The Branded Rose Prophecy

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  “Oh, yes, it’s very glamorous when every Einherjar in the hall is panting after you. But Eira controls your life now. You handed over control when you became an Amica, and Eira won’t waste your potential on a lowly Einherjar like me. She’ll wait until someone with real power takes a fancy to you and use their interest to tie them to her locus of control.”

  A fine trembling began in her legs and hands. She was cold, so cold. Words failed her. There was nothing, no argument she could use to dispute him. Even as he said it, Charlee’s perspective shifted and the shape of the pattern reformed, letting her see motives and agendas, including Eira’s, clearly.

  “Why do you think Eira took on your training personally?” Asher asked, his voice dry. “She knows quality when she sees it.”

  It was true. He was right. Charlee stared at him, the first tendrils of horror growing in her gut.

  Asher straightened. “But it’s done now,” he said flatly. Again, his gaze shifted sideways, as he checked for witnesses. Charlee looked around herself and more cold fright touched her when she saw that Eira was standing by the hall doors, watching them. How much had she seen?

  But they had simply been standing here and talking. Outside observers wouldn’t guess the degree of gut-wrenching emotions ripping through her. She had learned how to mask her true feelings from watching Eira control her reactions. Eira had explained the reasons why it was better politically to keep strong emotions hidden, because they were a weakness and made you vulnerable. They could be manipulated and used against you.

  Asher took a step away from Charlee, moving backwards, like he was wary. (Or retreating.)

  Charlee threw out her hand. “No, wait,” she begged softly.

  “I did wait. I waited over ten years.” His jaw flexed. “I won’t sit there and watch you get bartered off to the most influential bidder. I refuse.”

  “Asher.…”

  He shook his head. “Goodbye.”

  And before she could scrape together a protest, another denial, anything that would keep him there in front of her, he was gone. He turned and strode toward the portals and stepped into the New York one and disappeared.

  Charlee had rushed to her room and shut the door and stayed there for hours. Eira had been silently understanding, not calling upon her until the evening preparations were needed. Charlee emerged at her summons and woodenly helped her with the evening work, her mind blank and frozen.

  At the end of the evening, as Eira stripped the formal garments from her and thrust her long legs into jeans, she had glanced at Charlee where she stood waiting with the gown over her arm. “It’s better this way,” she said gently.

  “Is it?” Charlee asked. She didn’t bother asking if Eira was talking about Asher. Eira had seen them together. She had watched Asher walk away from her.

  “You have the potential to make a powerful alliance, Charlee, if only you play your cards right.”

  “And for what reason?” Charlee shot back. “To become the paramour of a powerful Kine? Why are the Kine even here? What is the point? What good is power if there’s no love?”

  “You tell me the meaning of life, Charlee, and I’ll answer your questions.” Eira gave her a small smile. “I don’t know why we’re here. We’re here, just as humans are here. We gave up long ago trying to understand why we were thrust upon Midgard.”

  “And you think becoming more powerful is the answer?” Charlee asked. “What good is it struggling to climb a ladder, if the ladder is leaning against the wrong building?”

  “It’s better to climb, than to sit at the foot of the ladder and get squashed when it falls,” Eira shot back. She sighed. “I know you’re confused, Charlee. It probably doesn’t help if I tell you that every Amica before you has reached a similar point in their lives, and questioned what they were doing. But you have unique opportunities. You must understand that.”

  “Better to be the companion of the most powerful Kine, if you can’t be the most powerful Kine yourself?” Charlee asked bitterly.

  Eira’s expression shifted, as something came and went swiftly across her face. “Better to be the most powerful Valkyrie, if you cannot be a powerful Einherjar,” she replied.

  Charlee stared at her, her misery forgotten for a moment. She glanced at the long sword hanging on its pegs on the wall over Eira’s bed, the pattern shifting a little bit more. Eira had been a warrior among men, her whole human life. “You were taken from the battlefield by the Valkyrie.” Charlee murmured.

