by Terry Graves
“I’m sorry,” Sigrún said, and Runa thought she was addressing her and stopped. But the woman kept talking. “Even if I’m wrong, I have to.”
Runa waited, half-expecting the raven to open its beak and utter human words. It did not happen, but there was a pause, and Sigrún muttered something that got lost in the wind. The raven flapped its wings and rattled.
“Yes,” Sigrún said then, as if she was replying. “But what can one expect from you, Lord? This is how I see things now.”
The bird produced another vague noise. Somehow, they were having a conversation. Runa waited behind the bushes, too scared to move, but there was no more talking. Sigrún remained there with her eyes closed and a smile on her lips. After a while, Runa concluded that she was drowsing against the tree trunk, so she crept back carefully and returned to the camp.
Gerda was awake, sitting in the darkness, gazing at her.
“I won’t ask, because I no longer expect a thing from you,” she stated.
“This is not what you think.” Runa collapsed on the nest of blankets. Dew had turned into ice and had become rigid and crunched when she tried to cover herself with them. “I was following her. She spoke with the raven. I don’t trust her anymore.”
“Neither do I trust you.”
Her expression was deadly serious, but her eyes were bright and Runa saw her lower lip trembling a bit. She did not know what to say to that, so she said nothing, still knowing that, as the silence grew, her friend slipped further away from her.
“Runa, what is happening to us?”
She was not ready for that question. Kai was happening, and the giant, and the journey. They were not the same as they had been when they left Veraheim. They were no longer children and they were growing apart. And Sigrún’s words had also made her realize something. Runa had always envied Gerda, although she had been oblivious to that feeling until the goddess had offered her body. She envied Gerda’s life. Even with all her problems, her life was full of love and words and laughter, while Runa’s was full of silence and awkward gazes and loneliness. She envied her father, who was a drunk, but a living drunk. She envied her relationship with Kai and Alarr, which seemed easier and came more naturally than the one she had with them.
Runa envied Gerda and, as a consequence, she discovered with surprise that she hated her.
To put a name to that sentiment that was eating her up inside made her feel even worse. She had never thought she could be so shallow. Runa closed her eyes and saw the wolves, their tongues hanging out, steam rising from their rough gray hair, so she opened them again.
“Help me pack, and get your sword ready,” she said, and took out a couple of arrows and left them next to her. “As soon as she comes back, we’re going to get some answers.”
Sigrún returned much later, at morning. By then, Runa and Gerda had packed up camp, had a light breakfast, and fed the horse. The food they had brought from Veraheim was gone, and the supplies Knútr and Frída had provided were dangerously depleted. Runa had tried to hunt but, as the layer of snow grew and the weather became more inclement, the number of animals decreased.
“The time has come for you to explain what your intentions are,” said Gerda. Her sword was still in its sheath, but Runa had the bow in her hands, lowered but with an arrow ready. Sigrún opened her arms and showed them her empty hands. She had left her sword in the camp and was unarmed.
“Yes, perhaps is time,” she said. She paced lightly toward them, but stopped before reaching them. “No harm can come from it, I think, now that the plan is out in the open. But I suggest we should sit, as the story will be long and I am tired and ravenous.”
Runa and Gerda exchanged looks, but it was Gerda who finally nodded and relaxed a bit. They sat on the snow while Sigrún had stale bread and a chunk of goat cheese.
“What do you know about the Vanir?” she asked them with her mouth full.
“I thought we were the ones asking the questions,” Gerda replied.
Runa tried to remember the stories that the elders of Veraheim used to tell the children while gathered around the hearth. A long time ago, there had been two races of gods, the Æsir and the Vanir. The conflict had arisen when the Æsir had speared the Vanir Gullveig to death in Óðin’s hall. According to the story, Gullveig had been burned and came back to life three times; and the last, she had risen under the name of Heiðr, a powerful sorceress. Then, both races had clashed and fought, and for a long time it seemed that neither of them was going to win and that the war would destroy them both. But in the end, and at a very high cost, the Æsir triumphed. They established a truce that had stood until today, and hostages were exchanged to secure it.
