The Strange Maid

FOUR

UNFERTH’S BASE IS an abandoned meadery outside the ruins of Montreal. There’s broken asphalt underfoot when we park, an hour past sunset, and Unferth surprises me by taking my hand to lead me through the darkness toward the black shadow of the building. I stop, though, to stare up at the brilliant stars. They’re thick as spilled salt in the freezing night, and without being told I recognize the Milk Path for the first time. A sliver moon hardly disrupts the glorious heavens, and I’m dizzy as I stare at it all, at the huge arc of sky, because there’s more stars than earth and for a moment I don’t think anything is real except those billions of tiny lights.

Unferth squeezes my fingers. “Here the mask of daylight stripped away,” he murmurs.

“What poem is that?”

“It isn’t one. Yet.” He smiles briefly so his teeth catch the moonlight. Truth shines silver beside his pupil. A star itself, caught there forever.

“Why do you always tell the truth?” I ask.

His good mood breaks, and he lets go of my hand.

I press on. “Is it to build trust? To make me trust you?”

Though only the stars are watching us, he backs away from me and murmurs, “Perhaps you shouldn’t, little raven.” He walks swiftly away, limping toward the abandoned meadery and the doors leaning off their hinges.

The danger implied by his answer makes me recall what the Alfather said to me: fear and excitement belong in the same breath.

I hurry to follow him inside. There are no lights in the lobby, and dim moonlight presses its way through cracks in the roof to reveal a long counter and dusty old shelves where once bottles would’ve been displayed, and cups for a mead-tasting. My boots crack against broken glass, and even decades later a sour honey smell hangs in the air. It seeps into my hair like sticky smoke. I breathe deeply. The broken glass shimmers in the moonlight, and I decide this beautiful abandonment is a good sign in favor of this quest.

Twelve rickety stairs lead into the cellar, where Unferth keeps only a cot and sleeping bag, plus a short table and stools, tin coffee mugs stacked beside one, and a gas stove sitting in the middle of the floor.

Thick wooden beams hold up the plaster ceiling, and the floor laminate curls in the corners. An elaborate copper distillery covers the rear wall, where Unferth uses the pots and tubes to make some kind of street-shine. Smells like corn mash, which we’d have sold fingers to get ahold of in the Chicagland alleys. Three oak barrels tuck into the corner, one of them tapped with a thin spigot. We won’t be thirsty.

It’s warm, and behind a thin plywood door is a toilet and crudely rigged shower. I hang my coat on a nail and am moved in within minutes. All my possessions fit into the pockets of that coat: tightly rolled shirts and panties, toothbrush and hairpins, a comb, camping tools like fishing wire and matches, and a variety of oddities. Some notes and coins. Two slim books. While Unferth unloads his truck, I shower awkwardly and slip into the sleeping bag. I hear him clattering around but keep my eyes pressed shut. He doesn’t complain I stole his bed.

And good thing, too, because at dawn he knocks me out of it and stuffs me full of coffee and protein before dragging me up to the empty display room to assess my combat skills.

To my pleasure, I hold my own. I can box and have a strong front kick, I’m excellent with the seax, and I can run and climb trees and lift rocks as long as he likes, though my endurance turns out to be the only thing Unferth bothers to praise. He’s appalled I only know how to use a sword in combination with a round-shield, which a troll will break in seconds, and sneers at my hand-to-hand, says it’s built for speed and escape, not taking on an enemy of any stature. “You must be stronger to face the mountain trolls,” he says, “or use the right techniques to fake it.”

I’m so determined to prove him wrong that I gather bouquets of blisters on my palms from his heavy troll-spears. Unferth is a fast and cranky teacher, voice impatient when I don’t angle my hips correctly or shift my alignment to something more comfortable. He unceremoniously grabs my shoulders or slaps away a hand when he needs to, grunting with exasperation at my fancy Valkyrie-style footwork. It might look impressive on TV, he says, but it won’t hold for two breaths against an opponent with the bulk of a greater mountain troll. They use their fists like hammers and will rush forward, knocking anything out of their way. Running or climbing to higher ground is usually the right course, but in my case to kill one I have to learn to use physics in my favor.

