The Strange Maid

SEVEN

IN THE DIM light of a stuffy dressing room, I become Valtheow the Dark.

Black liner drawn thick evokes the eye Odin Alfather gouged out at the Well of Mimir in return for wisdom. Both eyes marked black turns my face into a skull, the death Valkyrie carry in their hearts. Crimson lipstick cuts across my mouth like a mortal wound, but I smile and it becomes a lover’s mouth to speak the Alfather’s words.

I’m glad for this quick moment alone in the dressing room usually reserved for the clowns. Peachtree, the only clown my age, is out leading the audience through a Wild Hunt number, and I can hear the screams and laughter through the thin wooden walls. This afternoon the Viker Festival is a crush of people. Baldur’s Night is the unofficial first day of the season, and they’ve come in droves from New Scotland and mainland Massadchuset to see us perform. To see me, and my troll, for one night only. Come one, come all!

I wear an old-fashioned scarlet dress and an apron the deep green color of decay. It hooks at my shoulders with abalone brooches, and a belt of iron loops heavily against my hips, dragged off-center by my seax in its sheath. I’ve braided my hair into two ropes, framing my face in the traditional Valkyrie’s way. My sleeves are cuffed with silver bracers tooled to gleam golden in the stage lights. Rings set with colored glass decorate my hands.

Here is Signy Valborn in the mirror, looking for all the nine worlds like an ancient Death Chooser.

But it’s only an illusion. I think of what my sisters would say, who spent nearly ten years trying to make me see how much of a Valkyrie’s job is performance. Here I am, doing what they always wanted: translating the raw power of death into a palatable display for the masses.

Much to my irritation, I couldn’t avoid it any longer.

The past three and a half frozen months have been one constant negotiation; between Unferth and me, Unferth and the town, the town and me, Unferth and Rome, me and Rome, me and Jesca, on and on until I wished the ice would fall harder, the snow pile on tons of layers. Anything so I could hole up in the tower and never be expected to smile for a crowd or explain one more time to one more resident of Jellyfish Cove why I’m learning to kill trolls when Red Stripe is so tame, what it all has to do with my riddle and my eventual triumphant return to the New World Tree.

It wasn’t me who spilled the connection between trolls and my riddle; it was Ned Unferth the first night Rome and Jesca joined us for dinner at the signal tower. Unferth and his cursed truth-telling, his refusal to just sit silent when they asked how we met. Like revenge for my thrusting him into the festival as a performing poet, the answers just fell out of his mouth. He wasn’t even drunk.

Rome and Jesca knew from Rathi enough about my situation they weren’t surprised, and Rome immediately started in on a number of historical examples of quests like this involving the great beasts of legend. By the time he and Unferth were halfway through a bottle of mead and a thesis on dragon hoards in history, Jesca pulled me aside to clean up and gently but firmly reminded me that living openly with a man like Unferth wasn’t entirely decent.

She hardly cared about the riddle or troll or my winning my place on the Valkyrie council. She cared about my virtue.

I promised her that I had no virtue left to tarnish.

As they left on their gas-guzzling ATV back for the Cove, I wondered how long it would take Jesca to bring it up with Rathi. Judging by how fast the whole town knew Unferth was helping the Child Valkyrie solve her riddle, she likely called him in the middle of the night.

Avoiding everyone became my mission. Unferth helped or hindered, depending on his mood. He either pushed me harder than ever with the troll-spears and sword work so I legitimately had no time for conversations, or he meandered into town like he had nothing better to do and told people I was open to visitors. They poured in, always in couples or groups, as if too nervous to face me alone. They asked about Odin, about the Tree, about trolls and hunting and whether Elisa of the Prairie dyed her jet-black hair or Gundrun slept over at the White Hall as rumors suggest.

I made it a point of honor to lie about everything.

Once or twice I caught ten-year-old boys running up to the tower door, knocking, and then fleeing as if their lives depended on it.

