Bound to Gods

by Eva Chase

  “But I did,” Hod said. “I killed you. It was my fault, at least as much as Loki’s.”

  “All your fault,” the draug gurgled. “All your—”

  It lunged unexpectedly, swiping out with the mistletoe spear. I’d been right about Hod. His arm shot up, but only to block the blow. The spear tip sliced across his wrist, drawing a thin red line. Panic flashed across Baldur’s face. He might have been able to stop it too, but God, how could anyone ask him to kill himself after all the horror he’d been through.

  Desperation wrenched through me. The draug would kill Hod if it could. That was what Muninn wanted here.

  It heaved forward with another lash, and I thrust my hands toward it. “Stop!”

  Lightning crackled through my veins and burst from my palms. The corpse jerked and seized. It toppled over and hit the ground, disappearing into a puff of dust.

  I lowered my arms, my body trembling. I really wished I had a little more control over when that happened, even though I was pretty happy with this outcome. I shot a glance toward the twins.

  Baldur gave me a terse nod. A ragged sigh rushed out of Hod. He rubbed his face.

  “That thing and what it said might not have been real,” he said, “but you have to know it was my fault. Who else can you blame?”

  The light god glanced at me and swallowed audibly. “If it’ll take truth to beat Muninn’s prison: How about myself?”

  Hod’s head jerked up. “What in Hel’s name are you talking about?”

  “I was there, wasn’t I?” Baldur waved his hand toward the middle of the courtyard. “I let Mother collect those vows. I let them play that game—which was stupid; Loki was right about that. I flaunted the care and security I’d been given. If I’d been happy simply having it, if I’d shut down the idea of the game… I never would have been in a position where anyone could have hurt me. I can take responsibility for that.”

  Hod stared at his brother—as much as he could stare. A little of the tension left his shoulders. “So where do we go from there?” he asked.

  Baldur dragged in a breath. “Well, I think first we need to get out of this prison. But then, after… I’d like to be able to talk to you about it more. Darkness is your forte. Maybe you’ll be able to help me make more peace with what I went through. If you don’t mind taking on some of that burden—”

  “Of course not,” Hod said quickly. “Anything I can do. It won’t be a burden if it helps you heal.”

  A small but bright smile spread across Baldur’s face. “Then I couldn’t ask for anything else, brother,” he said.

  Hod smiled back—and the courtyard around us shimmered. It was working. I froze, my heart leaping as I searched for the chinks in Muninn’s construct. We’d challenged the memories she was using again, shaken up her foundations. There had to be—

  There. I caught a glimpse of gray rock through a gouge in the tiles. I leapt toward it, and the world tilted over again.

  No. My arms darted out. I trained my mind on that image, that rock, the reddish glow and the ashen smell I’d caught before. That was the real world. That was the place we needed to reach.

  The courtyard whirled away in a gust of fog. I half dashed, half skidded through it, my feet bumping over rough rock. A scene stretched out ahead of me, hazy around the edges like the moment I’d seen of Muninn and that man in what had seemed to be their home.

  But this was no house. A dark cliff loomed over me, and a tall figure strode along several feet ahead of me, beside a river that glowed searing red. The figure wore a faded cloak and a broad-brimmed hat. A familiar twang ran through my chest.

  “Odin!” I started to call, but the name snagged in my throat. As I’d opened my mouth, a flurry of men and monsters rained down on the god from the cliffside and from crevices in the ground beside it. He swept out his spear, but it was knocked from his grasp in an instant. He crumpled under the mass of attackers.

  “There,” Muninn’s sweetly hoarse voice said, somewhere distant. “I delivered him. I fulfilled my end.”

  “You did,” a man answered in a searing tone. “But are you really finished with him, raven?”

  A force socked me in the gut, sending me flying back into the fog, and I lost her answer.