  “And taken to Valhalla,” Eira confirmed. “Only to learn that there are no women Einherjar. I became a Valkyrie, instead.”

  “Oh.” How that must have rankled!

  “And now I am the most powerful Valkyrie,” Eira added, with one of her mischievous smiles that Charlee suspected very few people ever got to see. “Once you climb the ladder, you can see much farther than you can at the bottom. Power gives you options, opportunities that would never come your way as the lover of a stallari in a small hall in the States.”

  Charlee went thoughtfully back to work. She didn’t see Asher again for over four years.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Charlee had seen large assemblies of Kine before, but nothing like this. The central hall and the main grand hall were full of Einherjar and Valkyrie in their formal best. Only the Amica wore the traditional apron dresses, and they were scattered among the crowd in the round hall, serving the several different varieties of mead available. Tonight, unlike almost every other night and event held in the halls, every single Kine was given a serving of mead, poured into a glass, not the usual mugs.

  The Kine wore human fashions, for the event was a reaffirmation of their service to humans and their oath to Odin to remain ready to defend Midgard.

  “Tomorrow’s High Council meeting is where the old clothes and the old traditions are trotted out,” Eira had explained as they were getting ready.

  The High Council meeting was held every five years and was when the terms for the Annarr and Regin were renewed…or a new Second and Council were elected, if the former pair had not served adequately.

  “There won’t be any challenges,” Eira said complacently. “Stefan is one of the strongest and most able Seconds we’ve had, so they will put up with me for the sake of keeping Stefan.”

  It had taken Charlee a while to understand that even though Stefan and Eira were the equivalent of a ruling King and his Queen, they were not life partners or involved personally in any way. Eira respected Stefan, and if she thought he had any weaknesses, she did not speak of them to Charlee. But since the Descent, whenever a new Annarr was appointed, a new Regin was generally rotated into the big chair, too.

  “Would Stefan resign if they tried to remove you?” Charlee asked curiously.

  “He would threaten to,” Eira told her. “He has in the past.”

  That not everyone liked Eira as Regin was a shock to Charlee.

  “I have made changes in my two hundred years on the chair,” Eira said frankly. “Change is hard for humans to handle. For the Kine, for whom time marches on endlessly, change can stir the strongest fear. The only reason I can make those changes is because Stefan maintains peace and prosperity, which everyone likes. We complement each other.”

  At Eira’s suggestion, Charlee had taken five minutes to race to the gallery that lined the round hall, high up by the roofline, a soaring sixty feet above the assembled Kine, and looked down upon the sea of heads and shoulders.

  There were far more Einherjar than Valkyrie, even though many of the earls had brought with them their mates and most of the earls’ mates were full Valkyrie. For tomorrow’s council meeting, they would bring their stallari and there would be no Valkyrie in the room except for Eira.

  There were no tables and no benches. The hall would not hold everyone and the tables, too. It was taking a long time for the Kine to make their way through the big doors into the hall itself, even though the entire hall had been emptied to make room for them.

  E
ventually, though, the last of them stepped through and Charlee hurried back down to the hall level, to help close the doors and begin the ceremony of reaffirmation.

  As Annarr and Regin, Stefan and Eira stood upon a small platform that was higher than the tallest of them in the room, so that even those at the back of the room could see and hear them.

  Sindri, the little man with the strange tattoos and the black, medieval-looking robes, stepped to the front of the platform, facing everyone below. “We swear fealty to Odin—” he began, and everyone in the hall instantly followed after him, their voices rising to the beams far overhead;

  “—the first among us, whose wisdom and strength is our guiding light. We swear to protect humanity, whose care was given into our hands. We will remain upon this path, forsaking all others, and forsaking our own humanity in order to provide the strength and valor that Odin has granted us. So say we all.”

  An almost total silence gripped the hall, as everyone raised their glasses and drank.