Though I refused to perform, I helped Unferth create a troll-baiting show for the festival, with Red Stripe as the main attraction. Thankfully, once it was Yule there was no tourism to speak of on the island. We had two blissful weeks snowed into the tower, just us because Red Stripe hunkered down unchained against the outer wall and buried himself in the snow to snore all day.

To pass time Unferth and I made the tower into an obstacle course and I ran it again and again while he graded me from the kitchen counter. My grades tended to be less about success and more about flare, as he awarded me with cries of “You look like a donkey!” or “There are those beautiful Valkyrie wings!” depending on how well I finessed a corner. I built a huge nest of old sweaters and blankets near the ground-floor hearth, the only place warm enough that my voice didn’t puff out in icy fog. We’d fall asleep side by side, though sometimes I stayed awake on purpose, just to listen to him breathe.

Every morning I looked for runes in my eyes. Torch and death and choice cycled through as they always had, with torch the most frequent as our isolation lasted, unsurprising because of my burning desire to get back out into the world.

Finally the snow melted enough that we crashed into town for an impromptu celebration at the Shipworm. Amidst the laughter and fiddle and crush of everyone, I glanced once at Unferth and caught him in the corner with his shoulders against two other men’s, obviously sharing gossip like a clutch of chickens. His cheeks were bright, his mouth loose, and when he saw me looking his gray eyes shone. He was happy with the Freyans, knew all their songs and prayers. Some boys dragged him to the middle of the dance floor, where he first crouched and touched his fist to the wooden panels in an old Freyan act of devotion to the earth. Then he leapt onto a table with a yell and recited the opening lines of The Charge of Winter to much uproarious applause.

The inn grew hot with his poetry and the enthusiasm of the crowd. He held them trapped in rhyme and rhythm so long that sweat melted through his shirt and he stripped it off during the dramatic transition from the warrior-king’s forces to the approaching army of frost giants.

Two girls beside me gasped to see the jagged claw marks striping down Unferth’s chest and across his back. I shifted away, itching with tension as he performed for them. The scars shimmered in the firelight, forming runes against his skin like a message just for me. Truth and always truth.

The final line rang through the fiery air and Unferth’s head fell forward in a bow, his hands turned palm out, his shoulders heaved. It was a moment when I could have called out a response, drawn his attention, gotten those rain-colored eyes on me and me alone. But we were surrounded and I didn’t want to share it—share him. I rubbed my arms as the inn exploded with cheering. They clapped his hands and pulled him off the tabletop, offering mugs of beer and requests for another or another. As he promised he’d perform at the festival feast when it started up again, the crowd swallowed him whole.

He belonged there, shining with sweat and pleasure, and I wanted to destroy it all. I shoved my way outside into the white snow.

Every time Unferth went into town after that, I stayed in the tower. I dug mazes in the snow, building my muscles until I could throw the troll-spears accurately. I tended to Red Stripe, picking dust out of the crevices of his stone skin, polishing the shards of amethyst at his arm stump until they shone. I wandered the island as I could, pretended there were trolls to hunt here, and twice tracked a pack of wolves swinging too near town. Using troll-spears on caribou is overkill, but I did it anyway.

And if I heard Unferth’s familiar gait stomping through crusts of ice toward me, anticipation burned like never before. I started leaving the tower just to dredge up the buzz of expectation I’d feel when I went home to him again. It was pathetic, but I didn’t stop. I blamed the forced stagnation of the winter, the inability to act or get anything accomplished. There was nothing more fantastic to hold my attention, and so too big a piece of me latched on to him.

But sometimes he would push me onto a stool to brush and braid my hair, or tease me with a string of riddles whose answers were always troll, and his hands would linger on my neck, his smile relaxed, and I’d have traitorous thoughts about staying in that tower with him forever.

It was a rough winter.

So when Rome and Unferth came to me last week, as the first icebergs in the harbor cracked open, it was easy for them to convince me to perform in their Baldur’s Night feast, as a sendoff for their temporary Vinland Valkyrie. Our show would open the season for the arrival of spring, and then Unferth and I would charge back to the mainland to seek out my sacrifice.

