The Strange Maid

SEVENTEEN

LONG SALT IS a walled town in Vertmont kingstate, situated along the North River about forty kilometers southwest of the ruins of Montreal. We arrive midmorning the day after leaving the Mad Eagles. Pain stabs the back of my eyes, since I woke up again and again last night, despite the completely decent hotel room Soren bought for us with a fancy credit card he sheepishly admitted had been supplied by Baldur the Beautiful.

In my dreams the troll mother raked her claws across my eyes, her tusks hooked into my ribs as she buried her face in my chest, tearing me apart, until all that remained was my bright, beating heart. Soren dragged me up after midnight to run laps around the hotel parking lot until the sun rose. We piled into the SUV then, with Styrofoam cups of bad lobby coffee, and I leaned my head against the window, eyes shut, while Soren kept me barely awake with stories of the Berserker Wars. He’s no poet, and his voice faded into the gentle rumble of the engine more often than not, but he knows more grim details about the five-year back-and-forth between berserkers and the last of the frost giants. He almost manages to distract me from all my worries about whether this troll mother they saw in Vertmont is my troll mother.

The walls of Long Salt are four meters tall and at least one thick, meant to deter most types of trolls or at least slow down a greater mountain herd. We roll slowly through, though there’s no guard, into a charming town that bustles with life. Early spring flowers burst from long boxes lining the main street, and colorful prayer flags flutter from the tall light posts. A handful of temples raise the only skyline, their white steeples reaching toward the perfect cotton-ball clouds. Children run through the school yard, mothers push strollers along the sidewalks, and every block has its own crossroads shrine strung with plastic beads and incense sticks.

As we reach the whitewashed downtown with its antiques stores and coffee shops, a long banner stretches across the road, bright yellow with green and pink daisies, that reads: WELCOME TO LONG SALT GARDEN FESTIVAL.

There’s nothing here to indicate the presence of trolls. With the national troll alert so recent, it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t have reacted even more strongly than usual.

“You’re sure this is where the report came from?” I ask.

“It was an anonymous caller who claimed to be fishing out by the old locks and saw her rooting around near the northern wall of town.”

“Who’d he call? The militia?”

“The Mjolnir Institute.”

I don’t know much about the institute except that it’s funded through efforts of Thor Thunderer and tracks all kinds of troll information. They aren’t the first responders in an attack, and so it’s odd this tipster would’ve called them. But I heard about it so fast probably because it went through Thor’s institute and straight to Baldur’s ear.

We stop for brunch at a bistro with outdoor seating, and Soren does his best to hunker down and not draw attention while I flirt with our waitress for information. I pretend to be interested in the history of the town and ask about the garden festival, about how the population did during Baldur’s disappearance, and with the troll alert if she thinks they’ll get as many out-of-town guests as usual. I bring up trolls at least three times, giving her ample opportunity to tell me about any actual sightings, but the nearest she offers is an anecdote about a place out by the river the kids call Troll Spot, where they can look toward the system of locks and some drowned cities called the Lost Villages. They go up there to smoke leaf and make out, and pretend to see trolls in the water. Since the anonymous fisherman mentioned the locks, too, I guess it’s our best bet. I give Soren a sidelong glance and say to the waitress, “A good make-out spot, you say? How do we get there?”

Soren, bless him, ducks his face, which is as good as a blush.

Full of caffeine and sandwiches, we get back into the SUV and follow her directions out the east gate, then north on a dirt road through a lovely forest. Spring leaves turn the light chartreuse as the road climbs over a slight hill and stops. The land slopes away toward the river, a quick-moving, wide-banked waterway here, glinting brown in the sun. Soren stops the car and we climb out, armed with troll-spears and our swords. The view north stretches over flat fields and groves of green trees, and to the east the river narrows and we can see the concrete rectangles of abandoned locks. Farther east the horizon slides into a haze of clouds, but it must be where the Lost Villages were.

