The Strange Maid

FIFTEEN

THE TROLL MOTHER doesn’t appear. I take my frustration out on a few of the trees and hunt with my nose to the ground around and around the lake until I find four tiny broken branches at her shoulder height that maybe she crushed in passing. If so, she definitely is headed for Lonely Shadow. I feel like I’m grasping at shadows.

We abandon the trucks as near the foot of the mountain as we can get, load up supplies, and hike the entire circumference together, hunting her. If we didn’t travel so slowly, searching through the forest and spreads of granite scree, it would be strenuous. But stretched over five days it’s only exercise. Though we find a few marks of lesser trolls again—grass woven into the low branches of a yellow birch, the carcass of a red fox pulled apart and skinned—there’s nothing to show she was ever here.

In my dreams she and I grapple together, both of us as large as the mountain, crushing lakes and towns as we wrestle. Unferth’s sword melds with my arm and my bones turn to steel, her skin becomes iron and we start massive fires when we spark together, when we clash. Soren wakes me up several mornings before dawn. I’m stained with sweat, but he doesn’t ask why. He silently hauls me into stretches and boxing warm-ups until my sweat is just from hard work.

Overall, he’s a quiet companion, speaking little but to point out the dark backs of caribou moving across a distant field or ask if I want the grilled chicken MRE for dinner. At night I tell him stories about the Vinland I knew, the Summerlings and Unferth, the festival, and even the massacre itself. I talk about the Valkyrie, about how different they all are but that together they’re the voice of Odin. I tell him about climbing the Tree and meeting the god of the hanged, and he tells me of his own encounter with Odin, how everyone believes the boon he asked was to be allowed to serve Baldur as a berserker, but really he begged not to forget Astrid’s name. I learn his mom was born in Baja California and is a U.S. citizen, but her parents were Savaiian, that she was Lokiskin and met his dad while working where he was stationed. He learns how my parents met at a Freyan leadership camp but died far away in Guathemala.

We discuss the riddle, and I tell him what the troll mother said, that it makes me chill with fear but also hope, because I’m certain we’ll meet again. Soren says there must be more to the riddle’s answer than only presenting a heart of stone to the Death Hall, that there will be a catch or a trick because Odin Alfather does nothing without a catch.

I ask him why he dedicated himself to Baldur, and he only shrugs and says, “When you meet him, you’ll know.”

“A lot of people meet him and don’t change their dedication to him.”

“I …” Soren drags the pause out, not to avoid me, I think, but because he’s never put it into words before. “Baldur is the first god I’ve ever believed in.” He’s quick to add, “I know they all exist—there’s nothing to believe in that way—but I mean that I know he cares what happens to me, and that he’s good. He believes in me, and none of the rest of them do.”

Hanging behind his words is the question: Does Odin believe in you?

It’s such a light word, a gentle word: to have confidence in, to trust in. I put my fingers over my heart. “When my parents died, I felt this desperate longing, this growth in my heart that made me want to scream and drag others behind me until they felt that scream in their own hearts. I still feel it, and so does the Alfather. He recognized it in me, and instead of saying I was too wild or wrong he embraced it. He’s the god who not only lets me need to feel the troll mother’s blood between my fingers; he encourages it. The god of the hanged understands how violence is part of life. Creation itself is an act of violence, and everything I do is violent.”

Even your way of kissing, Unferth whispers.

“So I believe in that. And Odin does, too. We want the same thing. That makes us allies.”

“Dangerous ones,” Soren says.

“Danger is necessary to life.”

“If you can contain it, control it.”

“Ride it; use it! Dance with it! You can’t control life, Soren. That’s what people try to do with troll walls and seat belts; it’s what the Valkyrie do with their rules and costumes, but you can’t. Horrible things still happen. Trolls attack; people die. People who shouldn’t.” My throat tightens and I realize I was near yelling.

Soren doesn’t try to comfort me. The tiny fire casts him in bronze and earthy tones, like he’s a statue. A calcified hill troll.

I look away. I want Unferth here so badly to argue on Soren’s side, to cut me down with a well-placed barb, to twist what I say into a riddle so I’ll spend hours delving deeper into myself. That’s what he did. He drove me deeper.

Ned Unferth believed in me.

It’s no use. The day we reach the trailhead, and there’s the lightning-scoured spruce as proof we’ve gone all the way around, I take my backpack off and fling it to the ground with a cry. I pick up a rock and throw it as hard as I can toward the mountain. It clatters through branches and lands softly, rolling several paces. I throw another and another.

Soren puts a hand on my shoulder and I drop the last rock. Sunlight pounds down on us, warm enough to actually feel. “How am I supposed to find her? Where am I supposed to go next?” I yell, tossing out my arms.

