The Strange Maid

TWENTY-THREE

NEAR MIDNIGHT I slip out the front door in jeans, boots, and my black Mad Eagles hoodie despite the warmth that lingers in the night air. Thebes is on guard duty in Red Stripe’s violently bright garage, and he whispers “Good luck” as I strap Unferth’s sword over my shoulder.

I spent three hours with my berserkers going over the maps of troll sightings in Port Orleans to pinpoint the best possibility for me encountering the least dangerous iron wights. The majority of the sightings are near the river and bridges, of course, or near highway overpasses and up north by the Wide Water. Darius suggested I avoid deep water if I’m truly uninterested in danger, and we isolated a seven-block area south of here between the trolley tracks and river where there’ve been sightings of mostly iron wights. So that’s where I’m headed, and alone in order to be less of a threat to the curious little trolls. There are some cheap silver rings in my pockets to bribe them with, and a handful of colored paper clips I found in a kitchen drawer. My other pocket is full with a cell phone, at the captain’s insistence. Just in case.

The night is quiet but for the harsh-pitched cry of frogs and muffled traffic, and I jog down our dim street to an avenue with better lighting and four lanes divided by a grass median. It’s lined with scraggly oak trees and a strange blend of very nice antebellum houses and sorry ranches on concrete foundations with sagging porches. I start at an easy gait, Unferth’s sword quietly slapping my butt as I go. I count the blocks, and after nine take a left onto Sanctus Charles, which is busy even at this time of night. I follow the trolley tracks for two blocks before heading right, toward the river, again, this time on a narrower street in the center of these localized iron wight sightings. This one is quiet and dark thanks to fewer streetlamps. One side is lined with gorgeous three-story town houses, the other with short chain-link fences and single-family homes. Even in the dark it’s like two cities crashing into one another.

I tuck into the shadow of a tree as a cluster of five men spreads out across the street, sweeping their UV flashlights up the sides of houses and into the branches of trees.

Hunters after the bounty Thor promised yesterday, on account of all the extra sightings.

Once they’ve passed, I step off the sidewalk to cross the street. On my left the houses are replaced by a two-meter-tall whitewashed brick wall that glows in the dingy streetlights. I slow my pace and hop onto my tiptoes to see over it.

Darker gray and white rooftops peer at me from the other side, some peaked or curved, others entirely flat. They’re decorated with stone flowers and urns, some with false windows or wrought-iron crowns. Mausoleums and family crypts.

I sink to my heels. It’s one of Port Orleans’ cities of the dead. An entire block of marble and stone that wasn’t marked on my map. This should be the center of that iron wight territory Darius identified. What better place for small trolls to hide under the sun?

With a running start, I leap to grab the top edge of the wall and drag myself up. I roll onto my side across the flat top and catch my breath. Right before my face is a crumbling mausoleum, tucked against the wall, stained gray by rain and weathering. A lush green fern grows from the top corner. I sit to dangle my legs down into the cemetery. No streetlamps invade the city of graves, but it looks like there’s a lane around the inner perimeter and two that cross in the middle to create four smaller blocks of crypts within the larger block. Trees grow near the center and along the lanes, casting additional shadows in the dim moonlight.

I hop down into the cemetery.

My boots hit the dirt hard, and I crouch with my back against the cool brick wall. I’m hidden between two mausoleums. The breeze smells like wet stone and mud, and down here the city sounds are muffled.

I touch the cool marble to my right, skimming my fingers down it. This place reminds me of the death ship beach, though crowded and claustrophobic. I wish I knew who this cemetery is dedicated to. Most like it’s for Thunderers, who are often buried whole-bodied in stone graves like this, or in crypts beneath one of their rock cathedrals, waiting in peace for the day Thor Thunderer summons them to his side, to travel with him to his far mountain home. But in a city like Port Orleans, there might be shared cemeteries, with portions assigned to Freyan ashes or Biblist internment or foreigners or anything.

My neck prickles. I tug the cowl of my hoodie down over my forehead and go out into the narrow lane. Moonlight shines on the rows of thin mausoleums, exactly like a row of town houses but small and gray. The tiny death homes are worn, the poems and epitaphs faded from their marble faces. What few markings I recognize are messy and eclectic: hammers carved into the lintels, or circle snakes or crosses, lambs and flowers. Long grass squeezes out a living between them, and a few of their doors are crumbled or missing and replaced with plywood. This is no cared-for graveyard like the one at the Death Hall; it’s old and forgotten even in the heart of the city.

