The Strange Maid (28 page)

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 down. 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 so when the blood spills out she uses it to paint runes on the walls and ceilings:
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 will brook 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 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.