Giants of the Frost

by Kim Wilkins

  He had the edge of my anorak and then it slipped from his hand. He was big and clumsy, I was small and desperate.

  I ran.

  I burst through the trees and found myself in the clearing.

  He dived and caught me around the feet, bringing me crashing to the ground. And so it was all going to happen again.

  I kicked at him, got a little way from him, toward the anvil-shaped rock, but then realized I didn’t want to go there, not again. It had already been painted with my blood. In my moment of hesitation he flipped me flat on my back, then sat on my ankles and raised his axe. I flung one hand out to try to struggle into a sitting position. My fingers brushed the head of a soil thermometer that Magnus had inserted into the ground. I yanked it from the earth and sat up, plunging it into Odin’s empty socket.

  He screamed and fell backward, dropping his axe. I didn’t wait to see if he would get up. People do that in movies and end up dead. I got to my feet, snatched up the axe and kept running, wondering when my legs and lungs were going to give out. The clatter of metal on stone alerted me to the fact that he’d got the thermometer out of his eye. His screams and bellows echoed through the forest like the sounds of a monster being tortured. I almost didn’t hear the other voice, faint and far away.

  “Victoria!”

  It was Vidar. “Here, here!” I called.

  His voice was closer this time. “I’m coming, I’m coming.”

  “Quickly, Vidar.” I stopped and looked around. Odin was nowhere in sight but I could hear footsteps all around me and didn’t know to whom they belonged. So I stood perfectly still and hoped Vidar would get to me first.

  Pounding feet, running through the trees. I raised the axe, knowing I was pitiably unable to wield it. If this was Odin, I was just going to have to stand there and take what was coming.

  A shadow emerged from my left and I collapsed to my knees.

  It was Vidar.

  Vidar threw a cloak over us both and crouched on the ground next to me, his arms around me.

  “Victoria,” he gasped, covering my face in desperate kisses, “I’ve found you.”

  “He’s right behind me.”

  “He can’t find us under this cloak. Come with me, we’ll find a safe place to hide where we can talk.”

  He helped me to my feet and I leaned on him heavily. The cloak was made of some weird dark material that seemed to bleed into the shadows of the forest; I almost couldn’t see us. Vidar led me to the beach. The frost hadn’t held on the sand and my feet sank into the fine grains gratefully. The wind was cold, but the sand was soft and Vidar laid me down and stretched out next to me, making sure the cloak covered us from view.

  “He won’t look for us out here,” Vidar said. “He’ll run around in the trees for a long time before he’ll think of heading for open space.”

  “I thought I might never see you again.”

  “I thought the same.”

  Vidar’s face was close to mine. I touched it lovingly. “What happened?”

  “I’m not certain, but I’m here now, and I have something to show you.” He wriggled so his left hand was loose and showed me his index finger. Around it, he had tied a piece of colored thread. It glowed gently in the dark.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s our fate. I have to confront Odin to change it. One of my brothers will become my father’s protector, and he won’t care where I go or what I do.”

  “So we can be together?” I said, hope swelling in my heart.

  “Yes. More than that, we can have children, and grow old together, and be buried next to each other. I’m going to become mortal.”

  On top of the fear and the fatigue, his words undid me and I began to sob. “No. It’s too much.”

  He smiled; his dark eyes were so dear to me. “It’s too late. That’s the bargain I made. If I misuse this thread, I’m sentenced to a thousand years in servitude.” He dropped his lips to my cheek. “You’re stuck with me, Victoria. For life.”

  The tide surged in my chest. I brought my tears under control. “Why, Vidar? Why me?”

  “Because the stars wished it to be so,” he murmured against my skin.

  He kissed me, his tongue gently touched mine, and I felt a shiver of longing and fear.

  “Vidar, we have too much to lose,” I said. “We’re vulnerable.”

  His warm fingers were in my hair. “I’ll protect you, Victoria. Whatever happens.”

  “So what do we do next?”

  “I have to find Odin. Nothing can change until I have spoken to him.”