He stomps the spear butt into the cold ground, secures it with the sole of his boot, and points the wicked blade up at forty-five degrees with a sharp war cry. I copy him, minus the cry, and he says, “No, little raven, no. Vocalize! Focus your energy and aggression with your voice—give the Alfather the wordless poetry of battle; scream for him; cry for him!”

Unferth provides workout clothes for me, and a sturdy hunting outfit. I try to hide my relief at fresh new clothes. It’s been weeks since I had anything not worn thin from rough hand-washing.

At night when I’m too exhausted to move, he breaks out a flask of his home-brew. He offers it to me, and I take too large a swallow, gasping and tearing up at the burn. “It’s called screech,” he says calmly, rubbing rough circles against my back as I hold on to my knees in an awkward crouch.

We feast on jerky and dried fruit, oatmeal we cook on the gas stove, or rehydrated stew and canned chili. As we nibble and drink, we flyt. It’s an elaborate game of back-and-forth riddles and insults, the more rhythmic and poetical the better. Unferth introduces myth and history into it right away, so we’re not insulting each other so much as creatively dragging Sanctus Grim’s parentage through the mud or making fun of Fafnir and Loki and Sigurd Dragonslayer or, more frequently than is fair, Thor Thunderer.

The game continues until I fall asleep in the middle of his triumphant verse, and we pick it back up in the morning. Between laps, between sparring matches, we keep up the back-and-forth, though he wins every time.

On the third afternoon he takes me out tracking. He shows me how the forest should look, what’s normal as a baseline, before he starts pointing out deer paths and scat and frost-covered tracks. We spend little time with such signs, as trolls themselves are both exceedingly obvious and nearly impossible to detect.

I’m to look for exposed rocks first of all, as trolls turn to stone under the sun and prefer to find natural stone where they’ll stand out less. A giant boulder in the middle of a field won’t keep any troll safe. When there’s no stone in sight, I should begin with water, since like all living things they have to drink, and soft earth holds footprints. If there’s a deep-enough river, a troll may even hide from the sun below the surface. The oldest may go hours without air. He’s heard of troll mothers pushing their already-calcified youngest sons into lakes and rivers to hide them from other trolls or Thor’s Army. Not this far north in the winter, he adds, because of the thick ice.

We also keep our eyes open for shallow caves carved into the hillsides or overhangs, and check the ceilings for smoke sign. Trolls scatter the ashes of their fires but rarely rub out the char marks.

“Trolls cook their food?” I interrupt, appalled.

“If their mother is wise.” It’s the troll mothers who determine a herd’s behavior, he says. In all troll species that gather into such family groups it’s the case, but especially with the greater mountain trolls. If the mother is smart, she’ll teach her sons wider vocabulary and to use simple tools or paint with mud and scar their own bodies for decoration. A triumvirate of ancient, shrewd troll mothers was responsible for the Montreal Troll Wars in the first place, able to command their own army and even negotiate with Thor Thunderer.

I thought such things were only legend. I thought the stories of peace talks were exaggerated, but Unferth is too grave as he explains it for that to be the case.

Lucky for us, he’s not heard of troll mothers working together since the burning of Montreal.

I wonder if in the end it will be the heart of a mother I take back to the Alfather.

Abruptly Unferth crouches down with a tight wince, favoring his left leg. He scrapes a finger through dead leaves, revealing grayish dirt. “Do you know, little raven, how trolls came to be?”

I do, but say, “Tell me.”

He pauses just long enough to let me know he sees my dissembling, then begins. “In ancient days, when the frost giants pressed south hard and harder against our gods, the brave northern kings who carved out livings at the bases of glaciers begged the gods for a weapon against them. Thor, who loves men, asked his cousin Loki Changer to use what magic he could to fashion it. And so Loki drew fire from the earth and pressed it into the chests of thirteen men.

“But the fire burned the men, devouring them completely. Loki turned to the goblins-under-the-mountain, who were no friend of his but owed him. The goblin queen set her best smiths to discovering a solution that would allow the monstrous men to hold the fire in their hearts without burning. Yet even their skills, even their mountain forges and moon-silver tools, could not find a way.