  17

  Hod

  The warmth in my brother’s voice melted some of my anguish. I smiled at him, sensing exactly where he stood from the gentle energy he carried with him everywhere. It seemed to wrap around me, quiet but reassuring. Were we really good? Better than we had been, at least?

  Ari sucked in a startled breath. Her footsteps dashed across the tiles, and my head snapped around to follow them. The air rippled around us. I stepped forward instinctively. If she’d seen some sort of danger, I had to be there for her too.

  For one instant, I thought I heard the rustling of a cloak, a rough cough I would have sworn was my father’s. My breath caught. Then something struck me, walloping me off my feet.

  “Hod!” Ari’s voice called out from somewhere far away. Fear lanced through me. I reached after her, but I was sliding, tumbling, farther away.

  I fought the wind, but no movement I made affected my direction. It blasted me so hard my ears rang. I careened through formless space until I jarred with a halt at the edge of a thin rug across a cool stone floor. My hand braced against the polished surface.

  The raven’s illusion had started to shatter. That must be it—I had gotten a glimpse of Odin, of some other place that wasn’t part of her construct. Ari had been right. As we changed the way we thought about our memories, what we knew to be true about the past at all, Muninn’s hold on us weakened.

  And because we’d gotten close to breaking through, she’d tossed us away again.

  At least I was gone from that awful courtyard. What worse was there she could throw at me?

  It wasn’t myself I should be worrying about now, I didn’t think. What she’d put Baldur through—every part of me ached just remembering the way he’d talked about it. How broken he felt. How wrong. If she put him through that again, how much longer could he hold himself together?

  Or maybe he was stronger than I was giving him credit for. Even as an ache rippled through me, a sense of relief flowed beneath it. I’d finally closed the distance that had grown between us. He was opening up to me. He was willing to ask for my help, even though those conversations would be even harder for him than for me. If I could pull him even a little out of the haze he’d been hiding in, all the torture I’d faced here would have been worth it.

  Where had Muninn sent him now? What had she done with Ari?

  The raven had already battered our valkyrie so much. I hadn’t even had a chance to make sure she was all right, to ask what she’d been through. I’d been so lost in my own pain. But if Muninn had dredging up those memories for me and my twin, twisted them so cruelly… My stomach twisted at what she might have thrown at Ari.

  I had to try to find my way back to her. She’d managed to find me before, using the connection between us. Whenever the prison faltered, it was because we were working together, finding those truths together.

  I filled my lungs, getting a sense of my surroundings. A wide room, from the air currents drifting past me. A streak of warmth fell across one of my shoulders where sunlight must be spilling through a high window. A subdued murmuring carried through that window, along with the rasp of dragged logs.

  My body tensed all over again. Ah. Muninn hadn’t thrown me far in time from my last location. They were building Baldur’s funeral pyre out there.

  A wail rose up, petering out into sobbing. Nanna, Baldur’s wife. I swallowed hard. I’d heard, after we’d all returned, that she’d thrown herself on his pyre to be burned up with him. You could almost say I’d killed two gods when I’d killed him.

  Some had said that.

  If this was that day, then I was in one of the lower chambers of my father’s hall, one I’d never had reason to be in before then. The door behind me would be locked, until—<
br />
  The bolt thudded over. The hinges squeaked faintly as the Allfather stepped inside with slow footfalls. Heavier than usual. I could feel the slump of his shoulders in the sound of his exhale.

  Other footsteps slipped in behind him, so faint I might not have noticed them if I’d had all my senses to distract me. The second visitor stopped at the edge of the room and set the object he’d been holding against the wall with a soft thump.

  “My son,” Odin said.

  “Father,” I replied. Anticipation had clamped tight around my chest. I stayed turned away from him, turned toward the window and the sun. The first time, when this had really happened, I’d been standing facing him, hadn’t I? But there was no need to recreate this memory perfectly. Would he say the exact same things, make the same excuses?

  Part of me clenched with grim satisfaction at the idea of him having to speak to my back to deliver this message.

