The Strange Maid (4 page)

TWO

THE RIDDLE APPEARED
at dawn the morning after my fifteenth birthday.

I’d slept shivering between two massive roots of the New World Tree, tears dried on my cheeks and a gnawing hunger in my belly, for I’d refused to eat with the Council of Valkyrie the night before. They’d come for my birthday, early to surprise me, and instead of a celebration with honey wine and cakes we fought hard enough to shake the tallest limbs of the Tree.

They didn’t like my Yule plans.
Gutless, old-fashioned cowards,
I called them.

Impudent child, destructive, reckless!
they called me back.

All because I took what the Alfather taught me and tried to put it into action.

The last time he’d come to me, we didn’t spar and we didn’t dissect dead birds or dig into the roots for perfect beetles. Instead, Odin allowed me to curl under his arm and listen to beat of his heart while he told me stories of his favorite, ancient Valkyrie.

He told me of Signy Volsung, who turned herself into a dire wolf and destroyed her husband’s entire family with fire. He told me of Lady Hervor and her magical sword, of Sanctus Judith, who cut the heads off her enemies and tied them onto a loom of veins and intestines.
They understood the violence of creation,
he said with a sigh.
Do you feel this, little raven?
he asked, putting my fingers to his wrist, where his pulse raged with a strange beat like the hooves of Sleipnir the eight-legged stallion. To feel the god’s blood under the pad of my finger teased at my fear, and at my excitement, too. I didn’t know which to feel, and he laughed. He said,
Give me a sacrifice for understanding,
and I grabbed up the knife from his boot. Without a thought, I cut open my hand. It burned like fire and I spilled blood and tears right there into his lap.

The Alfather used my braids to wipe the tears off my cheek, and the entire garden of the New World Tree smelled sharply of blood.
For your tears I will say that fear and excitement belong in the same breath, and for your blood I will tell you of Valtheow the Dark, who was born my daughter as no other in the long history of our people.

I’d heard of her, Valtheow: she was a Valkyrie who lived sixteen hundred years ago and first hung herself at the Yule sacrifice in Old Uppsala when she was thirteen, but Odin did not let her die. She cut her own throat to weave a necklace of blood and survived that, too. She married the king of what became Daneland, Hrothgar Shielding, rode with him into battle, and bore him two sons and a daughter, and when the troll Grendel came to destroy their palace, she fought him as wildly as any retainer. She conjured spells to empower the warriors’ swords, though none could penetrate Grendel’s cursed iron skin.

Beowulf Berserk finally came with his war band, and she bound him into a blood pledge to defeat Grendel or die. He did so, but it only enraged the troll’s mother, who took vengeance upon the Shieldings and nearly tore Beowulf apart, too. Valtheow built herself a gown of mud and blood and moss, forged a mask of iron, hunted the troll mother down, and faced the monster at Beowulf’s side.

But as the Alfather spoke of her, his face lit with longing and perfect joy. It was no expression I’d ever seen on my parents’ faces or even the Valkyrie’s. I did not know it, except that it hurt me with
wanting
to know it. I wanted to be the one to make him feel that way and while I thought of it, my wrist burned, my nose and throat were sticky with the smell of my own blood.

I said,
Tell me what to do, Hangatyr.

Odin smiled. He touched my nose and ran his knuckles tenderly along my jaw.
Oh, little raven, what can you do? Those times are lost to us—to me.
And he told me the story of his riddle match with the poet Thomas Jefferson, who tricked him at the founding of the United States of Asgard into the Covenant that stripped all true power and divinity from the Valkyrie.

Odin said,
Before that rascal, before his riddles, my Valkyrie were spectacular. Near gods in your own right. You led armies and burned castles to the earth, cast vicious curses and changed the course of destiny with a kiss of my favor to the right king. You rode through the sky on wolves and starlight horses, hunting the most magnificent warriors to bring up to immortality in the Valhol, my heavenly Death Hall. You carried my magic in your hearts, with my wild passions to guide you. You were my immortal queens. You were worshipped even after death. Would that you could be so again.

