Instantly, Nith took them through the Veil, and they re-emerged into the teeth of a vicious blizzard. “This is starting to feel like an Ice Age!” Sigrun shouted above the wind.
Unexpectedly, Nith returned, According to your books, there was less precipitation during the actual Ice Ages, because so much water was caught in the ice caps.
Sigrun smiled. The expression felt unfamiliar under her mask. I’d forgotten that.
His wings tore at the sky, and they were buffeted and thrown about by the howling winds until he managed to break through the clouds. Above their cover, Sigrun blinked, grateful for her mask’s protective lenses. Her eyes were increasingly dark-adapted, and direct sunlight often stung. We’re in the general vicinity of Yssel, where Dvalin said Erikir was positioned. But how to find him . . . Ah. He’s bound to Freyr. Sigrun concentrated and found a slim cord of Freyr’s power to the south, like sun catching on a cobweb. There, I think. Past the edge of the storm.
The city of Yssel had once been marshland, and it was less than fifty miles from the North Sea, which had an increasingly thick cap of ice over it. It was also seventeen hundred miles from Áhkká, which held the entrance to Valhalla under its snows. Sigrun hadn’t had much non-combat or non-patrol time in the air in years, largely due to the danger of mad godlings and the threat of attack by Roman gods. She was suddenly acutely aware of how Nith’s wings caught the wind, the way his body vibrated with the air-flow, which transmitted up through her legs, where she rode, wedged between neck ridges. She could feel the muscles under the scales in his neck and back move in response to air-currents, a sweet rocking, lifting motion as the air currents buffeted them. She wondered a little at the aching sensation between her legs, and then brought her mind sharply back on task. She couldn’t afford to be distracted at the moment.
The sky below cleared of clouds, revealing a snowfield was melting, if slowly, at the touch of Aprilis’ breath. Conifer forests hunched below them, bent by the snow, and she could see the tracks of animals—feral horses and reindeer. The reindeer had burrowed down to the grasses and lichen buried below the snow, and the horses stayed largely in areas where the snow had melted. No signs of human habitation, but Nith plowed directly through a murder of lindworms—locals didn’t call them a flock or a swarm, but a murder, like a flock of ravens. Sigrun pulled up a barrier of seiðr to keep herself from being swept off the dragon’s back by an errant wing, and glanced over her shoulder as the lindworms fell behind them, their shrill cries fading into nothingness. They are attempting to follow us, she pointed out.
All things should strive, he said, swiveling his head to show her his diamond fangs for a moment.
The wilderness gave way to what had once been farms. No smoke rising from the chimneys. No vehicles on the roads. A few animals, here and there, grazing in fields still outlined, faintly, by crumbling fences . . . and she spotted wild fenris, chasing down a lone moose bull. The farms gave way to crumbling suburbs. Smoke from grendel bonfires rose from the rubble. Looking down, Sigrun could see boulders being hurled up at them . . . and once, a surface-to-air missile, which she slapped away with a lash of seiðr. “A wasted shot,” she shouted over the wind.
The grendels are running out of looted armaments. Unfortunately, the humans are running out of production facilities, as well. Soon, the humans will be down to swords, spears, and bows again.
And seiðr. I have yet to see a grendel that could manage seiðr. And if we can just get everything to an equilibrium point, industry can come back. She had to keep that hope in her heart.
As they came in for a landing, Sigrun saw the ruined city of Yssel up close. Few of the old stone buildings had roofs, and snow had invaded most of them. Frost coated every window left intact. No missiles greeted them, but Sigrun examined the area with all of her senses. There were gray shapes visible to othersight inside every building. Jotun and fenris, lupine shapes with connections made of fog, linking one to another. Pack-bonds. And there, in that building, with sunlight glittering off of icicles that descended two stories to meet stalagmites of ice coming back up . . . a single figure that seemed to glow bright gold. “Erikir!” Sigrun called, lifting off her helmet, and then resorted to mind-speech. Erikir! I know you’re here. Come out!
