Black Ice

by Susan Krinard

  They looked at each other with complete understanding. Loki might want to get his hands on that even more than any of the other Treasures. The “unbreakable” chain had been used to bind Fenrisulfr, also called Fenrir, because the gods had feared what the Wolf could do: kill Odin, as prophecy foretold. And yet, for reasons of honor, they didn’t dare kill him.

  It went without saying that Loki hadn’t been too thrilled about having one of his kin handled with such disrespect.

  But Loki himself had been in a similar position just before the events of Ragnarok were supposed to occur. Events he’d set in motion. He’d never owned up to the legitimacy of his punishment, and he hadn’t exactly forgiven the Aesir for that, either.

  There wasn’t a whole lot he had forgiven.

  “Good work,” Mist said, patting Vali’s arm. “Take a long break. You’ve earned it.”

  “I’m on a roll,” Vali said. “I think I’ll keep going.”

  Mist nodded, grateful for his dedication, and gestured Dainn out of the room.

  “This is going to be tricky,” she said. “I can only get to one of these places at a time.”

  “I had assumed that I would go,” Dainn said.

  “We didn’t get to find out if using magic would provoke the beast again.”

  “But while you were saving Anna, I was able to strengthen the wards around the loft as well as gave Svardkell’s body back to the earth.”

  So now, Mist thought, he didn’t think he needed another test. Right when she needed him.

  “If Loki knows about these Valkyrie,” Dainn said, predicting her next words, “he will focus his resources on reaching them, not attacking here.”

  “He needs Orn,” Mist said. “He can split his resources, and he has a lot more of them than we do. If you managed to strengthen the wards, you can still protect—”

  “You don’t have to worry,” a woman’s voice said.

  Anna joined them, wearing only a fresh set of Mist’s jeans, sneakers and a worn but comfortable T-shirt. Orn, in raven shape, perched on her shoulder.

  “I’ll be okay,” she said. “Orn will protect me.”

  Mist looked at Orn. He was staring at Dainn with what she guessed was contempt … and a very personal dislike.

  Orn must know about the curse, just as she’d feared—at least enough to hold some resentment toward Dainn, even though the All-father would have been well aware that Freya had called on Dainn to assist the Aesir in Midgard.

  “Has he spoken?” Dainn asked, apparently unconscious of Orn’s obsidian glare.

  “Not since he said I was safe here,” Anna said. “I just know he’s not going to let anything happen to me.”

  “Like he didn’t when Loki got you?” Mist asked, deliberately harsh.

  Orn croaked, his crest rising. Mist didn’t need an interpretation of that reaction.

  “He came to find you, and you saved me,” Anna said. “I know he won’t let Loki get his hands on me again. And since the kids are here, they’ll be safe, too.”

  Mist and Dainn exchanged glances. Anna seemed confident, but what if she was wrong? What if she was telling Mist what she wanted to hear?

  “We have little choice but to accept Ms. Stangeland’s judgment,” Dainn said, speaking as if he and Mist were alone. “Your other options are few. Bryn has minimal magic, and the other Einherjar have none at all.”

  “You’ll need reliable magic if you run into Loki or his Jotunar,” Mist said quietly, “and you can’t guarantee you have it. What happens if Loki attacks you, and your magic does fail?”

  “I ask you to trust me.”

  So once again the decision was hers. She closed her eyes, afraid for Dainn, afraid that Anna was wrong about Orn. She had to trust the judgment of a woman she barely knew, and to rely on a creature who remained silent when she most needed him to make his purpose clear.

  “If you don’t mind,” Anna said, “I’ll go inside now.”

  “You’ll tell me if you change your mind about Orn.”

  Anna nodded and rushed off, Orn flapping his wings to keep his balance. Mist turned to Dainn again.

  “Okay,” Mist said, releasing a sharp breath. “Now all we have to figure out is which of us will go where,” she said, “and then I’ll have Vali get us the first available flights.” She shook her head. “I still hate relying on Orn to protect the kids, too. I’ll keep working on Tashiro until we’re ready to leave.”

