The Strange Maid (16 page)

When my hair is dry enough I slowly weave my fingers through it. Its color is bland like ashes and driftwood, though afternoon sun can tease out darker honey-brown strands to set alight. Separating it into sections, I put it back into a braided crown and am near finished when I hear the uneven creak of Unferth on the stairs. He pushes through the thin door out onto the balcony and I keep braiding, my back to him. My fingers slow as he sets things down, and my arms burn from effort by the time he kneels behind me. His fingers slide into my hair and he undoes the braids, gently slapping my hands away. I lift my chin, but silently he pushes my head back down.

While the sun sets, Unferth braids an intricate pattern into my hair that requires me to lend him the use of my hands to hold different sections at different times. When I try to speak, he grunts at me to be quiet and let him concentrate or my hair will be lopsided.

The moment he’s finished, having stuck in the final pin, I move around behind him to return the favor. As I begin separating sections, his shoulders slump in a sigh. Pink blotches his cheeks and I know he’s already been drinking.

An arrow of gulls flies past us; to the north I hear the rustle of the cormorants spilling out of their breeding ground. I want to talk, but resist it other than to playfully tweak a strand of his long blond hair between my fingers. He reaches up and skims his hand against mine for the barest moment of comfort.

We at last both have intricate braids like the poets and queens of old, and I don’t know what to do next that won’t shatter this temporary peace. I sit back against the round wall and glance at what Unferth brought: a bearskin blanket and ham sandwiches and a nearly full bottle of lavender mead labeled with masking tape.

I work the stopper free and pour a mouthful down my throat. The sweet alcohol brightens my insides. Unferth pulls my blanket aside and spreads the bearskin down instead. He sits and he drinks, too, before upending the bottle over the edge of the balcony to splash some down to the faraway ground.

“To the Glorified Dead,” he says, “all who are and those to come.”

“Are you worried about Baldur?”

“No.”

“Then what are you afraid of?”

He’s quiet and won’t look at me.

I tip my head back to study the paling sky, a gradation of blue and violet, and accept the bottle when he offers it. For a while we pass it back and forth. I grow warm with the bearskin beneath us and with Unferth so close and the alcohol filling in the cracks.

Without looking at him, I say, “It doesn’t matter that Baldur is missing. Or maybe it matters even more. In the morning, I go hunting.”

He doesn’t respond.

“I want you to come.”

Still nothing.

“And if fear is what made you stop last night, then … well. I guess I’m glad. I don’t want to kiss a coward.” At that last, I turn and he’s right there, face very near and shadowed in the evening light.

“Really, that’s what you think,” he says.

“I don’t know what
else
to think.” My voice is softer than I intend it to be.

“Don’t you?”

I force myself to say, “Unless you don’t … you don’t want to kiss me …”

Unferth flips his hands in a little shrug. He says,
“Often shall many men, for the will of one, endure suffering.”

“Riddles, Ned?” I hug my knees against my chest, trying to parse what he means.

To my surprise, he murmurs, “Isn’t the heart of every relationship a riddle?”

There’s so much regret layered into his voice that I wonder, as I study the sharp line of his nose, the last sunlight gilding his eyelashes, if ours is a riddle for me to solve, or him.

Unferth says, “So, in the morning you leave.”

You.
Not we.

“You’re not coming?” The words are as tight as I can make them, lest my voice shake. “I thought that you’d be with me for it, I
want
you with me for it.”

Say it, Ned, say you want to be with me, too.

“We can’t always have what we want.” His toothy smile edges toward triumph.

“Why not?”

“That isn’t how destiny works.” Unferth glances away from me, out over the ocean. “We’re bound by history and our circumstances, and sometimes all we can do is let it wash over us.”

“I won’t let destiny drag me along like an unwilling victim. I will take it in my hands, Unferth. Like I did when I climbed the Tree. I did that.” My fingers are rigid as I grasp for the right explanation. “I won’t let anybody else make my destiny for me.”

He gives me that grin again, the one that’s all teeth and longing. “That’s what will make you great, Signy, daughter of Odin.”

I put my hand against his neck and caress down to the collar of this ragged red sweater of his I love so much. I start to slip under the cloth, pulling him closer to me, and he allows it, until our lips are a breath apart and he says, “Or, you’ll do something foolish and die young, never to achieve any glory.”

I push myself away, then snatch the mead. The alcohol fills my mouth with secondary delight, gone too fast. I tilt the bottle so it sloshes gently, moving it in a circle until I find the same rhythm of the waves below. My head already swims, and when the sea wind blows I sway with it. The scar in my palm burns.

“Signy.”

I turn my head to Unferth. Our faces are so near I can smell the sweet drink wafting on the air between us. His eyes go silver in the moonlight.
Chaos
is plain in them, sharp as lightning. I inhale hard. It’s never been anything but
truth
in him.

“Little raven, what is wrong?”

“I’m drunk,” I whisper. Maybe I imagined it, and I can hear pounding, like hoofbeats on the sand.
Sleipnir, the eight-legged beast, is coming for me.

“You’ve been so before.”

I try to tug away, but he holds on.

“Signy.”

“I see
chaos
in your eyes, Ned.”

