Sword of Light

by S. M. Schmitz

  Behind me, I could hear Keira apologizing quietly, but Yngvarr likely overheard her as well. And I had a feeling that was only going to lead to an argument between them. “Hey,” I said. “If we find it, I can just lie. I don’t care if Odin gets pissed off at me. I don’t even know the guy.”

  Yngvarr glanced in my direction but didn’t slow down. “I do know him, and I have no problem lying to him. Don’t you think it’s suspicious that he wants us to promise we’ll take a sword to him that only he knows anything about?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “Really suspicious, actually. The whole thing kinda unsettled me, too, but I’m not entirely sure if it’s because Havard hated him or because my own instincts are telling me not to trust him.”

  “Probably both. But be careful what you say around Keira. As a Valkyrie, her loyalty is always going to be with her father.”

  I looked over my shoulder at her and Odin then asked, “Is he literally her father?”

  Honestly, I expected Yngvarr to tell me it was just what they called him, so when he nodded and said all of the Valkyries were his daughters he’d had with mortal women, I stopped short again. Yngvarr shot me a strained smile, because he knew how I felt about her, of course, and he also knew that I’d find her relationship with Odin troubling. “For as long as anyone can remember, Odin would bring his infant daughters to Asgard to train as Valkyries as soon as they could hold a sword. Technically, they’re all demigoddesses, but being Valkyries, they’re given special gifts, including the ability to cross the veil.”

  “And if they don’t want to be a Valkyrie?” I asked. Keira had finally broken away from Odin and was heading toward us. I watched her as she offered me a small wave, but I was burdened now with the knowledge that she’d been forced into a life she may not have wanted. And what made it worse was that her own father had forced her into that life.

  Yngvarr sighed and shrugged. “They don’t exactly have a choice, Gavyn. And while Valkyries have always taken lovers, they’re not allowed to marry or have children or anything that could interfere with their loyalty to Odin.”

  “They’re his slaves,” I murmured. “He enslaved his own daughters.”

  Yngvarr just nodded and sighed again. “Now you’re starting to see why Havard hated him. And why I still hate him, too. He takes whatever he wants and doesn’t care who gets hurt.”

  I looked away from Keira and asked him, “Do you think he could’ve killed your brother and stolen this sword?”

  “Could he?” Yngvarr repeated. “Yeah, he’s definitely capable of something like that. And it would explain why none of us can remember Havard—if everyone knew Odin had murdered one of the Aesir just to steal his weapon or his wife, all of Asgard would turn on him.”

  Keira had finally walked within earshot, so I decided to drop the topic of her father possibly murdering my ancestor and smiled at her as if we’d just been hanging out to wait for her. “Ready to ransack Yngvarr’s palace?” I asked her.

  “Hey!” he protested.

  Keira laughed and nodded. “Ransacking is my favorite pastime.”

  “Just remember,” Yngvarr said. “You break it, you buy it.”

  I reached into my pocket and held a crumpled ten-dollar bill out to him. “Where can I exchange my Earth currency for Asgardian currency?”

  And that bastard actually snatched my money out of my hand and stuffed it into his own pocket. “I accept American money.”

  “Down payment on anticipated damage to property?” Keira asked.

  Yngvarr snickered. “Something like that. Plus, I get to aggravate Gavyn, which is always a bonus.”

  “Definitely,” Keira agreed. “He’s going to cover me for any damage I may cause, by the way.”

  “Pay for your own ransacking,” I told her. We’d reached Yngvarr’s palace, but I wanted to check the stables first. I suspected it had more to do with Havard’s love of them than any real sense that I’d find an enchanted sword hidden with a bunch of horses, but Keira and Yngvarr followed me anyway. I moved heavy bags of sweet oats to check the walls for loose panels while Yngvarr and Keira emptied the saddle room. We eventually conceded the sword wasn’t in the stables, but as we were leaving, I passed a horse that looked awfully familiar. I stopped and stroked his face and his nostrils flared briefly then he nuzzled my hand.