That was the end of it, but as the sun rose I realized that while he could do nothing, bound as he was by the Covenant, I had agreed to no such pledge. It was in my power to bring the old ways back to the Valkyrie. I could show my sisters what our god truly wished, for Odin’s sake. I would be Valtheow reborn in his eyes, in the world’s eyes, even if I had none of her ancient magic.

I’d prove it through a grand gesture nobody in the whole country could ignore.

For weeks I corresponded with three felons who had written to my Death Hall asking for the Alfather’s absolution, asking me to witness their executions as was their right. I wrote poetry with them, to determine which was most worthy to be my first, and just as my birthday arrived I knew it would be Malchai, son of Elizabeth, convicted of murdering his wife and brother. His rage seeped through his handwriting, and his grief. I wrote to him,
I will tell you a secret, Malchai. The Alfather longs for the time before the Covenant, for the days when we sacrificed to him in great celebrations. The laughter in his voice as he speaks of such things teaches me to laugh at them, too, until I long as he does for the sharp scent of blood, the sick, clinging rot of death and battle. To find it and experience it: this moment he speaks of when terror turns into glory, when shaking fear becomes strength. That is the power I will claim, to take all my worries and dangers and transform them. To take your fears, the anxiety of the entire country even, and change them with sacrifice.

He wrote back,
Come.

I drove an hour north of Philadelphia to the New Dutchland Royal Penitentiary, a nearly fifteen-year-old Child Valkyrie weighed down by rings and bracelets and an embroidered coat the rich green color of death.

Malchai Elizabethson leaned his elbows onto the table, shoulders strong under the tight blue jumpsuit, wrists at an awkward angle thanks to the handcuffs. He smiled thin and wide like a lizard. His hard face was only softened by a scruff of beard.

I stared into his eyes and saw the rune I needed pressed into his slimy green iris:
sacrifice.

“You wish to be hung instead of put down with a needle like a dog,” I said. My palms sweated and I pressed them against my dark jeans as subtly as I was able. I wore thick black liner around my eyes and a smear of scarlet like blood on my mouth, both to help me maintain this mask of composure, of absolute control. “I want you to go with me to the gallows outside the garden of the New World Tree, walk of your own volition up the dais on Yule night, and let me place the noose about your neck. You will not leap or fall but be lifted up and strangled slowly.” I had practiced this speech in the mirror all the day before, so as not to hesitate or hear my own voice shake at the violence.

He said, “What will this scheme of yours do for me?”

And I slowly smiled. “Here is the magic of sacrifice, the power the god of the hanged gives to humankind: to take your death and tragedy and transform it into prayer, into opportunity. We’ve let go of this power, relegated it to history, when look what it’s done for me, Malchai. My parents died, and from their sacrifice I was reborn the first Valkyrie of the Tree in one hundred and fifty years. What could it do for you? For all the United States of Asgard?”

“But I will be dead!”

Jerking forward, I grasped his forearms. I dug my nails into his skin. Malchai shoved his face into mine, that silver
sacrifice
rune brilliant as a star in his iris. I could smell his cigarette breath, the bland soap from his hair. All the flaws of rage and weariness spelled out in his heavy pores and the uneven stubble etching the shape of his jaw.

I said, “Your name is a cursed one. A kinslayer you are, with no family to say your name or remember you, no one to kneel at your pyre or scatter your ashes in nine places you’ve never been, as your Lokiskin do. Join with me, let me use your name to resurrect this power, and your name shall also be resurrected. Your glory, if not your honor.”

The guards burst in and dragged us apart, but not before Malchai cried, “Yes!”

And I left with the blood of my first sacrifice staining my hands.

