The one Loki requested was on the smaller of the world’s northern continents. The bridge stone itself, as with most of those on Midgard, lay fallen and forgotten by the world’s inhabitants. This particular stone was weathered and covered in moss and lichen, its runes long vanished, its communication crystal cracked and trapped against the equally-aged oak against which it leaned. The oak’s thick roots had lifted one corner of the stone from the earth.
“This way.” Loki offered his arm to me. After one last moment of uncertainty, I took hold of his elbow and let him lead me. I only needed a bridge stone as a target, not as a starting point for a bridge. If trouble happened, I could open a way directly to Asgard and get us out of it.
Or so I reasoned.
“It’s a nice world, isn’t it?” Loki tipped his head back and inhaled deeply. “Room to breathe.”
I glanced around at a forest of heavy-limbed, black-barked trees, mostly shrouded in fog. Nothing struck me as being particularly beautiful about it. But Loki had closed his eyes, and some of the hard edges had fallen from his face. In the soft lines that replaced them, I glimpsed the boy he must have once been.
“It is.” I tightened my fingers slightly around his arm and added a note of gentle urgency. “But we have to hurry. We’re not supposed to be here.”
Loki opened his eyes. They glittered like polished obsidian. One corner of his mouth curled up, into an expression that I’d learned could mean either amusement or disdain.
“That’s half the fun of it, little rainbow.”
I tugged at his arm. “Maybe for you. Come on.”
Loki heaved a theatrical sigh and rolled his eyes. But he also put his free hand over the one I had on his arm and picked up the pace.
The apple trees were as close as Loki had promised. Shorter and greener but no less gnarled than the surrounding oaks, they held apples twice the size of those in Idun’s orchard. Loki let go of my hand and slipped away from me, ducking branches. After a second, I followed, picking my way through fallen fruit that cluttered the spongy turf beneath the trees.
Loki stopped a few feet ahead of me and stretched on tiptoe to reach into the lowest branches. When he turned around, it was to hold a ruby-daubed fruit toward me. When I took it, it filled both hands.
“It’s huge,” I said.
Loki’s grin quirked. “Are we still talking about apples?” he quipped, playing off my earlier remark so neatly that I wondered if he’d somehow manipulated me into it.
“Stop.” But I half-laughed as I said it.
I lifted the apple close to my nose, closed my eyes, and inhaled. The apple’s scent shivered across my tongue, promising bright-sharp tart-sweetness.
“Too bad Baldur didn’t say that a split second sooner to Thor this morning.”
Loki’s voice sounded more distant. It also rang with a self-satisfaction that sent a thrill of suspicion up my spine—that, and the fact that Loki had voluntarily mentioned Baldur.
Once a week or so, the Aesir held a council meeting of sorts in the center of the city, beside the Yggdrasil. In a bit of overly-flashy pageantry, Baldur and Thor, clad in their ceremonial armor, traditionally opened the meeting by clashing their hammers together.
This morning, Baldur’s hammer had nearly slid from his grasp when he hefted it. Thor’s incoming blow had glanced off Baldur’s shoulder, in part because Thor had twisted his aim to the side. Baldur had, quite brilliantly, simply stood there with his mouth hanging open. When Thor’s blow had struck him, he’d squealed like a small child.
The other part of Baldur’s fortune was that Loki had been standing beside Baldur, close enough to reach out and haul Baldur away from the worst of Thor’s blow.
“Loki?” I opened my eyes, the apple’s heavenly scent forgotten.
Loki was several yards deeper into the trees than I, by now. He kept walking, ducking boughs and peering up into the trees.
Holding the apple loosely in one hand, I tramped after him.
“What did you do?” I nearly asked. But that was what one of the Aesir would have asked. What they would have assumed. Could I do that to him?
I eyed the back of Loki’s head, but he didn’t turn. In the haze-filtered sunlight, his dark auburn curls seemed nearly black.
“Baldur’s lucky you were standing nearby.” I spoke the words with careful neutrality. They were not an accusation. “That you were there to drag him back. He could have been hurt much worse.”
