by Matt Larkin
“Jarl Hadding risked travel in winter. Out of respect for Borr,” Tyr said. Always chiding him. Like everyone else, he expected Odin to turn into his father. But no one could.
Still, he supposed he ought to try. Even knowing he could not live up to that legacy, he must come as close as he could. He was the eldest son of Borr, after all. Odin waved the others to calmness. “You need not worry. I will uphold any oath my father made.”
“Borr did not make us an oath, exactly.” Frigg laid a hand on his forearm, then jerked her arm away as if Odin truly were aflame. “I …”
“Daughter?” Hadding coughed again. “Are you well?”
“The weight of urd crashes upon us …” Frigg’s face had turned ashen, eyes staring off at something beyond sight.
Urd? Now she spoke of fate. She talked like … Frey’s flaming sword! “You’re a fucking vӧlva.”
For the jarl’s oldest daughter to be a vӧlva—she must have had some natural gift to be chosen for such a calling. Vӧlvur didn’t marry, not often, so the jarl sacrificed a valuable political asset. But some women were born with unnatural insight. You couldn’t trust them. They were always messing with strange plants, speaking to ghosts. And they could bespell a man’s mind with their beguiling seid.
Let a vӧlva get her legs around you, and she’d ensorcel you. A vӧlva’s trench was as dangerous as a troll’s fist.
Frigg blinked, shook her head, then scowled as if suddenly aware of him once again. “You say that as if it were a bad thing. Do the Wodanar not rely on their own vӧlvur?”
His father had. He had looked to Heidr for guidance. But the vӧlva had not foreseen his death or betrayal, or had not warned him of it. She had failed her jarl. Odin would not make the same mistake of trusting in such otherworldly insights.
Hadding’s daughter was dangerous.
4
A low fire simmered in the pit in Frigg’s room, its embers nigh burned out even as Sigyn huddled close, warming her hands. Sigyn’s half sister had returned from the Wodan town, and returned with the new jarl of that tribe, no less. Like any vӧlva, Frigg did what she did with a plan, though she oft kept close-lipped on the details. The vӧlva wanted Sigyn’s advice, of course, but had too much pride to ask for it or even to reveal her own endgame. Not that she had to.
Whenever they played tafl—one more game sat abandoned on the board nearby—Sigyn always won, much to her elder sister’s chagrin. Frigg saw the board and the pieces, thought about her turns, and yet, somehow never quite wrapped her mind around the finite possibilities of such a game. A limited number of moves existed and, discounting moves made without logic, fewer still remained.
The Hasding tribe teetered upon a precipice, poised to collapse and be annihilated by any other tribe, be it the Skalduns, Godwulfs, or Itrmanni.
Sigyn’s stomach churned at the thought of such a day. Men would come with fire and lust, burning and raping, quick to enslave whomever they could and butcher the rest. Warriors, like her foster family, they would die. Noble women, like her sister, would be lucky to find themselves forced into marriage.
Even the Wodan tribe, those Frigg pled to for succor, had become a source of unpredictability. Their new jarl might embrace Borr’s peace or reject it, and betray the Hasdingi to their enemies. It meant Frigg needed to sway this Odin and do so quickly, before he set his course. To win him to their side, the Hasdingi would need to seduce him, be it with silver, political power, or a more literal seduction, and the vӧlva daughter of a jarl would know of all such means.
From the way Frigg sat now, eyes staring into the flames, Sigyn could guess how well any of those tactics had worked. Frigg’s maid, Fulla, brought a bowl of soup to her lady, then offered Sigyn one as well. Unlike everyone else in the fortress, the maid had never looked on Sigyn with disdain. Truly, even from a servant, a woman had to appreciate that.
“Careful now,” Fulla said. The maid had fiery red hair, a face full of freckles, and an over-quick smile. “It’s plenty hot and more than fresh.”
“How can something be more than fresh?” Sigyn mumbled, not really looking at the maid.
“Really, now, that’s a silly question from such a smart girl. You just have to ask the cooks, you do, you tell them ‘I want this extra fresh,’ and they give it to you. With a smile. Most times you just have to ask for what you want.”