But not everything has forgotten it.

There’s a scratching like rats in the walls. I turn slowly, see nothing but leaf shadows.

Wind brushes the edge of my hood, caresses my cheek. On my right the proper entrance appears, its iron gate locked tightly, with the name of the place arched over: Garden Cemetery No. 1. In cursive script, almost impossible to read backward, it promises, All the dead are welcome here.

A modern orange sign is tied to the bars. I pull the bottom away to read it. CLOSED FOR REPAIRS.

Putting my back to the gates, I walk directly down the overgrown lane toward the center.

Stone scrapes stone, like one of the tomb doors is opening. My lips part and I suck in a quick breath. They’re here; I was right. There the sound comes again: the scratching, the claws scrabbling across marble roofs.

I scan the black shadows between tombs, the short iron fences that mark family vaults, the sudden splashes of color from the plastic bouquets set about the place.

There’s a growl at my back; I swing around but nothing stands behind me. I hear it again, a low growl and skittering claws, followed by high-pitched giggling.

All the shadows move. There! The golden glint of reflecting eyes.

Cat wights.

Skit. They’re less conversational and will hardly care for the paper clips and rings I brought to trade. Cat wights want to play, rather like their feline namesakes, and won’t think twice about biting off my fingers. “Good evening,” I say gently, firmly, as if I’ve nothing to fear.

For an answer, a chunk of marble the size of my fist flies out from between two mausoleums. I shift my leg and it hits the lane. Another follows. Then a hail of pebbles, and with them comes more laughter. Snickers and babbles surround me. I block my face, pummeled briefly by the hard rain.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” I say, pulse quickening. I hold out my bare hands, spread them.

There’s a chorus of hoots in reply. Not only cat wights but also the iron eaters I was expecting. I recognize the calls from Chicagland. There must an entire troop here at least, and probably a whole pack of cat wights. This might be on the verge of going very, very badly.

“I only want to know if you’ve seen the troll mother. I’ve brought metal to trade.” I dig into my hoodie pocket and pull out a handful of rings and clips. They scatter on the gravel.

More hooting, and the cat wights hiss. A greater shadow moves suddenly away from a tomb and slinks, hyena-like with long legs and a hunched back, into the moonlight. A prairie troll. I suck in air, lift my chin against sudden fear. Saber teeth glow as it opens its mouth and hisses at me, rising onto shorter rear legs. They’re man-eaters, and where there’s one, there’s another. “Ssssnack,” it whispers.

I take a step back but glance over my shoulder so I don’t run into another. Rag me. I consider fumbling for the cell phone, but the Mad Eagles won’t get here for ten minutes. By then I’ll either be fine, or dead. More like madness than bravery.

Behind me iron eaters cling to a tomb with their huge eyes and gnarled baby faces. As one, they laugh, displaying blocky teeth. I turn in a careful circle, hands flat out from me, and back toward the iron wights: there’s more chance of surviving a flat-out run through them than past the prairie troll. How is it there are these huge prairie trolls and nobody saw them in the city? And why was this a center of iron wight activity but also full of cat wights? Though with the cemetery closed to the public, they could hulk here all day long without being discovered.

The prairie troll swings its head left; I follow the look but see only three more of its kind stalking nearer from the thin copse of trees huddled around the crossroads in the center of the graveyard. I step back toward the wights, and back again. I unsheathe my sword. There’s no use pretending this is going to end peacefully.

The prairie trolls slink nearer, their shoulders knocking and tongues lolled out more like hyenas now than ever. Cat wights hiss from the shadows, and my peripheral vision is full of laughing iron eaters clinging to the walls and roofs of the dead city.

My heel catches on a patch of gravel and I stumble back into the sharp corner of a mausoleum.

It grunts.

Horror burns through me, leaving only ice in its wake. Turning, I raise my eyes to a greater mountain troll as it shakes free of its mausoleum shape.

I bite back a whimper. That troll was shaped like a house and all right angles a moment ago! I remember with a shock Unferth saying in Montreal that the troll mothers use runework to hide their sons in plain sight.

Every tomb in this entire yard could be a massive, bone-crunching troll.

A hand grabs my shoulder and there’s the sharp prick of a knife at my throat. Somebody has me from behind.

Unferth whispers, Bad timing for you, friend.

Except this time it’s not in my head.

I knock my hood back as I spin around. A line of pain slices across my throat.

He stands there, shock painted over his sharp face, knife up and glinting with my blood. Like me, he’s all in black, tight against his body for slipping through shadows. Signy, he mouths voicelessly.