The front door of what was probably the former town hall opened slowly, as snow piled in front of it gave way. “Sigrun?” The low voice that came back was startled, but glad, and Erikir stomped his way out of the building. “Waes hael, Sigrun Caetia. Or is it Sigrun Stormborn?”
“Just Sigrun will do. I’ve known you too long to stand on ceremony.” She slipped down off Nith’s back, landing lightly to offer a hand for a wrist-clasp, only to be taken at her word and engulfed in a huge hug that seemed comprised of equal parts wool, armor, and beard. “Erikir, you’ve got icicles in your beard.”
“Just got back from a morning patrol,” he told her, as jotun and fenris began to file out the door behind him. “We’ve got no humans left up here, besides a few Sami who help us scout. We’re the northernmost advance position left.” He paused. “What brings you to the ass-end of the earth?” His words held good humor, and an attempt to keep things on the old footing. Emotional sparks, faintly visible in othersight. Hints of dark blue, but muted. Attenuated by time. Sky blue with it, and little yellow flickers. Sigrun was bad at putting names to the emotional colors, but sky blue was friendship, yellow was worry or concern.
“Supply drop and a request for your presence at the Odinhall for the day. I’ll have you back here by tomorrow morning,” she told him, unslinging a bag from her back. “We can retrieve lindworm eggs, too, if there are any rookeries nearby. The ones with voices need mates.”
“When Freyr told me three years ago that they had voices, I couldn’t believe him at first,” Erikir admitted. “We’d been fighting them for so damned long by that point.”
About three in ten hatched from wild-laid eggs have voices. They can be reared and educated. Nith’s voice was surprisingly steely. He’d grown startlingly attached to the lindworms that called him Father these days. Their belief strengthened him, and he’d spent time with them in the Caledonian Woods, talking with them as they nursed their wounds, or waited for their riders to recover from theirs. Of the eggs clutched by lindworms with voices? All of the offspring turn out to be sane and intelligent. But they must have more choices of mates, to prevent the inbreeding that could destroy their intelligence.
“I’m not denying the evidence,” Erikir told the dragon, looking up at him, his tone and gaze level. “It just took some mental adjustments. Even though the fenris went hungry up here periodically, they tried to hold back from eating the lindworms. Just because we didn’t know if they hadn’t started off human. And we didn’t know if they were still sapient, somehow.” His expression tightened. “Though I know they’ve been tempted.”
Sigrun nodded tightly and slipped into mental speech. The fenris are predators, and it was hard for them not to see the lindworms as a rival predator species. I am sure that the wild packs and flights both fight each other for territory and feed on one another. The wild ones do not know better. They are subject to instinct and desperation. But the real distinguishing point, anymore, is the voice. That’s what separates the person from the animal. The grendels from the jotun. The wild fenris from the pack.
“You’ve changed,” he told her.
“How so?” Sigrun asked as she reached into her heavy bag, and began distributing supplies.
“You’re colder. More distant.”
“That’s the whole world, Erikir. We’re all colder now. Only the dead don’t change,” Sigrun told him, handing him a haunch of meat that might have fit in the sack, but the sack itself didn’t seem to be more or less empty. “Believe me. I know.”
He shook his head, handing off the meat to a jotun behind him. “Just so you know, I don’t think I could ever really . . . pray to you.”
“Of course not,” Sigrun told him, handing another jotun a heavy sack of flour. �
��I wouldn’t expect you to. You see me as I was when I went to the Odinhall. Awkward. Socially inept.” She laughed under her breath. “Adam doesn’t believe in me. Why should you?”