I pick my way downhill to the river. West where the water slows, a handful of motorboats laze in the current, and a couple of kayaks, too. Nobody here is worried about trolls. The couple who spot us give our spears a surprised look, though.

My boots sink into the mud. A few drowned trees cling to the bank. Insects buzz at my face and I swat them away. I shuck off my coat, wishing I’d left it in the car. We’re not on a glacier island anymore, obviously, and spring is in full bloom. Behind me, Soren sneezes.

For an hour I walk along the bank toward the locks, eyes down for troll-sign. There’s absolutely nothing. Frustration has me slashing with the spear at the thin branches that hang in my way, stomping down on grass that did me no harm. We get to the locks and I push easily through a hole in the rusty chain-link fence. The locks are huge rectangular chambers built into the river, with mechanisms for raising and lowering the water level in order to help boats get upriver. These are drained and defunct, because there’s nothing north since Montreal fell.

I climb the crumbling old stairs up to the top and look down into the first lock. Moss darkens the low, stagnant water, and it smells like rotten plants. The river flows free on the other side, splashing resentfully at the concrete.

Soren touches my elbow and points to the bottom of this first lock. Huddled down in the sunny corner are three small oblong stones. The water has them only partially hidden.

“Skit,” I say. Lesser trolls. There’s a broken and rusty old ladder beside them, missing several rungs. Fine dining for an iron wight. I don’t know if that makes it more or less likely the troll mother is here. Conventional wisdom would say they avoid their larger cousins, but the wights appeared on Vinland only when there’d recently been a herd moving about. If mine is the first mother, with Freya’s charm in her heart, there’s no knowing what effect she might have on the lesser trolls.

I hurry along the side of the lock, heave up onto the next one, and keep going. There’s evidence of claws and chewing on some metal drums lined along the land side of the locks, and one spillway has been torn out enough that water trickles slowly through, making a perfect little drinking fountain. But I spy no broken trees, no boulders of any size, and there’s nothing but flat farmland for kilometers. No caves, no veins of granite near the surface of the earth.

“There’s nowhere for her to hide,” I exclaim when the sun is at its apex, wiping away any shadows. “Unless she’s underwater.”

He squints against the glare off the river. “You aren’t about to propose diving, are you?”

“A few more sleepless nights and I might be.”

“We can come back when the sun is gone, and until then go interview the fishermen. Maybe find our anonymous informant.”

With a final glare at the little iron wights calcified into stones at the bottom of the lock, I agree.

But even interviewing all the hikers and kayakers we can find nearer to the town, there’s no sign of him.

When the sun sets we drive out to the end of the locks, farther east toward Montreal than we walked. We eat takeout in the SUV, staring at the black river through the windshield. Stars pop out, brighter in the northeast than they are back toward the glow from Long Salt. Maybe she’ll show herself in the darkness.

I drift into sleep, waking as Soren shuffles around because a muffled pop song sounds behind the dash. He mumbles an apology as he reaches across me for the glove compartment. It unlatches and a cell phone falls out. He catches it and thumbs it on. “Hello? Ah, yes. No.”

The tinny voice on the other end sounds like Baldur. I think I hear Port Orleans and your Valkyrie.

“Yes, thanks. No, we haven’t had any luck. Yes …” Soren taps his head back against the driver’s seat, staring at the roof. “That might be related; we’ll talk about it.” Turning his head away from me, he whispers, “Baldur, stop.”

There’s laughter from the god of light. I’m torn between wanting and not wanting to know what he’s teasing Soren about.

Soren closes the phone and clears his throat. “Can you put this back?” He drops it in my hand. “Baldur says he’s taking Red Stripe to Port Orleans for a Disir Day charity ball he’s throwing with one of the southern preachers, to benefit Vinland relief. He wants you to come claim your troll there and be his special guest.”

Shoving the phone back into the glove compartment gives me a moment to calculate. “That’s the end of next week?”

“Nine days. Probably three days’ easy driving from here, two if we push it.”

