The Strange Maid

TWENTY-FIVE

IN THE GLOOMY evening light, Ned gives me a tight smile and lowers his sword until the tip nearly skims the porch. He’s dressed in the same dark shirt and black jeans as last night, a knife strapped to his thigh and another in his belt.

I step aside to let him in, pressing my spine to the doorway so he doesn’t have to brush against me. But he ignores everyone to stop under the lintel and face me. “I need to talk to you,” he says.

There’s a rumble from the Mad Eagles and Rathi says, “It’s Ned Unferth.”

I keep my eyes on Ned’s. “We were leaving; we have to go.”

“Signy, you have to—” He reaches for my elbow and I jerk it away so hard it smacks into the wall.

Thebes and Sharkman have Ned in an instant, dragging him inside and away from me. He doesn’t fight as they throw him past all our gear and into the empty dining room. Sharkman pulls Hrunting out of Ned’s grip and hands it to Darius. We follow the berserkers.

Ned sits slowly up and wipes a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. “Call off your dogs, little raven,” he says.

Sharkman kicks him down again.

“Stop.” My voice is hard and doesn’t shake.

Rathi pushes past me and kneels beside Ned, offers him a hand up at the same time he glares at me. “What is wrong with you? He’s still a man.”

“Yes, Signy,” Ned says, knocking away Rathi’s hand. “What’s wrong with you?”

I clench my fists. The three Mad Eagles array themselves behind me and Soren goes to the window, where he crosses his arms over his chest in disapproval. I say, “Ned knew about the Vinland troll attack before it happened, and he did nothing.”

Rathi’s hand slowly falls, along with his face. He looks from me to Ned. “You did?”

Ned nods once and manages, somehow, not to sneer.

“Why?”

“I had my reasons.”

“Don’t lie to my brother!” I yell, leaping forward. Darius catches me around the waist and I struggle out of his arm.

Ned holds up his hands. “I came to—Signy, send them away; let me talk to you.”

“Whatever you have to say you can say to them. I’ll only tell them later. That’s what trust is.”

He stares at me, as if his eyes hold any power over me anymore. Then he sighs. He scoots back to lean his shoulders against the bare wall. “She’s coming for you. Tonight.”

“And she knows where I am because you told her.”

Ned grimaces. “One of the prairie trolls found her and told her. Just like I found you because the cat wight who followed you home last night told me. They’re watching this house even now.”

“And before that?” I grip my hips, fingers bent so hard against my jeans I think they might break.

From the floor, Ned gives me a parody of a smile. “Yes. I knew you would come to Ohiyo after her.”

“You called in the tips to get me there. For her.”

“To get both of you together again!”

“In Ohiyo!”

Rathi inserts himself between Ned and me. “What happened on Vinland? How did you know about the attack?”

“It doesn’t matter right now, Rathi.” I face him, breathing hard. “He has nothing to do with what happens next.”

“You’re wrong, little raven,” Ned says. “I have everything to do with it.”

“Don’t call me that anymore.”

“What would you have us do, Signy?” Soren asks quietly, his first words since I opened the front door. He walks over to me and slips his hand against my back. I lean into the comfort.

Ned sees it, and his colorless eyes narrow at Soren and me.

“We should chain him up in the garage and get to the ship,” Sharkman suggests with a malicious grin.

I stare down at Ned to consider it. He tilts his head back to meet my gaze and I am struck again by how tired he appears. His eyes pinch at the corners; his mouth is flat and pale. Even his braids seem limp. I step over his legs and crouch so I’m straddling his thighs, and I take his head in my hands. “Tell me, Ned Unferth. Why I shouldn’t do what he says and leave you here, chained.”

“Because.” His jaw works under my hands. I brush my thumbs along his cheeks and his eyelashes flutter. “I can help you kill her.”

Pressing his head into the wall, I release him. “Why should I believe that’s what you want?”

He grasps my wrist with rigid fingers. “You know me, Signy.”

I twist my hand around in his and grip his wrist, connecting us strongly. “If you are lying I will let Sharkman pull you into pieces.”

“I’m not,” he whispers. “I swear it, though my word has always been my curse.”

“No more riddles, I said.”

“By swearing to you now, I foreswear my former self. That is as plain as I can make it,” he hurriedly adds, voice hollow.

Soren crouches beside me. “There’s no risk to taking him with us. We want the troll mother to come to the island, so even if he’s leading her, that works for us.”

I lean my shoulder against Soren’s. “Let’s go.”

In the garage, I unhook the troll chains from the iron posts buried in the concrete foundation. Sharkman opens the garage door and the semi-trailer is parked in the gravel driveway, rear doors open like a gaping whale. Sharkman slides the ramp into place and latches it, then lifts two of the heavy troll chains so they don’t drag while I lead Red Stripe up into the metal container. I chain him under the UV lights rigged to the top corners of the trailer but don’t turn them on. The roof itself was cut away so while they drove in the afternoon, sunshine would pour inside. Now early evening sky glows pale blue, but the sun is too low in the west to cast its rays upon us.

