Stormbringer

by Alis Franklin

When she next dared look, Lain was on the ground, shoulders shaking.

  “When I am done with you,” Magni said, stalking forward, “you will laugh no longer. You will know your place.”

  “Broken and bloodied,” Lain said, voice cracked with madness and wet from blood. “Quivering at the feet of a Þórsson. Yes, I know my place. But tell me, Magni. Do you? Hurt me all you would, torture me. You have such rage in you, like your father did. Do you think it would please him to see the brute you have become? Do you think it pleases your brother, pleases your sister, while they cower behind you, wondering how long it will be before you have Mjölnir in your hand and you turn that rage unto—”

  “Silence!” Magni spat the word, literally, onto his palm, and when Lain howled from the pain of the tattoo, Þrúðr felt the earth beneath her shake.

  “Enough! Brother, enough!” And then she was on her feet. Striding forward, heart racing in time to Lain’s wet and ragged breath. “This has gone far enough. I will not allow you to—”

  Magni spun, a retort bristling on his tongue.

  In the next instant, Þrúðr heard a growl—a twang!—and saw a great dark shape leap forth from the forest, slamming into Magni and sending him rolling across the dirt.

  Then everything was chaos, a dozen beasts pouring into the camp from among the trees, trailing howls and the sound of loosing arrows in their wake. One of the latter buried itself at Þrúðr’s feet. Yet another had driven right through Móði’s shoulder as he struggled to drag himself from his bed.

  Þrúðr lunged sideways, back to where her own belongings sat, pulling her sword from the ground and rising with it held before her. The tip of it shook in time to Þrúðr’s thunderous heart, her hands damp and clammy on the hilt, and she tried to still her breath and remember the forms trainer Hlín had taught her as a girl.

  From her left, Þrúðr heard a growl, and she spun. A great wolf crouched there, dappled gray fur bristling as it bared its wicked teeth. Behind it, Magni grappled with another, this one huge and rusty red. Two more circled Móði, and from above came both strange birdcalls and the hail of piercing arrows.

  “Please,” Þrúðr called. “We mean you no harm. We are travelers, only. Passing th—”

  The wolf before her lunged. Þrúðr tried to sidestep, but her foot caught against a root, and the next thing she knew she was on the ground, beast’s claws pressing into her chest and the fetid stink of its meat-rot breath on her face.

  She shrieked, bringing her arm up beneath the wolf’s neck to keep its fangs from her throat. She’d dropped her sword as she fell and her free hand scrabbled for it now, feeling worms and insects scurry between her fingers as she pushed them through the loam.

  Above her, the wolf snapped, pressing forward, and Þrúðr yelped as its teeth grazed against her cheek. Then, finally, she found steel and leather, and with a cry she brought the sword up, grip backhanded and awkward, but enough to twist and drive the blade into a heaving flank.

  Now it was the wolf’s turn to yelp, ears flattened as Þrúðr heaved with all her might, with the strength of her father and the will of her mother, sending the beast backward across the dirt.

  She got no time to savor victory. Not when another wolf shape went hurtling past, thrown by Magni with a roar. Behind that, Þrúðr could see Móði working runes that had frozen a third wolf in place, while another prepared to leap on him from the side. And behind that, Þrúðr saw a girl.

  A girl. An ásynja girl, with olive skin smeared by dark blood, and feathers woven in her flame-red hair. No more than a child, and Lain had said there were children in the forest, but he’d called them þursar, and this girl was not.

  She also held a bow, and was aiming it at Móði.

  “Móði! Behind you!” Þrúðr cried.

  “Alu!” At Móði’s word, a shimmering barrier coiled around him. From the forest, the girl let loose her arrow, which flew straight and true and shattered harmlessly against the magic. “Ýr-kaun!” Móði added, even as the strange girl prepared to nock another shaft.

  When she drew the bow, however, the wood snapped in two.

  She hissed, then was gone. Back into the trees, even as Þrúðr lunged forward with a “Wait!”

  A girl. In the forest.

  “Sister!”

  Magni’s voice, and Þrúðr turned, bringing her sword up just in time to meet the fangs of the red wolf.

  Or . . . not a wolf, perhaps. Because it was too big, with too-large forelimbs and claws that almost looked like hands.