I blow out a frustrated sigh. I want Red Stripe, but to take so much time away from the hunt sticks under my skin. Maybe we’ll find her before then. “I’ll think about it. Do you know the story of Freya creating the trolls?” I ask.

Soren grunts acknowledgment, and I tell him my theory that the mother we’re hunting might be the mother from that story.

“That’s … old.”

I keep my voice calm when I answer, as if it will rein in my enthusiasm. “And so are the gods, and the giants lived centuries, too, millennia even, before they were destroyed.”

“Maybe you should pick a different heart, then. The riddle says a stone heart, doesn’t it?”

Frustration makes me kick the glove compartment. “Never. I saw the answer in her eyes, and she owes me blood price now. Even without the riddle, without anything else, I’d be hunting her.”

Outside the SUV the wind flutters the leaves and turns the banks of the river into ruffles of grass. I open my door and jump out, taking a UV flashlight with me to the lock. In the dark it’s hard to find good footing, but I climb up to peer down into the low water. “Hey, bridge eaters,” I call. Something skitters against the concrete, and I hear gentle lapping below. I flip on the light and scan it straight down along the edge of the water. A tiny shriek starts my heart beating faster. There’s movement in the pit. Light reflects back at me from the tiny tossing waves.

I slide the spotlight back the other way, then around the whole perimeter. Five pairs of eyes flash at me; I see teeth and flailing limbs in the far corner.

It’s only a two-meter drop, and I crouch first, put my hand on the edge, and jump down.

I hit with a huge splash, boots on slick ground, and shove fast to the corner. Water up to my knees sloshes everywhere and the iron wights scream. Thrusting out my hand, I snatch one by the neck and push it into the wall, pointing the UV light toward the rest of them so they stay back. The wight weighs about as much as a house cat but is shaped like a monkey, tiny hands grasping at my wrist and man-shaped mouth gaping. Its front teeth are jagged like a shark’s, for tearing through metal—or soft human flesh—and the molars heavy and hard. It wears thin, ragged pants it probably stole off some stuffed animal. “Peas, peas!” it gasps.

“Where’s the troll mother?” I ask calmly. “I won’t hurt you if you tell me.”

“No—no!”

“There isn’t one? Or she’s gone?”

“Cat-man!”

Above me, Soren says, “What are you doing?”

Ignoring him, I lean nearer the iron wight. It snaps at my face. “Did you see a troll mother, a giant, mean mountain troll?”

“Mean troll yessss.” It nods and slobber drops onto my hand.

“Signy, it’s just answering because it’s terrified.” Disapproval coats Soren’s words.

Claws rake against my calf and I kick out, connecting with a small body. I hurl my wight into the water.

“Come on,” Soren calls, reaching his hand down. I throw the flashlight up. It arcs over him, flashing light at the sky like a strobe, and lands back on the grass with a thump. Then I leap up to grasp his forearm. He drags me up, none too gently, pulling on my arm and, when he can reach it, the scruff of my shirt. Below me the iron wights hiss and curse. Water splashes and a few hard chunks of metal hit my legs and back.

I roll over onto my back against the rough concrete of the lock and Soren sighs. “That was a waste of time.”

“She’s not here.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Bruises, nothing else.”

“You need sleep. We’ll get a hotel room in town, and then … head for Port Orleans?”

“There has to be sign of her somewhere. We’ll go up into Montreal, hunt in the ruins. I’m not giving up.”

“I don’t want you to, but let’s be smart about it. If you go to New Orleans for Disir Day, afterward Baldur might join us, and if there’s anybody you want at your side for troll hunting, it’s him.”

That’s not true. I want Ned Unferth.

That night the troll mother crouches on my chest. She suffocates me, scratching her claws down my arm, and when the blood spills out she uses it to paint runes on the walls and ceiling: Find me, Death Chooser; I will eat your heart.

Find me.

Find me.

I wake with Unferth’s name on my tongue.