For the ninety-minute drive to Bay Louis, where our ship awaits, Sharkman will pilot the semi, Ned’s knives and sword in the passenger seat, while the other four men are spread between the SUV and Soren’s truck with all the gear. I’m riding in the trailer with Red Stripe and Ned, and when Darius paused as if to suggest otherwise, I gave him such a mean look he only sighed and passed me a knife from his boot.

With two water bottles, I follow Ned up the ramp into the trailer. Sharkman shoves the ramp up behind me. Metal shrieks against the trailer floor. The outside lock rings into place.

I’m alone in shade with Red Stripe and Ned Unferth, and I feel a weight settle onto my shoulders. I sink onto the floor, back against the corrugated metal wall. Red Stripe squats as far from the rear doors as possible and hums at Ned. He picks his way to the troll as the engine roars and we jerk into motion. I watch him rub Red Stripe’s arm, pat his chest, and give the left tusk a friendly tug. “It’s good to see you, too,” he murmurs. Red Stripe moans softly, a contented sound like a cat’s purr.

Ned’s hand is dark against Red Stripe’s pale marble chest. He touches the healing gash.

I say, “If you’d been here, been alive, you could have taken care of it.”

Ned grunts and carefully walks over. He puts his back to the metal wall an arm’s length from me and sits slowly. The hiss of his breath as he adjusts for the pain in this thigh is so familiar I close my eyes and press the back of my skull into the wall.

We sit in silence until the truck stops slowing to make tight turns, stops moving in fits and starts from traffic lights, and instead picks up speed. A highway must rush beneath us, vibrating the entire trailer. I look up through the missing roof to the sky. By the time we reach the ship, it’ll be violet with sunset. Will she find us fast enough to come tonight?

“Signy.”

I roll my head to him. He’s drawn up his good leg to balance his elbow on the knee and looks at me. “What do you want, Ned?”

“It … doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is that you listen to me now.”

“I listened to you for five months, and at the end of it my home was destroyed, my heart broken.”

He falls quiet again. After a moment I shift to face him completely. “Tell me what’s different. Tell me why you came to warn us now, when you could have last night. You could have said then that she’d come faster, that the trolls would give our location away. But you said you couldn’t help, wouldn’t tell me anything.”

“I changed my mind,” he says dismissively.

“Oh, no. You do not get out of this so easily. What really changed?”

“You,” he snarls. “You—always you changing me.”

“Me!”

Fast as a cat he pulls me against him. I raise my hands to shove him away, but then he’s kissing me.

Startled, I gasp into his mouth. He scrapes his teeth on my lips and my eyes flutter closed. From those teeth down to my belly there’s a hot, tight cord. Ned kisses me harder and his arms crush me and it’s like being buried alive.

I reach for his face as a lifeline. He slows down, mirroring my gesture with his hands on my jaw, gentle and caressing. His mouth and tongue grow tender, kissing the aching places on my lips where his teeth bruised. I slide my arms around his neck and hold on, thawing against him with a little moan.

He tilts my head to reach farther inside me, to draw everything I have out through my mouth. It stops being a kiss and instead becomes a poem.

That’s the moment I pull away.

Ned whispers a sigh, and says, “So.”

My wits dance around, trying to form back up into thoughts and words. “So,” I repeat.

“Now it doesn’t matter; now everything is over.” He leans back against the wall, closes his eyes. “I have forgotten my promises; I have forgotten how to care if I live, forgotten my gods, forgotten what even a thousand years of dying is like.”

“Because … you … kissed me?”

“Because I kissed you.”

I draw away from the weight of that riddle and stretch down onto the floor of the trailer. The speed and engine vibrate through my bones as I take long and measured breaths, trying to compose myself, refusing to touch my hot mouth. “I don’t understand,” I finally whisper.

“I’m going to tell you a story. You’ve already guessed some of the pieces.”

I turn my head but his eyes remain closed, his head back against the metal wall, crushing his braids, and he’s touching his own hot mouth. His hand drops away and he says, “I was born when men did not dedicate themselves to gods but to kings.”

“To kings!”

“Don’t interrupt until I finish, or I may never finish.”

I clench my teeth, fist my hands at my sides.

He continues in a hollow voice, with nearly none of the rhythm I expect from him. “My mother called me Edolfr, and I was the son of Einrik the Widow-Maker, a king. But I was only a second son and so allowed to be nothing more than a poet, until my brother slew my father for his crown and I was forced to challenge him for our father’s blood price.”