He freezes. It seems even the wind stops blowing and the waves stop crashing for a moment as he stares at me. I bring my hands up to his face and he grips my wrists like they’re saving his life. Like he
wants
me to save his life. “If you finally see my true, wretched worth, I beg you not to look further.”

“Tell me what you’re afraid of, Ned,” I whisper.

“Oh, everything, little raven,” he whispers back. One of his thumbs brushes over my lips. “But you most of all.”

“Me?”

“Signy the Valkyrie, to dangerous for her own good, who walks along the precipice of power and temptation. Longing to dive in.”

I snort.

But he keeps on. “Who sees into men’s hearts, who will change the courses of fate, serve at the Alfather’s side … shouldn’t we all be afraid of the Death Choosers?”

“Not you! Not when I
—
”

Ned Unferth covers my mouth with his hand. “Don’t say anything you’ll regret.”

“I won’t ever regret how I feel and what I want.”

He laughs once, like a lazy dog. “If I can have a prayer, this is it:
May Signy Valborn never regret.
” He rolls the empty mead bottle against the uneaten pile of sandwiches, then lies down against the bearskin with his hands behind his head. He stretches, wincing as his right leg straightens. And then he opens his arm for me. Because I’m drunk, it takes little courage to put my head on his shoulder and close my eyes around the sliver of nausea poking in my stomach.

We’re quiet again while the ocean continues to murmur, only waves now and voiceless, against the shore. Unferth’s chest rises and falls against my cheek and he curls his arm around me tightly. I want more and more, but tonight this is enough. I close my eyes, thinking of what he’s trying to tell me with his riddles and open arms, thinking of Baldur and tomorrow and what choices I’ll make and whether he’ll be here to make them with me.

Cold wind on my cheek wakes me. I’m alone in the dark, curled against bearskin on the tower balcony. Moonlight flashes red near my eyes. I slowly focus onto the pommel of Unferth’s sword. The one he brought with him across the moor, strapped to his back, the finest possession he owns. Once he said,
It is an unhallowed blade.
The style is old, a ring-sword with a relatively short, fat blade, a wide fuller, and a narrow, crescent guard. A loose iron ring attaches to the pommel, which is embedded with a small round garnet and etched with a tiny boar. That bloody eye is what winks back at me in the moonlight.

“Ned?” I call, sitting up and taking his sword in my hand. The smooth wooden grip is freezing. He never leaves his sword behind.

A long sound like a faraway trumpet calls back. It echoes over our edge of the island and I pull myself to my feet. I lean over the rail and stare northwest toward Leif’s Channel. The howl comes again and again, layering atop of itself; an argument of low, deep screams followed by a roar I recognize in my bones.

The signal cry of a greater mountain troll.

TEN

IN THE MOONLIGHT
the trolls are like a river of ice and marble, shining white and blue and gray-silver as they roar past. The herd gallops over the black rocks toward Jellyfish Cove. Their path will not bring them here but pass the tower by.

I lean out over the railing, gripping it so tightly my knuckles ache.

What are they doing here? So far south, across the channel! How did they get here? The ice is too broken up now, they should be migrating back north for the summer or hunkering down in their ruined cities.

They could destroy the entire island. Panic squeezes my throat.

I turn to the signal bell that, thank blessed Freyr, still hangs lopsided from its lintel. There’s no clapper, I know, or the hard sea winds would make it sound. I touch it, then slap my hand against the cold metal, causing only a dull noise that dies fast. My heart rages at me to get going, to leave it and run to town, but this will warn them fastest. That’s why it’s here.

“Ned!”
I scream, and turn in tight circles, hunting for a thing to beat the bell with.

His sword is in my hand.

Flipping it around, I grip it with the pommel down and take a deep breath before slamming it with all my strength into the bell.

Pain jars up my arm, but the shock of the signal bell’s cry knocks me back into the railing. It reverberates through my skull and beyond, fading into silence. Even the troll cries are diminished.

I hit it again, and again, and again. Gritting my teeth, letting tears of effort fall cold onto my cheeks. The warning bell fills every space inside and around me as I ring it until my feet are numb, until my eyeballs vibrate and my bones crack.

It continues to sound as I run down the tower stairs with nothing but Unferth’s sword. I grab an armful of troll-spears from the disaster of a third level but can’t carry heavier swords or shields. We’ll have to make do.

I burst out of the tower, crying Ned’s name again, but he’s not anywhere.

The terrain is wet from melting snow and uneven. Cold air slices down my throat as I fight to keep running even as I slip and fall in the loose earth. Unferth’s sword weighs me down, and the spears are awkward in my arms. Hidden pockets of snow catch my feet and send me down hard. My wool dress becomes heavy at the hem with water and mud. I’d never make it if I didn’t know the way in all this darkness.

The two kilometers from tower to town has never been so long. I struggle and pant, fear like lightning in my veins, but a thrill, too. The trolls came to me. They’re here. As if it were meant to be: my stone heart, served to me on a platter!

If only I can remember my training and survive. The mother is the leader. Stop her, stop them all. Use my whole body against their weight. Stab, not slash. The eyes are a good target.
Run.

Fear and excitement in the same breath. Oh, Alfather, be with me.

The first screams hit me as I round the hill that shelters the Cove from the harshest ocean winds.