by Matt Larkin
And bringing mind, body, and soul into accord rather exceeded Odin’s experience as a teacher. Still, no one managed much with the Art on the first try.
“That’s enough,” Odin said.
Hermod sighed, opened his eyes, and almost looked relieved. “Sorry, I couldn’t do it.”
“Do not fret. We’ll try again tomorrow. It will get easier with time.”
“T-tomorrow?”
Odin let the wry grin spread over his face. “Of course.”
12
The explanation for Hödr’s behavior, however distasteful, seemed obvious. Sigyn had called up a vaettr of ash and flame and wished to restore her son’s sight. It appeared to have granted her wish in the most perverse way imaginable—by possessing him. The vaettr—jinn as the Serklanders called such things—must now be in complete control of Hödr. His behavior had become increasingly erratic since she had first made the mistake of calling upon that perverse spirit.
For the thousandth time, she flipped through Mundilfari’s journals. She’d spent the past year pouring over every last scroll, tome, or vague musing she could find that might answer the darkness she—and Hermod—had seen in her son.
Even Hoenir had failed to control the boy.
Sigyn shook her head, trying to keep from weeping in frustration.
In ancient times, the Mad Vanr had called up Eldr. Perhaps she ought to have finished reading his journals before releasing the jinn. The intervening years had given her long to ponder her decision and go back and peruse the sorcerer’s writings, including the reasons he had decided to bind the vaettr in that jar.
An incarnation of deceit and wickedness.
And she had let it into her own son. It was the only explanation she could see. In her eagerness—her desperation—to save Hödr from his blindness, she had given little thought to the potential risk to him. And for eight years her secret shame had grown hand in hand with her gnawing doubts, her fear as to what had happened to her beloved son.
Mundilfari’s complex writings were filled with speculation as to the nature of the Fire vaettir, and Eldr in particular. His intentions, rituals, and invocations interspersed his musings, but never laid out in any clear prescriptive manner, perhaps because he had never considered anyone would release Eldr from his confinement.
Sigyn shut the book. She might study Mundilfari’s scattered and befuddling notes for a millennium and still not match the sorcerer in the Art. So, if she could not herself do aught to help her son, she needed to find someone who could. The obvious answer remained—Mundilfari had first summoned Eldr from Muspelheim and then bound the vaettr. It stood to reason, he might be the only one on Midgard who could do so again.
The difficulty, then, became finding the reclusive and insane sorcerer.
Finally, she rose. Sealing the Vanr’s secret chamber behind her, she headed out. She’d need provisions, a bow, and, of course, the swan cloak. She had a lot of ground to cover, after all.
First, though, she needed to see her son.
Odin had imprisoned Hödr in a chamber in the back of Valaskjalf, around the corner from Lodur. Any hope Sigyn had that her son’s confinement might prove short-term foundered next to the obvious implication of placing the boy next to a man Odin had left to rot for nigh two decades.
The king’s guards wouldn’t even let Sigyn past them. After casting glares at the pair of men, she stormed out.
Frigg met her halfway beyond the hall. “He’s expecting you in his private chambers in the back.”
Sigyn stiffened, almost afraid to even ask what her half-sister thought of all this. “Hödr is my son.”
The queen nodded, sadness in her eyes. “Which is the main reason he yet lives, I suspect.”
Sigyn flinched. “I’d have thought you would …”
Her sister reached out for her, but Sigyn pulled away. Frigg just frowned. “Laws exist for a reason, Sigyn. Willfully ignoring or breaking them must carry with it consequences or society crumbles.”
“Oh, spare me the petty völva folk wisdoms. Were it Thor, he’d not be locked in a cell just now. Indeed, your son attacked the acting king on his very throne. He got sent to the front, earned an apple, and came home a hero.”
Frigg shut her eyes, shaking her head. “No law is more sacred than the one that protects Yggdrasil. Without those apples—”
Sigyn shoved past her sister and toward the hall leading to Odin’s personal chamber. While she’d never been here, she was familiar enough with the layout to figure out where it was most like to lie.