Baldur calls first thing in the morning to tell us of greater mountain troll–sign in Ohiyo kingstate. I actually talk to him personally, and he tells me the man who called it in was hunting deer with his two sons and she rose out of the river fog “like the moon.” He described her in explicit detail, down to the green-blue of her eyes and the sickle-shaped scar on her left shoulder. It must be her, no matter how strange that she’s traveling that fast and out of her territory. Where could she be headed and why? What is southwest of here but the center of the country?

We drive straight to Ohiyo. But the results are the same: nobody will admit to being the source, and this time we’re in rolling forested hills, the proper habitat for hill trolls, not mountain trolls. Unlike Vinland, where they’re only rare, this far south greater mountain trolls are unheard-of. What they’ve plenty of, however, in Cleaveland and Louisville, are lesser trolls. There’s a news bulletin about a bridge on the Ohiyo River buckling under the weight of a semi, thanks to ruined support beams that were just replaced three years ago, and another about a riverboat in Cincinnatus infested by cat wights, who’re supposed to despise water.

Soren and I spend four days in the kingstate, using his Sun’s Berserk credentials to talk with city planners and local exterminators about the sightings and serious uptick in lesser-troll presence. They all agree it must have been the recent national crisis bringing the wights out of their normal shadows. They say that, like the Vinland herd, the wights were sensitive to the air of fear here in the heartland when Baldur vanished. Soren believes it, but that sounds like a bunch of fluffy nonsense to me. The iron wights I’ve known weren’t sensitive to anything but the presence of metal or shiny toys. Fortunately, Soren inserts himself between me and the city workers before I say anything unforgivable.

The longer I spend along the river, the crankier I become. She is my destiny, I tell Soren, and she recognized my heart, too, somehow. I have to find her.

He says, “You choose, Signy. You make your destiny; don’t just let it pull you along,” and I remember saying exactly that thing to Unferth our last night together. How he would scorn me for accepting the drag of destiny now, because it aligns with what I selfishly want.

Soren continues to push for us to head south to Port Orleans. I’m torn because I want Baldur’s resources, but I don’t want to risk losing her trail. If only I could sense her somehow, or use my dreams as a guide.

For she comes to me every night now, from slimy swamps, rising out of the water with long grasses that slide off her head and shoulders. She bears rune scars carved into her hard marble chest. My rune scar, which Unferth translated: death-born, servant of death. Strange Maid. She comes with it painted in blood over her heart. She crouches on a white sand beach, drawing a rune poem into the sand, but before I can read it the tide washes it away and the mother is behind me, ripping runes into my flesh, and I scream prayers for my skin to harden like hers.

The fourth night in Ohiyo, I soar over a battlefield on a massive gray horse, at the head of a flight of Valkyrie. Below us the dead burn in a single great bonfire. We point, my sisters and I, at one man, and then another, drawing their spirits up with us as we gallop across the clouds. I laugh and shriek at the glory of it all, at the blood, the hunger. But when I twist to look back, they’re not golden women at my flanks but eight troll mothers in feather capes, the one near me as wide as the moon and graceful as a swan. She bats me out of the sky, but a rope around my neck snaps and I hang from her thick hand as she flies over the battlefield. Tall flames lick up at my legs. I scream and struggle. I flail my legs and claw at the noose.

Someone says my name, over and over, calmly. Puts cool hands on my face, unwinds the noose and gently kisses me.

Little raven.

I’m awake, and he’s gripping me tightly, pinning my hands between us. Ned, Ned, Ned. But it’s Soren, light streaming around him from the desk lamp. I bury my face against him and try to breathe.

“Skit, Signy,” he whispers, “are you sick? You’re on fire.” He slides his hands down my bare arms until he reaches my hands. “Let me get you water.”

I grab his hands, gouging him with my nails hard enough that he grunts. I let go. “Sorry,” I whisper.

