The Strange Maid

FOURTEEN

IN THE GLOW of my truck’s headlights I clean Soren Bearstar’s wounds. He stares up at the darkening sky as I pat alcohol onto the gouge in his ribs. It’s not as deep as I thought, and bled so much because of the berserker rage heating up his heart. I use Band-Aids to hold the worst part together and then wrap gauze all around his torso. He’s so wide I only have enough to go around three times.

“At least you’ll finally have a scar,” I mutter, eyeing the rest of his perfect body. Except for a few nicks and scratches, there’s nothing dramatic marked on him. “What kind of berserker has no scars until he’s eighteen?”

Soren pulls a new T-shirt over his head. “I won’t be eighteen until the middle of the summer.”

My hands find their way to my hips and I study him. He moves deliberately, even just putting on a shirt. He reaches for the alcohol and cotton pads, then meets my gaze. “May I?” He nods toward my left arm.

Awkwardly I roll up my sleeve, not wanting to lose the shirt. He doctors the three parallel claw marks drawn bright scarlet down my forearm. It stings, but he’s incredibly gentle. I lift my drooping braids to let him see the back of my neck. He cleans the cuts there, too, and my arms tremble from effort because it’s difficult to breathe with them raised and my ribs smarting.

At least I’m not cold, despite the frigid night. Soren’s like a walking radiator.

“Done,” he murmurs. “Except your ribs. I … I apologize. You’re lucky I didn’t crush them more.”

“A troll did that.” I turn and poke him in the chest. “A greater mountain troll, three weeks ago.”

Soren takes a step back from me. “You’re the survivor.”

“There were others.”

“Baldur and I heard a story about you—about the girl who charged an entire herd of trolls with nothing but a sword in her hand.”

It makes me smile. I was hardly charging at that point, but I prefer this version to the reality.

We drive to higher ground and make camp at the edge of a cliff. I haven’t seen any troll-sign, but to be safe I suggest we don’t build a fire. Soren nods and pulls three flat brown cardboard packages from his SUV. They’re self-heating MREs. I watch as he adds water to a chemical pouch and slides it back into the box. It silently but effectively warms up the beef ravioli. All three boxes are different flavors, and he lets me choose. I decide the stew will be the lesser evil, and he eats both other packets. Mine is thick and sticky, but I haven’t had a hot meal in over a week. I miss the sloppy oatmeal Unferth used to make, when it was the two of us.

Starlight and a soft sliver of moon keep the night dark, but as I eat, my eyes adjust to the layers of nighttime, to the distant peaks and darker valleys. To the undulating shadows of the ocean in the west. Ghost-gray clouds drift low, and the longer I rest the better my ribs and stinging cuts feel. I stretch out on my sleeping bag, and Soren does the same. We make a V with our heads together near the cliff, feet pointing at the trucks. The half of me nearer to him remains warm, though my outer arm and leg feel the ice still hanging in Vinland’s spring wind.

“What are you doing out here?” I finally ask him.

“Baldur and I are concerned about the troll herd.”

“Don’t you trust your brother berserkers to clear the island?”

It takes a moment before he answers. “Baldur feels guilty about the massacre.”

“Why?”

“He thinks it wouldn’t have happened if he had not been gone and forgotten himself.”

And so even Baldur believes the massacre is connected to his disappearance. I shake my head. “What does it mean, forgotten himself?”

“Ah, that … He didn’t remember his name or know anything about himself when he rose in the desert. We found him and he was mortal, memory-free without the apple of immortality from Idun’s garden.”

“I didn’t know death strips away your memories. Or is it resurrection that does it?”

“Either. My understanding is you need a guide for crossing between worlds if you want to retain yourself,” Soren says very sadly.

The ache in his voice finds my own pinched grief. So Unferth has forgotten me. I realize I’m rubbing my hand against my chest. I stop, let my fingers spread over my heart. “Who is we?” I ask suddenly. “I thought you were alone until after you had him, until you met the little girl berserker?”

The dead silence that exudes from my left, the flare of heat, makes me roll over to stare at him. “You didn’t tell the true story.”

Even in the pale starlight I see his jaw work hard as he clenches and unclenches it. He sits in one smooth motion. “I … can you just pretend you didn’t hear that?”

“Never.” I laugh and sit, too. “Tell me, Soren Bearstar; I’ll keep your secret with you.”

“I … can’t. I’m not supposed to.” He chews the words like even they are difficult. I wait, hugging my knees to my chest. To keep myself from pushing him harder, I draw hero against the toe of my boot. With a twist, I transform it into a binding rune with his name: bear star, hope’s hero.

Hear the bear star be born, the seether fall into darkness.