  Then, every single one of them smashed their glasses to the floor. The compound sound of thousands of glasses breaking with a sodden tinkling sound was one that Charlee knew she would never hear anywhere else.

  Then, almost at the same instant, everyone cheered. Many of them were turning to each other and hugging, slapping themselves on the arms and shoulders, and laughing.

  Charlee looked at the other Amica ranged beside her along the edges of the hall. “Amazing,” she murmured.

  “Makes you wish humans did something like it, too,” one of them said back. “It looks like fun.”

  Charlee didn’t think it was fun, exactly. It looked superficial and showy, on the surface, but there was a deeper significance to the short ceremony.

  “All of us, Einherjar and Valkyrie, are tied to each other,” Eira had explained. “The reaffirmation renews that bond. We can choose to break it, as the Eldre do when they choose a mortal human life once more. Then they must retire from Herleifr affairs as Ylva did, to be with her human lover. The tie, the bond, is what lets the Valkyrie know an Einherjar has fallen on the battle field. It’s what lets us know when trouble brews.”

  Since the Descent, the Valkyrie had been called to a battle to retrieve fallen warriors with sharply decreasing frequency. They had healed the chosen warriors, but the warriors had not risen as Einherjar, because the way to Valhalla had been lost.

  “Closed. Lost. The bridges are gone,” Eira declared. “How and why doesn’t matter. We’re lucky the bridges are not there, anyway. You think the Kine are bad, Charlee? You should meet some of the races from the other eight worlds.”

  Since 1815 and the Battle of Waterloo, the only call the Valkyrie had felt had been for one of their own. Modern battles, with their impersonal long-distance weapons and battle lines drawn far apart, failed to touch their bond or call the Valkyrie to them.

  As a result, there had been no Einherjar or Valkyrie created since the sixth century, when the Kine had descended to Midgard and Valhalla had been lost to them. The longer they stayed on Earth, the more their numbers dwindled. Of the nearly one thousand halls around the world, over two hundred of them were empty and abandoned because there were simply not enough Kine to populate and maintain them.

  “The longer we remain on Midgard, the weaker we become,” Stefan had told Charlee once, on a rare occasion when he had visited Eira in her private chambers to discuss something between them, out of hearing range of other Kine. “If we were called upon to truly defend humans, now, I’m not sure we would have the necessary numbers or strength. But we do what we can,” he added hastily.

  “Reaffirmation helps,” Eira had added.

  “Not enough to overcome small numbers,” Stefan responded.

  “But defend humans against what?” Charlee asked. “I thought Ragnarok had already happened.”

  “Ragnarok is not the only threat,” Stefan had said. “There are plenty of others. The Vanir gave us dozens of prophecies besides Ragnarok, and not all of them have happened yet.”

  “The Nine Worlds Prophecy,” Eira had murmured.

  “And that’s a perfect example,” Stefan had agreed, although neither of them had told Charlee was the prophecy was. The subject had shifted and soon after, Stefan had left for his own quarters.

  Ragnarok had been the original war that Odin had been preparing for, long before the Descent, even further back into early human history. Darwin had defined it as the equivalent to the end of the world. “The Apocalypse,” he had said. “Or Judgment Day, if you want a modern metaphor. There are prophecies forewarning them about the invasion of the nine worlds and the chaos to follow.”

  But Ragnarok had already happened, millennia before. Eira had explained it simply. “The Bible talks about a flood that wiped out everyone except Noah and his Ark of animals. They drew inspiration for that story from somewhere, Charlee. Ragnarok was quite real, and humans only barely survived it. Although I don’t think the Christians’ one true God started it.”

  Charlee watched the reaffirmation with a deep appreciation for the symbolism and meaning behind it. It wasn’t really fun at all. It was a way for the Kine to remind themselves that there was a purpose for them, however vague and distant it might seem to them. There was a reason they were here on Midgard. They just had to be patient.

