Freya and the Magic Jewel

by Joan Holub

  In third-period Runes class they spent time outdoors using wooden wands to draw runes in the snow. The teacher said that later, after they’d reviewed more symbols, they’d learn to foretell destiny with the use of small, carved rune stones. She would have liked to keep taking this class as well.

  Then came lunch, which she shared with her three podmates. While eating, they continued to come up with possible names for their pod in Vingolf.

  “Yggdragirls?”

  “The Pod Squad?”

  Idun sighed. “Those don’t feel quite right.”

  Freya nodded. “Let’s face it—they’re just not us.”

  “Yeah, we need something with girl power,” said Skade.

  “The Norse Force?” suggested Sif.

  Although they kind of liked this one, they were still unsure about it, so they kept tossing around ideas. All the while Freya couldn’t help imagining what might be going on back home at her old school. Her Vanaheim friends would be making jewelry without her and practicing ice-skating drills without her. Were they missing her? She missed doing all the familiar, fun things they’d done together. Despite the interesting classes and these nice podmate girls, being here at AA was a tough change!

  After lunch she had two more classes to go. The hall for her fourth-period Findings class was at the top of a branch ladder. Its portal door was made of real, dazzling gold studded with gemstones! As she gazed at the door in wonder, Ms. Frigg came by.

  “Are you the Findings teacher?” Freya asked her in surprise.

  Ms. Frigg shook her head and gestured toward another portal nearby. “I teach one class only—Runes, fourth period. My coprincipal duties keep me too busy for more.”

  “Oh. Well, I want to thank you for the pouch,” Freya said sincerely. She held it out, showing Ms. Frigg that she’d strung it on one of her bead necklaces. “How did you know I’d lost one? Are you a seer too?” Freya asked, hoping this was not the case. She wasn’t ready for Odin to find out the truth about Brising being gone!

  Ms. Frigg laughed. “Goodness, no! Knitting and spinning are my talents. However, I suppose I can see in a way. I can tell when people are missing something, so I knit a replacement for them if I can.”

  If only Ms. Frigg could knit a mini version of the entire village of Vanaheim so Freya could carry it around with her always! The notion of a teeny, lopsided knitted replica of her village made her grin.

  After Ms. Frigg had continued on to teach Runes, Freya pushed through the golden door to Findings. To her delight, it turned out to be a jewelry-making class with all the gold she could ever want for creating her designs. Woo-hoo! “Findings,” she learned, was the general term for the tools they would use to make their jewelry.

  Her last class of the day was Ragnarok Survival Skills. Its door was dark wood that was divided into nine rectangles, each carved with a scene to represent one of the nine worlds. Once through the portal, she entered a vast landscape with all kinds of climbing walls and obstacle courses. She quickly spotted Loki, Thor, Od, Skade, and Idun in the class. Idun motioned her over to sit with her on a large rock, and they both waved to Skade where she sat with some girlgiants. There were no chairs. Everyone else sat on the ground or on rocks too.

  Suddenly Heimdall, the security guard, walked in. “Welcome, Asguardians! And I’m spelling that with a u as in ‘guard,’ ” he boomed. “Because learning to guard Asgard is what you’ll be doing here.”

  Freya and Idun shared confused glances. Somehow they were going to learn how to guard Asgard Academy?

  “I’ll be your teacher this period. Every student at this school will spend one hour a week here at this guard post with me, acquiring skills that will keep Ragnarok at bay,” Heimdall went on.

  Huh? This classroom is a guard post? Freya recalled the word “Ragnarok” from that button on the column behind the goat fountain in the V. She had a feeling they would all soon be told what that button-under-glass was for, and that it would be something unpleasant.

  “If he’s teaching this class, who’s watching the bridge?” she whispered to Idun.

  “Good question,” Idun whispered back.

  Heimdall whipped around. “This is the bridge!” he informed them. “Or rather my hall, Himinbjorg, which overlooks it.” He stood at least twenty feet away. How had he managed to hear them talking?