“As intrigued as she was frustrated, the goblin queen sought out Freya, the feather-flying goddess of magic, who is herself a daughter of goblins and of elves. And Freya, always twining her fingers into the strands of fate, looked far into every future and smiled. The queen of dreams took the fire of the earth, formed it into a brilliant charm, and put it into the heart of a woman. The magic overwhelmed the woman, but she kept her mind. That woman became the first troll, the mother of all trolls. From her were born the race of trollkin, monstrous as their monstrous mother.

“Freya said to the goblin queen, ‘Only magic as powerful as the earth’s fire can hold such creatures alive, and the only fire as strong as the earth’s belongs to the sun.’ And so to balance the magic, the troll mothers and their children were cursed to transform into stone whenever the sun cast its light upon them, that the rock of the earth itself might contain their inner fire.”

Unferth’s voice fades and he waits expectantly. I say, “If that’s the case, where did cat wights and iron eaters come from?”

He smiles. “Early experiments the goblins performed with tundra cats and monkeys?”

I laugh to think of elegant elves and crystal-boned goblins fussing with a basket of cats.

“So you believe they evolved as the rest of us did,” he says, combing through the brown leaves again with his fingers.

“Why not?”

He tosses a fistful of leaves away in frustration.

I kneel beside him. “What are you looking for?”

“Last winter this was a path they used to travel to the ruins of Montreal. There were frequently prints. It must be nearer the creek than I remembered.”

“I’ll find them.” I crash ahead, stomping through the low growth with my boots, not waiting for him.

Unferth calls after me, “There’s another story that the trolls were born the bastard sons of fallen Valkyrie.”

I stop, my back to him. His tone says he meant it obnoxiously, that he’s needling me. And so I slowly turn around and make as vicious a face as I can. “Then I should be very good at hunting them, shouldn’t I?”

My voice rings between us, light and sharp, and Unferth’s eyes pinch in a secret smile that never quite touches his mouth.

It’s becoming my favorite expression of his.

The next morning—two before my birthday—Unferth packs camping gear and all manner of weapons and leads me southeast toward the ruins of Montreal, to show me the damage greater mountain trolls can do, and maybe even find one so I can begin to appreciate their real size and malice. Only to watch from a distance, though I want to get in his face and insist I’m ready now, I’ve been training all my life for this. I suspect that is exactly the opposite way of convincing him. Ned Unferth needs poetry and action, not impatience.

We hike at least fifteen kilometers with troll-spears and heavy packs, and despite the winter I’m glad my coat is tied over my pack instead of around my shoulders. The therma-wool shirt Unferth provided is plenty warm, and sweat stings my eyes.

The forests are thin but wild, with thick underbrush and cold, leafless branches that clatter together in the wind. We tromp through fields, some with evidence of fifty-year-old farms: half-buried giant tractor wheels, silos missing all their tiles and roofs, crumbling troll-walls graffitied with the thorn rune, which has always signified a warning that here be trolls. Most of them are faded or obscured by weeds. A few walls still protect farmhouses and barns, whose broken windows reflect the light like eyes.

At lunch we break to spar with the troll-spears and for me to find at least three places a mountain troll might hide from the sun amidst the abandoned traces of humanity.

As evening approaches we climb to the top of a hill from which we can see in the distance the ruined skyline that used to be the city of Montreal. Blocky buildings that were in fashion sixty years ago and the dark gray and brown of trees grown up in the streets, gaping holes from the bombing that destroyed half the city before Thor Thunderer and the troll mothers made their treaty.

“This,” he says as I catch my breath. “This is evidence of their power. Even in your grandmother’s day, with all the heliplanes and machine guns and technology of mankind, the trolls took back Montreal, where hundreds of years ago they’d ruled. The mothers worked together, brought their herds into one massive herd, and when the sun was gone they attacked. Again and again, disappearing at dawn into the Lawrence River, hiding in basements, and even using runework to appear like man-made slabs of concrete, they attacked every time the sun fell. They crushed skulls and set fire to homes, they chased men and women out of the city, and even when Thor’s Army arrived with their heliplanes and their bombs, even when hundreds of trolls died and were shattered into dust, the troll mothers did not let up the charge.”

“They say most of the troll mothers died.” I wave my hand at the distant skyline. “Thor tracks them; there are scientists, and that Freekin Project with the reserve in the desert. They say there are not enough of them left to be a threat.”