Sigyn snorted.
“See now.” Fulla pointed a finger at her. “You didn’t leave the alfar their copper, did you? Now I told you twice, you just need to offer up a copper—in the right place, of course, in an alf stone—and they’d help you find yourself luck in love. But you didn’t try it, did you now?”
“No man wants a wife smarter than she is,” Sigyn mumbled under her breath. Freyja, she was tired of hearing her father spout that nonsense! She’d think the daughter of the jarl—even the bastard daughter—would have prospects. And yet, nineteen winters was already nigh past marrying age. She shook her head at Fulla. “If the alfar exist at all, why would they take the least interest in who a mortal girl married?”
Fulla opened her mouth, but Frigg answered first. “They exist, all the vaettir do, sister, just beyond the edge of our world. The Otherworlds touch ours in places. Do not forget that.”
“And,” Fulla added, “they’d care about your marriage if you paid them the copper, they would.”
Sigyn rolled her eyes.
“Jarl Odin has a grander urd upon him than I would have first thought.” Frigg looked at Sigyn. There it was, wanting advice, wanting to know how to plan her next move, but too proud to ask for it.
Sigyn folded her arms. “You’ve had one of your visions.” She made special effort to keep any disdain from her voice. “But you don’t know what it means, whether you saw some truth or whether your vision was the result of smoking nasty weeds.”
“I do not smoke weeds, sister.”
Sure. “If you are so convinced of your mystical abilities, why do you still doubt them?”
“I do not doubt my visions. I just … Odin cares only for avenging his father and seemed more than taken aback to learn of my status.”
Sigyn raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, I did not tell him I was a vӧlva. He determined as much after I read him.”
Sigyn sighed, then poked the fire. Tending it was Fulla’s task, but Sigyn was used to taking care of such things herself. Not everyone grew up in the jarl’s fortress. Unlike Frigg, Sigyn had learned independence from a young age. “Whatever you plan now will fail, not because you’ve chosen the wrong plan, but because you’ve chosen the wrong time. When you lost your mother, would you have received the advances of a man, political, sexual, or otherwise?”
Frigg frowned and rubbed her arms at the mention of Fjorgyn’s death two winters back. Sigyn had comforted Frigg as best she could, but Fjorgyn had always despised Sigyn as the reminder of her husband’s infidelity. Only with Fjorgyn’s death had Sigyn even been allowed inside her father’s hall. It made it hard to truly mourn the woman’s passing. Her death did not make this place home, though, nor did it endear her to anyone in it. She came here for Frigg, because her sister needed her, even if she hated to admit it.
Fulla clucked her tongue. “Now why’d you have to go and bring that up? Here my lady was almost able to forget how her mother went and died like that. It’s a hard thing you know, a hard thing indeed, losing a parent. Now I would know, see. I lost both my parents back in the war, and here I was a tiny girl, not even ten winters.”
Sigyn fixed Fulla with a level gaze, but the maid didn’t catch the barest hint of her intent. The Njarar War had cost them all a great deal. Sigyn’s mother had died, too, and her father would have exposed her to the winter were it not for his thegn Agilaz taking her in. She sympathized with Fulla, of course, but the woman had the unending effusiveness of a girl of three winters and the credulity to match. “If you wish to win Odin to our side,” she said to her sister, “help him avenge Borr. Then, while he is flush with victory, the
n you start making your moves.”
Frigg frowned. “Yes, I told him about a tracker who came here, one Father has housed in the fortress.”
Sigyn shrugged. “Good. How you help him doesn’t matter overmuch, just that, if he succeeds, he remembers he owes you. And if he fails, still he knows you aided him as best you could.” She rose, stretching.
“You won’t stay here tonight?” Frigg asked.
Sigyn shook her head. Sleeping in Frigg’s room she’d be safe enough, yes, but not even their father seemed to want her here. She had better places to be, places where people might relish her company, and where none would look on her with the contempt of Hadding’s court.
