Bound to Gods

by Eva Chase

  “I just… I saw her. But you’re right. This is what Muninn wants—us frantic rather than trying to work our way out.” The goddess sighed. “Let’s go down to earth. I’ll think clearer there.”

  We had flown past the main city and the orchard now. Freya dipped down toward a glade in the thicker forest. We came down on the soft grass near a large stone well. Brown ridges jutted from the soil at the edge of the glade, but their shape and texture looked wrong for rocks. After a moment I realized they were enormous tree roots. But where was the tree?

  “Those are the roots of Yggdrasil,” Freya said with a tip of her head. “I suppose the raven decided no harm could come from us having access to them.” She let her hand trail along the edge of the well. “This is where the Norns used to pass their time. They liked to water the tree, among other things.”

  Other things. “I’ve heard you and the others mention the Norns before,” I said. “I’ve got no idea who they were.”

  “None of us really did,” Freya said. “They just turned up in Asgard one day and settled down here, these three. Spinning prophecies. Some said they determined the future. I think they merely read the signs to see where it was leading.” She paused. “Odin did too. We weren’t married then, but I noticed he visited them often. He’s always wanted to know all he can about what is and what will be.”

  “I guess that habit got him into a lot of trouble this time around.”

  “So it seems.” She shook her head with a wry expression, her golden hair tumbling over her shoulders. “I wouldn’t have stopped him from his wanderings, even if I could have, though. I miss him when he’s away, but that thirst for knowledge is part of what makes him the man I love.”

  I thought of the Odin that Muninn had shown me in her tarnished Valhalla. He hadn’t looked all that loveable then. But then, Freya could obviously be bloodthirsty too. That was why they got along.

  “You’ve been together a long time?” I ventured.

  “His relationship with the twins’ mother fell apart not long after that scene you saw with the mistletoe and so on,” she said. “I wouldn’t have thought of anything happening between us, but after Ragnarok, when we all got our second chances… It seemed foolish to hold back from what might make us both happy.”

  She glanced at me sideways, with a teasing lift of her eyebrows. “I notice you’re indulging in at least one godly dalliance of your own.”

  My face flushed. The worst part is, I didn’t even know which god she was definitely talking about. Probably Loki. She’d definitely seen him kiss me.

  “That’s just—” I started, and didn’t know how to finish that sentence. I had no idea what I was doing with any of them. Only that it felt good when I was doing it, and at the time that always seemed like enough. The thought of trying to define anything, put some sort of meaning on it, made my stomach twist.

  “It’s all right,” Freya said. “You’ll find no judgment here. I get the impression you’re a woman who knows how to protect her own heart. I expect you can handle them.”

  Them. Okay, she’d definitely noticed something was up with the others. This seemed like a good time to change the subject.

  “Muninn stayed with Odin for a while after Ragnarok, didn’t she?” I said. “You must have gotten to know her pretty well back then. Maybe something you saw back then will give us more of an answer to escaping this place.”

  “I don’t know if I would say I knew her well.” Freya leaned back against the well, her expression going thoughtful. “She couldn’t shapeshift back then, you know. She was always a raven. An extraordinarily intelligent and aware raven, but she could only speak to Odin, through a mental bond they had. I never spoke with her directly. From the way he talked about her, though, he thought of her as an old friend. I never got the impression he saw reason to doubt her loyalty.”

  “Did he ever say what happened right before she left? Where she’d gone? If there was anything—”

  Before I could finish the thought or Freya could answer it, the walls of the well blasted apart. One of them knocked me back into the darkness that filled the gaps between Muninn’s constructs. I sucked air into my lungs, trying to right myself, and only tumbled backward again. The wind whirled me around and then dropped me.

  Muninn didn’t want me asking those questions. Okay. I must be getting close to tearing this prison down.

  I landed on a scuffed wooden floor, my hand shooting out to grip the banister instinctively. Freya was gone, off in some new nightmare of her own, no doubt. The dreary smell of my mother’s house closed in around me. Tension clenched around my chest.