  Claws like hands and ears like horns. Red fur that clumped and shifted and looked so very much like feathers. And above a jagged grin stained dark with Magni’s blood, a pair of too-familiar eyes.

  “Blood for blood,” the not-wolf snarled. “A brother for a brother. Which one shall we take?”

  “Please,” Þrúðr begged. “We’ve done nothing to you!”

  “Liar!”

  The voice was loud enough to shake the trees, broken by pain and fury. Whatever this attack was, it wasn’t about the forest. Not something so impersonal as territory or land. This was something else, some other treasure from the heart of this strange beast and the girl who flew among the trees, shooting arrows from the boughs.

  A brother for a brother, the beast had said, and these were þurs lands.

  And Þrúðr, born from a legacy stained dark purple with each of her mighty father’s kills.

  “Please,” she said. “Whatever has been done to you, I am truly sorry. But killing us will not bring your brother back, it will not undo the pain that has been done.”

  The beast bared its teeth. Behind it, Magni and Móði fought back-to-back against the others.

  “No,” it said. “But it will stop you from doing more.”

  Then it lunged.

  “Valdís, no!”

  Sword pressed against a red-feathered throat, one huge claw inches from her skull, and in that moment, time froze.

  “Vala, enough.”

  So close, Þrúðr saw the beast’s eyes draw wide, rings of white around the color.

  And, behind it, she saw Lain. Standing, free from his chain and a single shackle, blood running from a deep claw gash in his arm.

  His eyes, Þrúðr thought, looked not unlike the beast’s.

  One moment, nothing more. In the next, the ground beneath the beast exploded, sending it flying backward and away from Þrúðr’s reach. Móði’s magic, followed soon after by Magni’s hammer, slamming into flesh.

  The beast whimpered, cowering beneath the blow, its pack-mates lying scattered and bloodied against the trees.

  “Die, monster!” Magni lifted his hammer, aiming for the head.

  “No!”

  And then Lain was there, exploding in a fireball against Magni’s flank. They both went flying, rolling over and over like a falling star. When they came to a stop, Magni’s fingers were locked around Lain’s throat.

  “Traitor!” He hauled himself upright, Lain unresisting in his grasp. “I should kill you!”

  “Brother, no!” Too much death, and Þrúðr would not see more.

  “If he dies, then so do you!” growled the wolf-beast, hackles raised even as it struggled to its feet. “I will tear you limb from limb and feast upon your entrails.”

  “You cannot best the sons of Thor.” Magni’s eyes blazed bright and mad within the darkness of the forest. “Nor will you take this wretch.” A shake of Lain’s unresisting form. “Normally I would gladly let you have him, but today? Today he owes us dowry. My sister is to be wed and Ásgarðr’s gift to her new groom was with our horses. The ones this thief”—another shake—“stole from us while we slept.”

  Lain muttered something Þrúðr couldn’t hear, and earned another shake from Magni for his trouble.

  “Brother.” Þrúðr stepped forward, hands outstretched in placation. All around her, she felt the eyes of wolves watching her every move. “Enough. Whatever you think—”

  “I think I am the eldest
son of Thor,” Magni said, voice as hard and blunt as Mjölnir. “I think this decision is mine to make, to uphold the honor of our family.”

  This time, when Lain spoke, Þrúðr could not fail to hear it.

  “This is not honor.”

  “This is obligation,” Magni said. “Mine, and yours. You will serve well enough as Þrúðr’s dowry, in lieu of gold and trinkets. I’m sure the dvergar would take a jötunn slave in recompense for their loss.”

  “No!” Þrúðr’s voice was drowned out by the beast’s, as it lunged forward. “I will die before I let you do this wretched thing!”

  “Vala, no.” Lain again, speaking the old tongue. Shoulders slumped and face downcast. “I’m sorry. I—You must go. I’m sorry.”

  The beast stopped, hesitating, feathers flattened and eyes wide and beseeching. “I—”

  “Listen to the traitor, whelp,” Magni said. “Take your pack and go. If I see you again, I will show you just how close Loki’s bindings hold him. For every leaf I hear that rustles, every flickering shadow, I will give him pain a thousandfold. Until the forest is nothing but his cries as he begs and mewls for mercy. And the only one who can give succor, in your absence, will be you.”