His face twists and his hand clenches. “I killed him, avenging my father, but that made me a kinslayer, and I did not argue when the people, when my father’s and brother’s men, called me to hang myself for Odin at the summer sacrifice.”

Now I do press a hand over my mouth. It’s the only way to remain silent, to stay still. Lines from The Song of Beowulf tease at me, lines about Unferth the Poet, the kinslayer. His sword.

“I hung, Signy, but the Alfather did not want me then, and so I did not die. I had paid my blood price but couldn’t remain where my father and brother had died. And so I left my home to serve another king, who did not care of my past but only of my poetry and counsel. That is where I met her, Valtheow the Dark, the king’s wife and Valkyrie-born.”

“Ned!” I sit up, clutching at my chest. The knife wound smarts. “She lived sixteen hundred years ago.”

He holds out a hand for my silence. “And she was everything a Valkyrie should be. Strong and vicious and mad, like a great ocean storm in a tiny, dark creature. She read runes and fought me in poems, ruled that place more surely than Hrothgar could. She is the one Beowulf came to serve, and she was the reason the trolls were there at all. In the end she was too dark, too mad, for her own good.”

I draw my knees up to my chest and hold myself tightly together. “What happened, Ned? How did you—That was so long ago!”

In the darkness, his eyes glint like elf-gold. “That damned berserker Beowulf lost my sword at the bottom of a lake, and I did not have it to defend my king when our enemies came. I died truly. Only this time it was at my king’s side, fighting with Hrothgar in defense of our hall. That was an honorable death, and the—the Valkyrie came for us.” His eyes drift closed. “Dancing out of the stars, screaming and bloody, they came.”

“Odd-eye, you said you aren’t a Lonely Warrior.”

“I,” Ned says, fist pressing hard into his wounded thigh, “I am a kinslayer, and not worthy of such glory. Yes, I was taken to the eternal battlefield. I fought every battle again and again, but we who are dishonorable, who deserve no grace, we do not drink nor feast with the others. We only fight, long battles that last not merely a day but days and days, until every last one of us has died again. We are kinslayers and oath-breakers, who have broken the greatest covenants of warriors and men. When we wake, my dark brothers and I, it is only to fight again, starved and thirsty, weary on our feet. I am no Einherjar.” His voice hushes in a way I’ve never known.

Sadness drags down my shoulders and mouth, and Unferth sees it. “You understand. It was so long, so many centuries of fighting and dying again and again. There is nothing in the nine worlds that could be pleasant for so long, without peace, without variation. Nothing.”

I reach for his fist and cover it gently.

“Do not be kind to me, Signy,” he murmurs. “Not until you’ve heard it all. In life I lost my father, killed my brother, and was plagued by pain, by trolls and hardship. In death there was no reprieve, not ever. And so when I woke one morning into comfort, into a meadow of sun-warmed flowers, with a breeze blowing against my face that smelled of sweetness and the sea, not blood and vicious rot, I would have agreed to anything to remain.”

Elf-kisses rise on my neck, my arms, for here is a familiar story rhythm. I know what comes next in my cold, knotted guts.

“A woman lay beside me, beautiful and soft, caressing my cheek and lips with her shining hand. I’d never known such bliss, such freedom from the pain in my bones and my heart. She looked at me, and said, Truth-Teller, I want you to do something for me, and as a reward, this will be your heaven. Her eyes were the color of the moon and half her face shadowed—exactly half, split down the middle.”

“Freya the Witch,” I whisper.

“Yes.” Ned’s shoulders tuck together and he shudders. “The queen of Hel and magic had plucked me from my death and brought me to her bed. I immediately said I would do anything for her. It curved such a smile across her face I might’ve died again in her arms.”

I crawl nearer him and take both his hands. I squeeze them in mine and raise his knuckles to my mouth. Ned watches me and does not pull back. “Freya took me to an icy country, pointed to a lonely troll mother as she crept through the moonlight, hunting polar bears. In this mother’s heart rages the fire of all trolls, the heart of stone. In one year, you will find the Child Valkyrie and tell her this is the answer to her riddle. You will tell her nothing of yourself or of me. You will teach her and guide her, prepare her for the troll mother. She will face her destiny and end your suffering.”

My hands are shaking and I’m glad for the pretense of comforting Ned so I can grip him tighter. He smiles grimly. “Freya said, If you speak of this to the Child Valkyrie, if you give her any of my truths or change her destiny, if you distract her or if you love her, Ned Spiritless, you will lose heaven. She is meant for someone else.”

“Someone else!”

He turns his hands to wind our fingers together. “She gave me my sword back, that had been lost in the mere, and everything I needed to acclimate to sixteen hundred years of change. I read and learned; I focused on the history of the Valkyrie, on new poetry and legends about them. And you, of course. I looked up Signy Valborn in old newspapers and online. Then the final thing Freya the Witch said to me was You will know you are finished when the sun is lost from the sky and the troll mother comes for the Valkyrie’s heart.”