  The upstairs hallway. I was in the upstairs hall, outside the bedrooms. Even as I realized that, steadying my feet on the floor, the creak of the stairs carried up from below. A heavier creak than my mother’s steps would have made. Every muscle in my body clenched up.

  “No!” I shouted at Muninn, wherever the hell she was. “Don’t you dare.”

  Another creak. My heart lurched. I hurtled myself toward the wall at the end of the hallway with the burn of all my valkyrie strength.

  “Let. Me. Out.”

  I slammed into the wall fists first, and it cracked apart with a shower of dust. With a heave of my feet and a frantic flap of my wings, I propelled myself into the darkness on the other side.

  Muninn’s wind whipped around me, yanking me to the side. Not back there—no, I wouldn’t let her. I beat my wings as hard as I could against it, groping for anything else I could hold on to. I’d beat her before. I could be stronger than her if I just pushed hard enough.

  A forest spiraled by beneath me. The invisible force walloped me to the right. As my head spun, Asgard’s halls flashed by. Was that Thor outside one? I reached toward him, but the wind snatched me back too fast, too strong.

  I spun head over feet. “Ari!” Loki’s voice called, there and then sucked away in the howl of air around me. I jerked up and plummeted, tripped down a set of steps—the ones from my old elementary school?—hurled myself upward again, and caught another impression of one of the gods. There. I wanted to go there. We’d fight her together. I was so done with being shoved around at the raven woman’s whim.

  My wings ached, but I flapped them even harder. The force dragged at them—and then snapped. I tumbled headlong into a dark room, landing on my ass.

  A cold stone floor lay beneath me. A sliver of a moon gleamed beyond the window, and a massive bed stood just across from me. Three figures clustered to my right, huddled together by the back wall. And one form, pale and lean with short black hair mussed as if the wind had dropped him here not that long ago, bent over the bed.

  Hod didn’t seem to have noticed me. His hand drifted over the covers—over the body lying under them. A halting rattle of a breath carried from the pillow, followed by a faint groan. Hod’s mouth tightened. He drew his fingers to his palm, and the sensation echoed in the shadows that lurked inside me as he pulled the last shreds of life into his own darkness.

  The room had been quiet before, but now the hush was total. Hod straightened up, his hand falling to his side. His head turned toward his audience, and they pulled even farther back without a word. His lips curled into a grimace. He headed out the door, and the watching figures let out their breaths in one combined exhalation.

  I pushed myself to my feet and hurried after him. I nearly collided with him in the hall outside, where he’d stopped, I guessed at the sound of my steps. He caught my elbow, steadying me.

  “Ari?”

  His voice was terse, but his grip on me trembled. I knew the dark god well enough to have noticed that he always got more prickly when he was trying to cover his own discomfort.

  “The one and only,” I said with a lot more cheer than I felt. Anything was better than my childhood memories, and at least I wasn’t alone. We had a chance to escaping when we could work with each other. Muninn was jerking us around more and more. It must be getting harder for her to maintain any one illusion.

&n
bsp; My gaze caught on an angry purple-red splotch on the side of Hod’s forehead—the side that had been turned away from me before—and my body tensed. “What happened to you? Who did that?” Because I’d like to give them a matching bruise as payback.

  Hod’s hand rose to his temple as if he’d forgotten the injury. “It’s nothing,” he said, still terse. “I got careless. My skull is still intact, which is about as much as I could have asked for.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that, but he clearly wasn’t in the mood to discuss the trouble he’d encountered. I forced myself to look away, considering the hall. “What do you think we’ve gotten ourselves into this time?”

  He shrugged. “If you saw me in there, it’s already over.”

  I glanced back toward the bedroom. “You were taking that person’s life.” Person? These stone walls had an Asgardian vibe. “That god’s?”