Loki’s responding scoff drifted through the dappled shadows beneath the trees. “Not that you heard anyone saying ‘thank you, Loki’ afterward.”
A sick certainty settled into my stomach, that Loki had tampered with Baldur’s hammer himself and set the near-disaster into motion.
What did you do?
Aloud, I only said, still with careful neutrality so that Loki would maybe hear me, “Baldur could as easily have been killed.”
“He’s Aesir.” Despite my caution, Loki’s voice turned cool. “And that pretty armor of his is enchanted. Even if Thor had hit him full-on, he could handle it.”
“It was just a joke,” he seemed to be telling me. “Nothing more harmful than a practical joke.”
Loki’s utter lack of concern ate at me. But maybe he was right—Baldur was Aesir, with a greater share of hardiness and strength than the other races deemed ordinary. This was the first I’d heard of enchanted armor, but it made sense.
“It’s not as if he can’t dish it out.” Loki spoke with a flatness that further ate at me, because this time I thought of the stories Loki had shared of Baldur’s and Thor’s cruelty as children. According to Loki, Thor had been the more physical of the two, but Baldur had been the mastermind behind Thor’s actions. And I’d come to believe, from my time with Loki, that Baldur’s psychological cuts had wounded Loki far more deeply.
“Baldur is worse,” was what Loki would snap at me if I tried to pry further details from him.
And still there was nothing I could say that would sound anything but accusatory. Or like I condoned Loki’s possible involvement in this mysteriously-slippery hammer.
Neither option seemed helpful, to Loki personally or to our friendship. So instead, I sighed and looked up into the trees.
Up close, the bark was black mottled with mossy gray. In amongst the rosy apples, clumps of greenery with smaller leaves grew like small baskets, clinging to the tree branches.
“What is this other stuff?” I didn’t care, particularly. I only wanted to change the subject. “The basket-looking plant?”
“Mistletoe. Nasty parasitic stuff, feeds on the living trees. We don’t have it on Asgard.”
Loki’s voice sounded closer again. I glanced his way.
He carried a half dozen fruit folded up in the hem of his tunic, some still attached to bits of branches and twigs they’d grown on. Bundles of narrower green and tiny white berries clung tenaciously to the same branches.
“Shouldn’t you pull it off the apples before you take them home, then?”
Loki tipped his head and twitched a curious brow furrow at me. “What, the mistletoe? Oh, it’s harmless once it’s out of the tree.”
He stopped beside me and shifted his grip on his tunic to hold it with one hand, leaving the other free to hold out to me. “Can’t hurt a thing. I’ll clean it off once we get you back. Come on, you’re in a hurry, remember? Can’t keep the Watcher waiting.”
And still something in Loki’s tone nagged at me. But I couldn’t place it, and he was right—I needed to get to Heimdal. We’d only been here on Midgard a few minutes. Not even Loki could get into trouble in such a short time.
I held my hand out toward Loki’s, palm up. As he laid his palm down on mine, he smiled, a rare flash of pure happiness that eased my concerns.
“Thank you for indulging my whim, little rainbow. You are a true friend.”
9
* * *
Present day
Light dwindled to dusk as my Jeep covered the sometimes gravel, s
ometimes dirt road between the Cox farmhouse and my own cabin, tucked into the ashes and elms surrounding Cox Lake. The cabin was part of my wage for working the rental office. Further from the lake than the rest of the guest cabins, I imagined the loss of its rental income to Maureen and Everett was less due to the lack of lake view.
A gray fog of confused thoughts and even more confused feelings whirled around me. This time, though, I could paint for real instead of merely pretending as an attempt to distract myself. I followed the stone-paved path from where I parked the Jeep to my front door, flung the door open like a refugee seeking shelter, and quickly shut it behind me. After tossing my keys onto the counter that divided my galley kitchen from the cabin’s single living area, I went directly to the back of the cabin.
My easel sat before a row of tall windows. The warm stink of turpentine and oils filled my senses like holy incense.