Ned closes his eyes again and we ride in silence.

The troll mother comes for the Valkyrie’s heart.

A mirror riddle. My mouth is dry.

Freya wanted the troll mother and me to come together, and so she dragged Unferth out of Hel and offered him heaven. It was all her. Where does my god fit in to all of this? “How did you know what Odin calls me? Little raven?”

Without looking, he says, “I told you the truth of that. Even Valtheow was called Hrafnling when she was young. It is no secret name for you, but what the god of the hanged calls his favorites. A lucky guess on my part.”

“A lucky guess determined the whole course of the past half year.” I let go of him. I press the balls of my hands into my eyes.

He says, “I should have confessed it all when you told me Baldur was missing. I should have. The sun was lost from the sky, and so I knew the trolls would come.”

“You were forbidden by a goddess to warn me, to warn my family. I don’t know what I’d have done with a challenge like that.”

“But I know.” He touches my bottom lip with his thumb. “You would have rung the warning bells; you would have evacuated; you would have made certain a hundred berserkers waited for the herd, to save your family, your home.”

I take his hand, drop it into my lap. “Maybe.”

“Most definitely, Signy, for you are brave where I am not, you are wild and a little crazy and you would have told Freya to hang herself and assumed you could find another way out of Hel when the time came, or maybe not even thought of yourself at all. You’re not as selfish as you presume to be.”

“Ned,” I whisper.

“I told myself that when you met the troll mother, that would be the end of it. You would be the Valkyrie of the Tree, and you wouldn’t need me. Freya would overlook my feelings for you because the job was finished, and I could enjoy the heaven she’d prepared.”

“But that isn’t what happened,” I whisper.

“No. I woke up buried under leaves, as if the troll mother had tried to keep me safe. She was alive; I was alive—you hadn’t killed her. She heard the heliplanes coming and charged back to the valley. I tried to follow, but was too late. It was over, and I barely found her again. I convinced her to wait, to bide her time until the berserkers were gone, that she could only get to you when you weren’t with them.” Ned’s speaking faster and faster, losing all semblance of storytelling. “But she was desperate—I don’t know what Freya did or said to make the troll mother want your heart as fiercely as you want hers, but she does, Signy; she wants to kill you. Or worse.”

“Worse!”

“Make you like her, Signy. Turn you into a monster.”

I scoff.

He glares at me but keeps pushing. “I went to Vertmont and Ohiyo to draw you out in those hills, to get you away from Vinland, where all the attention of the world was turned. She came after, slowly because of the wights crowding around and making it harder for her to hide. But she’s calling them, because her heart is the heart of all trolls. She saw you in Ohiyo, and after that it was all I could do to keep up with her. She’s only been waiting in the swamps for a sign of exactly where you are.”

“Why did you come tonight? Why are you throwing your heaven away now, after everything?”

His eyes drop to my mouth and he sucks air through his teeth. “Because you are glorious. I see in you something I haven’t seen since Valtheow. And I want it more than a thousand years in heaven. I want to be as brave as you. I know I should have warned you on Vinland, and there’s no forgiveness for that. I’m acting now, before it’s too late again. Not because I have anything to gain.” He laughs that one barking laugh. “But because it’s what you would do. Because it is right.”

Because it is right. The same reason I gave Soren.

I wrap my arms around Ned, to give myself something to cling to, to feel his breath on my neck. His hands make fists against my back and he buries his face in my neck.

After a moment of silence, I ask, “Was it truly so horrible?”

“Being dead?” His voice is muffled, warm against my skin.

“Yes.”

“Perhaps it wouldn’t be to everyone, but oh yes, I despised it. I thought there was nothing I would not have agreed to, in order to be free of that killing field.”

“I’m sorry,” I whisper.

“For what?”

“All your pain.”

“Odd-eye, don’t be kind to me.” He pushes me away.

I lean back onto my heels. “If you’d had kindness before, none of this would ever have happened.”

“Our gods are not forgiving.”

“Maybe sometimes they’re wrong. You shouldn’t have been punished for hundreds of years, not so long. Not forever. It gave you no chance to grow or change or find redemption.” I put my hand on Unferth’s chest. He’s sharp and hard and surrounded by this bitter pain, but inside he’s a poet. He’s good. I know it. I see it. Truth in his eyes.

“You’ll bore a hole in me with that look,” he mutters.

“I don’t need a hole there to see what you’re made of.”

He lowers his eyes and whispers poetry from The Song of Beowulf: “And, gold-adorned, the queen stepped forth.”

I hold his hand and lean my head on his shoulder for the rest of the drive.