  I realized that his voice no longer sounded confident. “You don’t want to speak to him, do you?”

  He tried to smile, but failed. “Victoria, would you think me less of a man if I told you I’m afraid of my father?”

  I gazed at him a moment and realized that he was anxious about my answer.

  “Of course not,” I said. “He’s a monster.”

  This time he did smile, though only weakly. “Let’s not waste another moment,” he said. “You stay by me. We’ll find him together.”

  Vidar’s fingers were like a vise holding my hand as we made our way back through the trees.

  “Don’t leave my side,” he said. “He’ll want to get you away from me. Stay by me.”

  “I will,” I said, checking that Odin’s axe was tucked firmly into the waistband of my jeans.

  “He’ll be angry. He’ll shout and wave his club about. Don’t be afraid.”

  “I won’t.”

  He caught his breath. “Can you hear that?”

  I strained my ears. “No.”

  “Somebody coming toward us.”

  “Odin?”

  “Not heavy enough.”

  I looked around, thought I could make out a light approaching between the trees. A moment later, Gunnar appeared, wielding a kerosene lamp and his fake Viking sword.

  “Gunnar!” I gasped.

  “Victoria! You’re safe!”

  Vidar stepped forward. “Nobody is safe. Odin walks the forest. You must return to your metal box.”

  Gunnar’s expression was one of utter bewilderment. “Who?”

  “Gunnar, you have to go back to Kirkja. Right away. There’s nothing you can do here.”

  He was looking Vidar up and down, registering the details of his dress. “What’s going on?”

  “Go, Gunnar. I’ll explain it all in the morning, I promise you.”

  Footsteps in the undergrowth.

  “Go!” Vidar hissed. “Go now.”

  Gunnar turned and Odin hulked out of the trees at the same moment. Vidar shouted something in his own language, but Odin raised his club and ran at Gunnar.

  Gunnar dropped his sword and lamp and started to run. Vidar took off after him. I snatched up the lamp and followed in his wake. Branches whipped me and the cold bit my feet. Moments before, I’d been certain about what would happen next. Now chaos had been reintroduced. The light bobbed ahead of me. I kept my eyes on Vidar’s back and ran as fast as I could. Still he drew away from me, and I had to redouble my efforts not to lose sight of him.

  Up ahead somebody cried out in pain. Gunnar. I wanted to scream. The trees thinned. We were approaching the lake. I burst from the trees to see Gunnar’s body lying twisted and insensible over a rock near the edge of the water. Odin stood over him with his club raised. Vidar, suddenly aware that he had created too big a gap between us, was coming back up the slope for me. Gunnar was easy prey.

  I didn’t think, I just pulled the axe and threw it. It bounced off a branch and landed on the forest floor, at least ten feet from Odin.

  He turned and snarled at me. Vidar stepped between us.

  Odin began to bellow, not words, just a horrible insensible shouting that echoed around the forest. The lake was covered in wide shards of ice, and cracks appeared in them as Odin’s shout went on and on.

  I couldn’t leave Gunnar lying there. What if he was dying? I slipped out from behind Vidar and
ran down the slope to him. Vidar saw me, moved to cover me, putting himself once again between his father and me. The shouting went on, just as Vidar had predicted. It was a terrifying noise, but I tried to block it out. I set the lamp on the ground next to Gunnar and felt for a pulse at his throat. He was still alive. I pulled the rune off my neck and wrapped it around his wrist. Despite Skripi’s lack of faith, I had to believe the rune might be some protection for him.

  Odin’s shouting had turned into words now, more of that strange guttural language they spoke. Vidar tried to reply but Odin roared over the top of him. I glanced over my shoulder. Vidar, dark-haired and gentle-voiced, smaller than his father yet bravely holding his ground. Odin, wild and fair-haired, shouting him down over and over again. Vidar raised his hand. I saw the gleaming colors of the thread.

  Odin howled. Then abruptly stopped.

  The thread still glowed. What had caused his silence?

  I noticed he was gazing over my shoulder. And smiling.