Indeed, the sound of voices greeted her well before she reached the king’s chambers, reaching her even through the door.
“Ironic that your children continue to vex us so, isn’t it?” Odin said.
“Such petty snipes serve to undermine your position, not reinforce it.” Loki?
Sigyn threw open the door to find that the two men sat across from one another beside a lattice window. The fire pit between her and them created a strange mask of shadows over their faces that made them seem alien, like something spawned in the Otherworlds.
Neither man started at her entrance. Given that both possessed some degree of prescient insight—even if different in kind and presentation—it ought not to have surprised her. They did, however, both look to her, as if waiting for her to speak.
Wonderful. Well, she had their attention now, didn’t she? Sigyn shut the door behind herself, as much to buy herself time as for the desire for privacy. She hadn’t really prepared for this meeting … Oh, a thousand possible tracts had run through her mind. Just that none of them had played out well, nor had any involved Loki being here.
The king had a brow raised, looking at her when she turned back. He’d doffed his hat, leaving it beside his chair, exposing a mop of tangled gray hair. How changed he was from the man she’d first met so long ago, while she remained much the same. One possible price of the Art. And now they’d both paid a great deal because of it.
Without a word, she strolled around the fire to stand before them, desperately trying to soothe her nerves with each passing step. And failing. She paused before the king, tapped a finger to her lip, then looked to her husband. “Has the king agreed to rescind his judgment?”
Addressing Loki instead of Odin might serve to discomfit the king, just a little. Oft, it seemed to Sigyn, the key to gaining the upper hand in dealing with men blessed with the Sight seemed to come in approaching every subject at an angle. By obfuscating her true aim, or at least acting contrary to the way these oracles might have expected, she might catch them off their guard. Sometimes.
“The king’s judgment,” Odin said, “was already to spare your son the fate old Vanr law would have prescribed for him. Do you wish that judgment overturned?”
Being flayed alive and forced to live that way through foul sorcery … Sigyn couldn’t stop herself from flinching.
She looked to Odin now. “The sentence you mention was implemented by Mundilfari. Are you even capable of enacting such a vile curse?”
“Do you wish to find out?”
“Did you know I met him, once, years ago?”
Odin’s faint smirk slipped off his face. “You met Mundilfari. So he yet lives? Yet walks the face of Midgard?”
“He does. And as a First One, I imagine he was not affected by the spell you used to cast out the rest of the Vanir. Or wouldn’t have been, had he even been on Vanaheim. No, he’s out there.”
Loki shook his head. “And you think to find him?”
“No,” Odin snapped. “Leave the Vanir be, all of them. That sorcerer is dangerous. We cannot begin to fathom what horrors he let loose into his mind or soul in his long years of working the Art.”
“He may be the key to unraveling what’s wrong with my son.”
Odin shook his head. “No. What’s wrong with your son is obvious enough. You abused your access to Sessrumnir in an ill-conceived attempt to heal your son’s blindness. And you woke something up.”
Sig
yn snapped her mouth shut. Loki had spent years sharpening the king’s perception in an attempt to prepare him for Ragnarok. Now, that razor-sharp insight seemed rather inconvenient.
Odin rose from his chair, groaning ever so slightly as he did so. “I forbid you to search for Mundilfari. And given that I know you follow orders little better than your son, I forbid you to leave Asgard, Sigyn.”
No. No, this wasn’t happening. She … she could use the cloak to fly away when no one watched. But given Odin’s prescient insights, he might make such an endeavor risky at best.
“What about my son?”
Odin glanced to Loki, who hung his head. “Your husband has agreed to provide me a service in the future in exchange for leniency.”
“What service?” Sigyn demanded.
Odin shrugged. “I’m sure something will come up. In the meantime, Hödr will be sent to Valland, under the watchful eye of Tyr and Hermod, both. Whatever his new skills, he’ll hone them in service to the Aesir.”
