Black Ice

by Susan Krinard

  “Loki,” Mist said.

  “Yeah. He called himself Lukas Landvik. He tried to kidnap me and asked me questions about Orn and the Old Norse god Odin. Then I found myself stuck in the middle of a magical battle.” She nodded. “Yes, I think that’s about right.”?”

  This young woman really was remarkable, Mist thought. But she’d have to be … if, as Anna had claimed, the raven had stayed with her and her family since World War II.

  Mist glanced toward the door. Bryn and Dainn were listening in, but she’d asked them to stay out in the hall so as not to overwhelm Ann or alarm Orn, who was obviously very protective of his—

  What? Mist thought. Friend? Guardian? And why, if he was indeed what Mist, Dainn, and Loki suspected, had the raven hidden himself so long? Why was he so intent on reaching Mist now?

  Loki had been right. Freya had never once mentioned even the possibility that Odin had any kind of presence in this world. Only she was supposed to be capable of communication between Midgard and Ginnungagap.Had Odin sent another ambassador in her place? His own?

  But then surely the raven wouldn’t have been silently waiting in Midgard all these decades.

  Never believe anything Loki suggests, Mist thought. Especially when he claims to have known the raven was coming.

  “You’re right,” she said to Anna. “Loki and I fought with magic. It was real, and Orn isn’t an ordinary bird.”

  “And those men who captured me weren’t men at all, were they?”

  “No,” Mist said. “They were frost giants.”

  Anna reached for the cooling cup of coffee on the side table. Only the slight trembling of her fingers gave any indication that she was still suffering the emotional aftereffects of her ordeal. “I know a little Norse mythology,” she said. “Sometimes my grandmother and great-grandfather told me the old tales. Loki was responsible for starting the war between the gods and the giants, right? The one that was supposed to destroy everything before a new world rose out of the ashes.”

  “That’s right,” Mist said, relieved that she didn’t have to cover the basics. “But Ragnarok, as it was foretold, never happened. Eight Homeworlds were destroyed, but Midgard survived.” She hesitated, finding it difficult to explain the enormity of the threat to Anna’s world.

  “You need to understand,” she said slowly, “that Loki plans to start that war all over again here in Midgard—Earth—and is gathering allies to fight the gods, led by Odin and Freya.”

  “Of course,” Anna said, her hazel eyes almost fading into the shadows that framed them. “It all makes perfect sense.”

  “The Aesir are real, Anna. They’re still alive, waiting for the chance to stop Loki. And Loki will do anything to stop them.”

  “But where are the gods now? Why aren’t they here?”

  “They’re … in a kind of otherworld, where they don’t have physical bodies.”

  “But Loki is here.”

  Mist had no intent of explaining her past relationship with “Eric.” “Yes,” she said.

  Compressing her lips, Anna began to stroke Orn again. “Loki wanted to know if Odin was in communication with Midgard, as if I would have any idea—”

  “He knew you had to have some kind of close connection to Orn,” Mist said. “The two ravens Huginn and Muninn were Odin’s—”

  “I know,” Anna interrupted. “His advisors, and his messengers.” She closed her eyes. “Do you really think that’s what Orn is?”

  “We thought so as soon as he came to get us,” she said, leaning forward. “The important thing is that we keep both you and Orn safe and try to find out why he led you here.”

  “Safe?” Suddenly Anna’s whole demeanor changed, and her gaze became more focused and intent. “Who are you, Mist? You’re obviously not one of these goddesses … or are you?”

  Mist wished she could laugh. “I’m a Valkyrie,” she said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Do you still fly around picking soldiers off battlefields? Or just people with ravens?”

  “Our job descriptions have changed a little over the centuries,” Mist said dryly.

  “But you came from Asgard, right? Why are you here?”

  “Odin sent me to Midgard centuries ago, to protect something he wanted to keep out of the enemy’s hands.”

  “You look as if you’re in your late twenties,” Anna said. “I guess you must have to invent new identities and move around so people didn’t notice you weren’t getting any older.”

