The Strange Maid

THE VALKYRIE OF THE TREE

It was the night before the summer solstice, and I was Signy Valborn, the Valkyrie of the Tree.

My Death Hall was a grand old hall of stone and sweeping buttresses in the center of Philadelphia’s historic district. Heartwood pillars rose toward the ceiling, and in the very middle a massive black pillar carved like the trunk of the Tree spread branches that were truly rafters out across the ceiling in a web. Green banners hung, painted with silver binding runes. My throne was carved into the base of that central pillar, soft and gleaming with inlaid marble. Before it, squatted a short altar for laying out a body. Most days concentric half circles of pews waited empty for a congregation, and wisps of evergreen incense sharpened the air.

But that night I’d had all the pews pushed away, had torches and a thousand green candles lit. It was like a cave on fire.

In an intimate ritual at the foot of the New World Tree, I had finally, irrevocably, been named to the Council of Valkyrie. In attendance were only the Alfather himself, my sister Valkyrie, everyone I loved who still lived in the Middle World, and the entire country through the wide black lenses of television cameras. We preceded the solstice, not for any concern that Thor Thunderer, whose holiday it was, would mind, but in order that Soren could attend before rushing to see his Astrid for this single night.

After I spoke my name, and the Valkyrie spoke it back to me, Odin Alfather kissed my mouth and locked an iron chain at my neck. The small heart shimmered inside the delicate iron and steel setting.

I led everyone into the sanctuary for a wild reception. I kicked off my shoes and tied up my skirts and walked to the barrels of mead and street-shine. I climbed up onto one and held out my arms so the feather sleeves dripped off my elbows like wings and called, Welcome to the New World Death Hall; if you don’t dance here you might as well be dead!

The bluegrass band took their cue and in a blaze of banjo and tin drums and fiddle I dragged Soren Bearstar onto the wide floor in front of my throne and dared him not to move his feet.

I danced with everyone except Ned Unferth, who shot me a look that clearly said, I have already died, and so what have I to fear from your hall? Even the Valkyrie of the Rock and Gundrun Graycloak danced with me, even Captain Darius Strong. I ached when I thought of Sharkman, who had loved to dance as wildly as me.

Only the Valkyrie tapped and poured from the kegs and barrels, because we serve death, and the mad passion of death is what filled that sanctuary like heavy humidity. We passed out plastic goblets dripping with golden mead, and tiny shots of shine, and Elisa surreptitiously hid bottles of water where guests might find them.

My bare feet slapped the marble floor, I let my braids loose, and I showed the world my teeth and my laughing, while the stone heart in my necklace winked pink and blue and violet as if alive, kept cool on my skin by the silver and iron entwined around it like lace. A collar of power created to contain the heart by the Alfather himself.

The band cried poetry.

I sank into my throne, carved smooth and small into the wide, round pillar at the center of the sanctuary, an epic column of limestone and shale that reached up to the spanning roof like the Tree itself. It fit me now, like it was grown for me, for my hands to reach the raven-beaked ends of the armrests, for my knees to bend where the seat bent, for my feet to rest firm and flat on the floor. I gripped it and closed my eyes. Whirlwind music and talk flew in every direction, teasing at my smile.

I drifted until my heartbeat found the pace of the celebration, until I breathed with the rhythm of it. Until my party became a song and the lyrics whispered under it all, or above it all, like the constant drum of the ocean against the rocky shore of the death ships, high north on Vinland.

The queen walked out, gold-adorned.

I dipped my finger into my goblet of mead and smeared the sticky stuff onto the still-healing tattoo over my heart: a horizontal spear, Sharkman’s ninth, in honor of him who would never complete his own. The tattoo remained slightly raised and stung when I touched it. I wished it always would, a tiny sacrifice of pain to remind me.

Everyone else was present.

There was Rathi Summerling in green for me, arm around the son of the Philadelphia jarl, laughing and talking fast. There Soren dancing with Precia of the South, earnest and sure-footed while she teased him. There Siri of the Ice not-quite-smiling, with a line before her as she doled out shine to any who answered her riddles. Baldur the Beautiful slid behind the bass to pluck one string at a time while the player smiled so wide it was a grimace. Thebes Berserk loomed with a goblet of mead while a tipsy death priest flirted so hard it turned his fire scar white. Brick and his brother Gabriel laughing behind their hands. Myra Quick and Elisa’s modest, strong husband admiring Myra’s newest pauldron design.

And there was Ned, watching me without a smile, in that muslin shirt I made him put on, slacks that slouched at his ankles because they weren’t meant to be worn with tired old boots. He tugged at the end of one of his braids, a slick eyebrow raised. I ran my fingers through my free hair. Come fix it, I mouthed.

No fixing you, he mouthed back.