“You’re banishing him?” She gaped. And with her confined to Asgard … she’d not even see him again. Maybe for years.
“I’m giving him a chance to earn the apple he stole instead of having him damned to some unspeakable urd. Show a little gratitude.”
Shit, where was it?
Sigyn flung another scroll aside. Damn it, she knew she’d seen it here when she was researching the spirit worlds. A connection, a thread …
She felt like breaking ice, as if a spiderweb of cracks shot through her and any moment she’d come apart at the seams. Biting her lip just to keep from screaming, she scrambled along the floor of Sessrumnir. Had to find it.
Odin had made himself her foe. There was … just no other way about it. He’d placed himself between her and her son. That made him an enemy and a fool. So long as Odin remained on Asgard, she couldn’t do what she needed to do.
And Sigyn needed to save her son. Whatever it took, she’d save him, pull him back from this abyss she’d set him to straddling. Was it madness to summon a vaettr to aid her boy? Well, no more mad than it had been for the others to think she’d sit back and do naught.
She shoved another book away. Not here, but definitely a different tome written by Mundilfari. Was it in a book? Shit, had it been a scroll? She couldn’t remember.
So all she needed to do was find … Wait. Wait …
Ancient pages cracked beneath her fingers as she roughly flipped through them. Any other day she’d have taken extraordinary pains to preserve every last bit of Vanr wisdom, musings, and records. Now, though, in the face of her son’s urd, naught else mattered save him.
Muttering, she turned another page.
Yes!
Sigyn slumped back on her arse. Yes. It was real.
The main hall was deserted, save for Odin, sitting on his throne, staring at Sigyn. Moonlight drifted in through high windows, adding to the scant illumination provided by a single lit brazier.
“I’m not accustomed to being woken in the middle of the night,” the king finally said.
The way Frigg told it, Odin oft started awake, shaken by some dream or vision, though he rarely spoke of either. Not that such a comment was like to improve her case.
“Mundilfari left Asgard in search of another well,” Sigyn blurted. Not the calm, reasoned path she’d intended to take. A man ought to be led to the conclusions you wanted to him to make, for then he’d more easily mistake those ideas as his own.
“A well?” Odin asked, leaning forward ever so slightly. His eyes seemed glazed over, as if he’d been smoking some of those wretched herbs Frigg used to favor.
She needed to play this just right. Odin was too clever for his own good, much less for Sigyn’s. But there was one thing he sought above all else: knowledge. He traveled across Midgard and—she had reason to believe—even beyond in an obsessive search for answers about the urd before him, before them all. He thought himself—perhaps because of Loki—responsible for preparing for Ragnarok. A hefty weight to bear, yes.
“We thought,” she said, raising a finger. “We thought the Vanr came to power at the same time the mists first began this era.”
Odin nodded, looked like he might speak, perhaps to illuminate some of the dark depths of history Loki so oft refused to speak of. Instead, he leaned back in his throne and waved a hand for her to continue.
“They led us to believe they ruled for five thousand years, yes?”
“More like forty-eight centuries.”
“An approximation, for certain,” she admitted. And hardly relevant. “They may have been here on Asgard … on Vanaheim for all that time. But they didn’t rule Midgard back then. Another empire did.”
“Before the Vanir?” Now Odin cocked his head the side, seeming to look at something beyond her. Visions? Madness?
“The jotunnar were the first rulers of this world. They fought a war with the Vanir.”
The king looked to her now. “Yes, and Mundilfari raised the wall. He grew it out of stone.”
“After, yes. Few details remain in their records about the time before he became king. But one thing was clear, they respected the jotunnar as elder beings, ones steeped in ancient and oft terrible lore. Among them, a being called Mimir.”
Odin mumbled something under his breath, as if talking to himself. Seeing the king thus gave Sigyn pause. Suppose he truly had lost his mind out on his sojourns? What of Asgard then? What of Midgard?