  Sharp as Gungnir, Mist thought. “That’s right,” she said. “The name I go by now is Bjorgsen. Bryn is another one of us, and we’re looking for the other ten Valkyrie who were also sent here by Odin. We’re trying to hold out against Loki until the gods arrive.”

  Anna tried to sip her coffee. She couldn’t quite hold the rim of the mug steady against her lips. “And Loki will do anything to stop you.”

  “But he clearly didn’t know about Orn before.” Mist pushed loose tendrils of hair behind her ears. “Has anyone been following you, Anna?” she asked. “Anyone new come into your life since you arrived in San Francisco?”

  “No.” Anna set down her mug on the side table with great care. “No one.”

  “What about this fire no one else saw? How did it start?”

  “I don’t know.” Anna dropped her hands into her lap. “It wasn’t natural, was it?”

  “It sounds like magic,” Mist said. “But whose?”

  Evidently not Loki’s, she thought. And aside from a few of his Jotunar, she couldn’t think of anyone else who would have done it … except Vidarr and Vali, who would have approached Anna and Orn directly if they’d known about him. And Vali would simply have told Mist. But if Orn had a message from Odin to impart, why would he come to Mist instead of Odin’s sons? Because Freya had already paved the way?

  “I can’t go back to my place, can I?” Anna asked, pulling Mist out of her thoughts.

  “Not until we figure out what happened. But I’ll have someone go pick up some of your clothes and other necessities.” Another inconvenient thought occurred to Mist. “Can you take a break from your job? We can’t have you going in to work, at least not for awhile.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I don’t have one yet,” Anna said, “or I’d be out of one pretty fast. I’m in IT … a programmer analyst.” She smiled wryly. “Maybe you can help me find a more standard kind of employment when things go back to normal.”

  If things go back to normal, Mist thought. “I promise we’ll do everything we can to help you,” she said.

  Anna settled deeper into her chair, folding her arms across her chest. “I have another question,” she said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “When these gods show up, what going to happen to Earth?”

  Mist swallowed. She’d asked herself the same question at the very beginning, when Dainn had come to tell her that nothing would ever be the same again.

  She’d never been happy with her own answers.

  “The gods will prevent Loki from throwing all Midgard into chaos from which it may never recover,” she said.

  “I see,” Anna said. “But if they’re existing in some kind of limbo, and the other worlds were destroyed, wouldn’t they want to live here?”

  “Everything is complicated right now,” Mist said. “I won’t lie to you. It’s going to get a lot more complicated.”

  “What are you planning to do with Orn?”

  “Ask him to give us whatever information he has. Why he’s here, and what he wants.” She paused to gather her thoughts. “What made you move to San Francisco?” she asked.

  “I…” Anna bit her lip. “I felt compelled to come here. I just didn’t realize it until now. Did Orn do that, too?”

  “I don’t know,” Mist admitted. But it seemed quite possible that Odin’s messenger might influence Anna without her knowing it.

  Was it Orn’s magic, or Odin’s, that had caused the fire that drove Anna from her apartment?
/>   “How did your family get Orn?” Mist asked, switching to a less troubling subject.

  “My grandmother always had him. She never told anyone where he’d come from, but he was with her from the time of the war, when my great-grandfather adopted her after she lost her parents.”

  “But your grandmother never mentioned anything unusual about him.”

  “Nothing. She gave Orn to me when she died. My parents immigrated to the United States when I was six. We lived in New York until they passed, and I stayed there until two weeks ago.” She touched her throat. Her movement briefly revealed a chain hung around her neck.

  “Okay,” Mist said, shifting on the couch to stretch her stiff, sore legs. “I think that’s enough for now. I hope you don’t mind a half-finished room upstairs. We’ll try to make it comfortable.”

  “I really have to stay here?” Anna asked with a touch of rebellion.

  “You won’t be safer anywhere else,” she said.

  “Not even if I left the city?”

  “Obviously Orn needs to be here, and I don’t think he’ll want you to leave him.”