Just for an hour. I’ll paint for an hour, and then I’ll decide.
Burnt sienna and Phthalo blue. Cad red and viridian and ochre. The colors soothed, and the brush in my hand stroked away the pack of growling uncertainties about whether I should stay here at Cox Lake Resort.
While I painted, the sky’s dusk sank to darkness. Inside the cabin, I continued to paint long after the sun’s light had faded. I didn’t need it, not for painting. Asgard had taken my magic, but they couldn’t change who or what I was. I could feel the colors of the paints, choosing them as much by the sensation of the wavelengths of light bouncing back from them as by visibly witnessing them.
I painted for far longer than an hour, past midnight and into the wee hours of the morning. By the time I drew back from the canvas, I could feel the northern lights, the speeding solar winds a distant roar in my consciousness. With a sigh deeper than simple weariness, I cleaned my brush and left my painting.
A strip of decking ran along the back of the cabin, accessible through casement doors at one end of the windowed wall. I stepped outside into the night’s chill and closed the door behind me.
The southerly pull of the magnetic field tingled against my fingertips. As I waited for the ethereal colors to appear in the field of black overhanging the trees, I longed to feel the colors of my magic around me, too. Even after so long without it, its absence was as keen as pain.
The lights wouldn’t become visible for another fifteen minutes or more, but I leaned against the deck’s railing, content to simply be still and wait for the undulating curtain of ghostly color to paint itself above me. Each ribbon of green or orange or deep red felt like a strand of the rainbow bridges I used to be able to create. Sometimes, I imagined that through the dancing colors, I could catch a glimpse of Asgard’s distant halls.
It’s better that I can’t see.
I saw enough, as it was. I saw more in the lights than any mortal ever would. I felt a tension in the aurora borealis that echoed my long-lost magic, a magic that could become a bridge between the gods’ Asgard and the mortal-populated Midgard where I stood. All it needed was the right touch.
My touch. Except I no longer had that power, did I?
Every time I’d moved in the last six years, I’d told myself I’d go south. Away from cold and snow and all the things that reminded me of Asgard—of Heimdal and Loki and all the things that had gone wrong. Surely staying where everything reminded me so much of that place and those men did nothing to mitigate my homesickness. But I couldn’t bear to leave behind the lights entirely, no matter the ache they created in my chest.
Asgard, and a man I should not miss.
More clear-headed now that I’d had time at my easel, I again considered the thought that had occurred to me so many times over the course of the day.
Is it time to go?
Traveling to a new place held little appeal in and of itself. However enamored I’d been of stories about Midgard in the past, it held much less appeal now that I lived here. Maybe the gods hadn’t treated me as harshly as they could have. But there were many ways to inflict pain. What they’d taken from me was as painful as anything they could have done to me.
Recalled humiliation and the agony of betrayal crashed anew into my chest. Oh, what I would do to never feel that pain again.
I should go.
That felt like a decision. I thought it should make me feel lighter with relief—I would never again stand in Maureen Cox’s kitchen and listen to her dying husband’s struggle to breathe. I wouldn’t feel obligated to offer a sympathetic ear to Claire Wenham.
I would never again stand on this deck with my face toward the sky.
A breeze ran teasing fingers through my hair and lifted it in moon-stained streamers around my head. I followed the breeze off the deck, down the steps and nearer to the lake, where the cabin blocked less of the sky. I made it two paces out from the bottom step onto the spongy, dew-soaked grass.
My magic, distant and silent as the sky for six years, whispered directly against my skin.
I froze where I stood and peered sightlessly into the dark that lay between the trees around the cabin. Listening. Waiting.
Again. Not a far-off promise of power, but filling the air around me. In the tight darkness of early morning, wispy streamers of color danced. I felt the single spark of white brilliance I’d thought snuffed out forever, just there inside my head.
My magic. Not distant. Not blocked.
Here.
10
* * *
Six years past and worlds away
I pulled my feet onto the wooden bench and tucked them beneath me. Warmth from Valhalla’s hearth glowed against my skin, but even snuggled inside fur-lined slippers, my toes somehow always managed to remain cold.
