“Such sour words.” The Allfather tipped his head to the side as he considered me. The brim of his broad hat shadowed his face, but it couldn’t dampen the gleam in his eye. “I’d almost think you were sulking, Muninn.”
I resisted the urge to grimace at him. This human face could certainly pull a wide range of expressions. “Why are we even here?” I demanded. “Why do we linger anywhere in Midgard so long, so often—often enough that our entire beings are starting to change?” I flicked my hand toward my body.
Odin still watched me. Could he see how much this morning’s tumble into the battle was still gnawing at my nerves?
“There’s much to learn from humankind as they and their civilizations grow,” he said. “They never stop changing. Walking among them, drinking the same air, tells me far more than simply watching them from my high seat above. Would you rather ramble around Asgard in the peace and quiet for the next hundred years?”
Yes, I rather would. Especially when my own memories rose up of how we’d spent most of the hundreds of years previous.
“It’s always the wars you seek out,” I said. “The battles and skirmishes and sieges. Weapons blasting and stabbing, blood and guts scattered all around. Suffering.” So much bloody suffering. My memories of Midgard were a long stretch of yelps and sobs and shrieks.
“War is one of my domains,” Odin said. “And I can learn a tremendous amount more from times of suffering than those of happiness. People can be anything when they’re happy. It’s when they’re frightened or in pain that their deepest essence rises to the surface.”
I did grimace at him then. “Or maybe Ragnarok gave you too much of a taste for destruction.”
Odin let out a huff, but he sounded less amused than he usually did when I spoke my mind. Maybe I’d had a little more on my mind to speak today than I usually did.
“I think we serve a great purpose here,” Huginn started, the damn ass-kisser, but Odin cut him off before he could get any further.
“There are worse places we could travel to, you know. The Allfather’s cloaked, broad-shouldered form loomed even taller as he gripped his spear. “It seems to me a little perspective may have been lost over the years. Now that my ravens are more adaptable, perhaps we should check the lay of the land in the other realms too. For a change of pace, if you’re that eager for one.”
My stomach dropped. I didn’t like the thread of darkness ringing through his voice. But he was already spreading his arms and summoning down the vast shimmering bridge that would take us back to Asgard and his great hall of doors.
“Of the nine realms, Midgard has always interested me the most,” Odin said as we strode across the bridge, his magic urging us faster. “Asgard, there’s nothing left to know of. The others I thought I’d explored thoroughly long ago. But it has been a long time, and Norns only know what may have changed. I should not neglect any of them.”
“Where would you have us go, Allfather?” Huginn asked with a bob of his head.
Odin frowned. “Let me think on it. Where should we start? What will my raven of memory truly appreciate?” That teasing gleam had come back into his eye.
It was full night in Asgard when we arrived. No one lingered in the shining courtyard to ask how our travels had been. Odin headed straight to Valhalla, the now empty hall of warriors. Huginn and I hurried along behind him.
I brought up the memory of the one time I’d shifted back, in the midst of the battle, but my body didn’t respond. I gritted my teeth. Why was this human body so stubborn? If I was investigating a realm I hadn’t been to in ages or possibly at all, I wanted to do it on wings at least to start.
Odin’s footsteps rang out down the long hall with its thick shadows. He strode straight to the end where the vast fireplace stood and waved open the door to the great tree that led to all the realms.
Yggdrasil stretched out on its side over a fathomless chasm. The shadows seeped into the crevices in its ridged bark. Ahead of us, one branch and then another veered off into the thicker darkness where the doorways waited.
We stepped out onto the branching path, our feet rasping over the rough bark. Odin marched on at the lead. Several paces along, he pointed to a branch that stretched out to the left. “Huginn, you can drop in on Niflheim. Explore and return to tell me what you’ve observed.”
“Yes, Allfather,” Huginn said, his eyes shiny with nervousness but his jaw set. He darted down the path and vanished through the maw of the doorway at its end.