  “Let us hope your lawyer is more efficient than he has been thus far,” Dainn said.

  16

  “Maria Simona will see you now,” the woman said in heavily

  accented English.

  The sober nun, the “extern” who served as intermediary between the outside world and that of the monastery, slipped out of the waiting room. Dainn sat very straight in his hard chair and let the deep silence clear his thoughts.

  The flight had been a long one, but Dainn had been grateful for the time to think. And prepare. For all he had assured Mist that he was in no danger of losing himself to the beast should he encounter Loki or his allies, he had no way to be sure.

  All he had were the herbs, tucked in the inner pocket of his jacket. He still had no way of knowing how long the palliative would work, or if he was required to take regular doses. Edvard had never returned to answer his questions.

  At least his magic had returned when he needed it. The Sisters of Santo Gaudentio met only with close family members once a month and never left the monastery, so he had been compelled to use a small spell to obtain an interview with the nun who might once have been a Valkyrie.

  He sensed the woman approaching and turned his attention to the plain, narrow door that led from the convent proper to the waiting room. She floated in, veiled from head to foot in her order’s habit, only the round, pale center of her face visible. Even her hands were tucked into the folds of her robes. Her blue eyes met Dainn’s, and he heard her sigh.

  She knew what he was. As he knew her, even though he had never met her.

  “I am Sister Maria Simona,” she said in perfect British English.

  Dainn rose. “Is that your only name, Sister?”

  “I was born with another,” she said, one brow twitching up ever so slightly. “I confess I did not anticipate an elf to show up at my door.” She gestured. “Please, sit down, Mr.…?”

  “Dainn,” he said, inclining his head. “I prefer to stand.”

  “Very well. Let us not waste time, since this interview must be short.” She smiled slightly to ease the brusqueness of her words. “I am certain you have much to tell me, but this I know already. Midgard is in great peril, and you have come for something I have guarded for centuries.”

  “How did you come by this knowledge?” Dainn asked, watching her carefully.

  “Naturally you are cautious,” she said. “But I assure you, your enemies cannot enter this place. When one spends years in contemplative silence, once is open to the messages the world sends us. This world, and others.”

  “You knew the Aesir are alive?”

  “No,” Sigrun said, “but I am not surprised.” She searched Dainn’s face. “Where is she?”

  “I do not understand you.”

  “But I understand you, I think. You struggle greatly with emotions you cannot master. A difficult situation for an elf. I am sorry.”

  “You need not be,” he said, anger like a rope knotting around his heart.

  “Forgive me,” she said. “I do not mean to pass judgment.” She smiled again. “In the most sacred tales of those with whom I spend my days, there is good and there is evil. It is quite simple. Only one side will triumph in the end. An angel with a flaming sword will fight the Dark One, with his hordes behind him.”

  “I know no ‘angels,’” Dainn said. “And evil is not a useful concept among my kind. Have you then accepted the faith of the White Christ?”

  The nun’s face creased with amusement. “I am content here.” She glanced at the unbroken wall behind
Dainn as if she were looking out a window at the hills and fields beyond. “I was lonely in this world, and I saw much suffering and destruction I could not ease. A century ago, I sought and was granted sanctuary in this convent, thinking it would be for only a few days. But I found that the life suited me very well. I stayed. I became what you see now.”

  “Have your companions failed to notice that you have not aged?”

  “My order considers it a gift from their god that I appear to remain young. Why should I disillusion them with stories they will not comprehend?” She displayed her callused hands as if letting Dainn see them was a precious gift. “I know you have come to recruit me to the coming battle. But I cannot go with you. All I can do is give you what you seek.”

  She reached down to her waist and untied the woolen belt that gave her habit its only shape, carefully removing the rosary from its hooks and laying it on the small table beside her chair.

  “I have kept it hidden, as I was bid,” she said. “It is yours now. Yours, and hers.”

  Dainn stared at the belt. It had become a slender silver chain, no wider than a bootlace, glowing with the magic of the Dvergar, the dwarves, who had forged it.

