by Eva Chase
The air was chillier here. A shiver crept over my bare arms as I padded after Odin along the trunk. With a twitch of my shoulders, I unfurled my wings from my back. If I knew one thing for sure, it was that I’d want to be prepared to fly the second I stepped through this gate.
“Why did you release all your warriors and valkyries anyway?” I asked, watching the sway of Odin’s cloak ahead of me. “Baldur told me that you let them all leave a while ago. I guess there aren’t even any of them left after all this time, wherever they went? But it’d be a lot easier with an army of our own.”
Odin hummed to himself. “It was time to end that chapter,” he said, as if that explained anything at all. He drew to a halt and pointed to a branch at his right. “That way will lead you to Muspelheim.”
“Okay.” I flexed my wings. “Any last-minute tips?”
I hadn’t really expected any, but the Allfather gave me a foreboding look. “Stay wary. Move quickly. Don’t let yourself become distracted from your task, or you may find you’re the one caught.”
All right then. All of that advice fell into the category of No kidding. I bobbed my head to him with a tense smile and started down the branch.
A cloying heat seeped from the patch of thicker darkness at its end with a whiff of sulfur. I braced myself and sprang through the gate.
I tumbled out into hot bitter-smelling air over a stretch of jagged rock. A cliff loomed near me, and a river of magma churned by several feet away, casting a reddish glow over the dark gray stone. A dim glimmer lit the dull sky, barely enough that you could call it sunlight.
With a flap of my wings, I whirled myself around—and caught sight of the dragon just opening its eyes where it was sprawled by the edge of the cliff. Its gaze turned toward me. Stone scales clinked as the creature lifted itself onto its taloned feet, its wings spreading with a warble of air.
I wasn’t going to stick around to find out what that thing had in store for me. I took off toward the mountains on the other side of the river.
A searing gust of wind caught my feathers. I swooped into a crevice in the mountainside wide enough to fit me but not the dragon. A frustrated roar echoed through the air as it wheeled in the sky behind me.
I ventured along the crevice until it opened up around the side of the mountain. Peering out, I couldn’t see any sign of the dragon nearby. With a triumphant grin, I scrambled out and soared onward.
I’d seen a pretty limited amount of Muspelheim during my last “visit.” Just the cavern where Muninn had constructed her prison and the valley between it and the other cave where Surt’s dark elf allies had locked away Odin. The realm around me appeared as vast as it was desolate. How was I going to find the giant?
When we’d been searching for the dark elves’ gate before, I’d used the heightened senses the gods had given me to trace their oily energy. All living beings gave off some sort of tingling of life. It didn’t look like there was much living anywhere here. If I found a whole bunch of people all together, that would probably be Surt’s army. The other-than-undead part of it, anyway.
I reached out with my senses as I flew on, braced for any hint of those vibrations of life. A soft quavering touched me from somewhere to my right. I veered toward it, pushing my wings faster. Within a few minutes, the sensation had expanded into a faint ragged hum that grazed my skin.
A different feeling niggled at the back of my neck at the same time. I glanced behind me and then all around, but I didn’t see anyone nearby. Maybe it was just my paranoia in this freaky place making me think someone—or something—must be watching me.
I glided over a groove in the landscape that looked like it might once have been an actual stream, now dried up. Farther along it, skeletal husks of trees that I suspected would have crumbled in a stiff breeze scattered its edge. The remains of some kind of forest? It was hard to believe any vegetation on that scale had ever grown here.
Not much could have grown here now, that was for sure. The heat squeezed tighter around me, my throat burning each time I took a deeper breath.
The hum of life ahead of me expanded. I soared over a stretch of jagged hills, and my gaze came to rest on an immense stone fortress on the other side of a great barren plain up ahead. Several wide towering buildings stood inside a wall that looked as if it’d been made by tossing boulders into place somewhat haphazardly. Magma flowed around those high but uneven walls like a pulsing glowing moat. Even as far away as I was, I could make out figures guarding the place from ledges along the wall and balconies on the jutting towers.