  “You know, if it were simply my choice, we wouldn’t be here,” Odin said. His voice was strained but resigned. He’d already decided he had no choice. “But the balance is needed, now more than ever as summer fades from this realm. We need dark as well as light, but darkness when light is gone cannot be sustained.”

  “I know, Father,” I said.

  I didn’t really. He’d been afraid of Ragnarok’s approach; that much had become clear. But the balance hadn’t made any difference to that war. It had come down on Asgard anyway. Had this one act really swayed anything that mattered?

  I hadn’t thought it through in much detail in the original moment. I’d been drowned in my own guilt and grief. His pronouncement had stung, but in some ways I’d welcomed it. Death was better than living on with the knowledge of what I’d done. I was accustomed to darkness. I could accept it.

  Now, I could have tried for the door, tried to push past him, but I found I couldn’t bring myself to move. What were the chances I’d make it that far before he and his companion stopped me anyway? Maybe his words would make more sense this time around.

  “If we don’t appease Asgard’s sense of rightness a little longer, we could lose everything,” my father went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “That is the burden we bear.”

  He came forward to stand beside me where I was kneeling. His hand rested on my shoulder. “If I had known it would play out this way…”

  Then what? He’d have done something differently? What had he seen, in all the travels he’d been on, in his visits to the Norns, in his searching visions? All of us knew that the Allfather saw more with his one eye than anyone else came close to with two. He’d sacrificed the other so that he could glimpse what lay beyond the world of the present.

  “I would have liked to at least bear witness at the funeral,” I said. “Pay my last regards.” As if this conjured version of my father would give me any satisfaction there.

  The stranger by the wall spoke up then as he hadn’t in reality. His voice was a low rumble. “The blind god bearing witness? The murderer giving regards to his victim? What a joke.”

  “Quiet,” Odin boomed. His grip on my shoulder tightened. “I think it is better for all of us if the deed is done before then,” he said to me.

  Better for all of us? A jolt of anger shot through me. I heaved myself to my feet and turned to face him after all.

  “Why don’t you just say it, Father?” I said. “Instead of talking about deeds and balance. You’re going to kill me, like I killed Baldur. That’s the plain fact of it. Shouldn’t all this dancing around it be beneath you?”

  With each sentence that spilled from my mouth, the anger inside me flared a little hotter. A good burning, with a sear of energy and conviction. So much more than I’d even realized I’d kept bottled up.

  The Odin drawn from my memories was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Perhaps it is. I simply thought it might be kinder to you to avoid that much bluntness.”

  “Kinder to me?” A sharp laugh tumbled out. A starker searing blazed through me, so fast I didn’t have time to examine it before the words burst from my mouth. “Tell me the truth, Father. If I’d been the one who’d died first—if it’d been me falling at Baldur’s hand—would you have sacrificed him? Your light, your joy? Would our mother have even let you?”

  The questions left an acid aftertaste on my tongue. Odin stood still and silent. Every moment he didn’t speak turned any shame I might have felt at asking him back into anger.

  “Are you just not sure?” I demanded. “Or is it that you know I won’t like your answer if you tell the truth?”

  The stranger by the wall started to laugh in a rolling cackle. Odin stirred. “What answer would you want me to give you, my son?” he said in a low voice. “What could I say that would satisfy you?”

  Those words punctured the vicious swell inside me. It was my turn to hesitate. A tremor ran down through my gut.

  How long had I wondered those things without saying them, without even really thinking them? The emotion in them felt very, very old. Bone-deep and woven through my veins.

  How many times had I watched the other gods, including our parents, gravitate toward Baldur while leaving me alone? When had our mother ever gone on a quest to protect me, to ensure I’d never come to harm? It had all been for Baldur. Baldur the kind. Baldur the just. Baldur the bright.

  Why wouldn’t everyone prefer his company to the dark god who was most at home in the night?