5
Halfhaugr lay at the center of Aujum, and thus some might have called it the heart of Aesir lands. It earned its name from the hill it sat on, broken as if a jotunn had cleft it in half. A spiked wooden wall protected the town, with a single entrance by the river. Odin had visited here before, of course, and like now, he could not decide whether he ought to be impressed at the defenses or not. Yes, the strong wall and the fortress beyond probably kept the people safe within—even as it kept them prisoner in their own homes, slaves to the fears that surrounded them. Fears of the mist, of the vaettir, of even the other tribes of Aesir all too eager to claim this central location.
Odin’s tribe traded the security of such places for the ability to pursue game as it migrated. The Hasdingi would have to send their hunters far and wide to feed themselves. These people were ruled by their fears. Whatever they feared … they long ago had let it conquer them. And a people conquered once could be conquered again.
Still, the fortress itself was built of ancient stone, marked with strange runes perhaps only vӧlvur could read. It stood tall, with a pair of ravens sitting atop its peak as if taunting him. Ravens fed on corpses, and taking this place would create a great many of those.
Jarl Hadding had given his guest a room within the fortress. Odin and Tyr awaited this foreigner now, sitting in a feast hall lit by too few braziers and no windows. The whole place was choked in shadow and stank of too many men, women, and hounds huddling too close together.
“I do not understand why you think some foreigner will find what I could not,” Tyr said. “Your place is guiding your tribe. Not charging off alone on such a vain hope.”
Odin shrugged. “Go back to them, if you will. I’ll not let any chance to avenge Father pass me by.”
The shadows half masked Tyr’s answering scowl. Tyr cracked his neck. “I have no intention of letting the heir of Borr get himself killed.”
They sat apart from the other Hasding warriors. A few had tried to approach, to offer mead or elk flesh for the night meal. Odin had accepted the food but ushered away company. He did not come here seeking companionship from the cowards hiding behind these walls.
“I’m not going to die.”
Tyr thumped the table with his forefinger. “I fear you haven’t given proper thought to our own guest. Idunn. She comes to you and asks you to fulfill Borr’s legacy. To make yourself king of Aesir. How can you back away from such a calling? What better way to honor your father? If you were to unite the Aesir we could fulfill his dreams and more.”
Odin rubbed the stubble on his chin before fixing Tyr with a level gaze. Surely his father’s thegn knew better than that. Odin had a greater duty to his father. He had sworn blood vengeance, and he was damned tired of having to remind everyone of that.
A figure drifted toward them, moving in and out of firelight and shadow. The man nodded at them as he drew nigh, and Odin motioned for him to sit. The stranger did so, staring at Odin with intensely blue eyes, almost like crystal. Deep, haunted, seeming to know too much. Like some damned vӧlva. The stranger had reddish brown hair hanging down to his cheekbones, contrasting with the darker hair of his short beard.
“You are Loki?” Odin asked.
“Yes, Odin, I am.”
Frigg must have told him about them. The man didn’t talk like a foreigner, though the vӧlva had referred to him as such. His skin tone was a bit deeper than normal, though perhaps not so much as Idunn’s. “Where do you hail from?”
Loki laced his fingers together on the table, eyes refusing to release Odin from their gaze. “That’s not what you came here to ask me, nor would names of far off lands hold much meaning to your ears.”
“Miklagard?” The southern empire was more legend than place, at least to most tribes, but Odin had heard the Friallaf tribe had fought several skirmishes against them. They sailed the Black Sea in great longships every summer, seeking plunder and glory.
The barest hint of a smile quirked on Loki’s face. “Would you not rather speak of the true purpose of your visit to Halfhaugr? Do the empires of the South Realms hold true interest for you now?”
Odin shrugged. “No. I want to know about Unterhagen. So unless Miklagarders were the ones to massacre the village … Do you know of it?”
“I know it. I walked there the day after it fell.”
Before even Tyr or Odin.
Tyr leaned forward across the table now, staring at the foreigner. “Then how do we know you were not with the raiders who wrought this havoc?”
“You saw the ruins, did you not? And do you believe it the work of men? Men are indeed capable of the vilest of deeds, of terrible savagery, but there are forces of chaos in the wild possessed of far greater strength than men.”