And here I am, ready to perform the Valkyrie part on Baldur’s Night. It’s a holiday about hope, when across the USA we celebrate the god of light and his epic journey back to us from the darkness of Hel. He brings the sun with him, and the promise of summertime. Though on Vinland the ice remains, and there won’t be flowers for weeks, winter is officially over.

I smile just to think of it. By the next high holiday, Disir Day, in six weeks, I intend to be back in Philadelphia, sitting at my throne beneath the New World Tree.

My eyes in the mirror flash, and I lean nearer to see what rune will appear today. I hope for journey, because it’s time to move on, or fate.

But there, winking beside my pupil, is chaos.

Startled, I blink rapidly. Never before have I seen this rune.

It means upheaval, a moment when anything can happen. Anything can change.

Chaos probably reigned in my stars the night I climbed the Tree. Under chaos destiny breaks and even Freya, the goddess of Fate and magic, cannot see true. I take a calming breath.

The center cracked/no future seen/we fly into the chasm of fate.

With the thinnest makeup brush and liquid eyeliner, I paint the dangerous rune onto my thumbnails.

The back of my neck heats and I glance higher in the mirror to see him there, Ned the Spiritless leaning indolently against the door frame behind me. With him comes a spill of applause from the crowd waiting in the feast hall, but Ned’s expression is skeptical, studying my reflection. My heart pounds harder and I wonder what he would say if I told him I see chaos. But I tuck the surge of excitement away and lift my eyebrows. “Do I not suit?”

“Signy the Valkyrie,” he drawls. His pale eyes meet mine.

He’s already in his costume for the feast, where he plays court poet to Rome’s king. It’s a long wool shirt cut tight against his lean torso, a tooled belt, and loose dark pants tucked into heavy leather boots. His sword hangs over his shoulder, sheathed in a baldric that slashes a line from his right shoulder to his left hip.

Ned stalks from the door to me. He takes up the iron collar from the dressing table, the final piece of my costume, and with exaggerated concentration pushes aside my braids to clasp it about my neck. His hands linger there.

“Such a lowly thing for a Valkyrie to do,” he murmurs.

Though I agree with him, I raise my chin. “It isn’t lowly by virtue of a Valkyrie doing it.”

He laughs—just a single bark of a laugh—and leans his hip against the table to take weight off his injured leg. His gaze sinks to my mouth.

Elisa of the Prairie whispered to me once that her husband’s first kiss brought the nine worlds together for a single moment. Brynhild was awakened from a curse by the kiss of her true love. Signy Volsung kissed her husband and instantly knew she would destroy him one day. She said, My heart does not smile with his, before burning his castle to the ground.

I want to know what will happen if I kiss Ned Unferth.

But he glances away and pulls a flask of screech from his pocket. I stare at his neck as he drinks, until he offers it to me. I take it, warm from his hand, and put my lips where his were. I toss back a sip that burns down my throat.

As he screws the cap back on he says rather casually, “I’m to tell you we’re running twenty behind from the extra crowds. Rome says you can choose a big entrance or come with me and take your place at the throne. But I know you’ll choose the former.”

“What’s the point of a small entrance?” I shrug. It’s the heart of my problem with the council, with my riddle, after all.

He hesitates, then gives a sharp nod and leaves.

I head outside to prepare Red Stripe.

Equal parts historical attraction and carnival, the festival has taken over an entire meadow just outside the town of Jellyfish Cove. As I march quickly through the muddy lanes to the pancake booth, I’m surrounded by re-creations of thousand-year-old sod houses, a smithery, and a spiral of canvas tents thrown open for selling traditional Viker fare and fried foods, dragon masks, and wooden swords and jewelry. Tourists in puffy, colorful coats stream through the aisles, pointing at the girls demonstrating how to feed our pygmy mammoth or at the smith’s apprentice as he works the giant bellows while the smith pounds out a red-hot sword. Iron-smelting bloomeries squat like man-sized eggs along the road, tended by two kids in long tunics and fur coats. Reenactors in old Viker costumes demonstrate weapon forms, and two elder ladies in apron dresses teach tourists to weave at the standing loom. On two small stages across the meadow, players compete for the crowd and hat tips, and soon they’ll usher their audiences to the feast hall to eat roast boar and drink fine mead while Rome presides like a king of old over poetry contests or boasting games.