If that wasn’t Surt’s home, then I was the Queen of Portugal.
The nagging sense of being watching rippled down my back again. I jerked around, hoping to take my pursuer by surprise.
Nothing stirred amid the hills except a strip of frayed cloth the sluggish breeze couldn’t tug away from the thorny leafless shrub that had snagged it. I studied the landscape for a minute longer and then moved on.
Instead of heading straight for the fortress, which seemed incredibly unwise, I circled around and flew along the line of low cliffs to the east. As I drew closer, more and more guards came into view along the walls. Others were sparring in the fortress’s courtyard. Figures moved past the rough windows in the stone-slab walls.
Not all of them were dark elves. Several were either too tall or too light-haired to be those. And then there were the spidery creatures crawling across the sides of the buildings. I shuddered, remembering the one that had nearly crushed me between its knobby legs a few days ago.
Surt had gathered an army, all right. I wouldn’t have believed that many people could live in this whole realm, it was so bleak. And those figures didn’t move like the shuffling draug I’d seen before.
Odin might be confident, but I wasn’t so sure one special magic trick was going to be enough to bring this giant down.
I was just soaring closer, every sense perked, when a shadow swept over me. Another rock dragon was diving toward me from higher above. My nerves jumped, and I threw myself toward the shelter of the cliff.
There were no hiding places there, just sheer rock everywhere I looked. The dragon’s talons raked the stone just inches from my shoulder with an ear-splitting screech. I yelped and reached out to Asgard, to the golden gleam of Valhalla.
The taste of stale mead ran over my tongue, and with a jolt, the bitter heat of Muspelheim fell away from me. I stumbled onto the worn floorboards of Valhalla. Hod was at my side, gripping my arm to steady me, before I could catch my balance myself.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Did you discover anything?”
I rubbed the shoulder the dragon had nearly gouged. “Yes,” I said. “And not anywhere near as much as I’d have liked to. If the seven of us are going to take down Surt’s army, I think we’re going to need a hell of a lot of training.”
4
Aria
“Now!” Thor bellowed, and we all flung ourselves toward the targets. As my arm swung with my switchblade and my other hand shot out as if to wrench life from the wooden figure in front of me, four other pulses beat in unison with mine.
Loki’s fire veered like the arc of my slash, streaming to speed Thor’s hammer forward even faster. Bolts of light and shadow streaked around its trail and whipped apart again. Sparks and slivers of darkness exploded through the row of dummies. Before my feet had even touched the ground, our targets had crumpled into a heap of charred kindling. A thin smoky smell laced the warm air.
“Wow,” I said, my chest heaving as I caught my breath. I wasn’t just awed by the impact of our combined powers. Now that we were consciously trying to fight in unison, to bring out the connection that was growing between us, these merged attacks had come easier and easier. But with each practice strike, my awareness of the gods around me deepened. For a second or two, each time we hurled ourselves forward, it felt almost as if I was part of them and they were part of me.
Somehow that sensation was equally exhilarating and terrifying
. I’d never felt so close to anyone in my life, not even my brothers. But in that moment, I wasn’t just me anymore. If I let myself go even more than this, would I start to lose myself?
“One set left!” Freya called from the sidelines. She’d helped set up the targets in this field on the outskirts of the godly city. From the eager light in her midnight-blue eyes, I suspected she wished she could join in. Not that the goddess of war wasn’t a formidable force without any mystical bonding going on.
The five of us stepped into a formation that was becoming automatic: me front and center, Loki and Thor to my left and right, Hod and Baldur just a step behind and between us. Thor raised his hammer, our signal to focus. We waited one beat to be sure we were all ready, and then we charged at our next set of targets.