I followed Odin past another branch and another. No matter how much I prodded at my body with my mind, it wouldn’t budge. Transform. Become a raven. My skin prickled, but nothing changed. I swallowed hard.
“Allfather—”
“Muninn,” he said briskly, and pointed to the right. “I’d like to hear what you make of the current state of Muspelheim. I feel I’ve avoided that realm far too long. Bring its memories back to me.”
My legs balked. “I think it would be better if I could first—”
He spun with a sharper flash of his eye. “You asked to leave Midgard. You asked to delve into something new. Now off with you.”
He gave me a shove like he had on the ledge that morning. I didn’t have time to let out more than a squeak of protest before a gust of magic swept me along the great tree’s branch and tossed me through the doorway at its end.
2
I careened out into a space almost as dark as the one I’d left but streaked through with ruddy light. My human body sprawled on hands and knees against rocky ground so hot it singed my skin.
I didn’t even have time to scramble to my feet when a roar blasted my eardrums and my side. A punch of hot, putrid breath sent me tumbling head over heels toward the nearest ruddy glow.
Another stink filled my nose: molten lava. A stream of the pulsing magma wove through the rock just ahead of me, its heat wafting over me and crackling through my hair. I swallowed a yelp and hurled myself in the opposite direction, just as the creature that had roared at me pounced.
Claws raked across my shoulder, but I managed to spin to the side, out of the main force of the beast’s charge. Pain splintered through my arm and back.
I staggered, and the thing whirled on me. I could see it now: an immense sinewy dragon with scales that looked as if they were made out of chunks of rock glued together by still-glowing magma. Its eyes shone like red-hot embers, and they narrowed as they focused back on me.
It opened its mouth, revealing sharp crystal shards of teeth. Another acrid gush of breath seared toward me. I couldn’t help crying out as the heat lashed my skin.
I didn’t know where the hell this was or what was going on. The only thought that shone through my haze of panic was away. I had to get away.
I threw myself away from the dragon’s next swipe, my frantic gaze searching for the door I’d fallen through. I couldn’t find it amid the shifting shadows. The dragon lunged, claws screeching against the stone, and I leapt in the opposite direction. My heart thundered in my ears. Was there somewhere I could take shelter to gather my wits, anything to shield me…?
The dragon whipped toward me, and I didn’t dodge fast enough this time. Its foot slammed into my back, claws digging open new wounds and the impact slamming me into the ground. My chin knocked against the rock, and finally, like a miracle, my body realized that this particular form was not doing me any favors.
With a rippling that was both relieving and painful, I contracted into my raven self. The snap of the dragon’s teeth that would have taken off my human head closed around the air above me, and I took off in a mad flapping of my wings, so fast I left at least a few feathers behind me.
As soon as I soared high above the rocky terrain, a blast of hot air that had nothing to do with the dragon hurtled into me. It took all my strength to keep myself upright as I tried to dive out of it. But the dragon was leaping into the air from below, and the wind buffeted me from all sides. With my avian pulse rattling through my veins, I simply flapped my
wings as hard as I could and sped off. Away. As long as I was away, I’d be safer.
I dodged a jutting spear of rock and a pool of magma that spurted flares of fire up toward the ashen sky. The tips of my wing feathers turned crisp as cinders. After a time, the dragon was nothing but a distant roar, and then nothing at all. But the wind kept whipping around me, smacking at me from the side when I least expected it, filling my throat with charred heat.
An ache dug into my back where my wounds had reformed on my raven body. My wings started to falter. I peered down at the dark gray stone and the maze of magma streams that cut through it, searching for somewhere to set down and gather myself.
A rough-hewn structure against a low cliff up ahead caught my eye. Blocks of stone had been stacked into a somewhat haphazard-looking building with a wide doorway. A strip of ragged cloth hung across the entrance. The house hardly looked bigger than a chicken coop, but at this point I wasn’t going to complain. I just hoped whoever was living in there was friendlier than the damned dragon.