  “Is this Sigurd?” I asked. “Can horses be immortal, too?”

  “Yeah,” Yngvarr said. “They can be immortal if we feed them Idun’s apples.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you still had your brother’s horse?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Sometimes, I still have a hard time believing any of this is real. And other times, I hate that it is, because I know I’ll never get him back.”

  I let my hand fall and took a deep breath, but Sigurd didn’t seem to like that I planned to leave. He whinnied at me, and I promised I’d return, although I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to. I mean, how long did I have before I became a permanent resident of Valhalla? I doubted there were many leisurely trips to Asgard left in my future.

  Keira scratched Sigurd between his ears and smiled at me. “You must remind him of an owner he’d once been attached to.”

  “Yeah,” I sighed. Great. Someone else terribly disappointed that I wasn’t Havard and I couldn’t bring him back.

  We did our best not to ransack Yngvarr’s palace, although it was awfully tempting. I mean, we were looking for an enchanted sword in a god’s palace in Asgard, which just happened to exist in some parallel universe. I had to do a little ransacking.

  Keira put her hands on her hips and looked around the messy room. “I don’t think it’s here,” she said smartly.

  So I put my hands on my hips and, just as smartly, said, “We should tear down a few walls, just to make sure.”

  “They’re stone, dumbass,” Yngvarr teased. But then he put his hands on his hips and added, “But maybe Thor could break down one… you know, just to be sure.”

  “It would be criminal if we weren’t completely thorough,” I agreed.

  “We’re not destroying Yngvarr’s palace,” Keira scolded.

  “Killjoy,” Yngvarr and I both muttered.

  But we listened to her anyway, and as we headed out into the warm sunshine of early afternoon in Asgard, I had a sudden, and quite possibly insane, idea. “Let’s search Odin’s palace.”

  Keira and Yngvarr stared at me with their mouths open as if they were both trying to see through so much stupid. “Gavyn, if he stole Havard’s sword, he’s never going to allow us to search his palace,” Yngvarr argued. “And we can’t just break into Odin’s home, especially without any evidence he’s done something wrong.”

  “I’m afraid Yngvarr’s right,” Keira said. “We can’t—”

  “I’m not suggesting we break into Odin’s palace,” I interrupted. “Theoretically, he should want us to find this sword as badly as we do, right? So let’s ask him if we can search his pad, and if he says no, we’ll be on our way to building a case against him.”

  Yngvarr snorted and said, “I think you watched too much Law & Order.”

  “No, smartass,” I snapped. “CSI.”

  Keira nodded and agreed with me. “Much better show, especially the one set in Miami.”

  Apparently, Asgard had excellent cable packages.

  But since Tyr still hadn’t called, we decided to head to Odin’s palace anyway, provided I wasn’t the one asking him if we could search it. I would’ve been a little offended if I didn’t know exactly why Keira made me promise she could do the talking.

  Honestly, I expected Odin to slam the door in our faces, even if it was just a metaphorical door and he was really just telling us to stuff it. So when he held his door open for us to enter, I tried not to look too surprised. I sauntered in and gave him a cool, “What’s up?” and a “Nice digs” and thought, “Nailed it.”

  Keira rolled her eyes at me and I blurted out, “So how do you feel about us knocking down a few walls
?”

  Odin squinted at me and asked, “Were you dropped a lot as a baby?”

  I shrugged and reminded him my dad was around here somewhere, so he could go straight to the source and find out. Keira grabbed my arm and pulled me away from her father before I embarrassed her even more than I already had. I thought she should’ve known by now that there was an extraordinarily high chance of that, but when I pointed out her oversight, namely that I always embarrassed her, she just smiled and said, “Not always. Occasionally, I’m actually proud of you.”

  “Odin’s palace is much bigger than mine,” Yngvarr sighed. “We’ll never be able to search the entire thing.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “He was probably counting on that.”

  “Or,” Keira countered, “he didn’t have anything to do with Havard’s death.”

  “This would be so much easier if I could control these memories. Why do they have to come to me in chronological order?” I complained.