  “Not everyone in Asgard looked after themselves so well after the rebirth,” Hod said. “A few got to the point where what life they had left was barely life at all. They wanted their final end to be as peaceful and quiet as possible. So they’d call on me.” He turned his face away. “This was my life, while Asgard was still active: called for duties no one wanted to even mention by the light of day.”

  Duties no one else could have done the same way, I wanted to point out. But I’d seen the way his audience had cringed away from him. I couldn’t change his mind by lying.

  “What now?” I said instead.

  “I don’t know. I suppose we wait and see what Muninn stirs up next.”

  Was she watching us now? Did she even realize where I’d gotten to in her ever-expanding prison? She must have to focus her attention on the others part of the time. I’d broken out of the last memory she’d tried to trap me in—I’d managed to find my way here to Hod.

  “I think she’s tiring out,” I said. “She wants us anxious or upset all the time… It’s easier to control us that way? So, maybe we’ll have a better chance of breaking out completely if we’re somewhere with happier memories. I haven’t seen your hall yet. Why don’t you invite me over?”

  Something that sounded like a guffaw sputtered out of the dark god. “I don’t know how happy that place is, but all right. Will you accompany me home, valkyrie?”

  “It would be my pleasure,” I said in a formal tone, and the corners of his mouth twitched upward.

  We left that house behind and made our way to a smaller hall of stones that looked a slightly darker gray than the ones around them. A craftsman with a sense of humor or Hod’s own choice? He nudged open the door and strode over the threshold, confidence drawing his posture even straighter in the familiar space.

  “Here you have it,” he said dryly. “Home sweet home.”

  19

  Aria

  My pulse thumped with curiosity as I peeked through the closest doorways of the dark god’s house, finding a dining room and a parlor with a single chair and shelves upon shelves of books. So very Hod. Were his texts here written in whatever the Asgardian version of braille was, or did he have to use magic to read like he did with his collection back on Midgard? He trailed along behind me, but he didn’t speak, letting me take it all in uninterrupted.

  The lonely chair niggled at me. “You lived here alone?”

  “Live, present tense, when we’re back in the real Asgard,” Hod said. “Does that surprise you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was silly, but somehow I figured you and Baldur were pretty inseparable.”

  “Oh, he has his own hall, closer to the main courtyard. I’m told it has a beautiful view.”

  A strange edge had come into his voice. That talk with his twin had seemed to dull some of the guilt he’d been feeling, but not enough, apparently. Was that a point I could press to widen the gaps in Muninn’s prison?

  “We’re going to get out of here, you know,” I said. “And then you’ll have all the rest of your godly lives to hash out anything else that needs hashing out. At least—”

  I caught myself, realizing just in time that my own thoughts had started to veer in a guilty direction. Hod didn’t need my pain layered on top of his own.

  But clearly he knew me too well at this point. “At least I can talk to him?” he filled in quietly. “At least he’s still here. At least he remembers who I am.”

  “It’s stupid to compare,” I said. “Let’s just stick with, I know how shitty it feels when things aren’t right with someone you care about that much.”

  “There might be some day, when all this is over, that you could talk to Petey again.”

  I stared at him. “You’d let me, Mr. Leave All Your Earthly Concerns Behind?”

  Hod rubbed his mouth. “Maybe I’ve gotten a very thorough example of why trying to simply forget about old hurts isn’t always the best course of action. And… even I know it’s not right that he doesn’t even remember you, all the things you did for him, when you could be a real part of his life.” His voice dropped even lower. “I’m sorry I had to add to your pain.”

  My throat tightened so suddenly it took a moment before I could speak. “Hod… I’d have been in a lot more pain if I’d had to leave him with my mom. Or anywhere else the dark elves might find him. You were helping me.”

  “In a way.” He leaned back against the door frame. “That’s how I contribute, isn’t it? Through darkness, through taking away, through death… Even Loki brings brightness rather than quashing it sometimes.”