The pain in my back stabbed deeper as I descended. My wing-beats stuttered. I crashed more than landed on the ground outside the hovel, and my body sprang back into human form.
Wonderful. I groaned as I pulled myself onto my knees. When I touched my shoulder, my fingers came back sticky and red.
At least I could talk to my potential host in this form. They might have seen an intruding raven as only vermin. Most mortal beings didn’t have quite the respect for my proper form that they really should.
I heaved myself to my feet and staggered forward. I had to clutch the side of the doorway as I eased the flap of cloth aside.
The interior was larger than I expected. The manmade structure I’d seen outside was only a fore-room that held an equally rough stone bench. It led into a cave that must have been a natural formation in the cliff. I eased forward over the uneven rock floor, my teeth clenched against the throbbing in my back.
“Hello?” I said. My voice came out in a faint croak. I tried to swallow and barely could. Did this place even have water? Surely the inhabitants didn’t drink the magma.
No one answered. I wavered and then pushed on into the cave.
After a few steps, a faint illumination caught my eye. A crystalline patch on the cave ceiling emitted a dull red glow. I could see by it, but it made the space look as if it were painted in blood. Very homey.
Notches had been carved into the stone walls, holding a few metal dishes and cutlery, some bundles of fabric, slabs of what looked and smelled like cured meat. At the back of one shallow alcove, water trickled in a thin stream over the pock-marked rock.
My throat screamed with need. Without a second thought, I threw myself at the trickle and lapped it from the rock until the dryness inside stopped burning. The water had a faintly metallic taste, not exactly enjoyable, but not awful either.
It hadn’t done anything for the agony in my back, though. I pressed onward, peering into a chamber I took to be a bedroom with a few blankets in a tangle on the floor, and another with a narrow crevice I gathered served as the lavatory from the stomach-turning whiff that reached my nose. I hurried past that one.
The cave narrowed under one of those gleaming crystals. The floor felt even rougher there. I hesitated, not sure whether I should go on.
A man’s wryly lilting voice carried from somewhere behind me. “Just invited yourself right in, did you?”
I whirled around and gasped at the pain that lanced through me at the sudden movement. A tall figure stood between two streaks of ruddy light, his face mostly hidden in shadow. He had his arms crossed over his lean chest and his head cocked to one side. His eyes, the glint of them that I could see, were fixed on me.
I found my voice through the pain. “I’m sorry. I called out to see if anyone was here… I was just looking for somewhere to rest.”
The young man took a step forward, and the light caught his features. Features that I could imagine the human girls I’d watched from time to time in Midgard swooning over—smooth tan skin, clear sky-blue eyes, golden-blond hair pulled back at the base of his neck. Except for the scar. A ragged maroon slash wrenched across the left side of his face from the tip of his eyebrow across his high cheekbone down to the thin lips that were currently pressed in a flat unreadable line.
He wasn’t a being of Midgard anyway. His coloring, the angles of his face, and the slight point to his ears told me he was a light elf, one of the ljosalfar from the realm of Alfheim.
Memories stirred in the air between us. A wonderland of a forest, crystal spires jutting up between the pale-barked trees. A group of teenaged elves stopping to picnic beneath one. A couple of them scrambling up the spire. A horrible crack, the splintered peak plummeting to gouge this man’s, then boy’s, youthful face. The pain radiated out of the past in a yawning chasm of agony.
Bright tan faces and shining flaxen hair all around. Eyes averting from the wreckage of his face. Murmurs that quieted as soon as he got near. Bitterness collecting on his tongue.
A cluster of elders at a doorway, stern-faced and stiff-shouldered. The man before me gave them a little wave, however long ago that was, and ducked through the passage into darkness and heat.
The pieces connected in my mind. He’d been banished. My tongue flew before I thought better of it. I wasn’t used to speaking to anyone but Odin, and I’d never held back from the Allfather.
“Cut by a rock, and they sent you away to a land of rocks,” I said. “Not the most sensitive people, are they?”