The look of irritation on Erikir’s face was nothing to Nith’s low growl, which shook the ground, shattering every icicle and in the area. Sigrun shrugged, and kept handing out supplies. Little whispers of power, hardly a gift at all. Every time her fingers touched something inside the sack, Sigrun concentrated, and made sure it wasn’t the last one. Haunches of smoked meat. Strings of sausages, frozen hard. Loaves of barley bread. Sacks of dried peaches and dehydrated orange slices. Bags of flour, beans, and lentils. And, from the fenris all around her, murmurs of her Name. Sigrun Stormborn, we thank you . . . . “There,” she said. “That should help for a few more months, if you stretch it out.” She paused. “Rookery next, then I spirit you off to the Odinhall.”
“You haven’t exactly told me why,” Erikir complained cheerfully as they took flight.
“You’ve been invited to a hand-fasting,” Sigrun told him. “Let’s get aloft before I give you the rest of the details.”
“You have time for this?” The bear-warrior’s tone was disbelieving.
“I’m making the time,” Sigrun assured him, doing her best to suppress the voices at the back of her mind. The ones calling out for her aid. Just whispers at the moment. She had to fight with her conscience every now and again, and remind herself, that she couldn’t be everywhere at once. And that some things were duties of other sorts. “Brandr’s getting married.”
“Brandr? Ragnarok is upon us, then.” Erikir snorted, and ducked as a flight of birds scattered overhead, panicking at Nith’s presence in the air. “Do I know the lunatic . . . er, the lucky woman? Can I talk sense into her?”
Sigrun avoided that one for the moment, and Nith launched himself into the air. “He asks that you be his witness. All of his classmates from the Odinhall are dead, unfortunately.”
That sobered the god-born of Freyr for a moment. “Well, of course,” Erikir said, quietly, as they were now several hundred feet over the ground. “I’d be honored to stand beside him. Though I wish his true brothers-in-battle could be there, instead. I’m a poor substitute for them.” He clapped a hand on Sigrun’s shoulder. “So, what’s the lady’s name, eh?”
“You’ve met her before,” Sigrun admitted. “She was transformed into a siren ten years ago, and has been going by the name of Lorelei since then. But she’s a god-born of Valhalla. And her transformation did not stem from the death of Baal, but resulted from imprisonment in the Veil.”
She’d deliberately decided to break the news as far off the ground as possible. Erikir’s shouts couldn’t be heard by anyone else. And he couldn’t really hit anything up here, or storm off. Sigrun waited for the adrenaline spike to die down into a more fulminating rage, and said, calmly, “What’s the going weregild rate for a stab to the stomach, anyway? I think I’m carrying a couple of aureus in my poke . . . .”
“Oh, to Hel’s cold embrace with that . . . begging your pardon . . . .” Erikir added, as Nith’s head swung back to regard the bear-warrior. “It’s not like I can spend gold on anything, Sigrun! And I healed, and I . . . pretty well killed her. And hit Loki at the same time, too.” Erikir’s growl reverberated through her frame. “Exactly how has she gotten her hooks into him? What lies did she tell him this time?”
“None. She was living her required cover identity to train the harpies and sirens and any other transformed humans who could fly, and Brandr was assigned to take my place in Judea. To hear him tell it, he had her identified within the first twenty minutes of meeting her.” Sigrun detailed the punishment Reginleif had endured in the Veil, and her belief that their old mentor wouldn’t have done things as she had, if she hadn’t been affected by Hel’s soul-bond. Gradually, Erikir cooled down. And being god-born of Freyr, a fertility god, he eventually chuckled under his breath. “I’ll go, and I’ll make sure I give him my god’s blessing.” Erikir snickered.
“How is it that you haven’t found yourself a wife by now, Erikir?”
“I’ve admired plenty of women over the past seventy years or so.” She could hear the unabashed grin in his voice. “But you know how it is. There’s not much future with a mortal.” He shrugged as she turned towards him. “No offense meant.”
“None taken.” Her heart ached tiredly. “But still, there are many more non-mortals in the world these days. No one knows what the upper limit on a jotun’s age is, and many of the second-generation jotun women are quite beautiful. No underbites, no bestial features.”
