The Strange Maid (23 page)

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 inflection, 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 was 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 Eagle’s 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, 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 into 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 crossbars 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, 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.

FIFTEEN

THE TROLL MOTHER
doesn’t appear. I take my frustration out on a few of the trees and hunt with my nose to the ground around and around the lake until I find four tiny broken branches at her shoulder height that maybe she crushed in passing. If so, she definitely is headed for Lonely Shadow. I feel like I’m grasping at shadows.

We abandon the trucks as near the foot of the mountain as we can get, load up supplies, and hike the entire circumference together, hunting her. If we didn’t travel so slowly, searching through the forest and spreads of granite scree, it would be strenuous. But stretched over five days it’s only exercise. Though we find a few marks of lesser trolls again—grass woven into the low branches of a yellow birch, the carcass of a red fox pulled apart and skinned—there’s nothing to show she was ever here.

In my dreams she and I grapple together, both of us as large as the mountain, crushing lakes and towns as we wrestle. Unferth’s sword melds with my arm and my bones turn to steel, her skin becomes iron and we start massive fires when we spark together, when we clash. Soren wakes me up several mornings before dawn. I’m stained with sweat, but he doesn’t ask why. He silently hauls me into stretches and boxing warm-ups until my sweat is just from hard work.

Overall, he’s a quiet companion, speaking little but to point out the dark backs of caribou moving across a distant field or ask if I want the grilled chicken MRE for dinner. At night I tell him stories about the Vinland I knew, the Summerlings and Unferth, the festival, and even the massacre itself. I talk about the Valkyrie, about how different they all are but that together they’re the voice of Odin. I tell him about climbing the Tree and meeting the god of the hanged, and he tells me of his own encounter with Odin, how everyone believes the boon he asked was to be allowed to serve Baldur as a berserker, but really he begged not to forget Astrid’s name. I learn his mom was born in Baja California and is a U.S. citizen, but her parents were Savaiian, that she was Lokiskin and met his dad while working where he was stationed. He learns how my parents met at a Freyan leadership camp but died far away in Guathemala.