“We know enough,” Gerda said. “The Vanir and the Æsir fought, and the Vanir lost the war. So pray continue, before we run out of patience.”
“They lost the war,” Sigrún muttered, “or so it seemed. The Vanir hostages never mingled with the Æsir, which is surprising, given how gods usually behave. The Æsir received the god Njörð in Ásgarð, and the Vanir, in turn, welcomed Hœnir in Vanaheim. Njörð married Skaði, who is a Jötunn anyway, but they split apart and never had children. Then he remarried to her sister, who gave birth to Freyr and Freyja. The three of them had the ability to look into the mists of the future. That’s what all Vanir are. Seers. The Æsir wanted this power as well and they demanded it as part of the truce. What could be better than to know what the events that will shape the world are, and what our role in them will be?”
“I can think of many things,” said Runa, somberly, and Sigrún smiled.
“Their wish was granted. And the gift of prophecy infected the Æsir and, through them, the Jötnar and the humans. But the gift was tainted, for the future cannot be changed. You know this already, you’re a bright girl.”
Runa thought about her own dreams. Not the ones about the wolves, but the others, those that had come to her mind since they had started this journey. She had seen the Jötnar breaking free from the winter spell and the Queen dying on a bed of ice. And she had seen herself coming at Gerda with a knife.
Were these events bound to happen?
She did not know. She did not want to know.
“It is interesting how a prophecy works,” said Sigrún. She had finished her breakfast, and she dusted off the breadcrumbs from her clothes. “Someone utters the words, and then the words come true. As long as the Seeress’s predictions are fulfilled, nobody would question them. But ever since the beginning I’ve wondered… Wondered about what would happen if the words had not been uttered in the first place.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“What I’m saying is that an omen is like a promise, and if the person who receives it believes in it, they act according to what has been revealed. You see in a dream that you’re winning the battle, and then you fight with more confidence and twice as hard, and you win. And the opposite is true as well. So what I think is that the Vanir have used their magic on us; they have been putting all these alien thoughts and false glimpses of the future into our minds, and that way they have managed to manipulate us for hundreds of years. With their prophecies, they have shaped the destiny of the nine worlds. The war between the Æsir and the Vanir never truly ended. We’re still at war.”
Runa heard Gerda sighing. She had been chewing her hair, as she used to do when she was nervous. The implications of what Sigrún was proposing were obvious. “You’re saying that the Fimbulvetr is useless, and that Ragnarök is avoidable.”
“It might be,” said Sigrún, choosing her words with care. “Once things are set in motion, it is difficult to change the course of events. I believe the Vanir are forcing the twilight of the Æsir, so they can rule unchallenged. They live isolated in Vanaheim, and no one knows what has become of them since. The Sybil’s prophecy does not say a word about what will happen to them after Ragnarök. It is as if they did not exist.”
“Very well,” said Gerda. “You speak a lot, but you’re not tell
ing us how you plan to change this, or why you are speaking with ravens when we look away. So, are you going to search for the gods? Is that what you’re doing?”
As if summoned by the girl’s words, the raven flew over their heads and cawed, and the sound was carried by the north wind and echoed across the frozen moorlands.
“I couldn’t care less about the gods. They have been weakened after the Jötnar attack on Ásgarð and it would still take time for them to return to their former glory. We just need one god on our side, the only one who today is still strong enough to oppose the Jötnar and make a difference.”
“Loki,” Runa whispered. “It’s Loki, isn’t it?”
It was the only possibility. Loki was the only one among the Ásgarðian gods who had not been there when the Jötnar attacked, only because he had been imprisoned a while ago by the Æsir somewhere else.
“You have lost your mind,” said Gerda. “Loki’s freedom is one of the signs that marks the onset of Ragnarök.”