“Yes, but they’re as much bigger than us, as we bear-warriors are to most other humans.” Erikir patted her shoulder. “I’d never have thought to see the day that you’d play at matchmaker.”
She shrugged, and pulled her helmet on again. “I’m everyone’s grandmother, Erikir.”
“Not yet, you’re not,” he told her, cheerfully.
On arriving at the Odinhall, Sigrun told Nith, without preamble, “I require an escort. Shrink down to something more appropriately-sized, please.”
I had thought that the son of Freyr would be accompanying you to the ceremony? Nith sounded surprised.
“No, he’s here as Brandr’s witness.” Sigrun glanced up at the dragon. “In truth, Adam should be my escort. However . . .” She shrugged, and left all the manifold reasons unspoken.
As you wish, then. Nith accommodated himself to his more human surroundings, and followed her into the interface room. Sigrun wondered how Brandr and Reginleif actually saw the chamber, and resolved to ask the couple after they arrived. But for the moment, she saw it as a moonlit sky full of clouds. Like her realm, and unlike it. Loki and Thor were already waiting, and Minori, with Amaterasu-within, was likewise in attendance. Minori’s eyes were wide, but Sigrun could hear Amaterasu chattering with Dvalin politely about the amount of power required to hold the dimensional matrix in place. There were equations in their conversation, and Sigrun winced and did her best not to listen.
Brandr appeared first, in full armor, and promptly pounded on Erikir’s shoulders, though he quieted, looking down when Sigrun told him why Eitri hadn’t been available. He admitted to seeing the interface room as a forest outside of Novo Trier, on the border with the Iroquois Confederacy, near where he’d grown up, in late fall. “Peaceful,” Sigrun commented, smiling faintly. How like Brandr. Peace in his heart, and death in his hands.
Then Reginleif entered, her black wings sweeping behind her, her black hair as long and loose, as it had once been white and short. Sigrun was glad she’d insisted on turning all of Regin’s clothing black to match, including her armor. From the way Brandr had stopped moving beside Erikir, she rather thought it had made an impression.
Reginleif entered the interface room reluctantly. She’d been terrified that she’d see the pond. That she’d turn right back into the damned swan, and that Brandr would have to re-enact some cradle story to turn her back into a woman, by weaving her a shirt made of nettles. Instead, she saw a forest, covered in snow. Deepest night, the kind of night that had pervaded the world before the coming of ley-power and electricity. This is Pielinen, she thought, numbly. Pielinen, the way it was when my grandfather took me to the lake, when I was a child . . . .
You see my realm, daughter, Loki told her, and beckoned her forwards. I thought you would prefer it to your own.
Reginleif stepped forwards, her knees feeling like gelatin. She hadn’t wanted any recognition. She had wanted to slide quietly out of life into the peace of oblivion. But Brandr had asked her to share his. And that meant not hiding from existence anymore. But before she did anything else, she paused at the front of the tiny gathering of people—just seven entities, besides herself—and addressed Erikir, directly. “I have done you harm, Erikir Gifol. I ask, though I do not merit it, that you forgive me, or inform me of some means by which I can repay you the debt I owe.”
She was aware of how his eyes had widened,
staring at her. Trying to find the seams between reality and illusion. And after a moment or two, he said, simply, “A clean slate seems the best wedding gift I can give Brandr here.” He leaned forwards, however, to give her the kiss of peace, and whispered in her ear, “And if you wrong him, I will kill you, you understand?”
Reginleif nodded, and shrugged. She’d really have it no other way.
After that, the old, simple words. She remembered saying them to Joris, almost eighty years ago now. But horribly, she couldn’t remember what he’d looked like when he was young, anymore. The only memory she had left, was the image of his face as he’d been aged and dying in the hospital. Reginleif’s hands clenched on Brandr’s as the ribbon was wrapped around their wrists, and she did her best not to weep. Just looked up at his relatively youthful face. The scars there, and the wise patience in his eyes. At least I won’t have to face that again, she thought. Death in battle, perhaps. But not disease and age.
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