  “Take it,” Sigrun said. “And may you use it well for the sake of Midgard.” She rose. “As much as I can do within these walls, I will do.”

  “Pray, Sister?” Dainn said, clenching his fist on the table.

  “If you like.” She hesitated. “You must have faith. Not in a god, or in the past. Have faith in this world and in the power her enemies have never been able to take from her.”

  “And in mortalkind?” he asked.

  “In life, and in love,” she said. “They always find a way.”

  Her words rang with the deep wisdom she had gained in her solitude and contemplation, the wisdom that had eluded Dainn in spite of all the centuries of searching. He wasn’t prepared when she reached out and touched his forehead with her roughened fingertips.

  “May you find your own peace, my brother,” she murmured. And then she was walking away from him, passing through the door into the deepest silence Dainn had ever known in this world.

  He took Gleipnir from the table, feeling its silky weight shift in his palm. Searing pain bit into his skin, and he dropped it onto the table.

  Gleipnir had burned him, as the White Christ’s symbols were said to burn his enemies. It sensed the beast in him—the creature that, like Fenrisulfr, was a threat to the Aesir and all who stood with them.

  Ignoring the pain, Dainn picked it up again and let it fall into the small, warded box he had brought with him. Immediately it arranged itself into a tidy coil.

  Dainn left the convent by the door that led into a tiny side courtyard. The temperate Mediterranean weather was a reminder that San Francisco, and California as a whole, seemed to be bearing the brunt of this unusual winter. Birds sang among the neat fields, which lay at the foot of the hill where the village and convent overlooked the countryside around it.

  Dainn could feel the magic he understood—earth and grass and wood and all the living things that grew under and above it—seeping through the soles of his boots.

  Kneeling under the shelter of a small grove of trees at the foot of the hill, Dainn laid his hands flat on the earth and closed his eyes. He attempted no magic. He had nearly five hours before he must reach the airport, and for a time—so brief a time—he could remember who he had been long ago.

  It was dawn when the cliff vanished.

  Still groggy from another sleepless night, Mist tumbled out of the rented Jeep. There was a road where the end of the box canyon had been, the vestiges of the cliff barrier still floating around it as if it were reluctant to abandon its duty.

  Mist was sick to death of illusions. But this one might be keeping her Sister safe.

  In the distance, tucked in a small, dry valley, stood a house. Mist could barely make it out in the dim light, but the road—lightly rutted with the tracks of a small truck—led straight to it.

  Mist’s neck began to prickle again, and she studied the landscape. It was as dry and forbidding as much of the desert she’d been searching since her plane had arrived in Albuquerque early that morning, but only over the last few miles had she begun to feel the strange magic.

  If it were Eir’s, she’d developed abilities she’d never possessed as a Valkyrie. There had always been rumors that she was, in fact, a goddess herself. But she’d never let on, and had seemed content with a Valkyrie life.

  Unlike Mist.

  Climbing back into the Jeep, Mist released the brake and continued along the road. But soon she found herself facing a completely different kind of barrier. Strange, ethereal voices, speaking in some ancient, unknown language, seemed to urge her to turn around and go back the way she’d come.

  She had no time to guess at their origin. She did her best to ignore the voices as she lurched over the packed and corrugated dirt.

  When she looked in the rearview mirror, she saw that the road was blocked by another cliff exactly matching the one she had just passed through.

  As she drove toward the house—a one-story adobe structure that seemed to blend in with the browns and reds and tans of the landscape surrounding it—Mist could see no trees at all, let alone divine apple trees. She could still feel watching eyes assessing her, weighing her nature and purpose.

  But by the time she was within fifty yards of the building, the low red wall encircling the house shimmered, and suddenly there was an explosion of verdant life. Trees, a whole grove of them, with summer leaves instead of bare winter branches.