  Flapping his wings, Orn hopped from Anna’s shoulder to her knee, shook out his feathers, and began to change. Gray plumage darkened to the color of onyx, and in a moment a raven was peering at Anna out of one clever black eye.

  “Safe here,” it croaked. “Trust.”

  Anna reached inside the collar of her shirt and clutched at the chain Mist had glimpsed earlier. The raven’s head darted inside the collar and emerged with the chain in its beak, broken clasp dangling. The bird flew to Mist and dropped a small piece of stone into her hand.

  The stone was irregularly shaped but flat, and on one side were engraved Rune-staves and the profile of a bird’s head.

  Mist’s hand went numb, and she nearly dropped the pendant. “Where did you get this?” she asked Anna.

  The young woman was clearly rattled. “My grandmother passed it to me along with Orn when she died,” she said.

  “What was your grandmother’s name?”

  “Rebekka. Rebekka Forren.”

  Rebekka.

  Immediately Mist was swept back to that terrible day in 1942, the day when she had failed to protect her fellow Valkyrie and the innocent mortals under her care.

  Bryn had fallen that day, presumed dead, and Horja had taken her Treasure, Freya’s Falcon Cloak, along with the broken halves of Thor’s “unbreakable” staff, Gridarvoll. A score of Jewish refugees fleeing the murderous Nazis had nearly made it to the border between Norway and Sweden.

  Only one of them had survived—a nine-year-old girl, taken in and adopted by Mist’s lover and fellow resistance fighter, Geir Forren.

  Mist had never seen him or Rebekka again. She had left Norway behind, haunted by her failure. After the war, she’d tried to take up a new life alone. She had sent money anonymously to Geir and Rebekka for many years, though she knew Geir must have known where it came from. She’d wanted Rebekka to grow up without a constant reminder of the tragedy that had stolen all her kin and her childhood.

  She had stopped sending the money a decade after she’d moved to San Francisco. Rebekka would have been in her late twenties by then, a grown woman with a life of her own.

  Mist’s heart jumped around inside her ribcage like a crazed grasshopper. “What was your great-grandfather’s name?” she asked thickly.

  “Geir.” Anna looked down at the carpet. “He stayed in Norway, but we … we were close.”

  Mist closed her eyes. She didn’t want to imagine Geir as an old man, a man who must die like any other mortal. But he had succeeded in raising Rebekka and lived long enough to become a friend to Rebekka’s granddaughter.

  “Please give it back to me,” Anna said, holding out her hand.

  Mist opened her hand. She couldn’t tell Anna that she had given the pendant to Rebekka when they had parted forever.

  But she wondered if, and how, Orn was connected to the pendant. When Odin had given it to her just before he’d sent her and the other Valkyrie from Asgard, she had assumed it was only a token of his favor, as was her guardianship of his Spear. Had it always been more?

  That didn’t make sense. She had worn the pendant for centuries before her work with the Norwegian Resistance, and she had never seen parrot or raven.

  Slowly she passed the pendant back to Anna. Orn had found a perch on a floor lamp across the room and regarded both of them with an unreadable avian stare. Anna tucked the broken chain and pendant in her jeans pocket.

  “Come with me,” Mist said, getting to her feet. “I’ll show your room. No one will disturb you there.”

  “Who else is living here?” Anna asked, her eyes darting toward the door. “All those people who came with you?”

  “Absolutely not,” Mist said, shuddering at the thought. “My cousin Dainn—you saw him when you came in—and two kids are staying with us for a while. None of them will bother you.”

  “I saw that one of the men who helped rescue me and Orn was wounded…”

  “If you’re feeling guilty about that,” Mist said, “you can stop. They volunteered.” Once Anna was safely ensconced in the half-finished room on the second floor, Mist paused at the kids’ room next door. She’d asked Dainn to explain the situation to them while she’d dealt with Anna, and since then, they hadn’t made a peep. She went downstairs and found the elf waiting alone in the kitchen.

  “Where’s Bryn?” she asked, rubbing her aching eyes.