I returned triumphantly to the Death Hall, to discover my eight sisters waiting, ribbons drooping off discarded gifts in the corner of my suite. “Sisters!” I could hardly contain my joy at seeing them, could barely stop myself from crowing my plans. “What are you doing here?”

But my eyes lowered to see all my prison correspondence open and spread across the desk. Cursed evidence of my plotting.

Gundrun Graycloak, the First Valkyrie, took one long step forward and slapped my face. “Get on your knees, girl,” she coldly said.

The words shocked me, harsher than the slap burning on my cheek. I remained standing.

“What were you thinking?” Gundrun demanded. “Your wolf-guard called us, told us where you’d gone.”

Outrage made me yell, “Their loyalty should be to me!”

“To the council, foolish child. You are not one of us yet, and may never be after this.”

The Valkyrie of the East and West threw my letters at me; Myra Quick tore them to pieces, Elisa of the Prairie turned woeful eyes to the ceiling, and Siri of the Ice hissed a line of poetry about Brynhild, who was cursed for disobeying the Alfather.

“It is not disobedience,” I cried.

But Myra snapped, “That is what Kara Neverborn thought as well, and look at her punishment!”

“This is what the Alfather wants,” I said through my teeth. “He can do nothing to bring our power back, but we can. We can bring the old ways back to the Valkyrie.”

“In the old days we died young,” said the Valkyrie of the West.

The Valkyrie of the East put a hand on her sister’s shoulder and added, “In the old days, we were feared.”

“We
should
be feared!” I said. “We made curses and rune magic and rode with armies. We had power then.”

Gundrun stroked her feather cape, the mark of her station that she wears at the president’s side. “And we have no power now?”

“Only what the Covenant allows us. Not what we deserve!” I grasp at air, wanting to find the right words to convince them. “We could transform fear into hope if we tried.”

“Our power is more subtle now, not of war and fire and death but politics and money,” said the Valkyrie of the Rock. “But it
is
power.”

“What of the beauty of death?”

Siri of the Ice shook her head. “That is poetry, not action.”

“Our god is the god of poetry! Siri, you are the one who told me to remember that. What is the line of your favorite riddle?
The pearls that grace dead flesh.
Maggots! I know you can see what I mean, Siri. And Precia and Myra!” My voice was thin, a taut cord. I looked to each one, appalled. “We are the tendon that connects life and death, the choosers of heroes, who can see the worth in a man’s heart. We should embrace the potential of sacrifice—that is what I want, and what Odin wants. Let me bring this back. Let me show you how glorious it can be, I who was born out of sacrifice.” I gripped my hands together and nearly fell to my knees. “It can change all of you, as it changed me.”

None responded. They regarded me as a unit, eight pairs of eyes hammering me in place, bending my knees with their weight. If only I could have read runes in their eyes! But never had their worth been revealed to me that way.

I pressed my fist against my chest, where I had when I was a little girl and wanted to shriek and wail my grief. “You are gutless cowards! This is transformation, and action! Odin chose me because I am bold, and you’ll watch from behind me!”

“You will be rejected by the people if you try to bring back the old ways,” Precia the Valkyrie of the South said calmly, as she was always calm. The youngest of them, barely seven years my elder, she coifed her hair like an elegant old lady and wore chunky antique jewelry. “They want us as we are. Symbols, voices. Protectors. They trust us, and we will not let you jeopardize that trust. Or the Covenant. Without the Covenant, we cannot exist in the modern world.”

I felt tears in my throat, and I lifted my chin to keep them back. “You should hear his voice when he urges me to this, you should ask him yourselves. Let me show you!”

“You will not.” Gundrun cut her hand down, and that was the final word. Hers was always the final word.

Except Myra Quick, the Valkyrie of the Lakes, leaned forward. “Happy birthday, Signy,” she said bitterly.

I fled for the garden of the New World Tree, shoving through the death priest pruning the winter yew bushes. I flung myself at the base, scraped my hands against the trunk, and pressed my forehead into the rough bark until it hurt.