I am?
You are, Saraid said, sounding intrigued. Sometimes, mortals’ Names become more complex as they grow older. Steelsoul, after all, is Steelsoul Godslayer now.
And my Name has changed?
No. It has become what it always was meant to be. Saraid’s words, he understood, were a whisper meant only for his own mind. Not for Lassair’s ears, and he stiffened a little. He didn’t usually have secrets from either of them. And Saraid seemed to have few from Lassair. But this was, somehow, important.
Grown, Lassair said blithely, unaware of the byplay, and even in her sleep, her body moved a little against his. You went into the depths of the Veil. You went into the Dark.
And you hunt there now. Saraid’s voice was excited. I will go with you, whenever you like. I have always longed to explore the deeps. And now, you’re Worldwalker.
The Name Flamesower had never quite felt right to Trennus, for indefinable reasons. But it had been enough to bind and be bound by. Worldwalker, however, lanced through him from the top of his head to the tips of his toes, arcing like lightning along all his nerve endings.
Lassair’s eyes opened. Flamesower Worldwalker. A very good name. I like it.
Saraid’s cool hand slid down his back, finding where he’d long ago had the stag tattooed across his shoulder-blades. Part of his binding to her. Wherever she touched, coolness spread in the wake of her skin, and Trennus’ entire body went taut. Wild-heart, please . . . . He latched onto the first coherent thought he could. “I should probably get a wolf mark for you now, shouldn’t I?”
A new one would be some other place, and I like where my mark is, right now. Where no one can possibly miss the fact that we’re bound, you and I. Little hint of a possessive growl in her mental voice, and she nipped and bit her way lower now, following the path her hands had taken.
“Yes, but . . . that’s a . . . deer. Should be a wolf.” Focus. Concentration. He was a ley-mage and a summoner; he should have substantial quantities of both.
I can fix that for you, dear one. It will burn, however. We can attend to that . . . afterwards.
Saraid’s cool hand continued now, down his back, curved over his hip, and reached around to stroke him, where he pressed up against Lassair’s belly. His entire body twitched, and Lassair opened her glorious ruby eyes, and smiled up at him. Kissed him sweetly, and then spread amusement through his mind as one of her doubles appeared, looking disgruntled, and got out of bed. Her duplicate tossed her head and announced, Very well, I suppose one of us has to go feed the children.
That got Trennus’ mind back in working order. “Oh, gods, no. I’m awake. I’ll cook.”
You say that as if the children would starve or be poisoned if I handled the cooking around here. Lassair’s double pulled on a robe. I did us all a favor. I found this amazing thing at the market last week. Pre-cooked oatmeal.
Trennus made a face. “That can’t possibly be good.”
I will let you know if the children survive the experience. She stepped out of their bedroom, her head held high, and Trennus really wasn’t sure if he was supposed to chase after her or not. From the way her original self and Saraid were silently laughing, however, he suspected not, particularly when they pulled him back down into bed. We share him so very nicely, Saraid. You could share some of your wolves with me. Lassair’s tone, as always, was blithe.
Saraid’s tone, while polite, was uncompromising, however. No. They chose me. I chose them. They’re mine. I share him with you, and that should be enough.
The emotional subtext of the byplay passed him by, but sank into his subconscious as Saraid slipped sweetly atop of him, dropping down to bite his neck. Trennus was quite past caring about anything else at that point. It wasn’t even the bodies, although . . . those were wonderful. They were also playing his soul, and, as skilled as Lassair was, it was Saraid’s coolness that rushed in and filled the places that Lassair’s fire scorched.
Saraid let her whole body lie along his length, and Lassair pillowed herself along Saraid’s back. Doing things that made Saraid quiver and jolt on him. Pure delight in having bodies. Both of them looking down at him, and he reached up and wrapped his arms as tightly as he could around both. Hardly fair, he thought, distantly. I need two of me, but I’m not unselfish enough to say that one of you should find another to bind. You’re not human, and I accept you in your strangeness and your wonder, and you accept me in my fragility. And I love you both.
Lassair’s smile lit up her face, and she leaned down. Kissed him, and then kissed Saraid, too, for good measure, before demanifesting and rejoining her double, somewhere else in the big house. Trennus could smell oatmeal cooking, as Saraid told him, Turn over.
Oh, the markings?
Yes. It will burn.
So long as it’s no worse than getting it done in the first place, I don’t really care. Make it right, wild-heart.
So he lay on his stomach on their bed, hands clasped at the back of his neck, and endured as Saraid reshaped the markings between his shoulders, and then brought him two mirrors, so that he could see her handiwork. It had taken an hour . . . much less time than the original marking had taken, and the stag with the curling, geometrically complex, knotwork horns had been replaced by a knotwork wolf, with a similarly geometric moon. You like?
“Of course I do. You made it, didn’t you?”