“The funerals are tomorrow night,” Soren says.

“What?”

“It’s seven days since we met, which was a Moonsday, so the funerals are tomorrow night. Back at your Cove.”

I blow a hard breath. I don’t want to go. I don’t want to watch the town burn again, even if it’s in pyres.

But a Valkyrie does not balk at death.

We arrive as the sun is falling. There are media vans and death priests everywhere. I recognize logos from Freyan volunteer organizations from all up the eastern coast of the States. Soren is even more interested than I am in avoiding anybody with a camera. Men and women come from across the country; half of Congress is here, kings and princes, representatives from every priesthood, reporters, and the far-flung families of the dead. Baldur the Beautiful is here, Freyr the Satisfied with his endless entourage, and two Valkyrie: Siri of the Ice, whose region we’re in, and Precia, the Valkyrie of the South, where Rome and Jesca Summerling were born.

I’m glad I packed my last wool dress from the tower. It’s dark green and falls to my knees. A red apron ties over it, cinching my waist and pinned at my shoulders with abalone shells. Chains of fake gold line the collar and wrists. I pull on Jesca’s silver rings and wear both my seax and Unferth’s sword. I braid tiny ropes to either side of my face and let the rest of my hair fall down my back. I use ash to darken my eyes with thick lines, like a mask, and dab it onto my mouth, too.

It’s as if I think all this preparation and costume will help me look my sisters in the eye. They surely know what I’ve done, since even Soren had heard the story, and maybe that commander on the military base did get around to calling one of the Death Halls.

We join the mourners, and one look at either of us parts the next section of the crowd until a path arrows us toward the pavilion. It’s set up in the valley beside the razed festival site, a gilded stage hung with prayer flags and flowers flown in from some tropical greenhouse. It clashes dreadfully with the moor, especially as the sun sets and our island goes hard and harsh with shadows, but the pavilion lights up in a blaze. There are fourteen pyres arranged so that when lit they will become a circle of fire like Freya’s brisinga necklace. My stomach twists at the pomp. This is the part of being a Valkyrie I always hated. The decorations, the ceremony, the gilded prettiness of everything. I would prefer to light the fires and scream. Make a sacrifice, yell gruesome poetry, to remind the mourners death is all we truly have in common.

Rathi speaks at the podium in a red three-piece suit, pink starburst tie pinned with a horse brooch, his hair perfectly slicked back and his false green eyes bright. He welcomes everyone in a shining voice. Behind him stands Siri of the Ice, her thin lips in a line when she sees me; she flicks her fingers lightly against Precia’s elbow. There’s Baldur the Beautiful, nearly impossible to look at in person, a golden beach bum in jeans and a loose white coat, tears caught like stars in his night-purple eyes. And my parents’ own Freyr the Satisfied, taller than his cousin-god, in old-fashioned finery: purple velvet jacket and hose to show off his well-shaped legs, fur boots, a six-hundred-year-old sword crusted with gems, and an actual crown. There are congressmen and the president’s lawspeaker, a death priest in a silver raven mask, five wolf-guards with their faces tattooed black, attendants in gray and green cowls holding incense and torches at every corner of the pavilion.

The crowd waits in a half circle, the first fifty rows in wooden folding chairs, the rest arrayed among the fourteen pyres. I reach the end of one aisle, Soren at my side.

“Signy!” cries Peachtree the clown from across the crescent of empty moor between dais and crowd. She waves an arm as Rathi falls silent and everyone turns to me. I keep my eyes on Peachtree, on the two sequins melted onto her cheek from the fires of the attack.

Murmuring breaks out and Rathi steps around the podium. “Signy,” he says, only loud enough for those of us near to hear. He holds out his hand for me to take, to pull me up with him, but I shake my head.

“I am only here to grieve,” I call loudly. “To dance with the song of crackling flames.”

My wish-brother hesitates and then nods. He goes back to his welcome speech and ends with Rome Summerling’s favorite prayer. When he looks at me I mouth the words with him. It loosens the pain curled tight around his eyes.

Into the silence after his invocation, drums beat a sedate, gloomy rhythm, and a team of flautists raise the hairs on my neck with their ghostly accompaniment.

Precia and Siri step forward to opposite ends of the pavilion. The Valkyrie of the Ice is tall and lean, in a white feather cape and an impractical skirt of chain mail. Beside her the young Valkyrie of the South wears a leather and fur coat, her dark hair coiffed and her eyes dangerous. They are both so elegant, so powerful in every smooth gesture, and together they lift their voices in a song of mourning.

It’s controlled, synchronized. Not a word out of place, not a gesture unpracticed. So unlike the wild splash of death, the frenetic beating of my heart as I struggled and fought to save my family. Not desperate, not thick and bloody.