“You mean trolls,” Tyr said, the warrior’s disgust obvious in his voice. Odin had seen a troll only once in his life and had been fortunate enough not to have to fight it. The creatures were ungodly strong, and worse, had hides like solid rock.
No doubt trolls could have done it, but still … “They killed the women, too. Trolls claim human women as wives.”
Loki nodded. “Then it seems something other than trolls must have wrought the chaos. So then, what else could there be? When you think upon the wild, upon the lands beyond the realm of men, what comes to mind?”
Odin folded his arms. The foreigner was playing some kind of game with him, one he did not much appreciate. “Speak plainly, man. If you know what else besides trolls might have …” Beyond the realm of men. Beyond the … He shook his head. “No. If you are having a jest with me, I warn you I have no mood for it.”
“Before the snows buried the tracks, one could see footprints too large for a man.”
Tyr groaned. “You think a fucking jotunn did this?”
The jottunar were supposed to live beyond the Midgard Wall, banished into the outer realm of Utgard by the Vanir. Supposed to, but then, he and Tyr knew of at least one on this side. Odin glanced at Tyr, who shook his head.
“Hymir dwells very far from here, in Bjarmaland,” Tyr said. “I do not think he could have come here without someone learning of it.” Bjarmaland lay far to the east, nigh unto where the boundary of the Midgard Wall supposedly lay, encircling the realm of men and warding it against the greatest forces of chaos. The Aesir had lived there, generations back, before King Vingethor had brought them here in the Great March. And Tyr was right: if the jotunn had left his kingdom in Bjarmaland, surely stories would have spread.
Loki stared at Tyr now. “There is another who has crossed the Wall. Older and more powerful than his descendant Hymir. One called Ymir.”
The thegn scoffed. “I say this man is a liar, Odin. He could not possibly know the things of which he speaks. Even if he went to Unterhagen, even if he saw the tracks. You think tracks told him the name of their owner? If he speaks truth at all, it could only be because he serves the fucking jotunn.”
Odin bit back his response. Tyr would know about serving a jotunn. In service to Hymir, Tyr had raped and murdered, plundered and razed his way through half of Aujum. Until Father had stopped him. But Father had asked Odin never to speak of that.
Loki did not immediately answer, as a slave girl came and offered them a fresh drinking horn. Odin took it, took a long swig of the mead, then passed it to Tyr.
As the girl left, Loki smiled, just a little. “Anger is apt to cloud perception, and ignorance to narrow the possibilities you can conceive of. So burdened, a man blinds himself quite easily. Forgets, perhaps, one might take independent pieces of information and from them cobble together a clearer whole.”
Tyr drained the horn without offering a single sip to Loki, then belched before turning to Odin. “This man seeks to lure you with honeyed words. Like a skald. I cannot say what he wants, and for that alone, I say we leave him be. Go back. Talk to Idunn, give weight to her words.”
At that Loki’s smile slipped and he frowned. He did not speak, however, instead fixing Odin with that intense gaze of his.
Odin stared back a moment before answering. “Where do I find this Ymir?”
“In the peaks of the Sudurberks, not so very far from Unterhagen.”
“My lord,” Tyr said. “You cannot consider this. Even if he speaks truth, the Sudurberks cover half of Midgard. How will you search such a massive area?”
“I can track Ymir,” Loki said.
Odin nodded. Yes. Finally, progress. Father would know peace.
“You cannot fight a jotunn,” Tyr said. “They are larger and stronger than men. Than even trolls. It is mist-madness taking you.”
Odin slammed his fist on the table, drawing every eye in the feast hall. “Tyr! I tire of your complaints. If you are so enamored with the woman claiming to be Idunn, go back to her. And tell my brothers to meet me at Unterhagen. We will hunt down our father’s murderer.”
Tyr rose, mouth agape, stammering for a moment. “M-my lord? My place is by your—”
“Go!” Odin snapped. “Go and send for my brothers.”
Tyr rolled his shoulders, then cracked his neck. His hand toyed with the arm ring Father had given him as a symbol of his loyalty. Loyalty that ought now to bind him to Odin’s commands. “As you wish.”