I open my mouth but have no words. My hands tremble; my heart is a wild monster in my chest.

Ned the Spiritless takes a hesitant step toward me. “You’re bleeding,” he breathes, and the knife in his hand lowers.

One of the prairie trolls growls, bunching its legs to leap. I raise Unferth’s sword to defend myself, but Ned grabs my wrist and jerks me behind him. He faces the prairie troll as it stands two meters high on its rear paws, long tail flicking like a serpent behind. “Down,” Ned orders. “Now. This one is for me, not you.”

“Cat-man,” it whines. Two of its pack snicker, and the iron eaters hoot like monkeys. The greater mountain troll I disrupted hunkers quietly, almost indistinguishable from the other tombs.

Odd-eye, the iron eater at the Vertmont locks said cat-man, too.

Cat wights dart out and weave through Ned’s legs, rubbing his knees, one or two of them reaching up to tug at his pockets, at the hem of his shirt.

I back up again, stunned at the sight of him, but more so at his familiarity with these creatures, the casual way he strokes the triangle ears of one, gently bats another away from his hip.

Ned lifts his colorless eyes to mine and wipes his knife against his forearm before sheathing it against his thigh.

He’s here. Pale and slim, listing to the side as always, hair braided into a topknot to keep it out of his way. I don’t know whether to scream for answers or touch him, prove he’s here and he’s mine. I shake my head, breath tight.

“Signy,” he says. “Are you all right?”

I keep silent, afraid of what I’ll do.

Ned frowns. “Signy.” He waves away the cat wights, nudges them off with his boots. They swarm away from him and he walks to me, trailing trolls in his wake.

“I saw her kill you. I saw her eat you.” I fling his sword onto the ground. It hits concrete with an ugly clang.

Ned brings a finger to his lips. “Hunters are everywhere. Would you bring the city down on us? Have them all massacred, their packs and families?”

“They massacred mine! Why are they even here?”

Ned nods. “Witnesses. Nothing like this has happened in hundreds of years.”

“Nothing like what?”

He doesn’t respond except to twist his lips.

The trolls slink back into the shadows, curling into stone vases and pressing against curved roofs.

I stamp my boot. “Tell me, curse it. Is she in here, too? Where is she?”

Instead of answering, Ned crosses the distance between us, grabbing me up in his arms.

My eyes shut themselves and I clutch him, holding tight around his neck, my cheek against his rough jaw, sucking in huge breaths of him and the scent of my own blood. He hugs me, his fingers digging into my sides as if he’ll hook them through my ribs. His breath is cool on my ear, and he presses his lips to my temple, to my cheek.

Gasping, I shove back but seize his face. The moonlight does little to illuminate him or mask the strain in the corners of his mouth. I put my thumbs under his eyes and stare into them, into the gray-glass irises.

Truth.

“I don’t know if I can trust you, Ned,” I say in a voice so low it doesn’t sound like my own.

His eyes drift closed. “Finally.”

Confusion settles me somewhat. My natural state when I’m with him. It convinces me he’s real, at least, and I slide my hands down from his face. “What happened? Tell me how you’re here, alive?”

“Not here,” he says, picking his sword up off the ground. “Somewhere we can talk. Besides, I need a drink.”

We walk through the dark streets of Port Orleans. Ned moves in his off-kilter way, profile straight and sharp but missing the usual slight sneer from the corner of his mouth. He looks tired.

He glances at me, too, and I catch the tentative nature of it. Whatever happened to him has changed him, too. My Ned Unferth was never tentative about anything.

Or, I think as force myself to look away, I never knew him at all.

We find a dirty pub in the corner of a town house that blazes with neon beer signs. Ned stomps to the bar and gets us pints that slosh thickly over the rims. I use a fistful of napkins to mop off the tall round table I find, but mostly the paper sticks, so I unfold and spread them out like a tablecloth. Ned smiles tightly at my fastidiousness, clunking the glasses down.

Lazy jazz plays off a jukebox, harsh with static, and most of the other patrons hunker over their own drinks or bet at the pool table in the rear. We’re the only blond, pale-faced people here, which is surprisingly uncomfortable for me. It makes me think of Soren, and with a sharp longing, I wish he was here for a buffer.

Ned drinks a fourth of his pint in the first go, then curls his fingers around the glass. “I can’t tell you everything,” he begins.

I sip surprisingly smooth beer and wait.

“But not because I don’t want to. I truly cannot.”