The cliff seems to tilt below me like a ship going out with the tide. I say the line of poetry out loud, one careful word at a time.

“What?” Soren’s dark eyes glint as he turns them to me.

“A poem I wrote the morning Baldur vanished. About trolls and my faith and … you. And a seether.”

Heat blazes from him but Soren shuts his eyes, flattens his hands against air. He reins it in, lowering his hands to the earth slowly. “Yes,” he whispers.

“It’s a riddle, and you can’t tell me the answer,” I whisper back.

His head jerks one nod.

The seether fall into darkness. Death strips memories away. “She’s not dead?”

“No. It’s just that … nobody can remember her.”

“They tore her name out of the world,” I say. “Like Kara Neverborn.”

“Who?”

“Exactly. She was the last Valkyrie of the Tree.”

“I didn’t … didn’t know she had a name.”

Focusing on a different story seems to calm him, and so I keep on. “Kara, the last Valkyrie of the Tree, the most beautiful of all Odin’s handmaidens, lived a hundred and fifty years ago. Her triumph and her downfall came during the Thralls’ War.”

Precia of the South told me this tale the first night I stayed with her, and every time I stayed with her. It was a lesson for me, and, I always suspected, one she kept close to her own heart.

I close my eyes to recall her words, to recall the sorrow in her voice.

“Long in New Asgard the kings and jarls had argued, some claiming our traditions of conquering and thralldom were wrong, that a way of life, a tradition, does not equal truth. Odin’s men laughed, saying, Once defeated, a man’s destiny is enslavement, and his children’s. But Thor Thunderer said, If a man wins freedom with his sword, or even the Alfather’s favorite weapon of words, who is to say his fate is not changed? We warred over it, all of New Asgard sundered in two.

“The Ninth Valkyrie agreed with the Thunderer, with change and choice. When the Shenandoah Army and the Army of the Potomac faced each other at Gettysburg, she saw the hot, sticky death, the heroes falling, the lost and losing, and she cried, Why does my Alfather allow this slaughter? There is no glory here! On the third day of the battle, she defied Odin’s wishes by raising her sword to fight with the Potomac Army, bolstering their will and courage with hard, hopeful words. The ground trembled at Cemetery Ridge for the final charge, and Kara Neverborn screamed as she ran against Odin’s army. She spread her arms and her swan-shift flew out to either side, reaching out like massive wings. Her eyes marked the dead like a Death Chooser of old.

“General Leeson lost that day and the rebel army was broken. The war dragged on, but from the moment the Ninth Valkyrie stepped into the fray, just as her ancient sisters had done, picking a side to win and a side to lose, it was over. Even the Alfather reluctantly bowed to history, to the collective will of New Asgard. But no one living saw Kara again.”

I lean nearer to Soren and lower my voice. “For her betrayal, the Alfather ripped her out of the Middle World. The trail of her blood became the Red River, and all the history of her family vanished. Kara had a surname once, but she became the Neverborn. No one knows her name but for her sister Valkyrie.”

Soren says, “So they remember the price of defying him.”

“No, because he loves her, wherever she is, and couldn’t destroy the long poem of Valkyrie names by removing hers completely.”

His expression hardens. “The Alfather doesn’t love.”

“Just because he doesn’t love you, he must not love at all?” I laugh, and hear Unferth’s voice murmur, You’ve met someone more self-absorbed than you, little raven.

“There’s no evidence he loves anyone.”

“He loves us.”

Soren regards me, brow low in a frown, hooding his eyes. “Us.”

“The Valkyrie.”

“You’re … the Child Valkyrie. The Valkyrie of the Tree, who ran away because she couldn’t solve her riddle.”

I flop back down onto my sleeping bag. “Yes.”

“And the girl who faced the herd of trolls.”

“Yes.”

“And you think the Alfather loves you?”

Staring up at the bare glitter of stars, I say, “Yes. I know he loves me. And he never has betrayed one of us if we did not betray him first. In all the stories and poems, I defy you to find an example otherwise.”

I hear the shuffle as he lies back down, too. He says, “That isn’t how Odin treats the berserkers. He should love us as much.”

“Maybe he does and you just don’t see it.”

“No one who loves would give the berserking as a gift. It makes us outsiders, apart from the world.”

That familiar pinch of loneliness responds to his words. “At least you have each other, your fellow berserkers.”

“I don’t. Not since I chose Baldur.”

“But you still have your madness, the frenzy. It connects you back through generations of ancestors. You’re a berserker still, Soren. You chose to give up on the Alfather’s ways, but he didn’t give up on you.”

He sighs, low and deep like the earth itself lifting rough shoulders. “We’re tools to him. That’s what berserkers are. I’m glad for you if you think the Valkyrie are different.”