Today the meadow is decked out for Baldur’s Night. They’ve put up evergreen boughs and chalked sunbursts onto the tents and booths. Prayer flags flap in the sharp breeze. The air smells like ice and grease and tangy iron. Slush and mud slip under my boots, and yelling and laughter attack my ears. There is no room for peace here, and I love it.

The impromptu troll cage is a small shed on the side of the meadow nearest to town, where most of the electric hookups are. Melting snow pours down the sheet-metal roof, dripping in long streams to the rocky earth, where it forms a moat of mud and ice I easily step over. An evergreen bow shakes glitter onto my face as I jerk the door open.

Beside the bolt lock is a heavy switch that controls the UV lights rigged to the inner ceiling. When I flip the light switch a dull hum clicks off. I unlock the door, then shove it back with my hip in order to keep my eyes on Red Stripe.

He’s a statue of himself, pale blue and mottled with gray. His arm wraps protectively about his ducked face. His shoulders slump; his tusks are only cracked points of stone.

As I watch, dust flakes away from his skin and settles onto the mangy rug covering the floor. Tiny fissures appear all over his body and a thin layer of stone skin sloughs away. He shakes all over and groans.

Red Stripe rubs his tiny yellow eyes. In the cool light streaming through the windows set high enough the sun won’t ever touch him, that brilliant line of scarlet lichen stretching down his spine seems to bleed.

“Good evening,” I say loudly enough for him to easily hear, and set down the plate of toutons and molasses I brought from the pancake booth. Trolls are supposed to be carnivores, but theses cakes are Red Stripe’s favorite. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

He grunts thanks. Though he can say my and Unferth’s names and responds to commands, he seems to prefer communicating without words. Unferth teases me it’s to do with my mothering style.

While he eats, I go through into the small back room and grab the long broom. The handle is smooth and warm in my hand, thanks to Red Stripe’s amazing ability to fill the whole shed with his body heat. I brush him, scrubbing the remaining rock dust from his shoulders, from the creases of his elbows, and most important from under the heavy iron collar connecting him to the massive chain bolted three meters into the ground. I don’t believe he requires it, but for the comfort of the Summerlings and Coveys from town, who aren’t used to trolls at all, much less tame ones, we leave him trapped. He tilts his head and raises his arm for me, and his wide lips relax against his blunt tusks.

I smile as I scratch at his broken arm with the broom, where it itches the most. My fondness for the beast wells up and I’m glad we’ve already discussed with Rome leaving Red Stripe here when Unferth and I go. He’s a welcome attraction, given how rare it is these days to find greater mountain trolls in captivity. There are laws, I’ve learned, against hunting them in the Rock Mountains or near Montreal because of those old treaties between the troll mothers and Thor Thunderer, and when they wander farther south they’re destroyed almost immediately by militias. When they die they turn to stone, so almost nobody in the world knows what their living skin feels like, or the color of their eyes, or how well they communicate. Tonight will be a revelation for the festival guests.

“You’ll be happy here with Rome,” I say, patting Red Stripe’s cool arm. He heaves a massive sigh that fills the room with his hot, saccharine breath. It disrupts the motes of dust that hang lazily in the shaft of sunlight cutting past his head. I feel as he must, trapped and slow-moving, made to perform the same steps again and again. Now that the snows are melting, now that Baldur, the god of hope and light, is coming back to us, I’ll shake off my stone dust and explode back into the world with my stone heart.

Chaos is here to remind me: I’m going to change my destiny again.

The festival feast hall is modeled after the ancient kings’ halls of Old Scandia; a massive single room of wood and sod, with pillars holding up the roof, intricate ironwork thrones, long tables and benches, and painted round-shields hanging from the rafters. Three nights a week the tourists can buy a seat and a meal, complete with the sort of entertainment they might have found had they lived a thousand years ago and sworn to a Viker king.