“Uh …” Sigyn faltered. “Uh, Mimir knew of a well, one said to grant him wisdom beyond the ken of even the Vanir, perhaps even oracular foresight. And because of this well, the Vanir’s war very nigh ended in disaster. Millenia later, Mundilfari went searching for it. He left everything and never came back.”
“Hmm.” Odin suddenly leaned back, waving it all away as if inconsequential. “And just where did the Mad Vanr think to find this legendary jotunn well?”
“I … I don’t know.”
Odin shrugged. “Ah. Well, then. At least it was a good tale to help me get back to sleep. Was there something else?”
Sigyn kept her face impassive. “No, my king.”
She had him.
He’d go looking for this well, even if it took him to the ends of Midgard. He’d seek it—maybe find it, but probably not, considering Mundilfari had not returned. Either way, he’d be gone long enough for her to find the Mad Vanr herself and save her son.
13
Given a younger body, Odin would’ve taken the stairs two at a time. Instead, he climbed the spire of Valaskjalf at a measured pace, thumping his walking stick on the ground with each passing step. His heart raced, though not from exertion.
What if Sigyn had spoken the truth? What if the legend was real? The answers to every question Odin might ever need—even to those he might not have thought to ask—might lie hidden in the depths of those waters.
And why not?
The Well of Urd beneath Yggdrasil had opened Odin’s eyes to the past. It had forced him to accept that he had lived and died before. So many lives, clear for a moment, but now reduced to shadows in the back of his mind. But bits of that revelation had remained, secrets and lore, skills and wisdom beyond the ken of a single lifetime.
And why should another well not exist, revealing unto him the truth of the future? And, looking upon that shadowy visage, would Odin finally be able to foresee the cause of Ragnarok? Would he be able to avert it?
Dawn remained at least an hour away when Odin reached the pinnacle and settled down into the High Seat. Night had cooled the metal, but still, it held more heat than it ought to have. The warmth of uncounted souls forged into this work, denied any chance at another life so that Odin might see all.
Arms clasping the rests at his side, Odin let his mind relax. He let it strive, seeking ever outward. He did not know where this well might lie. But he would find it.
His mind soared over the snow-drenched hills in southern Valland. It dove into valleys and crawled along riverbanks. It climbed the peaks furt
her south still, into Andalus. The Caliphate’s armies had seized every town and city in this land and already they marshaled against their northern neighbors.
The taste of impending bloodshed tickled Odin’s tongue, a premonition of war that would break with the end of winter. It was coming.
But such battles did not call to him. Not when the chance at greater salvation lay within reach.
He swept around trees blanketed in white, then, finding naught on the slopes, began to hunt for caves. Faster than an eagle he flew, covering vast expanses in heartbeats. And still, no sign of the well.
Grunting, Odin leaned forward and rubbed his eyes. The sun now reflected off the silver plating around him, nigh to blinding. His stomach grumbled. He’d missed the day meal. Judging by the sun, it had to be noon.
And he’d searched all the North Realms, even unto Thule, where the draugar armies had begun to unite under a new king. Fortunately for the world of men, they had no means to cross the icy deep that separated them from the rest of Midgard.
He’d looked out into Bjarmaland, where Thor and his people struggled to hold back the encroachment of jotunnar from the east. Odin had provoked the Patriarchs of Miklagard and—though more cautious now—they yet plotted slow vengeance upon Odin’s disciples.
The thought drew a grimace. If Odin could but commit the whole of his forces to any one problem, perhaps he could hope to overcome Serkland or Miklagard or even the jotunnar or draugar. Instead, the Aesir spread themselves thin. As thin as Odin’s mind had become, stretched over the breadth of Midgard.
He rose, greeted by a crack in his lower spine which forced him to stretch. Hours sitting in place had left his legs tingling and his neck stiff. Unsteady on feet he could barely feel, he grabbed his walking stick and then plodded around the tower’s summit.