A hundred arguments crowd my head, that the Valkyrie have wills of our own, that he gives us choices, that Odin asked me to choose him; he didn’t make me. But it’s such a strange position to find myself in: defending the Valkyrie, talking of them as a unit, like I’m one of them.

I fall asleep wondering if my sisters know where I am.

Soren’s already up when I wake, boots scuffing slowly against the loose dirt and frost here at the top of the cliff as he works through a set of offensive postures. I sit, folding my legs up to my chest, and watch. His body is like one thick muscle, all shifting as one. It’s a different grace from Unferth’s, who was tight, fast motion. Soren is smooth and appears relaxed, though the sweat glinting in his buzzed hair and heat radiating off him are a sure sign otherwise.

He comes to a center pose, legs spread, hands together, and blows a long string of air before opening his dark eyes to look at me. In the bright morning sun it’s no easier to read his face than it was in the bare starlight. No expression but for the wrinkle between his eyebrows. It’s nearly a frown, but maybe that’s just how his face rests. I smile wryly, though he surely won’t understand why.

“Morning,” he says.

“Morning.”

Going to his SUV, he digs into the backseat, then tosses me a can of coffee. I catch it, startled by the cold metal. The logo is fancy, declaring, EVEN THE GODS CAN FIND HEAVEN IN OUR BEANS.

“Sorry it’s not hot. If we build a fire I have some real grounds.”

I raise my eyes to his and pop the top. “This alone is the nicest breakfast I’ve had in weeks.”

“Ah, Baldur bought the supplies.”

My laughter even surprises me with how merry it sounds. Soren’s mouth presses into a line. “Do you mind if I finish my routine?” he asks, then drops down to impress me with the speed and number of push-ups. I stop counting at forty-seven.

“Can you do the thing where you clap between each one?” I tease, but he pauses to say, “I’ve never tried.”

He does, and it makes a huge dull thump against the ground. He lifts his head to smile a little.

“What about pushing up from a handstand?”

Soren actually laughs. There’s his sense of humor: in his muscles.

I drink the smooth canned coffee and share my protein bars with him. As we pack up, I realize there’s no doubt in me that we’ll be hunting together now.

All morning we continue winding farther south than I’ve ever been, off the north peninsula and out of the tundra. The spruces gain strength and the ground grows thick with moss and ferns. The ocean flashes in the west, but in the east fog hugs the earth, clinging to the pockets between mountains, obscuring the sun to make our task more dangerous. The long highway twists inland, just south of the Lonely Shadow, the tallest mountain on the island. I hate being confined by the roadways and would rather cut straight there, because if I were a troll wanting to hide, the mountain is where I would go.

We stop for lunch by a lake that’s meadow on one side, hard, climbing cliff on the other. Sunlight has burned off the mist so the water shines blue. As we eat I tell Soren what I know of greater mountain troll–sign: scoured trees and disturbed rock scree, boulders with no cracks in them, caves that appear full of stone, a stripe of lichen that ends abruptly. Vaguely man-shaped boulders, for the younger trolls are less capable of calcifying into a decent disguise and tend to hunch over to hide their faces and hands. Water is everywhere here, so it’s useless to remain close to any particular body of it.

It relaxes me to be the teacher, though I find I can’t put the words into poetry or riddles, and instead let them fall explicit and dull from my mouth. My mind turns to Unferth again and again, his troll pads, his spears, the dangerous curve of his smile.

I fall silent, listening to the gentle lap of lake water against the pebbled shore, when Soren says, “I never expected to find any trolls. Baldur gave me the Mad Eagles’ report, and they believed they destroyed the entire herd but for the mother, who surely returned to Canadia. There was no proof they were right, though.”

We sit on two camp chairs unfolded from the trunk of his SUV. Mine creaks as I lean toward him. “You came hunting to appease Baldur’s conscience.”

“It lit him up when I suggested it. He wants to be sure the troll mother is gone, that they’re all gone.”

“I’ve seen signs of her periodically, and I’ll find her.”

“How do you know?”

“She’s my destiny. The Valkyrie of the Tree will prove herself with a stone heart.” I say the riddle up at the stratified stripes of the cliff across the lake. Green lines of moss highlight the jagged nature of it, and the top is flat, bare of trees. “Hers. Her heart. It’s my answer and my blood price, all wrapped into a tidy package.”

He grunts.

“What?”

Those big shoulders shrug. “I don’t trust tidy packages. Especially not when they come from the gods.”

“What do you trust?” I ask sourly.

“Not a what, a who.”

“Yourself?”

“Hardly.” There’s even a tinge of sarcasm in his voice.

I wait.

He says, “Baldur, and … her.”

“Not the Lokiskin girl? Who’s a berserker now?”