  Vidar turned. Called out, “Victoria!”

  Seaweed and pale fingers around my waist. I screamed. The draugr threw me in the lake. Ice-cold. My breath stopped. I tried to call for Vidar, but sour freezing water rushed into my mouth. A confused set of images: weeds and eyes and the lamplight watery in the quiet lake. I pushed upward, away from the draugr’s clutching hands. I hit ice. I tried again. More ice. I was trapped. My lungs grew solid.

  That’s all I remember.

  A wide, black gap exists in my memory at that point, as if I lost myself for a short time, but then light and sound and life rushed back on me, and I opened my eyes somewhere very bright and very warm.

  “I’ve done this before,” I said, and noticed that my throat wasn’t sore, as it had been the first time I had been under with the draugr.

  I was in bed in my cabin. Carsten was nearby, and Gunnar too.

  “She’s conscious.”

  “Where’s Vidar?” I asked.

  “Victoria, you’ve had an accident. What can you remember?”

  “Where’s Vidar?” I asked again, growing desperate. I sat up and tried to throw off the bedspread. “What’s going on?”

  “Rest, Victoria,” Carsten said.

  “I don’t want to rest. I’m fine.”

  “You shouldn’t be,” he huffed. “You should be brain-dead. You were under the ice for four minutes.”

  “She’s perfectly well,” Gunnar said. “I told you.”

  “Stop talking about me like I’m not here!” I shouted. “Where is Vidar?”

  Gunnar said a quiet word to Carsten, who nodded and left. I waited, horrified at the possibilities. It was daylight outside.

  “Vidar’s gone, Vicky. I’m sorry.”

  I couldn’t make sense of what Gunnar meant by gone.

  “Is he coming back? What did he say?”

  Gunnar shook his head. He had a graze on his forehead. “He’s not coming back.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He spoke to me before he left. You have to let me tell you what happened.”

  I slumped back on the bed. “How can he be gone?”

  “You were dying, Victoria. He did something . . . I don’t understand all of it.”

  I began to cry, suspecting what had happened. “Just tell me.”

  “The draugr took you under the ice. I came to. I saw you go under. Vidar dived in, couldn’t find you. The big fellow . . . Odin?”

  “That’s his name.”

  “He was laughing. They were speaking Old Norse . . . I couldn’t make it all out. But I think he said, ‘She’s dead by now. It’s over.’ Vidar dragged you out of the water and you were blue.” Gunnar glanced away, a puzzled expression on his brow.

  “Go on.”

  “That’s when the thing came out of the water.”

  “The draugr?”

  “Maybe I imagined it. I’d had a blow to the head.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “Just like the stories say. A bloated man-monster, covered in weed. He was crawling along the ground like one of those lungfish.” Gunnar tried to imitate the movement with his hand. “He was coming for me. There was an axe on the ground, and I picked it up and . . .” He looked up and smiled weakly. “This is all crazy.”

  “I know.”

  “I remembered that you’re supposed to cut off a draugr’s head. I flailed out, his head came clean off. Then it wasn’t a draugr at all, just a pile of pondweed and you still lay dying in Vidar’s lap, not breathing, pulse growing weaker.

  “Odin left, he shouted some insults at all of us. Vidar was bent over you, trying to breathe life back into you. He was getting more and more frantic, calling your name. And then . . . I don’t really understand what happened. He held up his hand and said something in his own language. Something about you, and about living and old age. There was a flash of color on his hand, and then it dimmed. You breathed. He laid you down in the mud and buried his face in his hands and cried.”

  I felt my heart drop into my stomach.

  “He gave me this.” Gunnar felt in his pocket and pulled out an animal’s tooth. I took it from him. “He said to use it if Odin came back, that he had to go and that you’d understand why. He said to tell you to get away from the island and that he loved you forever.”

  I stared at Gunnar. Vidar had used his one chance to change fate to keep me alive. And that meant that we weren’t going to be together after all. A wave of despair and yearning crashed over me. It also meant he had to serve the punishment.

  A thousand years.

