by Terry Graves
Not far away, two tall columns marked the entrance to the Bifröst Bridge.
The sky above their heads broke twice with lightning before it started to rain. Conventional, natural rain. Hrímnirm took the water as a good sign, but he knew that it would not be long before it turned to sleet. He raised his head, his chin pointing to the dark clouds, and let the rain wash away the sweat from the climbing.
“We’re too exposed here,” said Kâri. “We shall find refuge in the stronghold until dusk.”
Hrímnirm did not want to go in there. He felt apprehensive, as if the place was haunted or cursed with the witch’s magic. But he nodded, and they crossed the outer wall and went through the arcade, and Mögthrasir smashed the moldy door with his shoulder and broke into the hall.
There were no vengeful spirits inside. In fact, Thrymheim had been sacked and there was nothing left, only old furniture and dusty cobwebs and shattered glass, and snow piled in the areas where the roof had collapsed. Thunder roared outside, and the sky was so dark by then that they could only see thanks to the intermittent lightning. With the last one, Hrímnirm’s eyes captured the glint of a pearl on the floor, one of the beads of a necklace, perhaps hastily taken by a robber.
He picked it up from the floor and, with a clumsy gesture, offered it to Bára. She had been longing for the sea over the past few days, as she was not used to the air or the cold or the wind. Her lungs were not ready for the mountains. Her skin was sore and her eyes had dried out, and if she had not been a goddess, one of the nine daughters of Ægir, she would have been dead by then.
“What for?” Bára asked him.
“I’ve heard that pearls are rocks that grow in the guts of seashells,” he said simply, and turned around. “Maybe it reminds you of home.”
Bára held the white bead in her palm and smiled.
The father of the witch had lived in that place. He was king of the mountain, a position granted by the Æsir and not the Jötnar. Ages ago, Thjazi would have guarded the Miðgarð end of Bifröst and Heimdall had protected the Ásgarð end; that was the agreement they had reached, or so the story went.
“Did any of you know the king?” It was Kâri who asked the question, while sliding a finger over one of the tables and leaving a trail in the dirt.
“I did,” Logi replied. “A king without a warband, he was. A king without subjects.”
“And a traitor, Lord?” Mögthrasir whispered. He was scared of speaking ill of a highborn in front of others, even if he was a dead one. “He made a pact with the Æsir after all, and it was the father of the winter’s witch.”
“He made a pact, yes. That part is true. And it is also true that the witch was born under this very roof. Thjazi was fair until then. He was a great warrior, one of the best. But the daughter was bad to the bone. That was a curse, that girl. She killed her mother bit by bit with her cold fingers and her frosty breath. Had Thjazi thrown her from the top of the mountain when he got the chance, we would not be here today.”
“What became of him?”
Logi opened his mouth as if he was about to answer, but he did not. Instead, he said: “How long till dark?”
Hrímnirm looked through one of the windows. The sun had been gone for most of that day and it was easy to lose track of time.
“Not long.”
It was not long, no. It was about time. They were starving but they had lost most of the food during the avalanche and there was nothing left to placate their hunger. So for a while they sat on the floor and waited in silence, listening to the bitter wind that howled against the ancient walls of Thrymheim.
Hrímnirm tugged his boots off, took out the bow and examined the string for the millionth time. He stood up and paced around the place, too nervous to wait with the others. He walked through corridors and halls and chambers, all empty and wasted. He found broken pots in one of the rooms, plates and jugs smashed on the floor. In another he saw a ragged tapestry, hanging from a wall. It was a hunting scene, and a deer was bleeding to death with a dozen spears coming out from its belly. He saw plenty of clothes for women and children too. They had beautiful brocades, but they were dirty and tattered and were now worthless.
He leaned and rummaged with his foot in one of the piles of clothes to reveal a small blue dress with silver cords; something a little princess could have worn.
Skaði, he thought.
For some reason the eyes of the human thralls came back to his mind, those brown eyes, matted like pebbles. He thought of them and of how they had died, frozen to death or washed away by the snow. Those had been deaths devoid of interest or glory. They would come back as flies and worms — he had seen them sprouting out from human bodies before — because they had led miserable lives.
Hrímnirm did not know why the small blue dress had made him think about humans or why he felt that sadness. Perhaps because humans were also small and unimportant, but perhaps they were beautiful too, in their own strange way. Or perhaps because all the so-called Snow Queen was doing was protecting them from creatures like him.
There were two sides to every story, but one could only ever listen to one, he thought. Unless he made an effort.
The temperature around him had plummeted. The time had come at last, and he had to kill the girl who had worn that blue dress when she was a child. With trembling fingers he left it where he had found it and walked out of the room.
They walked to the Bifröst Bridge and gathered around. Hrímnirm raised his head to see the structure, now covered in icicles and impassable, an arch that rose into the sky. Himinbjörg on the other end mirrored Thrymheim, and beside it was the wall and Ásgarð. The strongholds were two of the same kind, probably built together to protect both sides of the bridge, who knows when. For his whole life, Hrímnirm had seen the Æsir abusing the Jötnar race. He had seen their warriors murdering his people in random raids when the weather was fair. He had seen giantesses kidnapped and raped, houses and palaces smashed to pebbles. Thor crushing the skulls of little children with his hammer; he had seen this too.