  “It’s almost like someone’s controlling them and only wants to reveal pieces of a story at a time,” Keira said.

  We blinked at each other then laughed and waved off such a crazy idea.

  The first floor of Odin’s palace was mostly an enormous library and an even more enormous hall where he apparently held feasts and parties. I nudged Yngvarr and whispered, “Come February, we’re having a Super Bowl party in here.”

  Yngvarr nodded and whispered back, “Let’s do it, but only if we don’t invite Odin.”

  “Send him to Freyja’s,” I suggested. “She’ll distract him.”

  I probably shouldn’t have mentioned the goddess Keira had issues with because she set her jaw and walked away, leaving me feeling guilty once again. And the craziest part was that I still had no idea why I’d slept with Freyja in the first place. Yngvarr quickly filled the awkward silence by asking me what Havard’s sword looked like even though I’d already told him. He hadn’t really forgotten, of course, but I provided as much detail as I could, from the way its blade shimmered and both reflected light and emitted it to the intricate silver carvings on the hilt.

  Yngvarr listened attentively anyway and as I described the carvings, none of which I recognized, his hand froze over a chest against the wall. I peeked inside it, but much to my disappointment, it only contained table linens. Who knew Odin had table linens?

  “Gavyn,” Yngvarr said, “those carvings sound like Norse runes. If that’s what they are, there’s no way this sword was ever Sumerian.”

  Something inside me agreed with him, but I wasn’t quite sure if that was because I wanted to or Havard’s DNA was already telling me those inscriptions were Norse. I concentrated on the details of those symbols then said, “Okay, so the one that looks like a stick figure trying to hug a child… I’m thinking this one is definitely Norse.”

  By now, Keira had returned and was listening attentively as well. “Follow me,” she instructed. “I think we can solve at least one puzzle.”

  She led us to Odin’s impressive, but definitely overcompensating, library and pulled a book that looked almost as old as Agnes from the shelf. “Can you find symbols in here like the ones you’ve seen?”

  I flipped the book open and immediately spotted the stick figure trying to hug a child. Yngvarr and Keira glanced at each other and she said, “That’s a rune for the gods. It literally means ‘one of the Aesir.’”

  I flipped through the book and pointed to a few more symbols that looked familiar, and each time Keira told me its meaning, I nodded because it just felt right and truthful. But the one symbol I wanted to find the most appeared to be absent, and toward the end of the book, I noticed a page seemed to have been ripped out.

  “None of these runes are quite like the ‘N’ on Havard’s sword,” I told her. “Yet that symbol is at the center of the others, like it’s the most important.”

  “Why is there a page missing?” Yngvarr asked.

  Keira’s eyebrows pulled together and she murmured, “Hm. I’ve never even noticed that before.”

  “Are there any other books we can check?” I asked.

  “Not like this one,” she answered. “It’s like our family tree.”

  “Um… is this where Havard would have been?” I pressed.

  Yngvarr immediately nodded. “Most likely. It’s in chronological order and based on where that should be, he would have been born around 300 AD.”

  I snickered and had to point out, “You’re a pagan god and use anno Domini to mark the passage of time?”

  But he just shrugged and said, “The rest of the western world does.”

  Keira looked unsettled by this development—the missing page, not Yngvarr’s use of the Gregorian calendar—so I suggested we continue our search for the sword. Yngvarr agreed and suggested, “Perhaps we should search the sword room?”

  I folded my arms over my chest and scowled at him. “Odin has a sword room and we’ve been wasting our time searching a library and hall?”

  He squirmed a bit and crossed his arms defensively. “Seemed too obvious a place to keep a stolen sword.”

  “Next time we’re searching for a stolen sword, lead with ‘Our suspect has a sword room,’” I said.

  Keira led us upstairs to a room that was, not surprisingly, filled with display cases containing swords. I tapped my fingers against the glass and asked, “Can I ransack this room?”

  “All this glass seems highly likely to result in our disfigurement,” Yngvarr said smartly.

