have found yourself, then.”

Something like a smile shifts over his luxurious mouth. It’s incongruous on his otherwise rectangular face: hard jaw, wide nose, broad cheeks, heavy brows. His eyes are mottled brown and slender. He certainly isn’t Asgardian. An Asgardian Islander, maybe, or with some of the old native blood, but the berserkers are supposed to be pure.

That’s when I recognize him. This is Soren Bearstar, the young man from Nebrasge who rescued Baldur the Beautiful. The berserker who forsook my mad god.

“Odd-eye,” I say, surprised. “The Sun’s Berserk.”

He has the grace to wince.

I crouch, then hop to the ground, hitting slightly too hard. He steadies me, but I catch myself against his chest. The whole left side of his shirt is plastered to him with blood. I offer my hand. “Sanctuary for the night, berserker?”

His sticky hand connects to mine and the last shine of sunset skims across his face. I see a golden rune in his pupil.

It says hero.