  A woman was sitting on a bench in front of the house as Mist braked and turned off the engine. At first Mist didn’t recognize her. She was thinner than Mist remembered, almost gaunt, her skin weathered and her light brown hair bleached nearly blond by the brilliant New Mexico sun. She wore an incongruous broad-brimmed straw hat, a jacket made from an Indian blanket, jeans, and scuffed boots. Lines carved by sun and wind bracketed her light brown eyes.

  “Eir?” Mist said, walking around the jeep.

  “Mist,” the woman said, making no move to meet her. “How did you find me?”

  “I had help,” Mist said. “From someone on our side.”

  “Our side,” Eir said. “Are there still sides?” She stroked the nearly shiny wood of the bench, worn smooth by years of constant use. “Why did you come here, Mist?”

  Eir clearly had no knowledge of the Aesir’s survival or Loki’s arrival on Midgard. And her expression wasn’t exactly welcoming. They had last seen each other in the early nineteenth century, when Eir had been working to help victims of the cholera pandemic in Europe.

  Eir had nearly killed herself trying to save the dying, and she had suffered the trauma of a dedicated healer watching hundreds fall before she could so much as touch them. Mist had the feeling that Eir was perfectly content to live here in solitude, undisturbed.

  “It’d be easier for me to explain if we got a little more comfortable,” Mist said. “Can we go inside? I’m thirsty as Yggdrasil.”

  Suddenly Eir sketched a Bind-Rune in the air, and Mist felt a blast of power, heat coursing through her like a fever.

  Slowly she reached behind her for Kettlingr, her hands shaking with effort. She drew it and sang it to its full size, dragging it into a defensive position.

  Abruptly the attack stopped. The heat burned away. Sweat beaded Mist’s brow, drying rapidly in a wind hungry for moisture.

  Shivering as if she had taken the fever on herself, Eir looked down at Kettlingr. “I remember that sword,” she said. “And if you weren’t who you say you are, you wouldn’t have been able to withstand my spell.”

  “Why are you afraid?” Mist asked, all but jamming Kettlingr into its sheath. “Have you been attacked?”

  “No,” Eir said, rising a little unsteadily. “Old habits are hard to break. The locals seemed pretty sure of you, but I had to be certain.” She smiled. “Come in, Sister.”

  “The loca
ls?” Mist asked.

  “Let’s go inside, and I’ll explain after you’ve told me why you’re here.”

  The main room of the house was spare but comfortable, with a rounded fireplace built into the wall in one corner of the main room—its wide mouth sheltering low-burning flames—a set of chairs heaped with woven blankets and pillows, and a rough-hewn table.

  “Coffee?” Eir offered. “Or would you prefer water? I suspect they kept you waiting out there some time.”

  “They?” Mist said, remembering the alien voices and the sense of watching eyes. “Didn’t you dispel the illusion?”

  “Oh, that wasn’t me,” Eir said, gesturing Mist to a chair. “This is their country, after all.”

  Before Mist could question her again, Eir walked out of the room through an arched doorway. Five minutes later she emerged with a glass of water and two steaming mugs of coffee balanced on a ceramic tray.

  “Do you still take it black?” Eir said, setting one of the mugs in front of Mist.

  “A lot has changed, but not that.”

  Eir sat down opposite Mist. “I have a feeling you’re about to complicate my peaceful life,” she said.

  Mist sipped her coffee. “The trees?”

  “Believe it or not, apple trees do grow in this state, though sometimes they don’t bear when it’s really cold. But of course mine are protected.”

  “And invisible,” Mist said.

  “Just a precaution. Not too many people find me out here. I go down to Gallup sometimes, but I don’t think I’ve had more than one visitor in a decade.”

  Mist set down her mug. “It was legends about your trees that brought me here.”

  “Legends no one takes very seriously, fortunately for me.” She cradled her hands around her mug as if she were cold, though her face was flushed. “Now you can tell me why you’re here.”

  Mist leaned over the table. “I need you, Eir. You and all our Sisters.”

  Because of their shared past, Mist was able to tell the story in a little over an hour, leaving out certain personal details. Eir listened almost without interruption, solemn and growing more so by the minute.