This is only a performance.

Such a lowly thing for a Valkyrie to do, Ned told me when I painted myself up for the festival.

I feel so empty.

We don’t even have his body to burn.

The Valkyrie fall silent and put their arms around each other like sisters.

Freyr the Satisfied holds out his hands. He draws Rathi forward with him, and from here I can see the shudder as my brother closes his eyes. The god is lovely and tall, as they all must be, and charisma flares in the corner of his smile, in the light way he flirts with the audience even as his words are sad. He offers condolences, and those of his twin sister, Freya the Witch, who promised him our island would never be forgotten in any of the strands of fate.

Freyr then tells us a story of meeting Rome Summerling once, over a decade ago; his words blur in my ears, but everyone around me laughs, gently at first, then uproariously. Even Rathi smiles widely and puts his hands together over his heart to bow to the god of joy.

Rathi leads another prayer, that lilt of his father’s accent carrying the sadness out of his voice, and he gleams with a sincere sort of glory. Cameras flash, and I imagine viewing this all through a television screen, as I’ve seen so many appearances by the gods and Valkyrie before.

But the cold ocean wind tickles my ears and I smell salt and mud under the perfume and gathered bodies. There are evergreen boughs tossed onto the pyres to brighten the inevitable sickening of the air when the remains burn, and I wish there weren’t. That we would all be forced to breathe in the sour death.

Why should it be beautified?

I ignore the congressman with his wide sideburns and rearing-horse lapel pin as he eulogizes my island. I ignore the click of a camera beside my face. Let them see that I stand to the side, that I don’t sing along with Jesca’s favorite hymn or the old dawn theme they used to open the festival.

Only when Baldur the Beautiful steps forward, and tears glint on his cheeks, do I feel any of it matters. He shines like a star in the darkness, tan and healthy and perfect, his jacket casually open, his collar unbuttoned. All the god of light says is “May they rest peacefully in Freya’s embrace, as I do in my turn.”

The Valkyrie step forward again, both with unlit torches in hand. They raise the carved wood in harmony, and in an arch over their heads tap the tips together.

Flames burst to life.

The congregation gasps, and Baldur claps with a smile. Freyr takes a torch and lights it from the Valkyrie’s fire, then so do Baldur, Rathi, the congressman, and the president’s lawspeaker, who is short and unimpressive among this company.

It is so choreographed, exactly like our Beowulf pantomime in the feast hall. A shallow production, a mask. This is not what death is. This is not all the Valkyrie should be.

A scream builds in my chest. I clench my hands into fists, push them hard against my heart, and the Valkyrie of the Ice suddenly looks at me. The Valkyrie of the South does the same.

They lift their voices in a keen. A beautiful, controlled wail of grief. There’s no rage in it, no desperation.

Other voices join them, until all around me a hundred people cry as the fire passes from torch to torch. This is no scream, but a song they tried to teach me.

The Valkyrie step away from the pavilion and stride together for the first pyre. It lights, flaring loud and bright and cutting off the howl of the crowd. The Valkyrie are shadows against the bonfire as the others file from the pavilion and walk through the rest of the pyres.

I back away, touch Soren to tell him he need not follow, and dart through the mourners onto the free, open tundra. It sparkles in the moonlight, so many human bodies shielding it and me from the warm light of the fires.

If the frost-tipped gorse rose up to become the troll mother, if her moon-white marble body loomed over me now, I would say his name for her.

“Signy.”

I turn to face the Valkyrie.

The firelight behind them darkens their faces, but the Valkyrie of the Ice tilts hers so I can see the glint of green in her eyes. And there is Precia beside her. In the two years since I’ve seen her, I’ve grown a head taller than the Valkyrie of the South.

“You do not mourn?” Siri of the Ice says with disdain.

I try to match her tone. “Not like this. It is too clean for me; you should know.”

“People like for death to be clean.”

Precia adds, “It’s part of what we do.”

“Death isn’t clean. Especially these deaths,” I say.

The Valkyrie of the South shakes her head at me. “We make death into what we need it to be.”

“Or what the Alfather needs it to be,” Siri adds. “We translate for him; we are his voice.”

I drop my hands to my sides. This is habit to argue with them, over this thing. I shrug. We will never agree.

Precia reaches for me, takes my hand. “Ask us for help, Signy.”

“No.”

“She’s too proud,” Siri scoffs.

Precia narrows her dark eyes and I hold my breath, wishing I could read runes in her irises.

The Valkyrie of the Ice laughs, a brutal, sharp laugh. “We saw the posters with your face, you wretched child. Playing Valtheow the Dark for tips. And you said we were shallow, we had lost our way.”

There are a handful of justifications I could give, especially that I was here for the riddle, but I won’t lend her the satisfaction. So I say nothing, not even that the Alfather led me here by the hand of a poet.