But, for an answer, Sigrún only smiled intriguingly. The raven glided over their heads twice and, on the third pass, it landed clumsily on her shoulder. It perched there and observed the two girls with its gilded eyes.
“Let me introduce you to Huginn, one of Óðin’s eyes. He strongly opposes what I’m about to do.”
TWENTY-NINE
It was unusual for her to leave the tower before nightfall. But there she was, midafternoon, walking among the reindeer, caressing their backs. Not exactly smiling, for Skaði never smiled. But all tension and pain had left her features and, though she still seemed feeble and exhausted, there was a sort of glow in her. The blue of her pupils was like iceblink, and the day was sunny, clear, and bright. Everything was perfect. She was perfect.
“You have to earn its trust,” she said, and she could have been speaking about them, about Skaði and Kai and how they were acting towards each other. “Trust is all.”
“They’re way too proud for that,” Kai replied.
He had tried feeding them, speaking to them softly, waiting for hours within their field of vision so they grew accustomed to his presence and his smell. Nothing had worked so far.
“Have you bowed?”
“Bowed?”
Skaði waited in front of the largest reindeer of the herd, a male with antlers dark like charred bone, and leaned her head forward. “Sometimes you must simply give away control.”
The reindeer stopped chewing, gazed at her, and flared its nostrils. It lowered its head and Skaði touched its horns, which were immediately covered by a thin layer of hoarfrost. Her eyes fluttered as if she was falling asleep. She jerked up, lifted her hands, and sent Kai a troubled look, but he acted as if he had not noticed it. The reindeer shook its head once and kept grazing.
“Bowed, aye?” Kai tried to repeat the gesture in front of one of the animals, but he was ignored. He sighed. “Forget it. It’s hopeless.”
He collapsed on the soft grass, under the shadow of a white oak tree. Skaði threw another gaze at the large reindeer, but soon walked toward him. They sat in silence, leaning against opposite sides of the trunk. Kai listened to her breathing and felt her cold, traveling through the bone-colored bark of the wood. He closed his eyes and tried to visualize her lips, kissing him like she had done so many years ago, but not quite, because now he was older and he longed for a kiss of a different kind.
“I’ve been looking at the carvings on the walls,” he said, after a while.
The answer came so late that he thought she was not going to reply at all.
“What for?”
“Because there’s not much else to do,” he said, but then, he felt the urge to tell the truth. “So I could learn more things about you.”
“Have you?”
“I think I have.” Kai stroked the grass with the tips of his fingers. “I’ve seen your marriage with Njörð and I’ve seen you living next to the sea, unhappy.”
“I longed for the mountains, that bit is true. Before I came here, I had always lived in Thrym, at the lower end of the Bifröst Bridge. Ásgarð rose over my head, with Miðgarð on one side of the mountain range and Jötunheim on the other. And Njörð and I were indeed unhappy and had nothing in common and barely ever spoke.”
Kai felt a fit of jealousy when he thought about Njörð, and wanted to ask more about her marriage but found it impolite. “I’ve also seen you with Loki, in a cavern next to a waterfall. He is bound to a rock and you’re holding the head of a lindworm.”
“And there he will remain until the end of days, which will not be long now,” Skaði replied. She had not asked him about the sacrifice in a while, and her tone was not reproachful. It was a statement. Ragnarök was, after all, unavoidable. “Don’t you know a thing about Loki? You would be the first.”
“Yes, I know a thing or two. But I don’t know if he deserved such a punishment.”
Skaði thought carefully about the answer. “Nobody deserves anything. Not punishment, or riches, love or happiness. We don’t decide those things. The norns do and we just carry on. You must understand, Kai: Loki is a Jötunn, as I am. We’re beings from another time and our kind live and die by a different set of rules. He is a stirrer by nature. His spirit is ever-changing, so there is good and bad in him, and always mixed in a confusing manner. I am the exact opposite, everything in me resists and opposes change, and I want things to be as they are forever. Tricksters trick; ice preserves. We cannot fight against these things. That’s who we are.”