Unferth takes the flask of his screech out of the inner pocket of his tattered gray coat. “And yet … Montreal remains a ruin.”

I shrug. “We have a long memory.”

“Yes.” He offers me the drink and I take it. I lift it up so the metal catches the evening sun behind us. It’s only light, none of its warmth penetrating the winter air.

“To the slaughtered,” I declare. “The men and monsters both, the mothers and women, the children.” I knock back a burning gulp, and as the fire scorches down my throat I think I can hear screams echoing. I cough, bending to lean my hands on my knees. My throat is raw, as if I’ve been the one screaming.

Unferth snatches his flask back. “To the poetry the dead leave behind.” A pause as he drinks. “May it not be all that is left of you, little raven,” he mutters.

“Poetry is all any of us leave behind.” I lift my chin defiantly.

We plow north around part of the city, but see only a few trees scoured of bark that might suggest trolls crashed through here. I find no footprints. As the sun sets we hear a long, echoing cry, a moan from the far distant city, and Unferth nods at me. “Not a battle cry, but a simple communication that she is awake.”

“She?”

“The mothers wake first, always.”

I listen until the moan fades completely, just as the light does. I want to go down into the city and find her, but Unferth insists the time is not right, the place not right. We’ll hunt when we are ready, not before, not because it’s the first I’ve heard her promising cry.

We make camp in the shell of a farmhouse, surrounded by mostly intact troll walls. There’s no fire, but we have a small battery-powered lamp. Its even light is more eerie than flickering flames might have been, illuminating rotting old chairs and a table still set with a runner and vase. I sink onto the worn rug while Unferth settles with a groan on a short old sofa printed with dull cabbage roses. He sips his screech and says, “Tell me, Signy, why you love Valtheow the Dark most of all.”

I lick my lips and reach for the flask. The blistering trail it leaves down my tongue gives fire to my words. “Nothing about her was half-done. She did not symbolically bleed; she poured her own blood out for sacrifice. She tied a rope around her neck. She … embraced passion and war like they were poetry, not only things to be described by it.” I gather my knees to my chest. “Since Odin first told me her name I knew she never hesitated to embody death, the way it feeds life.”

“Why do you want to be like her?”

“It’s exciting! It—it thrills me. It’s this …” I close my eyes and recall my Alfather again, arm around me so my ear presses to his thrumming heart. “An itch like madness, that I was born with. That drives me forward.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“Everything worth doing is dangerous, Unferth.”

He contemplates me as he drinks, one hand loose on the arm of the couch, his injured right leg stretched out so his pose is languid. The more I talk about this, the more I want to make him understand. I grab the flask from his hand and plop down beside him on the couch. My legs hook over his outstretched thigh and our shoulders touch as I drink. He sets his head against the wall. I let the vertigo of liquor sway me against him until I’m leaning. The upstairs floor groans gently. The electric lamp buzzes. I can hear the rush of my own blood in my ears.

“What would you do with that power if you had it?” he asks.

“Change the world,” I murmur contentedly.

“Don’t you mean destroy your enemies and paint your face with their blood?”

“Isn’t that the definition of change?”

“Ambitious.”

“No good reason to aim low.”

His shoulder trembles and I realize he’s laughing. I poke his ribs and he catches my hand. He turns it over and smooths out my fingers until he can see the binding rune. As he taps my scar with his thumb, a hot line sears from my palm to my belly. “Death Chooser,” he says. “Strange Maid.”

“What?” I whisper. The runes bound together into my palm are an odd variation of death and choice and servant. After parsing them out years ago, I had assumed they only meant to mark me as a Valkyrie. A Death Chooser.

“This binding rune is from a very old thread of language …” His breath touches my temple, curling down my cheek until I turn into it. There are his rain-colored eyes, alight with truth. He says, “Death is linguistically connected to otherness, to foreigners and … strangeness. Death and stranger, like different fruit on the same linguistic branch. You can trace all kinds of names through the binding rune. Like … Alfather—Valfather. Valborn, Valkyrie, Valtheow, death-born, Death Chooser, servant of death, death maid … Strange Maid.”

My breath catches in my throat. We are the Strange Maid and Ned the Spiritless, finally together again. The thought comes from nowhere as Unferth closes his eyes and settles his head against the wall, his hand loose around mine.