Februarius 15, 1972 AC
“I’m sorry, mistress, but there was . . . nothing we could do. The baby’s aortic valve was malformed. If we’d caught it in the womb . . . well, that type of surgery is experimental at best. Even our very best neonatal surgeons can only correct gross problems, like spinal bifida. Some of your people have come to us trying to have the . . . deformities, like the horn buds and hooves, corrected in the womb. But fetal heart surgery is a dream at the moment. In ten years, maybe fifteen, we’ll have the technology and the skill. I know that’s scant comfort. But if you sign this release form, we can use her body to help research exactly this kind of repair. So that other children, in the future, might live.” Judean doctors didn’t often get a chance to conduct autopsies or research using dead bodies. Their religion largely forbade it, and even forensic examination for crimes required religious dispensation. The doctor wasn’t giving the young Gothic couple the hard sell; his tone remained gentle and apologetic throughout. But the words, apparently, still needed to be spoken.
Fritti could barely hear his voice as he spoke to the parents in the obstetrics ward. The mother was a lovely Cimbric woman, pale blond hair, cornflower blue eyes, face still pink with the flush of pregnancy, but her face had crumpled, and she was curled in on herself, sobbing. She’d just endured eighteen hours of labor, and her child had developed an irregular heartbeat near the end. The Judean doctors had performed an emergency C-section, but it had been too late. The father, a nieten with only minor mutations, clasped his wife’s hand in his clawed ones gently, and stroked her hair back from her face. He appeared just as hurt, just in the desperately solitary sort of way that men tended to look when they needed to be strong for someone else. Walled off and very alone.
There were other relatives in the room. The young woman’s mother, who’d been afflicted with vicious, serrated teeth, like a lindworm, and thus, never smiled, lest anyone see them. The father’s grandmother, the only part of his family that had managed to evacuate with him, had no mutations of any kind.
“Doctor . . . medicus . . . please. Leave us for a while,” the father finally told the obstetrician, who looked genuinely upset. “We . . . we just need . . . a little time.”
Fritti had been in the room to provide translation, as needed, and to comfort the family as it had seemed more and more likely that the child wouldn’t survive. The mother’s mother wept openly, covering her face and mouth, so no one could see her face contort. “Pauli so wanted to see you two have children—” Her husband had been one of the ones who’d died instantly when Hel had . . . and when Loki had loosed his power.
&
nbsp; Fritti moved over, keeping her movements gentle. “Why don’t you say your good-byes?” she suggested, quietly. “It’ll be easier to make your decisions when you . . . don’t have to look at her.” The body remained in the small wooden bassinet the hospital provided for new parents, wrapped in a yellow blanket. Quiet, and very, very still.
“I don’t want them to take her! I don’t want them to cut her! I don’t want them to take her!” That, a soul-deep wail from the mother.
“All right. I’ll tell them that for you. They didn’t ask to hurt you. They asked because they hope to prevent this in the future.” Fritti kept her voice soft. Distressed people needed gentleness, more than anything else. They needed time. Time away from other people or in the tight knot of their friends and kin, to mourn.
The father wheeled the mother out of the room, his face set, and one clawed hand still on her shoulder, as she curled even further in on herself, trying to stifle her weeping. Her mother walked out behind them, leaving just the father’s grandmother, who leaned on a cane, and shuffled closer to the still form, pulling the blanket back from the face. “Such a pretty little love she was,” the old woman, who had to be in her late eighties, rasped out. Her lips were seamed with creases. “We need the young ones now. Not someone like me, who can just . . . sit by the radiator and mend clothes, if the light is good.”
Fritti’s head came up. She wasn’t sure if she were hearing what she thought she was hearing. “No one is useless,” she said, carefully.
“Young god-born . . . and you do seem to wear your years very lightly, love . . . I am old. I have had arthritis in my hips for thirty years. On a good day, I can walk. On my bad ones? My grandson had to carry me to the airplane to bring me here.” She sighed. “I am a burden to them. If I had the power? I would trade my life for their child. Right here. This instant.”
Fritti touched her shoulder, lightly. “Mistress. Be very careful what you say.” She met the old woman’s eyes. “Because that is absolutely within my power to grant.” Her throat closed. She had never used Baldur and the Evening Star’s gifts, besides the ability to heal. Resurrection had seemed . . . presumptuous. And there was a terrible price for the gift.
Nothing for nothing, after all.
“You can give my life, to this child?” The old, rheumy eyes crinkled. “I don’t have many years left. That hardly seems much better than giving a gift, only to take it away from my grandson again.”
Fritti shook her head. “Your life would bring the child back, and heal the heart. Think of it as . . . priming the engine. Then she would live as she . . . would normally have lived, had her heart been intact.” Fritti shook her head. “It’s not a choice to be made lightly. I’ve never used this power before.” Her voice trembled. “It is a terrible gift.”
“But you are precisely the right person to hold that gift from the gods, aren’t you? You respect it.” The old woman put her free hand, trembling and knotted, on Fritti’s shoulder. “Old age is not pretty, my child. It robs us of dignity, self-control, memory, sanity . . . our bodies, and then our selves. Time is a thief. If we can rob him back? Take what you need from me, child. Just . . . let me see her wake up in my arms.”
“If . . . if I can.” Fritti couldn’t promise that. She helped the old woman sit down again. “What’s your name?”
“Inga.”
“I think maybe her parents should name her for you.”
“Oh no. Perfectly horrible name. Hated it my whole life. Have them call her Lilli.” A little sidelong glance. “Who are you god-born of? Eir?”