“This is it. One chance, and one chance only,” Logi muttered. His eyes sparkled, a reflection of the flames burning within. “My fire is ready, frost giant. You guided us through the perilous paths of the mountain like she was your lover. I trust you. Let’s see now if the fool who sent us here was right.”
“It is fate, after all,” Kâri said. Despite the wind, his voice came out effortlessly and clear. “The Fimbulvetr, the war, the Ragnarök. So don’t be nervous, Hrímnirm, because fate will guide your hand.”
“Ymir is with you,” Bára agreed, “and we are too. We won’t let you fail.”
And she was right. The first Jötunn was all around them. He could feel him. It did not matter that the age of Ymir was coming to an end. It did not matter that the old gods of the earth would give way to the new gods of the sky. It was life, after all, the new thing getting rid of the old one. But the mountains remained, with molten lava in their bellies, and the rivers and the seas, and brooks and meadows and forests. They could not destroy all of that. And Jötnar were all these things, or would be when they died; part of Ymir. Everything ended and started again. Forever. Gods would rise and fall, but there would always be mountains and rivers and forests.
“There’s nothing for me to do,” Mögthrasir apologized, “except for being here.”
“That’s more than enough, my friend. My brother.”
They hugged, and the creature stepped back and joined the others. Hrímnirm drove one end of the bow into the snow and picked up his single arrow. The jasper head was red as blood and the fletching, made with Kâri’s feathers, was smooth to the touch and fluttered with the wind. He placed the arrow on the string and squinted, looking for his target in the distance.
Logi, Bára, and Kâri had their eyes closed tightly in deep concentration. At the end of the bridge, Himinbjörg was the size of an acorn. There were flickering lights behind the windows, but no movements. They waited for a long time, the Jö
tnar finding the strength to work their magic and Hrímnirm holding the bow and watching over.
“She’s not going to appear tonight,” said Mögthrasir, and there was relief in his voice, as if he was scared of something, either success or failure.
Hrímnirm opened his mouth, stuck out his tongue, and tasted the snowflakes. They had a metallic flavor, like steel, or silver.
“She will. Just wait.”
He kept scanning the darkness and finally found her perched on top of one of the fortress towers, a white dot far away with a speck of blonde hair. The witch raised her arms and a vortex of clouds gathered in the sky above her head.
Hrímnirm started to listen to the song of Vindsval. The winter’s teeth gnawed in his ears. For a hundred years that was all he heard at night, her malevolent voice and the sound of the wind howling, and all he felt was a deep cold inside, as if the hole where his heart had been was frozen. He thought about what he had lost to that song and frowned, and he managed to tauten the string of the bow an inch more. By then, the wood was bent to the point of breakage. If it had not been part of Yggdrasil, the Laerad tree, it would have cracked.
You make things simpler, Vafthrúðnir had said to him once. That’s your skill.
“Die,” Hrímnirm muttered. “Die, you nasty creature.”
And he let the string go.
As soon as the arrow left the bow, Logi set it aflame with a quick movement of his hands. The missile traveled fast into the sky, closely following the curve of the bridge. Kâri started to sing afterwards, and his song got mixed with the horrid verses of the witch and turned into something different. A path opened in the dark clouds and the arrow kept its course despite the wicked winds and soon he lost sight of it as it started to descend again in a parabola.
Hrímnirm managed to glance at it once again, a falling star, right before Bára used her magic and extinguished the flames. She had to do it at the last possible moment, so the witch did not see it coming. The arrow landed, too far away to guess the exact spot. But from where he stood, Hrímnirm saw the small figure disappearing behind the battlements.
The Vindsval song echoed in the mountain chains once more, and ended.
THIRTY-SIX
The song stopped. Her voice turned into a scream and, even while dreaming, Kai knew that something really wrong had happened. His mind was drifting with the music and he was feeling cradled by her sound. But not anymore.
She had not say a word to him while she carried him back from Óðin’s hall to Himinbjörg. She was furious, and in all fairness Kai half-expected it, but the only way he found to deal with it was by getting angry himself. He had risked his life for her, after all, just to make her happy. Perhaps not in the way she wanted, but he had sacrificed.
When they arrived, they had argued for a long time. Their voices had woken up the beasts in the stables and the bees had swarmed all around them.
“I’m willing to do it,” Kai had said to her, and she had gazed at him coldly, not knowing what he meant. “I won’t die for the gods, for Miðgarð or for anything else. But I will die for you.”
And he meant it. But that did not make her happy either. Not even those words had made her smile, and she had stormed off to the north wing while icicles grew all around like shark teeth and the carvings on the walls got disfigured by new layers of ice. She had not even kept the orb of stars.
“I’m saying I will die!” Kai had yelled, his cheeks blushed, his eyes flashing. “That’s what you wanted!”