Heimdal sat at the opposite end of the same bench, as far from me as he could get. The two of us sat in the great hall, by the hearth furthest from the High Seat, although that stood empty for the moment. A handful of servants worked that other end of the room, laying fresh rushes on the plank floor, but aside from that the hall was empty.
Heimdal leaned forward, face toward the hearth and forearms resting on his knees, a cup of mead in his strong fingers. I studied him in profile—the lazy tousle of his hair, the strong line of his jaw, the way his silver-trimmed shirt stretched taut across his muscled shoulders.
A small frown knit his brow, as it so often did when I started asking questions in an attempt to turn his terse explanations about things into full-blown stories, complete with details I considered crucial and Heimdal evidently viewed as needless fluff.
I sighed. “All right. If you ‘don’t know’ any more stories about Midgard, then I guess you don’t.”
“Don’t know” had been Heimdal’s assertion. So many people lived on Midgard. Surely stories about that world must be plentiful.
The creases smoothed from Heimdal’s forehead. I saw his shoulders hitch in a sigh of his own.
I missed him, suddenly. Not stone-faced and recalcitrant Heimdal, but the warm and charming man with sunshine in his voice and a hint of a smile that I’d first met. Which was ridiculous, because I’d known that Heimdal for all of an hour. I hadn’t seen him since.
A hand on my shoulder. Fingers brushing my cheek, as I hid from my grief.
“Tell me something else, then,” I said, suddenly desperate to keep him talking.
Heimdal lifted his head and turned his face toward me, his eyebrows raised enough that I realized some of my desperation must have filtered into my voice.
“Please,” I added.
A moment from our first meeting echoed in my memory, of standing inside Heimdal’s arms with only his magical ward standing between me and the firestorm that had destroyed my world and now thrashed against the ward in an attempt to reach us.
“Please,” I’d whispered, wanting him to do something to help people we both knew couldn’t be helped.
An odd expression flitted across Heimdal’s face. Maybe he was remembering, too. He looked again into the hearth, and his brow creased all over again.
“Such a
s?” he asked.
The resignation in his voice abruptly flipped my desperation into determination. I hadn’t imagined the connection we’d felt the first time we’d met. I just hadn’t. What had been going on with him since, I didn’t know. Maybe he thought he was respecting my grief. Maybe he was playing dutiful Watcher for Odin, and Watchers weren’t allowed to smile or be friendly. I didn’t know. I just knew I was tired of it.
Without turning his head, Heimdal glanced at me from the corner of his eye.
He can hear my pulse. Did he know that irritation had caused its quickening?
“I don’t care. Anything.” I didn’t need Frigg’s talent for foretelling to predict the response that would net me, so I hurried to add, “What’s the smallest sound you can hear?”
As soon as the question was out of my mouth, I regretted it.
Again with the raised eyebrows, although he didn’t look at me this time. Heimdal pursed his lips and peered into his mead cup.
“The grass,” he finally replied. He spoke the words carefully.
I swore I heard that faintly-recalled note of amusement behind them. My heart lifted, tentatively hopeful.
“The grass,” I repeated. “Grass doesn’t make a sound. Unless you count the wind blowing through it. But everyone can hear that.”
“I can hear it growing.” Heimdal paused for a single gulp from his cup. “Its roots make a quiet, whispering sort of sound as it pushes through the earth. Like the worms do.”
I stared at him. He certainly looked serious. When did Heimdal not? Still, my heart kept up its hopeful little patter.
“You’re lying.” But I said it lightly, as if teasing.
“I don’t lie.” Heimdal turned his head as he spoke. His brows angled downward between his eyes and his mouth flattened. Firelight glittered in his oh-so-blue eyes as he aimed a sharp glance at me.
Then his eyes narrowed.
A breath later, his eyes widened. His brows lifted. The corners of his mouth twitched, as if he wanted to smile.
Bridge Burned: A Norse Myths & Legends Fantasy Romance (Bridge of the Gods Book 1) Page 6
