Contents
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty -Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
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Bauldr’s Tears
A Retelling of Loki’s Fate
Alydia Rackham
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Copyright © 2016 Alydia Rackham
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1523842563
ISBN-13: 978-1523842568
For my parents, my brother, Jody and Jaicee
I heard a voice, that cried,
“Balder the Beautiful
Is dead, is dead!"
And through the misty air
Passed like the mournful cry
Of sunward sailing cranes.
I saw the pallid corpse
Of the dead sun
Borne through the Northern sky.
Blasts from Niffelheim
Lifted the sheeted mists
Around him as he passed.
And the voice forever cried,
“Balder the Beautiful
Is dead, is dead!"
And died away
Through the dreary night,
In accents of despair.
Balder the Beautiful,
God of the summer sun,
Fairest of all the Gods!
Light from his forehead beamed,
Runes were upon his tongue,
As on the warrior's sword.
All things in earth and air
Bound were by magic spell
Never to do him harm;
Even the plants and stones;
All save the mistletoe,
The sacred mistletoe!
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Chapter One
“Loki Farbautison,” the deep, quiet voice resounded through the white marble courtyard. “You have been accused of murdering an Aesir—a willful and wicked act that cannot, through any cunning, be undone. Do you deny it?”
Slate gray clouds hung low, blocking the sun. Icy wind whipped between the pillars, tugging at the long, black, draping clothes and loosened blonde hair of the crowd of courtiers who hugged the perimeter. All of their pale faces, stark eyes, turned toward the center of the yard, where a young man stood alone.
He also wore black, with tatters hanging down from his shoulders and long sleeves. His long, colorless, shackled hands did not move, nor did his lean form shift. His curly, dark brown hair ruffled in the wind, strands falling down across his white brow.
He slowly raised his head. Beneath ink-dark eyebrows, striking eyes lifted to the far end of the courtyard—eyes like a gray dawn; alive, but distant. The courtiers focused on his angular, handsome face, noble nose, cheekbones and chin, and firm, quiet mouth. They watched him unblinkingly, waiting for his answer.
He took a breath, and slightly lifted his right eyebrow.
“Is there a point in answering?” He spoke lowly, each word elegant and precise. Vapor issued from his lips. The crowd seethed. Their murmurs rumbled like low thunder.
And the first one who had spoken—a tall, white-bearded king garbed in night, seated in a wooden throne on the dais—slammed his hand down on the armrest.
The blow shook the air.
His single sapphire eye blazed, and he gritted his teeth. His wizened brow knotted around his eye patch, and his fists clenched.
“You murdered my son,” he snarled. “You, who we took in as one of our own. You, who have been our…our friend for countless centuries. You have betrayed us.” The one-eyed king paused. His voice roughened. “You have betrayed me.”
The court murmured and groaned. Some shielded their eyes, others leaned their heads against their loved ones’. Loki Farbautison twisted his left hand and lifted his shoulder. His chains clinked. As if he could not help it, he glanced to the king’s right, where a magnificent, golden-headed prince stood, clad in dulled gold armor, and a heavy thundercloud of a cape that hung from his shoulders to his ankles. For an instant, Loki’s gray eyes met the prince’s burning blue ones. But the prince’s brow twisted, his eyes closed, and he turned his lion-like head away, pressing a hand to his mouth and over his bearded jaw. Loki swallowed, and turned again to the king. He raised his eyebrows.
“What can I say?” he asked.
The king would not look at him. His hand flexed, and he stared fixedly at something to his right.
“You make no defense, you will not answer for your conduct,” the king said hoarsely. “Therefore, we must acknowledge that there can be no question of your guilt.” He shut his eye, and closed his fist. “You murdered my son, a prince of Asgard. There is only one possible consequence.”
The court held its breath. The blue-eyed prince turned to hide the tears that spilled down his face. The king lifted his chin.
“Loki Farbautison,” he declared into the silence. “You are sentenced to death.”
Loki’s long-lashed eyes closed. Overhead, a groan of thunder rolled through the clouds.
And it began to snow.
Three Months Earlier…
Thunder growled around the thick wooden walls of the house as Marina Faroe crept from the sitting room toward the library, holding only a lit candle in her right hand. As her stocking feet slid across the floorboards, she bit her lip and prayed she wouldn’t trip over any of the boxes she had left out. The darkness hung thick and heavy around her, unwilling to flit away as her candlelight intruded. With her free hand, she pulled her long cashmere wrap closer around her very slight form, though the movement made her stiff arm ache from her thumb to her elbow.
She slipped through the pokey corridor, and then her feet padded onto the deep red, tapestry-like carpet of the library. She crossed the room, then reached up and pushed her candle down into a wooden candlestick standing on the carved mantle. Then, she knelt, groped for the matchbox, and leaned into the fireplace to snap flame from a single match, then light the tinder and logs inside.