The man’s jaw twitched. His arms tensed where they were still folded in front of him. “Who are you?” he demanded, dropping his hands to his sides in fists. “You’re not from Alfheim. How do you know me?”
“I’m Odin’s raven,” I said automatically. Maybe it would have been better to keep that to myself too. This human tongue obviously needed more practice at holding itself.
The statement drew the light elf up short. “You don’t look much like a raven,” he said, a little of that dry tone returning. His gaze slid over me, and for the first time I recognized something else in his expression. He was looking at me like I’d seen men look at women in the towns and the cities of Midgard, with a hint of that heated sort of hunger.
Was this human body attractive by those standards? I found it difficult to judge. I wasn’t even sure what my face looked like. But despite the dulling pain in my back, his attention tugged an echo of the same heat to the surface of my skin.
I didn’t know what to make of that alien sensation, so I did my best to ignore it. “I can assure you this is not my better form,” I said, matching his dryness. “Muninn, the raven of memory, pleased to make your acquaintance.”
I plucked the corners of my dress and dipped in a mockery of the courtesy I’d witnessed from women with airs. That was the wrong move. At the motion, my wounds flared back into full agony. My balance wavered, and the air hissed as I sucked it through my clenched teeth.
“What—” The light elf stepped closer. His face turned sallow. “You’ve been cut up. Come on. I’m not going to leave you bleeding all over my house. Sit down and tell me what in Hel’s name you’re doing here.”
He took my arm, lithe fingers closing around my wrist, and a giddy quiver shot through my nerves at the contact. Odin and Huginn hadn’t touched me in my human body. I hadn’t known the simple act of placing skin against skin could have quite that much effect. Although maybe it didn’t usually when you had a body that’d been properly broken in.
“I’m Jerrik,” the elf said as he guided me back to the fore-room where I’d entered. “If your magic didn’t already tell you that. And I’d appreciate you staying out of my memories, Miss Raven.”
It wasn’t that I went into them. They came to me, like flitting fish. But it was easier to tune them out in this form, with this pain distracting me. I didn’t bother to correct his phrasing.
Jerrik eased me down on the bench in the fore-room and stood over me, his expression su
ch a mix of emotions I couldn’t pick any of them apart. He rubbed his mouth. The bottom of his scar shifted with his lips. I had the urge to trace my fingers over it, to find out what that mottled tissue would feel like. To see what expression he’d make then.
“What in this realm ripped you up like that?” he asked, nodding to my shoulder. He pressed a wad of fabric he’d grabbed from one of his nooks against my back to staunch the bleeding.
“A dragon that looked as if it were made out of rock,” I said. “Like apparently everything in this wretched place. It happened to be lurking around right where I entered, and I couldn’t find my way out again. So I got away as quickly as I could and ended up here.”
“What are you doing here at all, if you’re one of Odin’s prized birds?”
The way he said that last bit, as if I’d been a pet—or worse, an ornament—made my hackles rise. “I serve the Allfather by being his eyes and ears where he can’t be. And whatever my usual physical nature might be, I’m far from bird-brained, so I’d appreciate the same respect you’d offer any other person. Odin wanted to know the current state of Muspelheim. From what I’ve seen, I’m quite prepared to declare it a horrid wasteland to which we should never again venture. I just have to return to the gate to Asgard to tell him so.”
“To the gate?” Jerrik said. “That might not be as easy as you’re talking about it.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of choice in the matter, so I’ll make it work one way or another. If you could simply point me in the right direction…”
The light elf sounded as if he’d swallowed a guffaw. “In your condition? You won’t make it past the first river. I can do a half-assed job of bandaging you up, but this isn’t my forte. I’d better take you to Gunnar.”
“Gunnar?” I repeated.
Jerrik’s hand tucked around my elbow to help me up—a solid but gentle grip that sent a pleasant shiver up my arm. Damned human body. Surely the inhabitants of Midgard didn’t go around responding like this to every casual contact between them?
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