  “Be aware that I can hear the grass grow! I can even hear the wool grow on sheep. And I hear when students whisper, too.” Heimdall didn’t name names, but Freya and Idun knew he meant them, and sent each other sheepish looks.

  “Someday we will battle a terrible foe that will spill out from one of the worlds to attack us!” Heimdall continued, pacing back and forth among the students now. “There will be a long winter. A great fire. Mighty Yggdrasil will shudder and quake. A great serpent will be unleashed. The alarm button in the Valhallateria will sound five hundred and forty blasts! It will be us against monsters! Doomsday!”

  Doomsday? Freya had heard that word too often recently—beginning with Brising’s future-telling. Ragnarok must be the doomsday her jewel had meant! The one that could be stopped by the power of that mysterious secret world. And that “X540” on the button in the V? It must refer to the alarm’s five hundred and forty blasts.

  “Doomsday, huh. Well, that sounds . . . fun,” joked Od, who broke the silence that had fallen and made everyone laugh.

  He had said just the right thing to ease the tension. Her crush had a sense of humor, too! Freya sat up straighter on her rock perch. Wait a minute! Crush? Was she really crushing on a boy? Not exactly. Not yet, anyway. But for the first time she kind of cared whether or not a particular boy liked her. Her whole world had just been ragnarocked!

  She smiled to herself at the word she’d just made up. It was perfect for describing a time when your own personal inside-yourself world was so totally shaken up that heads felt like tails and you went from feeling normal to feeling weird. Basically, like what had been happening to her for the last two days.

  Snapping back to attention, Freya heard Heimdall assuring the class that with proper preparation and caution, the real Ragnarok could be avoided for a long, long time.

  “I hope it never comes!” she blurted out. The end of the worlds was a scary thing to contemplate, so it was good they could do something to keep that day from coming too soon.

  “Not me—I look forward to the fight!” shouted Thor. The boys all cheered.

  Freya and many of the girls rolled their eyes.

  “Girls are every bit as good at fighting, though. If we ever have to!” said Skade.

  “Yeah!” shouted the girls.

  When Heimdall dismissed them later, Idun went to chat with Skade. But Freya walked superfast out of the hall, not wanting to talk to anyone, especially Od, until she figured out her feelings. She hardly even knew that boy, so how could she know if she was really in like with him?

  School was over, and none of the teachers had given her any homework yet. It seemed like the perfect time to sneak away and go snooping in Darkalfheim for her jewel. Freya was nearing the Bifrost Bridge when she noticed Heimdall already there, standing guard. He would probably ask her a bunch of nosy questions about where she was off to. Should she tell him the truth about her destination? It was said that dwarfs were unpredictable and that you could get lost forever in their underground tunnels, so he’d likely try to talk her out of going where she needed to go.

  Her kittycart! Instead of crossing the bridge, she would use that to fly to Darkalfheim. She veered into the nearby golden forest, where no one would notice her take off in it.

  Walking along the fernway, she could hear Mason working on the wall in the distance. Bam! went his sledgehammer. Snort! went his horse. After learning about Ragnarok, she now realized how important rebuilding the protective wall really was. So it was actually a good thing he was working on it.

  Still, she didn’t want to have to make good on her promise to give her heart to a boy who wasn’t special to her.
He couldn’t finish in time, right? Just in case, before two more days could pass, she needed to find Brising and Gullveig, and also talk Frey into going home!

  Bam! Bam! Snort! Snort!

  Freya sped off, trying to escape the worrisome sounds.

  13

  Gullveig

  IN THE GOLDEN WOODS FREYA slowed as she passed the spot where the little slot door had slid open in Yggdrasil’s tree trunk the previous day. She was the only one in this forest right now. Since school was out, other students were either on Ragnarok guard duty, studying, playing games, or hanging out to wait for dinner.

  She paused and rapped her knuckles on the bark, not really expecting anything to happen. “Hey, you in there! Knock, knock!”

  Ka-chunk! To her shock, the bark slid open just like the first time! Eyes stared back at her from the slot in the tree. Not those brown ones. No, she’d recognize these eyes anywhere. This was Gullveig!