  When the wolf-beast growled, Þrúðr felt the sound echoing in her heart.

  “Monsters,” the beast snarled. “Ásgarðr should have burned. That any of you wretches live is a curse unto the Tree.” But it was backing away, hackles raised. So were the others.

  “Run, dog,” Magni said. “Be grateful I have more mercy than my father.”

  A moment later, the beasts were gone. Slunk back between the twisted boughs of the Myrkviðr.

  Þrúðr stepped forward, “Brother?”

  But Magni wasn’t listening. Instead, he had thrown Lain to the ground. Lain, who was no longer chained or bleeding, and was missing a single shackle. Lain, who broke the silence with a sigh. Dusting himself off and making as if to stand.

  “Well. That worked. Though I’m not sure what we would’ve done if they hadn’t called your blu—” He was cut off by a fist against his face.

  “No!” Þrúðr felt the ice settle in her gut. This was wrong. All wrong. “Magni, stop this madness. You cannot be this cruel!”

  “Silence, sister!” When Magni rounded on her, Þrúðr couldn’t stop the flinch, couldn’t stop the half step back. She’d never been frightened of her brother. Never. No matter how big or strong or angry he could be, he was still her little baby Maggi.

  “Magni . . .”

  “Enough. I have no more patience for your simpering.” Little Maggi, every day except today. “Do not forget who brought us on this ill-fated journey, sister. Do not flinch now that your callow woman’s heart has seen the truth. This is the place of men, to make the choices you and yours cannot. Hard choices. Cruel choices. You knew this. Now you will have it.”

  This was not the way things should have gone, not the way they had gone, in Þrúðr’s mind. Nothing should ever be this broken, this vicious.

  She looked at Magni, burning and furious, then Lain, broken and defeated. And finally Móði, who would not meet her eyes.

  Þrúðr swallowed, straightened her spine, and met Magni, gaze for gaze.

  “I understand, brother,” she said. “It will be as you say.”

  Somewhere deep within, Þrúðr felt the storm begin to rise.

  Þrúðr

  Chapter 9

  They’d watched every single Die Hard and half of RoboCop by the time Hel’s arm-scort made it to the gates of Ásgarðr.

  Actually, if he thought about it, Sigmund really couldn’t be sure how long they’d been traveling. Time seemed to work differently here, outside of Miðgarðr, fading in and out until even the trudging of the náir and the bellows from the Helbeasts became routine.

  Maybe Sigmund was just too desensitized to the extraordinary, raised by a lifetime of comic books and video games. And Hel’s army—Sigmund decided to give up trying to pretend it was anything else—Hel’s army really was something straight out of a game, monsters and undead and tattered banners, flapping in the breeze. The golden road glimmered beneath their feet, and when they passed, the land around them fell to blight and rot.

  Sigmund saw that, too. It hadn’t been obvious when they’d been below, in Hel’s own realms, but as they’d ascended up the Tree the land had gotten verdant. They’d catch sight of grassy hills or forests, streaked green against the horizon, and then watch that green fade to gray and glossy black as they passed.

  “The visuals aren’t exactly subtle, are they?” Em had asked at one point. They’d been rolling through a blighted forest, and Em had grabbed a handful of leaves off a passing tree.

  Well, they’d probably been leaves, at one point. Now they were purple-black obsidian razors, and they left little white cuts across Em’s palms.

  “This is wa-aa-ay cooler than the Melbourne Zombie Shuffle,” Wayne had said, eyes bright and pink and sparkling.

  Being in the undead horde was kind of awesome, Sigmund wouldn’t deny it. Funny how no one ever seemed to show that.

  Eventually, the road beneath them began to run out of gold. First just gaps in the layer of crushed treasures, then whole patches, spreading out like dark, stony cancer until the gold flecks became the accents, not the paving. And then, in the distance, Sigmund saw the Wall.

  He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. More gold, maybe? Or lots of delicate spires. Something magic, anyway.

  Instead, the wall was . . . a wall. A long gray stone slash across the green, dotted by bigger square stone boxes at regular intervals. It was hard to get scale, given the distance, but it wasn’t like the thing was miles high. Sigmund could see roads and buildings on the other side, all wood and thatched roofs.