“No. God-touched.” Fritti swallowed. “Baldur. The Evening Star.” And, because she knew the woman would take it with her to her grave, she added, “And Loki.”
“Loki? He’s whom we have to blame for all of this.”
Fritti shook her head, her lips twisting downwards. “No. No, he asked for volunteers. They . . . they tried to murder him. In the end, they might even have succeeded.” She choked back on the tears, feeling an idiot.
A wide, and wondering glance. “It’s true, then. He had a mortal lover—you? Don’t lie. I know a widow when I see one, however young.” She sighed. “Well, then I’ll pray to all three of them that this works.”
Fritti swallowed, and lifted the still, chilly little body, her fingers cringing slightly, and handed the bundle to the child’s great-grandmother. Put a hand on the old woman’s shoulder, and on the child’s forehead. Shuddered, and pulled, hard. Energy flowed from one body into the other. The child stirred, and she worked, hard, knotting it in place, trying to reform that poor, broken aortic valve. A breath, the eyes opened, and then a loud and piercing squall of indignity. And then Fritti knelt down, hastily, to make sure that the infant didn’t fall from the now-limp hands of Inga. “I need a doctor in here!” Fritti shouted.
She’d never know if Inga had gotten to see her wish fulfilled. No way to ask the flown soul of the departed dead. But the doctors were flummoxed, and came to the entirely reasonable conclusion that the grandmother’s chest massage of the infant had stimulated the latent breathing reflex and restarted the heart. The parents were caught between speechless joy at having their daughter, alive and whole, and fresh grief, at the death of the grandmother who’d been wise enough to hold their daughter, one more time. Just in case there was one tiny sign of life.
Fritti endured the hugs and the gratitude for staying with Inga and Lilli as long as she could, and then excused herself. Found a bathroom, and vomited, miserably, into a toilet, until all that was left were dry heaves that wracked her body. She’d caught the confused and speculative glances from the Judean doctors, who’d carefully avoided calling this a miracle. Just as carefully as she’d avoided calling any attention to herself.
And in walking out of the hospital, an hour later, one more faceless refugee in a crowd of a hundred thousand or more, she wished—oh, how she wished—she could talk to Radulfr about this. Radulfr. Loki. Her heart twisted, in a mix of grief and shame. She needed to move past this. It had been two years since his death—and even longer, since Rig had been born. But she couldn’t move on. Like many other god-born, she was frozen in time, in the moment that had created her identity. And like most god-born, that identity was the product of a tragedy. That she knew it, wasn’t a help. She couldn’t even begin to imagine . . . finding someone else. I’ll talk to Sigrun about the resurrection power. I should have talked with her about this a long time ago. She’ll have some counsel for me. I might not like her counsel, but . . . she’ll listen. She’ll weigh both sides. And then she’ll tell me what she thinks. Nothing more, nothing less.
As it was, Sigrun had been in the north, and not due home for a week. When she did, Fritti felt the thud of the dragon touching down in the street outside, and she hauled on her clothing, heading for the door, before realizing, It’s late. And what are you, a child? Let her have some peace for an evening.
So it was actually the next morning when she’d run across the street and sat down on the floor in front of Sigrun’s chair, in spite of all the valkyrie’s efforts to have her take a seat on a couch, and had disclosed the whole series of events. Sigrun’s eyes had gone wide. “That is . . . a truly frightening power. I am glad it is not mine to hold.”
Fritti’s shoulders hunched. “That’s . . . hardly comforting, Sigrun.” If you would not have it, what am I to do with it?
A very light hand touched her shoulder. Fritti had long noticed that Sigrun didn’t touch other people often. The children usually hugged her, and she’d hug them back, and of course she touched Adam. But even after close to twenty years of acquaintance, her impulse seemed to be to offer a wrist-clasp to Trennus and Kanmi, and always looked surprised when Trennus, Lassair, and Saraid hugged her, instead . . . and oddly relieved when Kanmi accepted the wrist-clasp, or Minori, with a little smile, offered a tiny bow, instead. So the hand on Fritti’s shoulder spoke volumes. Took her back to the hotel room in Ponca, long ago, when Adam and Sigrun had reassured and comforted her. “
It may not be comforting,” Sigrun told her now, “but it is true. I would not want the weight of that kind of responsibility.” She shook her head. “I am comfortable in my judgment in legal matters. Even in meting out execution, when it is warranted. This is a step beyond that.”
“I know.” Fritti shuddered a little. “It feels like . . . taking the power of the gods in my own hands.”
Pale eyebrows rose. “Is that not precisely what we are meant to do? To use the power of the gods, to help mortals? To stand between them, and speak from one to the other?”
Fritti made a face. “That’s easy for you to say. You were born this way.”
“Yes. I was born to serve. You were chosen, Fritti. You have a mind and a spirit that stood out from others. In a way, you are far my superior.” Sigrun’s smile was faint and rueful. “You were trained, just as I was. Just as every god-born or god-touched should be. You are what I am, in a way. But where I am a chooser of the dead, you . . . you are a chooser of the living.”
The Goddess Denied Page 52