I flick my fingers but refuse to tell him it’s all right. Let me be the recalcitrant one now.

He takes another drink. “I wasn’t dead. I woke up after it all, in a stone dugout, hidden under leaves. She buried me; she hid me.”

“Why? I saw your sweater—I thought they were eating your bones, Ned.”

“She knew better than to kill me. She knew what I was.”

“And what was that?” I manage.

“Her ally.”

“Her ally! She killed people. Your friends. My family! Rome and Jesca are dead.”

His eyelids don’t even flicker. “I know. I always knew.”

“Always knew what, exactly?”

“That when the sun was lost, the trolls would come.”

I grip my hands together in my lap. “That’s what you were afraid of. When I told you Baldur was missing, that’s what it meant. The trolls were coming.”

“Yes.”

I shove away from the table. “Odd-eye.” My boots hit the ground. Like I’ll attack him, or run as far away as I can get.

“Signy.” He catches my elbow. “Signy, wait please.” He pulls my arm against his chest and I avert my face, unwilling to look at him.

“You could have warned them,” I say.

His fingers tighten and I notice the bartender eyeing us. It would serve Ned right for me to make a scene, hand him over. But probably he’d hurt somebody. I shake my head a little and pull myself free of his grip.

“I wanted to, Signy, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t allowed.”

The urgency in his tone makes me listen. But I glare. “You weren’t allowed. You can’t tell me! Why not? Who? Who forbids it? Freya? It was the goddess, wasn’t it? She gave you the prophecy about the sun being lost. She told you to find me.”

“I … can’t … say.” But he doesn’t avoid my eyes, staring hard as if he wants me to know I’m right.

“Skit, Ned, then why are you even talking?” I cry, flinging my arms out. “Why did you bring me here if you were just going to tell me rag-all?”

He glances up at the ceiling helplessly, revealing the shiny, nearly invisible scar that hugs his neck under his chin. Like a noose. When his eyes lower back to mine, truth throbs in the rainy irises, and I taste an edge of laughter like bitter, bitter rage. I say, “Ask the right question and you’ll answer? Is that it, Truth-Teller?”

“Always,” he sighs.

I’m tired of being the one responsible for riddling out his truth. Wearily I say, “The Alfather didn’t send you to me.”

He says, “He’s a student of history, not the future.”

“Stop beating into the wind, Ned.”

“I’m trying to be direct.”

“Well, you suck at it.”

“And you’ve gotten better,” he snaps, then drains the last of his beer.

I grind my jaw. “Tell me where the troll mother is.”

“Here.”

“Where here? Tell me.”

“I don’t know where, exactly. But I … I do know she’s looking for you. Waiting for you to make a move where she can get to you. You must be careful, though. She wants to kill you, Signy.” He says it like it will be a surprise. “As much as you want her.”

I shrug as flippantly as I can. “Tell me things I don’t know, Ned Unferth.”

He’s quiet, lips pinched.

“Why does she want to kill me? What have I done to her? Is she the first troll mother, and her heart is the first heart? Did Freya set her on me? Are you all in league? What is it they want?” Every question comes faster, a deluge I barely control.

Nothing.

“Tell me why you came to find me last year. Tell me why you set me onto her trail, why you told me the answer was a troll’s stone heart.”

His hands tighten around the glass of beer. Ringless, his fingers seem longer but vulnerable. I threw one of those rings into the foliage in that moonlit garden three nights ago.

I say, “Tell me or never speak to me again.”

Now his mouth twists into a wry, bitter smile.

Frustration makes me pound my fist on the table, shaking my pint. Suddenly I’m glad for this slice across my collarbone, itching with dry blood and painful when my hoodie scrapes against it. Not quite over my heart like the tiny cut I put there myself, but near enough to be an unavoidable reminder that I already know what Ned the Spiritless will do to me.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were alive?” I ask in nearly a whisper.

He reaches across the table and drags my beer to him, tearing the paper napkins stuck to the table. “I didn’t deserve to.”

Shock dries my mouth, freezes my tongue for a moment. It’s a struggle, and tears bleed into my eyes, but I harden my voice. “But I did. I deserved better than to mourn you and miss you and blame myself for your death when you were alive and—and her ally. You were supposed to be mine.”

“Maybe … it’s … the same thing.”

“Here the gutless son of the sword-widow,” I say. A line from Beowulf.

He sets down the beer, eyes glazed and staring at the caramel slosh.

I stand up. “Goodbye, Ned Unferth.”

Before he can respond or not, I leave.