  “I’ll be dead before he can come back,” I said.

  “Vicky, I don’t understand. Who were those people?”

  “You know. You’ve read about them.”

  He stood up and ran his hands through his hair. “It’s my fault, isn’t it? If I’d never turned up, like an idiot . . .”

  I looked at him. He was right. In a sense.

  “Can you forgive me, Victoria?”

  Or was it really Gunnar’s fault? Or my fault for not warning him what was really going on? Or Vidar’s fault for wanting too much, as those in love always do? Or Magnus’s fault for bringing me to the island in the first place?

  I saw the blame vanish backward into a long chain of cause and effect. Events that had seemed so casual, decisions I had made so carelessly, had actually been carving my future in stone. It seemed searingly important that I make the right decision in that moment.

  “Victoria?”

  “I can forgive you, Gunnar,” I said, “if you’ll take me to the other side of the world with you.”

  Thirty-Five

  [Asgard]

  As Vidar approached Gammaldal, two black shadows in the night sky circled him. Hugin and Munin, his father’s ravens. Odin would never again let Vidar out of his sight; once was an accident but twice was a pattern, and Odin was afraid of his own fate. Vidar picked up a stone and cast it into the sky. It clipped one of the birds on the wingtip, but neither of them slowed.

  Bad enough to see Heimdall’s smug face at his return to Bifrost. Or to hear the taunts of his assembled brothers who had come down from Valaskjálf on Odin’s urging. How he despised them. If the Norns went through with it, made him spend a thousand years in the company of his family’s enemies, it would not be such a bad thing.

  His blood was hot and his brain was hotter. He had to find Aud, make her take him back to the Norns. He could not accept this fate. To be apart from Victoria after all he had suffered . . . it was impossible. The Norns would have to be forced to fix things. He would do the service in Vanaheim, even if he had to do it as an old man once Victoria was gone. They had to let him go back to Midgard and be with her. Watching her breathe again, on the shore of the lake, had been an agony. He couldn’t stay to kiss her lips and tell her he loved her, for fear that the Norns would take back their favor if he lingered too long.

  The house waited in the dark. No smell of smoke rose. He pushed open the door. The room was in darkness,
the fire had been kicked over. Aud was gone.

  A moment of emptiness shivered over him. Alone.

  Then a shadow moved in the dark. A woman, cloaked in black, emerged from an alcove between pillars. She pushed back her cowl.

  Vidar peered into the dark. “Verda?” he asked.

  “Skuld,” she corrected him. “You made your deal with me.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “My sisters felt we hadn’t been clear enough in our negotiations. None of us expected you to return to Asgard.”

  “Things went badly for me.” Vidar dropped to his knees and touched the hem of her skirt. “I beg you to give me another chance. You see, I’ve kept the thread.” He held out his hand, the black thread still tied around his finger.

  “There will be no other chances, Vidar,” Skuld said, drawing a deep breath. The darkness moved over her face eerily. Vidar sat back on the floor. “My sisters and I have moved our residence, much deeper inside the World Tree, and we don’t intend to make any more bargains with anyone. Least of all you.” She crouched in front of him and tilted his chin upward so he had to meet her gaze. “I am very disappointed. We gave you great power and you misused it.”

  “She was dying.”

  “You will pay the price.”

  Vidar dropped his head and let the hopelessness claim him. “She is lost to me, then?”

  “A second time. Have you wondered, Vidar, whether you are not meant to be together?”

  “I know we are. I feel it like . . .” He wanted to say the Midgard word “electricity,” but found no counterpart in his own tongue. “Clearer than lightning, hotter than the sun.”

  Skuld rose and sat on a bench. “Sit with me, Vidar.”

  He did as she asked. His joints felt stiff and his heart felt tired.

  “You made a bargain with us, Vidar,” she said. “If you don’t adhere to the terms of the deal, I have to take back what I’ve done. Victoria will die.”

  He set his teeth. “I know. I’ll take the punishment.”

  “How do you feel about the punishment?” she said, and a cruel smile touched her lips.