  She could understand why the five-yearly reaffirmation helped strengthen their mutual bond. She could also understand why the reaffirmation was held the night before the High Council meeting: it would take a strengthened and renewed bond to keep the meeting from descending into a morass of negativity and doom-crying. Being freshly reminded of why they were here would give the participants a sense of vigor and direction.

  Charlee gripped the handle of her broom. “Ready?” she asked the Amica ranged beside her.

  They nodded and sailed out into the hall, thirty Amica pushing their brooms before them, to sweep and wipe up the remains of two thousand broken glasses and the dregs of the mead that had been in them, while the celebration went on around them.

  Another forty Amica slipped between them, carrying mugs—not glasses, this time—and pitchers of mead. The formalities were over and the party had begun.

  * * * * *

  After four years, Charlee knew a great many of the Kine by name, and even more by sight. She liked nearly all of them and while an old-fashioned taint spoiled the attitudes of some of them, there wasn’t a single Kine she could say she disliked. So moving through the great hall, greeting Kine by name and pouring them a drink was barely taxing work. She enjoyed it, most especially on this night of nights.

  The knowledge that Asher was somewhere in the room slipped deeper in her subconscious, barely rousing her, so that when she did see him, it was almost a surprise.

  He was part of a circle of five Einherjar standing and talking together, but he had obviously seen her first, for he was turned away from them and toward her, as if he had been watching her slow progress through the crowded room for some time.

  Charlee came to an abrupt halt, the mead sloshing in the heavy pitcher. Her heart leapt high and hard, and her innards roiled. She had been heading directly for him. His group would have been next.

  She hadn’t noticed him at all, but that was perhaps understandable. He looked so different! Hungrily, she ran her gaze over him, absorbing the difference, the details. He had let his hair grow. It was down to his shoulder blades and tied back with a leather thong, but that might be because this was a formal occasion. And he had let his beard grow out. Unlike his pale blond hair, his beard was a darker honey shade.

  And he was thinner than she remembered.

  He was wearing a shirt with a black band instead of a tie, and a leather coat cut long that was a substitute for a formal tuxedo jacket. His trousers were dark. It was a barely passable attempt at formal wear.

  What had happened to him? Was she responsible for his current state? But she denied that possibility quickly, before it could take hold and root itself in her mind.

/>   Then she saw one of the others in the group peer around the shoulders and backs facing her. It was Sindri, straining to see over the tops of the taller men and spot her.

  Charlee didn’t like Sindri. He was the one exception within the Kine, for most often she barely thought of him as one. He did not seem physically intimidating. He wore the strange robes and the odd markings. He had never said anything rude to her, or shown by an inch that he considered her desirable or even just plain beddable. He gave her the shivers (prickly gruellies), the way he was always standing off to one side and watching. Constantly watching. What went on in that domed head of his? She could never see behind his eyes. Thoughts didn’t reflect there. He just watched.

  No one else seemed to think he was odd, not in this race of oddities, mixed cultures, ages and backgrounds, so Charlee had kept her feelings to herself.

  But now, with Sindri staring at her, it made her turn and walk away. Away from Asher and all of them. Her heart was aching, her pulse thready and uneven. She slid between groups and pairs, slipping through openings with practiced ease. At the edge of the hall, she found one of the small tables that held empty and full pitchers and dropped hers onto it with a panicky thrust, the mead slopping out across the pitchers that were already there.

  She didn’t care. Her breath was coming in hard gasps now. She just wanted to get away from everyone. She dived through the swing door that gave access to the service corridors and hurried down its length.

  The door crashed open behind her, making her jump hard, her breath emerging in a squeak.

  “Charlee!” Asher roared.

  She halted and waited, pressing her back against the dark-painted wall because she was shaking so badly. If he would pursue her into the service corridor, where the Einherjar normally didn’t intrude, then he would follow her wherever she went. Better to get this over with now.

  Asher strode up to her. He was breathing as hard as she was. “You’re running away from me?” he demanded angrily.