Come here anyway, I wanted to say, and pull him onto my throne and make him kiss me right there in front of everyone, right where it could never be taken back.

A soft caress on my ankle startled me and I glanced down at a small gray cat. She flicked her tail at my knee, looked over her shoulder as she sauntered away. Toward the garden.

I followed.

My Tree was lush with summer and the green and yellow elf-lights I had wound through the branches. Red, pink, and yellow papers were tied among the leaves, each one a prayer from a citizen, like flowers budding on the limbs of fate. I walked over cool grass, past marigolds and extravagant lilies, falls of iris and rocket clusters of coneflowers. All the colored lights trembled in the wind, casting rainbow shadows on my hands and on the snaking black roots of the Tree. I sank into the crook of two roots, hands against the rough, damp bark, and breathed in the perfume all around me. My Tree. My throne.

The riddle was gone, grown over with gnarled, ropy bark, a scar there on the Tree that would slowly fade as my lifetime faded.

“There remain strands of the future where you do not get all you desire, Signy Valborn.”

She perched on the thick root beside my shoulder, ankles crossed. The colored shadows mottled half her face so it appeared ruined, burned, melted, and weeping with blood and pus. But her cool gray eyes fixed on mine, threaded with scarlet like the loom of fate itself always impressed upon her sight.

I whispered, “My poem began with a god in a tree, and here it ends with the same.”

Freya, the goddess of dreams, the Witch and the Weaver of Destiny, laughed just like the troll mother, “ha ha ha,” her teeth white and her mouth pretty. She said, “I am not here for your ending. Yet.”

“Why are you here, then, at the foot of the New World Tree?”

“I see roads diverging from this moment, and I’ve come to choose one to follow.” The goddess smoothed the velvety skirt over her thighs. She wore a long dress off her shoulders and a medieval girdle that looped low against her hips, all of it too heavy for such a summer night. But I saw no gleam of sweat, no curl or frizz in her loose, waving hair. In fact, she glowed pale and cool like the moon. Like the troll mother. Even her hair and the ruffle of her dress seemed carved of stone. “Will you ask?” she murmured at me.

Fear trickled down my spine. “What paths do you see?”

“One: you destroy that heart at your throat. Two: you wear it until it is taken from you violently. Three: you give it to me now.”

“You want it. That’s what you’ve always wanted.”

She smiled a cruel smile. “Never.”

“Tell me what you want now, lady moon, and maybe I will do it.”

“You, little raven, do exactly what you’re told?”

I shoved my back against the rough bark, the warm damp Tree alive where she was still and cold. “Try me.”

“Destroy it, for it was never meant to be in the world like this. Destroy it and it will never ruin your daughters.”

“Why did you make it if only to wish it broken?”

“That is what hearts are for.” Her gaze skimmed away from me, back toward the Death Hall. “You know my words are truth.”

“Are you threatening Ned?”

“He’s mine, little raven. I rule all the unsung dead, and he made promises to me.”

Words burned like bile at the back of my throat. I swallowed them. I whispered, “He will not remain unsung, no matter if he dies tonight or in fifty years. I am a Valkyrie and I choose. You cannot use him against me.”

“But you would miss him, if he were gone again.”

“Yes.”

We were silent, the goddess and I, while a breeze played through the branches above, hinting at stars and the changing paths dancing around us like elf-lights.

I said, “The Alfather forged this necklace for me. I am his, and he wants me to wear the heart. To discover what I can do with it. I have it from his own mouth, Freya.”

“Yes, my love craves power in you, but he does not see the future.” Her sigh tilted toward petulant, and I glanced at her, startled. The goddess pursed her lips. “Some day, Signy, you will come to me to ask a thing, and I will say no. Because of this. Because of tonight.”

She leaned nearer to me then and kissed me. I felt her breath in my mouth, sharp and sweet like a flower. I gasped and the heart blazed against my skin. Its tendrils curled through my ribs, searching for my own heart, making pleasure and madness burn through my body.

“Can you resist its song forever?” the goddess of dreams murmured into my ear. “Will your daughters? Will your priests and lovers?”

I didn’t want to resist. But I grasped the stone and said, “Tonight.”

“That is all you will have, a thousand tonights and a thousand tomorrows, always tempted, always choosing for the rest of your life, Signy.”

“That is everyone’s destiny,” I said. “Always choosing.”

I pushed to my feet. I held my hand to her, and she took it as she gracefully stood. She remained near, her cool presence and my wild, hair-raising passion pushing off each other like magnets.

“Everyone’s destiny,” the goddess intoned, transforming my words into reality. “Always choosing.”

“Maybe someday you’ll convince me to do it.” I drew chaos onto her chest with my finger. It glowed as green as death against her white, white skin. She drew destiny onto my cheek.

Together we passed through the garden, back into my sanctuary, where my family drank and cheered and danced.