“That’s Vider.” Soren stands up. He goes to the pebbles at the edge of the lake and sifts through them until he finds one round and the size of an eye. Rolling it between his palms he says, “I trust that she would mean to do her best for me, but she serves Odin now and chose it.”

Offended on my god’s behalf, I throw a balled-up MRE wrapper at him. It unfolds in the air and floats down to the grass harmlessly. “There are trustworthy Odinists, berserker.”

Soren glances at me over his shoulder. “Most of you are selfish, or mad, or racist.”

I jump to my feet. “I’m only one of those things, and it doesn’t make me untrustworthy.” I slap dirt off my hands. “Coming?”

He gets up more slowly. “Which one?”

I slam back inside my truck.

Two hours before sunset we find a shattered cluster of rock that looks like a dead troll. It can’t be her because there’s no bone jewelry or any trace of the ivory tusks. I walk into the forest about a kilometer off the road, trying to smell her or see if she really came this way. It brings me to the edge of a narrow, long lake, where I find a deep claw print with two little birds bathing in it. As the sun sets, we drag our equipment out to it and make camp. If she’s sleeping at the bottom of the lake, she’ll rise with the moon and we’ll be ready.

I breathe carefully around the thrill of excitement and tell Soren to go ahead and build a small fire. She won’t be scared away by it. Maybe it will be a beacon.

We eat and then wait, alert into the night.

Soren spends the time rubbing down his sword with an oilcloth. Its well-worn sheath leans against his thigh. The lobed pommel is plain metal, but etched into the crossguard are runes and small knot-work animals. The hilt is wrapped with something smooth and gray, and its overall design is from the Viker era, not as old as Unferth’s but old enough.

“Was it your father’s?” I ask. A side note to the story of Baldur’s rescue revolved around Soren’s infamous father, a berserker who lost control of his madness and murdered ten or so people in a mall.

Soren flicks his fingers against the hilt as one would pet a touchy cat. “Yes.”

I bite my tongue to keep from interrogating further. My own father had ashy hair like mine, long fingers that helped me paint ponies and long elegant trees. I remember a cold smear as he drew color down my nose. “My parents died when I was young, too.”

“My mother is still alive, somewhere.” His hands pause in their work; his eyes remain locked on the blade. “But I don’t have a family at all anymore.”

“Loyalty ties us together as well as blood,” I offer. It’s a Freyan proverb, and I hope he doesn’t recognize it as such.

The tattoo on his cheek curves as he smiles, a spear that bends but doesn’t break. “And your sword?” he asks. “It looks incredibly old.”

“Ah, a ring-sword.” It’s my turn to glance away. Odd-eye, and rag me, I think, curses the only words I can seem to apply to all this longing and the ache of missing Unferth. Especially hunting with a partner again, all day I’ve thought of Ned, as we approached the base of the Lonely Shadow, as I repeated his words to myself, as I drove with the weight of his sword across my lap.

I push off the rough ground and grab up Unferth’s sword. Facing Soren, I unsheathe it with a slick motion. The short old blade catches the gentle orange of the flames.

Soren meets me on his feet. He’s slightly taller than me, and I step near enough I have to tilt my chin to see the rune in his eyes. “It belonged to my friend who died in the troll attack,” I say, no prologue to soften it. “He told me once the blade was unhallowed and so could kill monsters. That it had killed monsters before. But he left it with me, and she killed him.” I hold it out as a horrible blaze of anxiety turns my blood into nausea or ice or both. “I loved him.”

Soren touches the tiny garnet and nudges the loose ring welded to the pommel but doesn’t lift it out of my hands. “Does the sword have a name?”

“I don’t know.” I don’t know. “I thought I had forever to ask that sort of thing.”

He slides his hand to cover mine so we’re holding the blade together.

“His name was Ned,” I whisper, “which was the plainest name for him. I called him Unferth.”

“Ned the Spiritless,” Soren says.

We’re alone under low, dark clouds so even the stars cannot see us. Wind blows hard off the lake, makes the trees dance. Soren steps closer. I do the same until the hilt touches both of our shoulders.

He says, “Her name was Astrid.”

“Astrid.” For the slightest moment I know everything there ever was to know about her. But she slips away and there’s only Soren staring back at me.

“Some days my greatest fear is that I will die and nobody will remember her name,” he adds hoarsely.

I stretch my hand out and find his fingers. “I will.”

With every breath his hand seems to grow hotter, and he flexes it but doesn’t pull away.

Soren takes a breath deeper than any three of mine, then blows it out in a continuous stream. When he finishes, his temperature has dropped noticeably. “I had hoped maybe Fate was finished with me,” he says.

Is that bitch ever really finished with us? Unferth whispers in my ear.