  “Amma!” A rush of joy filled her. But what was Gullveig doing inside Yggdrasil’s trunk? And why did she look strangely close, yet also far away?

  “Freya! I’m so glad to see you,” said Gullveig, her dear face creasing into wrinkles as she smiled. Atop her gray hair she wore a blue wool hat that Freya had embroidered for her with glittery white snowflakes.

  “What are you doing in there?” Freya exclaimed.

  Before her amma could reply, they heard voices from somewhere down the fernway that led to the Valhallateria. “Someone’s coming,” said Gullveig. “Quick. Use your fingertip to trace the words ‘Knowledge is power’ on your palm,” she ordered. “Then step forward until your nose and toes press against the tree.”

  “What?” Feeling a little foolish, Freya did as instructed.

  Whoosh! Instantly she found herself standing inside a hollowed-out space in the very middle of the tree trunk, with Gullveig beside her. It took powerful magic to transport something as big as an entire girl through tree bark all the way to the center of the World Tree—Yggdrasil magic!

  She and Gullveig hugged joyfully, grinning at each other. Then Freya gazed about in wonder. They were standing on a round wooden floor about two hundred feet across with a large hole in its center, through which she could view numerous other floors below them with similar holes. Several transparent tubular slides that ranged from about one to four feet in diameter corkscrewed up through the holes from somewhere far below.

  The tree’s curved inner walls were lined with runebook-filled shelves that extended as far downward as the eye could see. There were ladders on wheels that followed tracks here and there along the shelves, so by climbing from one ladder to another, all the other floors and their books could be reached. Comfy seating areas were haphazardly placed throughout the space.

  “What are you doing here? What is this place?” Freya asked.

  “Got myself a job,” the old sorceress replied proudly. “Been working here in the Heartwood Library for Mimir.”

  “Who’s Mimir?” asked Freya, not seeing anyone else around. Suddenly a column of bright-blue water shot up through one of the tubular slides to bubble in a tall fountainlike spout at eye level. Atop the spout sat a . . . head!

  “Someone call me?” asked the head. Glub, glub.

  “Freya, this is Mimir, the head librarian,” Gullveig said to her.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Freya told Mimir. She almost laughed at the idea of calling him the head librarian but managed to stop herself in time. She didn’t want to hurt Mimir’s feelings!

  He bowed his head graciously. “Welcome to the Heartwood Library.” Heartwood was a tree’s hardest wood, located at its center, Freya knew, so this was a fitting name.

  “Mimir’s incredibly smart,” Gullveig went on. “He’s known in all nine worlds for the extent of his knowledge.”

  “I don’t know everything,” Mimir admitted. “But what I don’t know, I can usually find in a book.”

  Wow! What she wouldn’t give to have a brain like Mimir’s. But only if it were in a head connected to a body!

  There were so many questions Freya wanted to ask right now. Like: Why were Gullveig and Mimir in here? Who had originally built this library? Also, how could a head live without a body, anyway?

  But then she noticed that Mimir’s eyes were brown, and something clicked. “It was your eye that looked out at me from Yggdrasil’s trunk yesterday! And you I saw in the heart vision I had at Gullveig’s hut, too!” she exclaimed to Mimir.

  He nodded, which caused him to gently bob atop the waterspout. “Correct. Gullveig told me I could trust you not to tell anyone our whereabouts, so I summoned you here.”

  Then Freya had another aha moment. The Heart wood Library? This place had to be the secret world Brising had been talking about in its prophecy two days ago:

  Adventure for you is about to start.

  In Asgard you must find the heart.

  A secret world there hides away

  That holds the power to stop doomsday!

  But how could a library stop Ragnarok? she wondered. Then her eyes wandered to the sign at the front of the library:

  THE HEARTWOOD LIBRARY

  Knowledge Is Power

  Of course! Libraries were totally full of knowledge. And somehow the stuff in this library was going to save them from doom. She’d figured out Brising’s future-telling! There were a lot of books here, though. Which one had the necessary knowledge? Time would tell, she hoped.

  Freya cocked her head at Mimir curiously. “Why did you say that stuff about Yggdrasil needing me?”

