The Strange Maid (8 page)

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 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 viciousness. 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 the exact 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.