I jabbed my switchblade into the straw chest of the dummy at the front with a satisfying crunch. A surge of energy washed over and through me as the gods hurled their magic forward. They were accomplishing a hell of a lot more than I was. For every one foe I might have been able to take down, their combined powers could have toppled fifty or more. But it didn’t work if I wasn’t fighting with them. We’d experimented with that.
When I’d stood on the sidelines with Freya and the four of them had tried to launch into battle in sync, their powers didn’t just fail to intertwine. The sense that I was supposed to be out there with them had wrenched through me hard enough to make me stumble toward them, as if I’d been yanked.
Even now, as Thor chuckled at the ruin we’d left of the targets, that more intense awareness lingered. Baldur’s contribution to my valkyrie transformation had been the ability to sense people’s emotions—hopes and desires, regrets and guilt—which if I’d been a proper valkyrie I’d have used to decide which side on the battlefield deserved to win and who was worthy of being sent up to Valhalla on their death. I could read human beings pretty well, but the minds of the gods had been nearly impenetrable, even when I’d tried.
Now, though, as Loki shot me one of his sly grins, a jitter of restless tension reached me. And when Baldur’s fingers grazed the small of my back in a brief but affectionate caress, along with the warm tingle of pleasure, a pang of distress echoed through me.
I turned to study the god of light. He smiled at me, his boyishly handsome face and shaggy white-blond hair as bright as ever. But that pang I’d just felt wasn’t the only tremor of uneasiness that had reached me while I was near him this morning.
“Are you all right?” I asked, touching his arm.
Something flickered in Baldur’s bright blue eyes, but his smile didn’t falter. He took my hand in his with a gentle squeeze. “Never better,” he said. “It’s amazing how much more we all become when we can build off each other’s power, isn’t it?”
That wasn’t really what I’d been asking him, but he did sound okay. Maybe that feeling of connection was unsettling him a little just like it was me, simply because it took some getting used to.
Loki brushed his hands together, scanning the mess we’d made with all the dummies we’d destroyed over the last few hours. “Odin will certainly be proud,” he said. His wry voice had more of an edge to it than sounded completely comfortable.
The Allfather had requested that we take up this training, but he hadn’t come out to observe any of it. Unless he was watching us from up in that high seat of his that apparently could give him a view over all of the nine realms. The thought made my skin crawl.
Who knew what he was doing while we were running around trying to prepare for war anyway? He’d told us what he wanted us to do, but not how he was going to fit into that strategy. He hadn’t seemed all that concerned when I’d reported what I’d seen in Muspelheim, only nodded and gazed off in thought. He’d better not be planning to sit on his throne while we did all the fighting.
Of course, maybe not everyone here was looking forward to fighting next to Odin. It was hard not to think of the things Loki had shown us from his memories: the way the Allfather had used him as his villain and let him take on all the blame when Odin himself had ordered the trickster god to spread chaos in Asgard. The way Loki had pleaded in vain to be released from that duty. I didn’t know how he’d managed to keep his peace with Odin for so long afterward, carrying that secret.
“It was good for us to practice,” Hod said, swiping his hand through the sweat-damp fringe of his short black hair. “We’ll fight together like this more effectively the more we’ve gotten used to the rhythm of it.” He might have felt more at peace with Loki after those recent revelations, but I guessed it was going to take a while longer before he got out of the habit of arguing with the trickster on a regular basis.
“And it very effectively keeps us out of his hair, doesn’t it?” Loki said in the same light but barbed tone.
Hod looked as if he were about to mutter something in return. I jumped in before he could.
“Are we ever going to talk to Odin about it?” I said. “About the things he asked Loki to do—about the fact that it seems like he wanted Ragnarok to happen? None of you knew about that before. We can’t pretend it doesn’t matter.”
The five figures around me went stiff and silent in an instant. Thor rubbed his mouth. “We will speak with him about it. Of course we will. But now, with Surt posing such a huge threat—we have to stand together against him before we can sort things out between us in Asgard.”