  “Working with her people to strengthen the patrols and extend their range,” he said. “Your Sister said that she would speak to you of your interview with the young woman at a later time.”

  He leaned against the counter, and Mist had the sense that he was deliberately avoiding her gaze. “What did you think?” she asked, plopping down into one of the kitchen chairs.

  “That your judgment in this matter is sound.”

  Mist laughed. “‘In this matter,’ huh?”

  Dainn shifted his weight. “Why is the name Rebekka Forren of such interest to you?”

  Suddenly Mist didn’t feel like laughing anymore. “What do you mean?” she asked..

  “Clearly it evoked some strong emotion, as did the name of Rebekka’s great-grandfather.”

  Mist sketched an invisible Rune on the table. Mannaz, the symbol of humanity and of the self. “They were part of my past. I never thought I’d see anyone connected to them again.”

  “These memories are painful?”

  Erasing the Rune with a swipe of her hand, Mist shook her head. Dainn responded with a long silence she didn’t like.

  “What is the significance of this pendant?” he finally asked.

  “You saw it?”

  “I was able to observe it, yes.”

  And, of course, she hadn’t noticed. “I got it from Odin before we came to Midgard, and gave it to Anna’s grandmother, Rebekka, during the Second World War.” “Indeed? Then your Rebekka would have been a child.”

  “I didn’t know, then, that the pendant was anything more than a gift from Odin,” she said. “Obviously I was wrong. I assume that the raven was somehow bound to it, and when I gave the pendant away, Odin’s messenger went with it.”

  “Perhaps Orn was meant to be your guide.”

  Dainn didn’t sound particularly happy with that theory, and it wasn’t what Mist wanted to hear. She didn’t want to think she’d literally carried yet another responsibility she’d managed to screw up.

  “I never saw the raven in my life,” she said.

  “And Anna implied that neither she nor her grandmother had ever seen anything but a parrot prior to her residence in this city,” Dainn said. “Perhaps you were not meant to perceive the bird during your time in Norway.”

  Mist got up, opened the refrigerator door, and found a few cans of beer the Einherjar had left behind. She wondered if she was beginning to drink too much.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” she said. “A lot of things might have turn
ed out differently if I’d kept the pendant.”

  “Perhaps. What was done cannot be undone.”

  Mist closed the refrigerator door. “Thanks for another pithy bit of elven wisdom,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without them.”

  Dainn’s lips thinned, but she could tell it wasn’t because she’d angered him with her mockery. They’d been talking that way to each other ever since they’d met, and there was a kind of comforting rhythm about it.

  Her next thought wasn’t comforting at all.

  “Loki’s piss,” she swore. “Until now, I didn’t even think…”

  “What is it?” Dainn asked, examining her face.

  “All this time, and I didn’t think about what it would be like for you to face Odin’s messenger after what Odin did to you.”

  He turned his back on her. “That ceased to be of importance when I became Freya’s ambassador on behalf of the Aesir.”

  “But you didn’t deserve that punishment. Don’t you feel anything?”

  “No.” His shoulders lifted and fell in a long, deep breath, and he turned toward her again. What will you tell Odin’s sons, since they apparently have no knowledge of these events?” he asked.

  Ashamed at her own relief, Mist sat down again, slumping over the table. “Vali’s been putting in his time at Asbrew, trying not to arouse Vidarr’s suspicions about his working for me. But he’ll obviously have to be told when he gets back.”

  “His reaction to learning about the raven will be interesting to observe.”

  “Yeah. I don’t think he’ll be too upset. But I want to keep Vidarr out of this as long as possible.”

  “Very wise,” he said. “But are you certain Vali will agree to keep these events concealed from his brother?”

  “I think so. I hope so.” She speared her hands through her hair, too exhausted to care if Dainn saw just how vulnerable she was feeling. “Did I mention that Loki claimed he knew the raven was coming?”

  “No, but I have no doubt that he was prevaricating.”

  “If by that you mean ‘lying,’ I agree.” She pressed her hot forehead to the table top. “Everything keeps happening at once, and I don’t know what to focus on.”