  Keira had frozen in front of an illuminated case, so I glanced inside and froze beside her. A strikingly ornate sword with a silver hilt and familiar runes embossed on it lay on a red velvet cushion, light reflecting from its slender blade and creating the illusion that the sword itself was glowing. I reached for the door on the display case but hesitated as I realized there was an important distinction between the sword in my dreams and this one. “It’s missing that ‘N,’” I said.

  “Maybe it’s on the other side?” Yngvarr suggested.

  “Why would he let us roam through his palace if he has the sword just sitting here?” I asked.

  “He can always claim he had no idea he had a murdered god’s sword,” Keira said softly. She looked pale and defeated, and I suddenly wanted to insist this sword didn’t look like the Sword of Light at all and we should leave. But my Valkyrie slid the door open and lifted the sword from its bed. She held it in her hands for a moment before holding it out to me, and I wanted to back away from it but I carefully held out my hands. As the cool metal touched my skin, I flinched and waited for something to happen, some explosion of light or overwhelming feeling that this sword had long ago been etched into my DNA. So when nothing happened, I grinned at Yngvarr and said, “It’s not glowing because I’m not in battle mode. Wanna see if you can survive decapitation?”

  “Can anyone survive decapitation?” he asked.

  Keira nodded at the sword and said, “Flip it over. See if the ‘N’ is on the other side.”

  I complied and was actually relieved when I didn’t see an ‘N’ on that side either. “Except for that rune, is it the same as in your dreams?” Yngvarr asked.

  “Yeah,” I acknowledged. “Extremely close.”

  But a voice from deep within me whispered, “This isn’t mine. This isn’t the sword that comes alive in my hands.”

  “What do you think?” Yngvarr asked. “Is this a replica?”

  I flipped it over a few times and shook my head. “No. I think it was made by the same blacksmith, but this isn’t the Sword of Light.”

  “Let’s find out who made this one,” Keira said. “We’ll talk to them next.”

  I was about to agree when her cellphone rang. Yngvarr and I both leaned closer to see who was calling, and when I saw Tyr’s name, I knew our search would be suspended.

  Our host of demigods had arrived.

  Chapter Twelve

  Have you ever been on your way to an epic showdown between supernatural good and evil and got held up by
Baton Rouge rush hour traffic?

  Yeah, me too.

  Keira glanced at me in the backseat and asked me, “What the hell is wrong with your city?”

  So I shrugged and said, “I don’t think we planned appropriately for a supernatural battle of the ages.”

  “Is this a battle of the ages?” Tyr asked. “If so, I should have worn my lucky socks.”

  “You have lucky socks?” I asked back.

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  I thought about it then shrugged again. “Point taken. But in the future, always wear your lucky socks when heading into battle, whether it’s one for the ages or not.”

  We inched down Airline Highway and Agnes scowled at the sea of red taillights in front of us. “Can’t you do something about this?” I said. “Surely witches have some sort of spell for clearing traffic jams.”

  Agnes, who’d decided to confront Ninurta and his minions as the smoking hot redheaded witch, scowled at me now. “If I had the ability to cast spells, I’d have done it on you a long time ago.”

  And, really, that seemed completely fair so I nodded and told her as long as I didn’t wake up in her bed, I wouldn’t even hold it against her. After an hour of being stuffed into a sedan with two gods and a Valkyrie, I was anxious for freedom, even if that meant having to fight an entire host of demigods. It was another half hour before we made it to the oak-lined streets of one of Baton Rouge’s oldest neighborhoods, where I’d grown up and my father still lived.

  Tyr turned onto my dad’s street and immediately pulled over to park. We could see his house from here, and his front lawn teemed with armed men and women as if they’d been waiting on us. And seeing them in front of the house where my mother spent her final days ignited a fire within me. What had they been doing to her home, to the possessions she’d once held dear, to the memories we’d created together? Keira turned in her seat so she could see me and grabbed my hand, squeezing it quickly before she just as quickly let go. “We’ll make them regret coming here, Gavyn.”