It was difficult—the last three fingers of her left hand stayed curled close to her palm, and her wrist refused to extend more than halfway, leaving all the work to be done by her right hand, and the forefinger and weak thumb of her left. Besides which, it hurt.
However, after a few minutes of quiet struggle, a small fire danced against the rough-hewn stones, warming her narrow face, and lighting her hazel eyes. She dusted her right hand off on her jeans, then pushed her sleek, unbound black hair out of her face. Taking a breath, she lifted her head, folded her arms, and glanced around the room.
Deep bookshelves covered all the walls, except for the door and the wide fireplace. Empty cardboard boxes sat against the north wall, the
ir former contents now lining the shelves. Ancient, leather-bound manuscripts, their spines ragged, their pages yellowed, sat in uneven rows, the titles illegible in the flickering half dark. But Marina knew them all—knew them like weathered faces of old friends. They belonged to her dad’s collection: volumes of Norse poetry, Viking travel records, maps, folklore, songs and legends. Some had been inscribed by hand, in now-faded ink. Others were first editions of research published a hundred years ago. She had read every one.
Marina sighed, bringing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her right arm around them, leaning back against more unpacked boxes as the scent of burning pine and the crackle of the flames filled the silence.
She glanced up at the softly-ticking, intricately-carved Swiss clock sitting on one side of the mantle. She could barely see its face by the light of the candle—it was past ten. Her delicate mouth hardened. The storm had knocked the electricity out, so she couldn’t charge her dead cell phone, and she hadn’t set up her landline yet. She couldn’t have called her mother in New York at nine-thirty. Even if she had wanted to.
She shifted, pressing her left arm against her stomach, turning her head to consider the empty shelves on the south wall. Tomorrow, she would set her dad’s collection of rusty Viking swords on the middle ones, along with his glass cases of beaten coins. She would heft the small, stone idols of Odin, Loki, Thor and Frigga to the very top shelves, so they could be studied, but never touched. And in the far corner, across the room, she would stand the three-hundred-year-old half-tree up, so that all of the wide-eyed, gaping faces and squatty bodies of the dwarves carved into it could be seen in the firelight. And over the mantle…
She got up. Thunder rumbled again, shaking the upper stories. Marina stepped nimbly through the maze of boxes on the floor, and bent over one in the back. She pried the lid open, then reached in with her right hand and pulled on a thick, gold-painted frame.
Carefully, she slid it up and out. Firelight flashed against the glass. She straightened, and held it up. For a long while, she just stood there, gazing at the broad picture within the frame. Then, she turned, moved back to the mantle, and, grunting, managed to lift the picture up and set it there, and let it ease back to rest against the wall. She stepped back and gazed at it, keeping her left arm pressed to her chest. She took a deep breath, and her lips moved to mouth the words penned beneath the strange drawing. Words she had whispered thousands of times.
“Stien til Asgard…”
Silence answered her. Silence that had always been interrupted before by a deep, eager voice forming words of explanation—a bright eye, a roughened hand reaching up to point at the illuminated edges, a smile bordered by a dark, graying beard…
A tear escaped her guard. It spilled down her cheek. She swiped it away, swallowed hard and tightened her jaw—but the flutter of the candle’s flame drew her gaze back to the picture. Marina’s arms tightened around herself as thunder once again grumbled overhead, and the spring rain broke loose, and lashed the outer walls.
Chapter Two
Marina took a deep breath of cool morning air, thick with the scent of rain, and shut the front door behind her, as the sunlight warmed her whole body. She stepped down the short landing and turned back to glance up at her new house. “New” being a relative word—it was actually only new to her.
She could see it better now than she had when she had moved in. Yesterday, it had been cloudy, and she had ducked her head and hauled boxes inside between spats of rain. But today, golden sunshine bathed the whole house, and she stopped on the brick pathway to look for a moment.
Three stories, all dark weathered wood, with a peaked roof and simple, sturdy bric-a-brac around the thick-pillared porch, and upper windows. Marina narrowed her eyes at those dusty, flaking windows. They needed cleaned and sealed and painted. And she was fairly certain that the deep-green, hardy ivy growing up the north side had already slipped its inquisitive fingers in through the windows of the second story.
She took another deep breath, and glanced around at the rest of the yard. The lush, dew-gleaming lawn needed mowed, the rosebushes flanking the path had twisted and sprawled out of their bounds, and the iron-wrought fence surrounding the whole half-acre needed re-painted. And she didn’t even want to look at the snarled knot that was the vegetable garden on the north side.