Now Kai woke up, and his mouth tasted of blood and it was because he had bitten himself while he slept, but he could not help but think that the blood in his mouth was hers. The night was silent. There was no snow whirling in the air, no wind battering against the stronghold. The silence was more unnerving than the scream.
Please, please, please, he thought, let it be dawn already.
He got up and peered over the windowsill. The clouds had retreated to the peaks of the distant mountains and the sky was clear. The moon shone high and the sun was not even a promise on the pitch-black horizon. Kai gazed at the top of the north tower and found it empty. The feeling that something terrible had happened increased.
On his pillow, the sparrow chirped faintly. Kai held it in his hands and tried to concentrate, but nothing happened, as usual. Perhaps the link was broken or there was something else Solfrid knew that she had never told him. Still, he tried. He imagined himself as a bird, flapping its wings in the night’s chill air, flying toward the window and into the nearby tower.
A drop of water fell on his forehead and he opened his eyes again. The ice of the stronghold was thawing.
He rose from the bed, left the bird on the pillow again, took Gerda’s cloak — which he used as an extra blanket — and ran toward the corridor and onto the stairs. He arrived at the great hall and then he kept going until he reached the sturdy ice door that isolated the north wing of Himinbjörg. He pushed and pulled for a while and tried to ram it with an old oak bench. But it was worthless. The door did not budge. Kai sank to the floor and touched the surface with his fingers. It was melting too, but it would take days until it was enough.
She’s dead.
He could not think clearly. His mind was plagued by images of her face, of her pale thin lips, of her big eyes blue-colored as iceberg cores, of the exquisite geometries of her complex white-blonde braids. And the last scream still reverberated in him, with all the pain, the anger. The fear.
He forced himself to count his heartbeats until he calmed down, then he ran to the stables. He thought that perhaps he could get a raft and some logs and build a fire in front of the door, knowing that it would take ages and feeling that it would be too late by then, if it was not too late already. He stopped as he was grabbing the firewood and looked at the reindeer, which were wide awake and seemed as nervous as he was, hitting the timber with their antlers, and he had another idea. A desperate one.
“I know we’re not the best of friends, you and me,” Kai said to the animals, aloud. His throat was sore, so maybe he had been screaming in his sleep. “But something is wrong with Skaði and I´m going to need your help.”
There was no answer to that, of course, but if nothing else, Kai felt a bit better. He walked up to the animals and stopped in front of the largest one, the male which Skaði had ridden to Ásgarð to rescue him. The reindeer gazed at him with wide silvery eyes, a creature that was not of this world, larger than any animal he had seen. From below, its black antlers resembled the crowns of scorched trees.
Remember to bow.
Kai leaned his head.
It must have remembered him from before, because the reindeer exhaled a low grunt and bowed, and Kai stepped inside the cubicle, grabbed the strong white hair of its back, and leaped onto the beast.
Skaði had ridden barebacked and there was not a saddle or reins he could use, but Kai doubted the reindeer would accept being enslaved by those things anyway. He climbed, trying to get more comfortable. When he reached the creature’s ear, he whispered: “Please, help me.”
And, as if it could understand him, the reindeer started trotting, crossed the opened doors of the stables, and went outside. The night was cold, but there was something different, a change in the air. The scents of the spring were not muffled anymore and he could smell the aroma of flowers, of violets and roses. His nose wrinkled in disgust. To him everything smelt like wolfsbane, like death, because it meant that the snow was melting and the ice retreating.
The reindeer cantered through the hill, away from Himinbjörg, distracted by all these new fragrances and maybe following the odor of the fresh green grass. Kai pulled one of the antlers to the left to force it to turn and the animal shook its head as a protest. It turned, though, and they both faced the stronghold just in time to see one of the ice spikes collapse, fracture, and fall to the ground where it shattered into pieces.
Kai pressed his legs against the animal and grasped the antlers with all his strength. The reindeer’s hoove
s lost contact with the snow and rose into the air too quickly and almost vertically. They were suddenly flying. Kai tried not to look down, at the layer of clouds or what could be hinted at below, even in the darkness of night: the serrated shape of the mountains and the white desolate valleys of Jötunheim.
“Go back! Back you coward!” he screamed. He forced it to peer at the building below, and pushed the antlers toward the north tower. But the reindeer neighed again, resisting. “Please!”
He managed to correct its course and descended steeply toward the fortress. The reindeer glided twice over the tower, avoiding the ice pinnacles that formed a second set of battlements, and landed with great stateliness on the cobbled floor. Skaði lay there with an arrow shaft coming out from her chest. Blood was pouring and her dress was soaking wet. Until then, Kai had not been sure she could even bleed.
He jumped down, and Skaði opened her eyes when Kai screamed her name. He was about to hold her when she spoke. She said, “Don’t,” but meekly, and Kai ignored her. He held her in his arms, astonished by how little she weighed. Her skin stung him with her touch. Kai’s muscles went numb and began to freeze and die. The blood turned solid in his veins, but he did not break the hug. He held her tighter, if that was even possible, and bit his lower lip so that pain could find its way through the dizziness he was experiencing. Then, Kai carried Skaði into the stronghold.