I flee to the bathroom to splash water over my face. We’re on the top floor of a standard highway hotel with free hot breakfast and an interweave connection if we had a computer. The walls are covered with gilded paper to remind us of another era, and these bathroom fixtures are overly elaborate. The kind you have to stare at too long before you figure out which is hot and which is cold.

Soren puts his shoulder against the wall and waits for me. After I pat my face dry and manage a few clean breaths, I face him, wrapping my arms around my stomach. “I’m all right. It’s only more of the same.”

“Do you need a workout?”

“I think I need a drink.” I duck around him with a flirty smile.

“My … Astrid … would say if you figure out what’s scaring you, you can face it.”

I stop beside my bed, head down. “I’m trying to, Soren. I’m looking for her. She’s looking for me.”

He says, “Nightmares like this aren’t normal, not even for post-trauma.”

My knees melt and I plop onto the floor with my back against the bed. He joins me and I only stare at him for a long moment. The lamp casts rather dim light onto us, and Soren lacks that guarded expression he normally wears.

“You don’t have to be alone,” he finally says.

“What would Astrid think of that?” I snap.

Soren frowns and studies his right palm. He slowly says, “She’d agree. She’d like you, and she’d know you helped me already.” He lifts his gaze to mine again, and when he speaks again his tone brooks no argument. “She wouldn’t be worried about us at all.”

I dig my fingers into the carpet. “Well, good.”

Silence drags through a couple of minutes.

“Maybe your dreams are trying to tell you something,” Soren finally says. “Something your imagination has already put together but you can’t parse yet.”

I think of the troll mother, of the imagery that she hanged me, that I died. That first we flew as sister Valkyrie. We were the same. I cover my face with my hands. But he gently pulls them away, folding them between his own hot hands. “Tell me.”

“She’s in a swamp, or on a white sand beach. My rune scar is carved onto her, like we’re connected—and we are connected, Soren. We both draw poetry into sand; her eyes are full of runes for the Valkyrie. She said to me, Your heart, when she held me close to her face. I used to dream of killing her, but now she kills me. She flays my skin; she knocks me out of the sky. It’s like instead of me becoming her mirror, she’s become mine.” I squeeze his fingers.

“Your mirror?”

“Valtheow the Dark, the Valkyrie? She hunted a troll mother centuries ago and said that in order to hunt the beast, she had to become a beast.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Of course you wouldn’t, Sun’s Berserk.”

He lets go of my hands. “You don’t have to be mean.”

I work my jaw and eventually grind out an apology.

Soren just watches me.

“I hate being afraid,” I confess.

“When I’m afraid, I take deep breaths. I remember who I am. I pray.”

“What are you afraid of?”

He’s so still, the least fidgety person I’ve ever met, and for a moment it’s like he’s become a statue. “Killing innocent people,” he says quietly.

Like his father, like the trolls. I touch the tattoo on his face gently, knowing better than to offer any easy comfort to that.

“I’ll tell you what I’ve learned about dreams,” he says, his voice almost too quiet for me to hear. I climb onto my bed while Soren stretches out on the floor at the foot. I wonder if it’s easier for him to talk when he can stare up at the ceiling, pretend I’m not really listening as he tells me how the berserking madness woke in him a few years ago, that it gave him insomnia and made him afraid of himself. Until he met a girl who dreamed true dreams, and Baldur the Beautiful, who always dreams of his death, and they taught him he wasn’t a monster.

I scoot sideways on the bed, hair loose and hanging to the carpet, arms splayed out like wings with my palms up. Unferth’s sword lies beside me, just near enough I can skim my fingers against the garnet. With my head tipped back the blood rushes into my eyes, filling my skull near to bursting. Fear can be a sacrifice, too, Ned whispers. I don’t want to hear him now, and take my hand away from his sword.

“It isn’t natural to dream your own death again and again,” Soren says. “But Baldur does. And Astrid’s were sometimes frightening, sometimes uplifting, sometimes about people she didn’t know and never would. They were always true, though. Because she was a seethkona. And her goddess is the goddess of dreams. That same goddess Baldur sleeps with every winter, in death. The goddess who connects them.”