She paused, listening. Birds chirped in the motionless boughs of the towering pines and oaks that surrounded and filled her property, but aside from that quiet, cheerful sound, all remained silent. She nearly smiled. So different from the rushing, wailing, flashing, seething streets of Manhattan.
She turned, adjusted the collar of her draping sweater wrap, and strode down the uneven walkway between the rose bushes, her boots tapping on the bricks. She pushed the squeaking iron gate out of the way, turned and opened the door of her dad’s pickup truck—a sturdy, new red Ford that had carried everything of hers up all the winding, sweeping roads from New York to here: an empty house by a tiny town near the Bay of Fundy.
She opened the door and crawled up into the cab—it was like climbing a tree. Her dad had been a lot bigger than her…
She settled, pulled her purse strap over her head and set her purse in the passenger seat, slammed the door, and started the big diesel engine. It grumbled to life as her keys jingled, and she gingerly pulled the truck out into the dirt road, sitting far forward in the seat and steering with just her right hand.
As she drove, the sunlight flashed through the trees and against the left side of her face. Marina rolled the window down, to let the fresh air in. She bit her lip, hoping she could remember the way back into town. She’d driven through it yesterday, late, but it had been in the rain…
She didn’t push the truck faster than twenty five, and she didn’t listen to any music as she maneuvered the road that wound through a canyon of pines, her left hand resting in her lap. She only came to one fork in the road, hesitated for a moment, wincing, then turned right. After a few minutes, though, she breathed a sigh. Here it was.
Marina doubted this little town appeared on most maps. But it had a medium-sized, stone post office that she could see from here, a wide, sunlit main street lined with a few quaint shops, a two-pump gas station, and a general store at the far end that she hoped would have what she needed.
She pulled up in front of the broad-windowed, brick general store and parked, then opened the door and slid down out of the truck. Her boots crunched on the gravel as she stepped up onto the sidewalk. She glanced to the right and realized that the store snugged up right next to what was probably the only restaurant in town—a white, pleasant little deli with the name Theresa’s painted in curly writing on the window—and the hanging sign said Closed.
Marina pushed the door of the general store open. A bell jangled over her head. She eased inside and let the door click shut behind her.
The shop was small, dimly-lit, and packed with rows of loaded standing shelves. White and maroon checked tiles made up the floor, and jars of old-fashioned candy almost covered the cashier’s counter off to her far left.
Before she had taken three steps, a middle-aged man in a plaid shirt and jeans stepped out from behind one of the back shelves.
“’Morning,” he greeted her, smiling. “Can I help you find anything?”
“Um,” Marina adjusted her purse strap on her shoulder and glanced around. “Paint?”
“Interior or exterior?” he asked, coming closer.
“Exterior,” she answered. “I’m painting my window frames.”
“It’s a nice day for that,” he commented. “Yeah, come this way.” He beckoned, then started back the way he had come. Marina followed him.
“Is there a specific color you’re looking for?”
“They used to be deep green,” Marina said. “Almost all the paint is gone now, but I think that’s right—some sort of pine green.”
The storekeeper paused and glanced back at her, brow furrowed.
“Which hous
e are you painting?” he wondered. “I’ve sold paint to pretty much everybody in this town, and there’s nobody with pine green windows.”
Marina almost smiled.
“I’m new in town—just moved in yesterday,” she said. “I bought the Stellan house.”
The storekeeper, now standing in front of a rainbow of paint swatches on the wall, stopped and looked at her.
“You mean…” He raised his eyebrows. “You mean that old, Danish-looking house on the edge of town?” he pointed. “The one where that author lived for all those years before he went out into the forest and…”
“Yeah,” Marina nodded, then shrugged, smiling. “What can I say? It was cheap.”
He laughed, then turned to search the swatches.
“Ghosts don’t bother you, huh?”
“No such thing,” Marina said quietly, the smile fading from her face.
“Tell that to the people around here,” the shopkeeper answered, reaching up to pull a couple swatches off the wall. “Especially after most of us have seen or heard more than one weird thing in those woods.” He turned and gave her a pointed look. “Word to the wise: don’t go out there at night. No matter what you think you see.”
Marina frowned at him, alarmed, but he was perfectly serious, so she nodded once. He faced the swatches again, and pulled down one more, then handed them to her with another smile.
“Feel free to take these home and see how they look.”
“I think I’ll actually pick one out now, if you’ll give me a minute,” Marina said, taking them from him.
“Okay, sure,” he nodded. “Take your time. I’ll just be up here organizing some stuff by the counter.”
“All right,” Marina said, and he left her alone in the aisle with three swatches of green. Marina watched him go, her brow slowly furrowing as she rubbed her thumb up and down the pieces of paper.
The overhead radio clicked on, playing oldies. She blinked, and forced herself to look down at the different shades.
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