“I think I understand,” said Kai, but deep inside he was not so sure. Sometimes he looked at her and all he saw was a girl his own age, scared and insecure, hiding all these things under a mask of rage and contempt. But that was just sometimes, like right then. Because some other times he saw the goddess in her, something ancient and powerful and dangerous, something alien to him that he was unable to comprehend.
“I’ve seen you playing in the mountains of Jötunheim when you were little, making ice statues of giants to scare the Winds away,” Kai said, again remembering the carvings on the walls. “You were alone, with no friends, but happy.”
“Not alone,” she said.
“Not alone,” Kai corrected himself. And he took a deep breath and shut his eyes, because what was going to say next could ruin everything and he did not want to come back to the silence and the blame. “But what I don’t know concerns the stars. I’ve seen the dome of the sky, every little dot painstakingly carved. But there is a void right at the top-center where my wandering eyes inevitably end up time after time. And when I looked through the window, I saw two bright stars where there should be none.”
He waited for Skaði to say something, knowing that it would be a while, if she ever speak at all. He did not want to force her, so Kai looked at Ásgarð, at the steep hills and the buildings, and the lavish halls full of who knows what treasures. For despite all the gold and the silver in their roofs and walls, the place seemed desolated and transmitted a feeling of despair.
“Every night,” she began, and it came out as a thread of voice. “Every night I cover the sky in clouds so I don’t have to watch them.” She sobbed, as if she was on the verge of tears, and Kai wanted to turn around and comfort her, but resisted the urge, for he needed to hear the story. He noticed Skaði’s effort to control herself when she spoke again: “If that is what you want, I will tell you about my father.”
And then she told him.
But first, she began speaking about her mother, who had not been well ever since Skaði had born. She had languished in a bed in Thrymheim, her hair white and thin and brittle, her eyes clouded with frost. She had been touched by her, tainted by winter. Her womb was frozen, her guts were covered in ice. She did not miscarriage, but she would never recover.
Skaði meant “harm” in the Old Tongue.
Day after day, Skaði could feel her mother’s warmth fading. She remembered being little and walking toward her room and watching her breathe laboriously, her lungs covered in perenn
ial ice spikes, and how she still smiled every time she noticed her presence, as if she did not mind. Not minding dying. Not minding that her murderer was with her, barely an ell away and trying to find something to say, an apology for being born.
Her father did not like Skaði to be so close to her and he used to push his daughter away, so her icy lethal fingers won’t touch her mother again. His name was Thjazi. He was a son of Ölvaldi, a wealthy Jötunn and a powerful king of the mountains. When Ölvaldi died, Thjazi received a large inheritance and the right to rule over Thrym and all the mines and gemstones and secrets that were buried beneath, under the ancient rocks.
Now Thjazi was one of the three who granted passage to Miðgarð to those giants who wanted to enter the human realm. But all Skaði remembered him doing was taking care of her mother and raising her as if he loved her. He brought her on his trips to the north. Together, they built strongholds and castles and whole cities of ice and snow, just to play for a while before crumbling them away at dusk. He showed her how to tame the albino reindeers from the mountains and how to hunt them, how to speak the language of the dwarves and how to trick them. And he made her presents with every passing year: a bow that had belonged to her grandfather, a sapphire in the shape of a heart, dresses stolen from human princesses who lived in kingdoms whose names had been long forgotten.
Once Thjazi killed a rival Jötunn during a fight. He made a hole in the ground and buried his head for ten years, and he unearthed it when the worms and the beetles had done their job and only the skull was left. He polished it and sanded it until it was as thin as the wings of a dragonfly. And, because their race’s nature was mutable and a giant could be a man and a mountain at the same time — in the same way a goddess can be a woman and a river and a dove — he turned the skull into glass.
“When everything seems dark and purposeless, and the world seems to change very fast,” her father had told her when he gave her that present, “look at the sky on this very same night of the year and you will see the stars as you see them today. And you will remember that, on this day, someone loved you.”