  “Because it’s true. Gullveig says you have gifts, magical ones. War is very hard on Yggdrasil. But with your abilities and mine, and perhaps the magic of others, too, we can help the World Tree survive all this fighting,” explained Mimir.

  His words confused Freya. First off, she had only one gift—future-seeing magic, which she needed her jewel to do. And secondly, what war was he talking about? The Asgard-Vanaheim war had ended, and Ragnarok had not begun (and hopefully never would!). Before she could ask, Gullveig spoke up again.

  “I’m so happy you’ve come.” Gullveig picked up a small branch from a pile of them on a table and began whittling it to a thinner shape. She had made wands back in Vanaheim, too, capable of magic that could do simple tasks. “All this hiding has grown tiresome. It’ll be nice for Mimir and me to have company. You’re such a joy to have around, always good at finding a bright side during dark times.” Having finished a wand, she sent it off to dust a shelf on its own and began another.

  “Dark times? Why are you hiding?” asked Freya, growing more confused by the minute.

  “The why should be obvious,” began Mimir. “The war.”

  “It’s the what we’re hiding that’s the secret,” Gullveig finished. Tossing her whittling aside, she marched over to a large, ancient-looking leather trunk in the shadows of the stairs and opened it. It was full of gold!

  Alarmed, Freya exclaimed, “Then the rumors are true? You stole Asgard’s gold?”

  “What? No!” Gullveig let go of the trunk’s lid and it bammed shut. “I’m helping Mimir protect it from thieves who might like to steal it while Asgard’s defenses are down.”

  Phew! So Gullveig hadn’t stolen gold because of Freya’s wish to have some for jewelry making after all. Hooray!

  “This all started when Odin sent Mimir on a diplomatic mission to Vanaheim,” Gullveig explained.

  “You were in Vanaheim?” Freya gazed at Mimir in surprise.

  He nodded, causing his head to bob up and down on top of the waterspout. “Briefly. And while I was there, a slight misunderstanding caused me to lose my head, er, body.”

  Picking up the thread of the story, Gullveig sent him a fond smile. “Got in way over his head in a situation he couldn’t make heads or tails of.” She laughed merrily and Mimir joined in.

  “Ha-ha!” he guffawed. “Stop! You’re going to make me laugh my head off!” He spun around and around in a way that looked rather dangerous to Freya. She
held her breath, fearing his head might fall to the floor and roll away! But phew! That didn’t happen.

  Abruptly, Mimir stopped spinning, his eyes going serious. “Odin once asked me to safeguard Asgard’s gold if trouble ever started. So when Gullveig spotted some frost giants stealing it, we stole it back.”

  Gullveig nodded. “Saw ’em hide the gold in a freshwater pool we call the Spring of Mimir near Jotunheim.” She gestured at the spout Mimir sat upon. “We discovered this tubular water slide runs through one of Yggdrasil’s roots, from that spring all the way up here.”

  “And that’s how we found this library,” Mimir said with a huge smile. “Purely by accident. In fact, the books in here helped us reverse engineer this slide. Whooshed the gold out from under the frost giants’ giant noses and all the way up here. Before we could get word to Odin, war broke out. Gullveig set her magic wands to organizing this place, and we sat tight.”

  “Feels like home now,” Gullveig said proudly. “Not even Odin knows about this library, I’ll bet. You’ll be safe in here with us until this horrible war ends,” she added, coming over to pat Freya’s hand.

  Wait! Thoughts were bubbling around in Freya’s brain, connecting themselves. Did these two think the war between Asgard and Vanaheim had actually been a war between Asgard and the frost giants? And that that war was still going on? Could Odin have forgotten he’d asked Mimir to safeguard the gold in case of trouble? Maybe those frost giants had seen Gullveig sneaking off with the gold and reported that she’d stolen it? Probably on purpose to make Asgard mad at Vanaheim! So maybe those giants had caused the war, not Gullveig.

  Before Freya could discuss these guesses with her amma and the librarian, Mimir went a little cross-eyed and then began spinning again. He went faster and faster, twirling crazily in place atop the roiling water and spattering drops every which way.