  “Amazing to think that was built by a horse, isn’t it?” Em said.

  “Huh?”

  She pointed. “The wall. You know Loki’s horse kid, Sleipnir?” Sigmund nodded and didn’t correct the pronunciation. “His horse daddy built it.” Sigmund had known that. Kinda. Like, he’d read about it on Wikipedia, but it wasn’t like he’d ever actually asked Lain for the full story. It’d felt . . . weird.

  “How does a horse build a wall?” Wayne asked, squinting at the structure in question.

  Em shrugged. “The sagas are a little vague on that, I have to admit.”

  “Because Svaðilfari was not a ‘horse,’” Sigmund heard himself say. “But the æsir are fools who cannot see plain the shapes of jötnar. So they give the names of beasts—horse, serpent, wolf—to those who do not deserve them.”

  If Em and Wayne were surprised to hear Sigyn speak—with Sigmund’s voice, no less—they didn’t show it. Instead, they both just made “aaah!” noises and nodded.

  “That makes a lot of sense,” Em said. She blinked, looking around them. “Actually, that makes a lot of things make a lot of sense.”

  “It also makes the story a bit less, um, licentious,” Wayne said. Sigmund could see her trying not to grin.

  “Sadder, though,” Sigmund said. It was him saying it, too, even if the emotion was Sigyn’s. A deep and aching pit, loss and compassion, but rage and loathing, too. “Because Sleipnir wasn’t a horse, either. So . . .” He let the implication hang, eyes looking down to where his fingers rubbed across his knuckles, over and over, pressure leaving brief pale smudges on the dark. Sleipnir might not have been a horse, but he’d been treated like one. Bound in tack and bridle and ridden, kept in the stables like a beast.

  “Jesus,” Em said, picking up the thought from where it lay. “That’s . . . that’s brutal, man. I’m sorry.”

  Sigmund nodded, feeling the warmth and comfort of his friends against his side. He told himself it was a long time ago, sins washed clean with blood and fire.

  Sigyn got her revenge, in the end. Made Ásgarðr pay for every cruelty and humiliation given to her husband’s blood. Maybe she still was, and that’s why Sigmund was sitting in a wagon, slowly dragging the blight of deat
h unto the gates of heaven.

  From somewhere up ahead, a horn sounded. It echoed through the army, repeated by others and by the bellowing of the Helbeasts and the drekar. Sigmund covered his ears against the pounding noise and, when it stopped, so had the wagon.

  “I think we’re here,” Em said.

  “Now what?” Wayne was standing up, peering out across the crowd. They hadn’t stopped right up against the wall, but close enough that anyone standing on the battlements would notice their arrival.

  “Now,” said a voice from outside the wagon. When they turned, it was to see Hel, hidden arms folded and watching them with veiled eyes. “Now I must call on your escort.”

  Wayne’s teeth were very white against the darkness of her skin.

  “Cool,” she said.

  There was a delegation waiting to meet them.

  Sigmund couldn’t think of any other name for it: three guys in shining chain mail and freshly sharpened swords who emerged from the gates and stood there, watching Hel’s army roll to a stop. From the front of the pack, Sigmund saw Hel’s rot bleed forward, shriveling grass into jagged shale and twisting shrubs into black-briar curls, before stopping in a sharp line about a hundred meters from the Wall. The border between Ásgarðr and Helheimr, Sigmund supposed. Bright and lush and green on one side, dead and twisted on the other.

  Standing beside Hel, flanked by half a dozen of the náir, they stepped forward.

  So did their welcoming committee, each side coming to a standstill on their respective sides of the Bleed-line.

  “Halt, sister of the Wolf. This place is not for you. Turn your armies around and return to whence you were once banished.” The guy in the middle was speaking. In Godstongue, which made Sigmund’s head ache and his throat itch, but which he could understand. Sort of. He was getting better at it, anyway.

  “Stand aside, Rígr, third son of Heimdallr,” Hel said in reply. “Helheimr comes to Ásgarðr’s gates to mourn its favored daughter. Felled in combat with none other than Ásgarðr’s king, she comes unto you now, with valkyrja at her side, to take her rightful place in Valhöll’s gilded halls.” Hel spread her hands as she spoke, wings opening in unison and rictus grin . . . slightly more rictus than usual.