“You look horrible,” Precia murmurs.

“I’ve been hunting on the mountains,” I say, cutting a hand toward the south.

“You fought the herd,” Precia says. “You faced a herd of greater mountain trolls and lived. We heard the stories, from your wish-brother and from Baldur the Beautiful, who is enamored with you. Come home with us. You have surely earned it, and this moment you could hold the country in your hand with your story: Signy the Valkyrie of the Tree, who shepherded the great Vinland sacrifice.”

“It’s not the answer.”

“To the riddle?” Precia asks hopefully.

“Yes.”

Ice leans nearer to me, takes my face in one cold hand. “I don’t believe you. You are still searching, undecided. It’s plain in your runes. You lack conviction.”

“I don’t believe you, Siri. Conviction is all I have tonight. And passion, and hope.” I twist out of her grasp. “Because I do know the answer, and before long I will bring a stone heart to the Death Hall that you cannot even imagine. You will be the one to change.”

Siri catches her surprise and snuffs it out fast. “Only death changes me. Another lesson you’ve never learned.”

“Death and poetry,” I snap.

But the Valkyrie of the Ice stalks away.

South lets her sister go and cocks her head. Not a single hair falls out of place. “Myra will be glad to know you still carry her knife.”

“You believe me?” I ask.

“Signy.” Precia’s hands are tucked into her fur and leather coat. She holds herself together, back from me, though her voice is tender. “I always have known you would succeed. It’s you who fights it, not me.”

Darkness surrounds us, wails and conversation from the funeral pyres, the harsh snaps of burning wood.

“What do you see, in my eyes?” I whisper.

“Not indecision but madness. Chaos.”

My jaw clenches. Chaos. Still.

The Valkyrie pulls her hand out of the pocket of her coat and points southeast. Toward the ocean. “For now, your madness is that way.”

Turning to look, all I see is the dark sky, the long shadowed stretch of the moor. What is that direction? The sea, the death ships, and, far over the ocean, the coast of the USA. Or perhaps she only means Your madness is away from us.

When I open my mouth to ask, the Valkyrie has already gone to join our sister again at the first bonfire.

I trip and cuss as I make my way through the intense darkness, through mud, for there is no path this way she pointed. I have no idea if she meant it literally, but if not I’ll reach the ocean and be forced to quit. I’ll find the death ships and sleep there, light my own pyre for Unferth. Once I took him there with me, held his shoulder as I climbed atop the prow of the flagship. Sometimes I think I want to remain here forever, I cried up at the windy sky. And Unferth said, You would hate forever.

Cold air chaps my lips, for even so many weeks after Baldur’s Night the island will freeze, but I press on. My boots slip and the hem of my dress grows heavy, despite it being cut just below the knee. My palms are raw from catching myself, and finally I stay where I fall.

The wool soaks up cold water off the hill, freezing my thighs and making my ass numb. I lie back and spread my arms. Unferth’s sword is like an external backbone, an exoskeleton shield for my heart. My fingertips brush baby grass, and sharp rocks cut up into my hips, but I don’t care. My chest heaves.

I stare up at the stars and try to find poetry in them, words to ground myself in, but there’s nothing.

Your heart. Your heart. Your heart.

The rhythm of the words is the rhythm of the distant waves.

Dark figures loom suddenly around me, coalescing out of the moorland. They’re broad and dressed in black coats, weapons strapped to shoulders and hips. Their eyes gleam and every one of them has a slice of darkness cutting down their left cheeks. Berserkers.

I hold my hand out and one takes it in a very firm grasp. He hauls me to my feet. “Hello, pretty Valkyrie,” he says, almost purring. There’s a buzzed line of hair striping down his otherwise bald skull and he smiles a head-swallowing smile. “I’m Sharkman,” he adds. “I saw you as I descended from the heliplanes. Your madness was so raw. It affected me, who is affected by little.”

“You affected all of us,” says the warrior to his right: a berserker with dark braids pulled tightly back from his face and one of those thin Frankish goatees around his solemn mouth. I know his brown eyes. This is the berserker who caught my sword in the fray, who held me back, who said, Balls.

He puts two fingers to his heart and says, “The Mad Eagles salute you, Valkyrie.”

At least seven of them surround me, mostly shadows in the dark. “Thank you,” I say.

“I am Darius Strong, captain of the Mad Eagles.” He covers my hand with his, the warmth of his skin traveling up my arm. “We returned here for you, Valkyrie. Come with us tonight, home to our hall, and drink in honor of our fallen, and yours. We will show you how the Mad God mourns.”

Without hesitation, I say yes. Darius and Sharkman flank me, with the five other berserkers spread behind.