  Loki’s cutting remarks in the courtyard came back to me. The bitterness was wafting off you like the stink of a skunk. Maybe it had been. Because this wrenching sensation inside me wasn’t just guilt or grief. Some part of me had been desperately jealous of the love that had been extended to my brother, over and over, and not to me.

  I gritted my teeth, but I couldn’t stop that final question from rising up in my mind. Had I wanted to hurt Baldur, deep down? Wanted to let him fall, just once?

  “I don’t know,” I said to my father. “I just— This isn’t what I wanted. I know this isn’t what I ever would have wanted.”

  “It’s easier to make our choices again in hindsight,” the Allfather said. “That doesn’t mean you weren’t true to yourself when you made them.”

  “He’s my brother,” I said, but the protest came out weak even to my own ears. Nanna’s sobbing carried through the window, along with the fainter sounds of weeping from other gods. All that grief, I’d brought to this place. Because I’d resented how happy Baldur made them?

  Odin clasped my shoulders again. He bowed his head close, brushing a dry kiss to my forehead like a blessing, the way he had all those centuries ago. “It’s time. I swear that I will see you, after.”

  “Father…” I didn’t know what else to say.

  Odin stepped back, a whisper of his feet against the rug. The stranger lifted his club off the floor and approached with weightier steps. His clothes rustled as he raised his arms. I braced myself, my hands clenched at my sides.

  Even if I was bitter, even if I’d been jealous, I could take my death with honor. I could accept the punishment I was due. I—

  I wasn’t really supposed to be here. I’d taken that punishment already, ages ago. This was Muninn’s doing. If I got swept up in the memory, I could die here all over again. That was what she meant for me. She’d wanted me to get swept away until I forgot to defend myself.

  The air shifted as my executioner swung his club. I dodged to the side, a split-second too late. The heavy shaft of wood missed bashing open my head, but it did clock me across the temple.

  Pain exploded through my skull. I staggered backwards, reeling, and tipped over an edge in the floor into freefall.

  18

  Aria

  This time Muninn’s intent hurled me upward—up, up, into a darkness that spilled open to clear blue sky. As it spat me out, I whipped out my wings to catch myself on the breeze.

  I whirled around. I was hovering over Asgard, the gleaming rooftops scattered below me, alone.

  No, not alone. A brown feathered body soa
red past me. Freya’s falcon, beating her wings hard as if her life depended on getting wherever she was going as quickly as possible.

  I swooped after her, straining to keep up. “Freya!” I called. “What’s happening? What’s wrong?” Was this one of her memories now, a chase by a monster maybe? I didn’t see anything flying after us.

  The falcon didn’t slow. “Freya!” I called again. What if it wasn’t her after all but a construct of her? But when I stretched my senses, I could feel a tingle of her godly life energy even from a few feet behind her.

  I flapped with a fresh burst of speed and shot past her. If she was caught up in a memory, maybe I could snap her out of it like Loki and I had before.

  “Freya, can you at least give me a sign—”

  The falcon banked at the sight of me. With a flutter, the goddess slipped out of the falcon cloak, draping it across her shoulders to keep her body in the air. She stared at me, her eyes slightly glazed as if she wasn’t totally seeing me yet.

  “My daughter,” she murmured. “I have to find my daughter.”

  My heart squeezed. “Freya,” I said, grasping her hand like I had when she’d thought she was slipping back into old age. “I don’t know what happened before, but Muninn wants to hurt us. To break us down. If it freaks you out this much not being able to find your daughter, I don’t think she’ll ever let you. But you did find her eventually, right?” I had trouble believing Loki would have joked about bartering her off to giants otherwise, but then, I’d have had trouble believing he’d have orchestrated a murder too, so what did I know?

  Freya’s breaths smoothed out. She swiped her hand across her eyes. “So you bring me back to reality again, Ari,” she said with a crooked smile.

  “I’ve needed those reminders too,” I said, thinking of the bedroom in Petey’s foster home, Hod’s strained voice.