  “Okay, now you’re being ridiculous,” I said. I’d have needed to argue with him even if I hadn’t thought challenging all our takes on any given situation was the key to getting out of here. “You contribute a lot more than that. You’ve got all that knowledge from those books, and you’re probably the closest thing this group has to a voice of reason, even if that’s a little pessimistic sometimes, and… and sometimes what you take away is pain. You gave me the space to talk about things I didn’t think I ever wanted to talk about with anyone. To let some of it out, knowing you were listening, knowing that it mattered to you. That meant a lot.”

  “You’ve only seen a small fraction of who I am, valkyrie,” he said, but his voice had softened a little.

  I made a scoffing sound. “I’ve seen enough. So you’re not all shiny like Baldur and you don’t have Thor’s bravado or whatever. So what? You’re all so different from each other… It’s kind of hard to imagine you all not being together. Like you’ve got the perfect balance between the bunch of you.”

  Something about that comment made Hod wince. “Not quite perfect,” he said. “There were all those fault lines we were trying not to let crack open. But with you being here—you’ve made it easier somehow. Stirred things up just enough to start clearing out the tensions, I suppose. It’s hard to imagine you not being with us now.”

  A giddy warmth passed through me at that comment. I stepped closer to him, taking his hand.

  “You know, I watched what happened in that courtyard, and I don’t think you can be blamed for what happened. You didn’t know. You thought you were just joining in with the rest of them. Loki—”

  Hod shook his head with a jerk. “I’m not so sure about that,” he said roughly. “Some of the things the raven has reminded me of… There were times I felt so angry at how the gods favored Baldur. I didn’t have to throw the stick that hard. I could have asked what Loki was up to.”

  I squeezed his hand harder. “Do you really think you wanted him dead?”

  The dark god paused. His jaw flexed. “No. Never that. But I might have wanted him to hurt just a little, just once. To have one thing go wrong.”

  Oh, my dear dark god.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That sounds pretty normal to me. I loved Francis with all my heart. But there were totally times when I resented all the things he got to do that I couldn’t because he was older. And times, after the really bad stuff started… when I hated that I had to go through that and somehow he got off free. Emotions aren’t fair. They just
are. Does that mean it’s my fault he died?”

  My pulse hitched as I said it, as if I were half afraid Hod would say yes, it was. He brought his hand to my face, stroking his thumb across my cheek. “Of course not,” he said firmly. “That’s hardly the same, though. And I doubt Baldur ever feels jealous of anyone. The light in him just washes away anything like resentment.”

  “Didn’t you hear him before? He’s been angry too.”

  “Only briefly, and for justifiable reasons.”

  “Hmph.” I tipped my head against Hod’s chest. His fingers moved to my hair, sending pleasant shivers over my scalp with each caress. “I’d bet being good all the time is stressful in different ways. Can’t you just believe you’re good enough?”

  “Can’t you?” he shot back.

  “I’m working on it,” I said. “You have helped me in lots of ways, you know, despite all the grimness and skepticism. I think it says a lot that you could be so kind to someone you didn’t trust at all to begin with.”

  Hod was silent for a moment. His hand stilled against my hair. “I don’t think you can call those acts kindness, Ari,” he said. “That was a man falling in love with you.”

  My breath stopped; my spine stiffened. I pulled back from Hod to stare into his face. His expression had already tensed.

  “It’s all right,” he said raggedly, backing up a step. “I didn’t expect the sentiment to be returned. If it’s easier, you can pretend I never—”

  An ache shot through my chest, even starker than my panic. I moved automatically, grabbing the front of his shirt and yanking him back to me. Bobbing up on my toes at the same moment to capture his mouth with mine.

  With a stuttered breath, he was kissing me back. His lips had the same salty, softly smoky flavor as the scent that clung to him, and they moved against mine as if he knew exactly how to find the most sensitive angle. As if he’d charted every inch of me a hundred times instead of this only being our second kiss.