My wish-father, Rome, plays the king, in a yellow and red wool shirt and trousers and a heavy fur cape latched with golden brooches. He has on a wide leather belt and bracers, with massive copper rings around his upper arms. The Freyan charms braided into his reddish beard glint in the false firelight as he welcomes the tourists back to Old Asgard, where please may they yell and cheer, please may they stand with a poem to share, and all give thanks to the great god of Vinland, Freyr the Satisfied.

Tonight he calls himself Hrothgar Shielding, the great king of Daneland, and welcomes the crowd to the golden hall Heorot. Unferth will play the poet as usual; I will be Valtheow the Dark, queen of Heorot. The beefiest of the actors, George, wears bearskin and has painted a spear onto his cheek to play the hero, Beowulf. We’ve created a breakaway section of wall for Red Stripe to burst through for the finale. He waits behind it now, with two clowns holding UV lights on his legs.

Once the welcome and the opening prayers are over, Rome exhorts his poet, Unferth Truth-Teller, to entertain his company while the meal is served. Most nights there’s roast boar and cured ham, apple tarts, salted cod, a not remotely authentic spinach salad, six options for beer, free honey soda for the kids, and plates of cheese. But as it’s Baldur’s Night, we have mead for toasting out of great cauldrons, and the trays are loaded with candied apples and bacon-wrapped apple sausages.

Unferth rises from his crouch beside the carved thrones to call out a song about Pol Darrathr, a son of Odin who lived hundreds of years ago and earned himself immortality and the name Baldur the Beautiful.

I listen for my cue while hidden behind the thrones and don’t wait for him to finish before I throw aside the curtain and stride in, arms spread. “Listen to the Valkyrie’s Prayer!” I cry.

Unferth flicks his hand dramatically at me, and I just as dramatically ignore him to take Rome’s hand and step onto the queen’s throne.

From here I can see out over the long tables, meet the eyes of families and guests spread out on benches with their plastic goblets lifted. Hot orange lights flicker like fire from sconces, gleaming against the snakes and deer and running wolves carved into the rafters. There are men of our company seated among the crowd in the hard leather and metal armor of a great king’s retainers grinning at me, and the serving women stop with hands full of mead and food to watch.

I slam the butt of my spear onto the throne three times before crying,

“Hail, day!

Hail, sons of day!

And night and her daughters now!

Look on us here

With loving eyes,

That waiting, we win victory!”

At the halfway point, everyone in the crowd recites it with me, even the smallest children. The Valkyrie’s Prayer is one of the first we learn as children, regardless of what god we most worship. The audience’s repetition of my words rumbles through me, becoming a familiar eight-count rhythm that sounds in my ears, like a pounding heart or Odin’s eight-legged horse running through my bones. It’s more exhilarating to lead the performance than I expected.

Holding up my spear, I call for silence. “Tonight is Baldur’s Night—tomorrow we will celebrate his return to us. But do you remember when he died? Do you remember the wailing and tears?” I lower my voice just a tad to say, “I remember; I remember every prince’s death, and this one we all dreamed!”

“What did you dream, Valkyrie?” calls a man with a little girl in his lap.

I point at him with the tip of my spear.

“I dreamed I rose before dawn

To clear up the Valhol for the newly slain.

I woke the Lonely Warriors,

Bade them up to strew the benches,

Clear the ale horns,

And my fellow Valkyrie to ready the wine.

I dreamed the arrival of a prince

Like no prince we had known before.”

I push through the crowd to tell them what runes I see and use my calligraphy set to paint binding runes and poetry onto their faces and hands. Rarely do I see actual runes in the faces of these tourists but only pretend I do for the act, for the game. When I can, I scare them with prophecies of death and gruesome visions.

One of the serving women brings me a goblet of mead and I drink it down before slamming the goblet onto the nearest table. The yellow honey alcohol sloshes over the sides and splashes onto the worn wood, and I cheer—the audience cheers with me.