“Freya, the queen of witches,” I whisper. I shiver and close my eyes. The troll mother roars.

“Signy … the Alfather does many things, manipulates words and memory, and thought … but he has no power over our dreams.”

My eyes fly open. “You think Freya is behind them. My dreams.”

“She stole Baldur’s ashes.”

“What?” I roll over abruptly, clutch the foot of the bed, and stare down at him. My hair falls all around my face. “They told us it was one of Odin’s Lonely Warriors, and why would she do that?” A memory flashes through my head: demanding to know if Unferth was Einherjar, and his swift, amused denial.

Soren’s dark eyes are grim, his lips tight. “To manipulate Astrid to exactly where Freya wanted her—for the destiny of the world, she said. Maybe she wants something from you, too.”

“But Odin Alfather cast my riddle into the Tree; the Valkyrie would know if it were otherwise. That’s what set me on this path!”

My calm companion doesn’t reply, his silence full of weight and meaning.

I throw myself back onto my back and stare at the popcorn ceiling as if I could force the swirls into answers. “What could she want from me?” I whisper.

“I don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t. I only know that either your dreams are only dreams, or they mean something because the goddess of dreams wants you to know a thing.”

“Odd-eye and rag me,” I whisper.

Could Freya be sending me dreams, could she be pushing me toward the troll mother? The troll mother she herself created?

“Odin,” I start, tentatively, “Odin would have to be … aware. He sent the riddle.”

“It sounds like a prophecy, though, doesn’t it? And Freya is the only one of them who sees the future.”

I say, “And so maybe he asked her to read my future, and this was her answer.”

“Which might have been all her intent, merely doing her cousin a favor.”

His tone makes clear that he doesn’t believe it. He doesn’t trust Freya, because whatever it is that happened to his Astrid, whatever got her name torn out of the world, he blames the goddess of dreams.

“All right.” I lick my dry lips. “Let’s pretend that’s what happened. She gave him this prophecy that he turned into a riddle. Maybe he knew the answer, that the troll mother is the stone heart I need—but Freya must have. If she’s the one driving me toward the mother.”

“And how did you figure out the troll mother was the answer?”

Nausea ruins my insides. “Ned.”

“Are you certain he came from Odin?”

“I believed it,” I whisper. “I chose to. Everything pointed to it; it was the right answer to the—the riddle of his existence.”

This is called doubt, little raven, he murmurs to me now.

“But no, I’m not certain,” I say through my teeth, barely willing to let the words out. I press the balls of my hands into my eyes. “Oh, Hangatyr, oh gods.”

May Signy Valborn never regret, Unferth prayed, the last thing before he died.

I knew he left pieces out of his story; I knew there was more to tell—but it can’t be that he used me. It can’t be. I kissed him. I loved him. I trusted him.

I want to take up his sword and crash it into the window, destroy something.

I have to know if Ned was a liar by his riddles, by all he omitted. I have to know if Freya sent him or if Odin did, because I am his, not hers: a Valkyrie and a wild, passionate, screaming one. If I am on a path Odin set me on, fine. But I won’t work against him. I have to know.

“Soren.”

“Signy.” He kneels, leaning his elbows onto the bed.

I sit cross-legged and reach for his hands. “Precia, the Valkyrie of the South, has her Death Hall in Port Orleans.”

He nods, turning his hands over so our palms connect.

“We’ll go for Disir Day and I’ll ask her about all of this. She told me she wanted to help.”

Soren agrees, and I cling to him. With my fingers dug into his wrists I beg him not to let go. We lie next to each other on the bed, only our hands connected. His hot, mine tingling with my pulse until I fall asleep.

But the troll mother waits.

Unferth is with her, and she puts her hand on his face gently, like a lover. It envelops his head and he leans into her, curls his fingers around her thumb. He smiles. He looks straight at me and says, “My only Signy.”

I wake up in darkness, unable to close my eyes again.