“He hasn’t even been home for a week yet, after all that time imprisoned,” Baldur added. “He’ll be able to give us better answers when he’s back to his usual self.”
“It’s going to be a hard conversation,” Hod said. “It’ll be better for all of us to have it when we don’t have much more pressing troubles hanging over us. It’s been centuries—a few more weeks can’t hurt.”
Loki’s gaze had slid from one of the gods to the next as they’d given their excuses. His jaw tightened, his mouth twisting at a pained angle for just a second before he caught it but long enough to make my gut twist in response.
“You didn’t seem to feel the past mattered so little just a few days ago, oh dark one,” he said with a half-hearted smile, sounding only weary now. He shrugged. “And so it goes in Asgard.”
Hod frowned at him. “I don’t see you bringing it up with Odin.”
“Because all the complaints I made before got me so far?” Loki waved him off. “He and I know where we stand with each other. If you’re fine standing where you always have as well, that’s your prerogative.” He swiveled on his heel. “I meant to do some more scouting today. There must be at least a few more gateways between Nidavellir and Midgard. With a little luck, I’ll track down another for us to seal.”
“Hey.” I caught his elbow before he could stalk away. The trickster paused and peered down at me, one eyebrow rising.
Loki knew how to put on his masks of indifference and carelessness so well, but I knew better than to believe this one. I’d seen firsthand what he’d endured to live here in Asgard, never accepted as an equal to the gods, never really trusted or respected. He’d accepted all that because of his blood-oath with Odin until he’d been pushed up to his breaking point, but even now, with the truth revealed, how much had changed for him?
I squeezed his arm. “I could come with you. We found that first gate together.” I was still with him, even if a valkyrie’s support didn’t count half as much as the other gods’.
Loki’s smile softened, and I caught a little more for the turmoil behind his amber gaze. “The offer is appreciated, pixie,” he said. “But I think after all this group bonding, me, myself, and I is plenty of company.”
“Okay.” What I’d said didn’t feel like enough. I reached up to grasp his tunic, and he bent his tall slim form to give me the kiss I’d been angling for. His lips lingered against mine for just long enough to leave my heart beating faster and my nerves singing for more.
“Perhaps we can enjoy each other’s company tonight,” he said with a wink when he eased back, sounding more like his usual b
reezy self.
“I could possibly be convinced,” I said, unable to contain my smile, and he strode off chuckling.
Thor took in the field with its heaps of splintered and seared wood and straw. “I suppose we’d better get on with cleaning up this mess.”
“Oh, you can bash it all into dust in a matter of minutes, can’t you, Thunderer?” Freya said. “Ari, let’s see what else we have around, before you lot resort to demolishing our forests.”
She motioned for me to follow her, so I fell into step beside her as she headed toward the city in the direction of her hall. She’d housed half of the warriors who’d been honored in Asgard way back when, and I guessed they’d needed lots to keep them busy. That first batch of targets we’d brought over from her storage rooms.
The goddess tucked a stray golden wave behind her perfectly shaped ear. “I can’t blame them, you know,” she said. “For not knowing what to say to Odin? I’m not sure how to start to talk to him about the subject myself, and he’s my husband. The way he perceives things, he may even have already gleaned the fact that we know.”
“So why not just bring it up then?” I said. “I would, but, I mean, I wasn’t even there when all that happened. I’ve got no idea about the details. It’s not going to mean much coming from me. Do you think he’s going to get angry?”
“I don’t know. I think maybe…” She sighed. “There’s a saying you mortals have about cans of worms? You bring up one thing and so many other concerns spring to the surface, and then you can’t put any of them back. Odin rules Asgard. To challenge his judgment, the decisions he’s made, it could rock the foundations of this place.”
I kicked at a pebble lying on the tiled road we’d just stepped onto. “It seems to me those foundations are already pretty shaky. How do you build them up better if you pretend they’re just fine?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” Freya said. “You weren’t there. And there are so many things…”