I sit back in the throne as Rome takes over again and encourages two performers to act out a boasting game while everyone eats. Unferth joins me, lounging against the side of my knee, and I once or twice take a thin braid of his in my hand, curling it possessively through my fingers. We cheer the competition, Rome and I, with Unferth crying insults to the losers while rubbing the ball of his hand into his cranky right thigh.

George stands up from among the actors playing King Hrothgar’s retainers. He says his name is Beowulf and challenges Unferth’s poetic prowess with a boasting poem about how strong he is, how he swam through the ocean strangling sea monsters. Unferth snarls back, perfectly in character, calling George a liar and a coward with florid language.

Just as their spar grows too heated, just as Rome and I pretend to consider intervening, a great low roar pierces the hall.

We freeze in exaggerated poses. It comes again. Red Stripe, exactly on the poetry cue Unferth’s been repeating for days. George/Beowulf draws his sword as Red Stripe bursts through the foam-brick wall to the north of the thrones. I scream as loud and horridly as I can, drowning out the troll’s war cry.

The audience screams, too.

Red Stripe charges in, taking prompts from Unferth, who’s shifted to the back of the hall, using blunt-tipped spears to poke and prod his thick skin. Rome yells to George, “No sword can penetrate this beast’s cursed hide!” and George throws down his weapon. The retainers join him, but it’s George alone who throws himself at Red Stripe, gripping the papier-mâché prosthetic arm we tied to him. The two grapple and dance, fast and grand in the firelight.

It’s all I can do not to laugh with delight.

Unferth yells, “Grendel!” and Red Stripe roars again, throwing George away. Red Stripe turns to the audience and opens his mouth hideously wide. Children scream and many of their parents, too, but there’s clapping and gasps of amazement. Nobody runs. They know this is a show, despite the terror blazing through the atmosphere.

George leaps onto Red Stripe from behind, grasps the immobile prosthetic arm, and tears it off with a berserker roar of his own. Dark purple corn syrup—my idea—splashes in an arc like arterial spray, pumping as George squeezes it from a hidden trigger.

Red Stripe crashes to his knees, but is up again and runs away with a long, sad moan, his footsteps shaking the hall. Unferth slips after him through the ruined wall of our false Heorot. George lifts the dripping fake arm over his head, and I climb onto my throne to begin the applause.

Great bands of laughter and cheering hit me, hit all of us. George and the retainers nail the arm to the wall behind the thrones and Rome calls for celebratory dessert.

The crowd is loud with chatter and wonder, cheering us and digging into their tarts and ice cream. I sink into the throne, hot and alive, a grin splitting my face so hard my cheeks ache.

After dessert I stand up and crow a harsh poem Unferth wrote about living on a rock of ice like ours, about how badly we need the coming dawn to drive the trolls away and for Baldur the Sun to bring joy back to the world. Rome waves a ring-adorned hand for dishes to be taken away and every goblet replaced with a paper lantern and an apple. The lantern is for releasing when the sun sets, to light Baldur’s path home. The apple reminds us of our mortality, that like Baldur we will all die some day without tasting the apples of youth that give eternal life to our gods.

I eat my apple wildly. I destroy it like it’s my enemy, letting juice run down my chin to a roar of approval from the actors playing Rome’s warriors. They pound their feet and I pound mine back, every grain of the wooden throne pulsing beneath me. Rome laughs, a comforting old sound, and the audience laughs with him, children joining me in messy eating; apples and apple juice stain the tables.

We release the crowd, Rome and I, crying out a closing prayer together. Rome invites them into the meadow for bonfires and a mummer dance before we release the lanterns at sunset. I toss the last of my mead into the fire and it bursts into sparks and snaking smoke.

Out in the meadow, I grab a mask from the communal box and dance as eagerly as any Freyan born. The bonfires remind me of harvest dances from my childhood, of my parents and colorful autumn leaves.

I drag tourists into the dancing with me, hold their hands and spin and spin. The clown Peachtree leaps onto me from behind, enveloping me in a monster hug. “That was amazing!” she shrieks. “Stay with us, Signy!” Her hair flairs blue and pink around her head and a hundred tiny plastic sequins stick to her face for a mask. I only laugh, and she flaps at my boring raven mask. We share a plastic glass of mead before diving back into the dancing.

Fiddles make raucous noise, and shrieks of laughter carry it along. Everyone wears a mask: some are plain from the bin like mine, some feathered or long-nosed, others bejeweled, painted, or scattering glitter with every step. Who can tell tourist from townie? Husband from wife, or Odinist from Freyan? We all crowd together on Baldur’s holiday, dancing, drinking, and readying paper lanterns to send up into the sky as a trailing beacon to guide Baldur home at dawn.

The raven mask lets me be one of them, not Signy Valborn, if only for a night.

Jesca bustles through the crowd, her hair uncharacteristically loose and a flute of champagne in her delicate hand. “Signy!” she calls out. Her hip bumps into the woman beside her, and she playfully apologizes before reaching for my hand. I kiss her cheek, and she says loudly in my ear, “I just spoke to Rathi before the feast! He’s accepted a summer fellowship at a church in Mizizibi; isn’t that wonderful! He said they fought for him!”

I look into her bright eyes and see only home there. Only a tipsy glaze and happiness. She pushes my mask off my face to better study it. “He’ll be here next week to visit, and I thought perhaps you might want to wait for him, to stay just a little bit longer.…”

“Jesca!”

“You two were always so good for each other.”

“We were little kids; that’s not who we are anymore.” My vivid joy is sinking away, but I cling to it, wanting to keep hold of this high bliss as long as I can, before I have to go away tomorrow and leave this perfect night behind me.

Jesca touches my cheeks. “That isn’t what he told me last summer, maidling.” But she shakes her head before I can answer. She kisses my cheeks and murmurs, “Happy Baldur’s Night,” into my ear.

She vanishes into the crowd again and suddenly I’m desperate to find Unferth. Where did he disappear to? Isn’t he finished putting Red Stripe to bed yet? I turn in a full circle, scanning the crowd.

Thin, straight clouds point toward the vanished sun, dragging lines of pink with them. The air is cold but bright and very much alive. People smile at me, hold out hands to pull me back into the dancing. They call her name, Valtheow! or Vinland Valkyrie!, not Signy. They want me to join them, offering another drink or piece of roasted apple. I take it all, eating from their fingers, drinking the mead or sparkling wine until my head spins.

What I want is Ned Unferth, right now. I want him to see me being part of all this, bright and heady like he was at the Shipworm, a piece of this whole.

I hurry toward the boundary of the meadow, heart beating harder than it should. The evening presses in and I blink fast, trying to find my best balance. I search the shadows for him, the edges of the crowd where he must be if he’s not in the center of it all. “A creature of thresholds.” I whisper a drunken poem to myself. “Spiritless because nothing exists between nothing.”

There he is, standing on the slope of the moor, flask in hand, still wearing his feast costume. A green goblin mask covers his face, with apple-round cheeks, crescent eye slits, and a wide, clownish nose. But under it is his dangerous smile, his sharp white teeth.

“Finished gaping?” Ned says lazily, one corner of that smile hooking up.

“I don’t think I am,” I whisper, stepping forward. I snatch his hand and pull him farther up the rocky slope to where the shadows dance, too. The beak of my mask is too long for what I want, and I shove it up over my forehead, catching it in my hair with a tangle. Ned widens his colorless eyes but says nothing as I pull off his mask. It leaves two small red lines on his cheeks where it pressed.

He’ll never be beautiful, never free of the gouges pain leaves around his mouth. Always tight angles and narrowed eyes. But there’s a charged string connecting us and it’s the only thing I understand at all.

As the firelight flickers across his thin lips I hear nothing but the howl of blood in my ears. I kiss him.

His chest is hard against mine and he touches my elbows. I cup his face; my fingers skim the rough edges of his jaw. A tiny sigh escapes him, and the moment he breathes into my mouth I sink in, dropping forward forever, but not like falling. Like floating.

“Oh, little raven,” he whispers, and I smile, thinking, I want those teeth cutting into my lips.

But when I move to kiss him again, Unferth holds me back.

“Ned?” I say, blinking. The slope puts him centimeters higher than me, so he looks down with an ache in his eyes, except that it might merely be pity.

“You shouldn’t do that again,” he says.

Confusion makes me spiky. “Do that?”

“Kiss me,” he snaps.

I push my hands into my stomach. “You liked it,” I say, knowing, knowing, knowing he kissed me back.

But he’s silent, as if he has no idea, for this one single time, what he can possibly say.

I grab his coat in my fists and kiss him again, pushing our teeth together, making it a fight. He’ll fight me to the end of the world if that’s the sort of kiss it has to be.

“Signy,” he hisses, shoving me away.

Everything inside me combusts. “Unferth,” I spit back. “What is wrong with you?”

He lifts his eyebrows in that arrogant way and I feel small and stupid. What is wrong with me?

My heels catch on gravel and I trip, righting myself with a furious grunt. Without a backward glance I stomp away, wishing my boots could pound bruises into the island and tear the night up.

Wind tosses mist off the surface of the sea and I scrape my hands against lichen-crusted rocks to balance in the near dark. At the far end of a narrow peninsula a fleet of standing stones waits, as though the island holds them in the palm of its outstretched hand. It’s precarious, but the easier path out to the death ship ruins is also longer by a kilometer.

I hurry through scruffy grasses and clumps of heather, kicking at stones and cursing, furious. Anger and hurt burn through me, keeping my fingers warm in the frozen evening, but not humiliation. Never humiliation. I did not misread anything, I did nothing wrong. I don’t know why he pushed me away, but odd-eye! It isn’t because he doesn’t want me.

The ruins are thirteen death ships in all, each built of sixteen standing stones over a thousand years ago as a holy place to burn the dead. The ships are worn smooth by high tides and cracked from ice, but their prows still aim at the ocean and the long way home to Scandia. Some of the rocks are collapsed upon themselves or crumbled, and a good ten of them tilt to one side or the other. But at least three of the ships are untouched by time, ruins in name only.

Few come here, even of the most adventurous tourists. There’s no marked path and no advertising. It’s lonely and cold and haunted. I found it accidentally, on one of my lonely winter marches.

Here at the western edge of the grassy beach, a shallow cave is dug into the hillside. Probably erosion and ice did all the work to create the three-quarter circle of shelter. Over the weeks I’ve left supplies there: candles and matches, blankets and extra mittens. The wind has died down, and cuts off completely when I’m in the dugout. With a fire and the blankets, it’ll be nearly cozy.

In the last light, I take the candles and pick my way out into the fleet. The very last of the sun sets behind me, casting gold against the edges of the icebergs that dip and soar with the gently rolling ocean. I stick a taper onto the prow-stone of each ship and set them aflame. Thirteen candles to light Baldur’s way.

I tried to celebrate it in community. I tried. I danced and I performed and embraced joy the way the Freyans do, yet here I end up again, alone in my red therma-wool dress and heavy boots, my hair braided like a Valkyrie and the darkness around my eyes, red on my mouth. I’m half Signy, half Valtheow, and all pretense. I touch my lips, and I think of Unferth’s teeth. “Odd-eye,” I whisper. The curse slinks through the ghostly fleet.

With my hand on the prow of the front ship, I lift my eyes to the stars.

Speak to me, Alfather. I miss you.

There is no answer.

My heart hurts, and I bitterly think maybe it is turning to stone. Maybe that’s why Unferth is here. To wound me. Valkyrie are supposed to know suffering, to understand pain and betrayal. In the old stories they hunt vengeance and cast curses, destroy cities when they need to and set fire to the world.

Light in the east catches my attention. A tiny glow rises up from the black horizon, flying slowly up and up.

There’s another, and another. Three more.

The lanterns being released back at the meadow for Baldur. Two hundred of them rise. They bob and twirl in the wind, dancing out over the sea. Like constellations come to life.

As I stare, as I sink down among the death ships, I imagine they spell out a burning, vibrant rune.

Chaos.

Again and again it appears against the starry sky, weaving in and out of itself like a message for the entire world.