Master of Umbra (The Valhalla Series)

by Poppet

  “This is a spirit stone, it stands on the cusp of two dimensions. You can only see this because I have chosen to reveal it to you,” he says, with pride embroidering his tone. “Take a look through the all seeing eye.”

  “Why?” I whisper, feeling jittery.

  “It is Odin's stone, it is a magical eyescope to view Finfolkaheem.”

  Curious, I crouch, looking through the hole which is big enough for my face. Staring through the open channel, the low fog and gloom of the dark day vanishes, exposing a sunny green landscape buried in a gossamer veil of aurora borealis. They glisten and shimmer like pellucid ribbons encasing the fair isle, ethereal wisps wrapping their wishes around the first maypole.

  “Wow,” I hush, amazed by this arcane spy-hole into another realm. “And this one next to it?”

  “That is his wife's stone, the eye of Skadi. They stood here for millennia until the ferrylouper Mackay smashed them down in the eighteen hundreds. Now they exist between realms, available to a select few.”

  I stare at the two diaphanous slabs, tall and slender like rugged piano keys planted in the ground.

  “Liah...” he says, his voice so velvet rich it makes me stand up and face him with my heart pounding.

  “Yes?”

  “I would like the honor of handfasting with you the ancient way. Clasping our hands through Odin's all seeing eye.” He's smiling affection at me, giving me the tryst stare, his wildfire irises lustrous with desire.

  The fulgent passion displayed so candidly flays my heart with acrid bitterness

  “I can't,” I mutter, ready to cry.

  “Why can't you?” he says, sounding surprised by my refusal.

  With my hopes splintering in my ankles, causing fragments to slice my insides all the way up to my chest, I turn my hand over to show him the palm.

  This entanglement is a tawdry dilemma for my simple mind.

  He ambles slowly toward me until he's so close his breath warms my cold cheeks. In freeze-frame increments he takes my hand, staring at the spiral of the galaxy imprinted inside my skin, tracing it with a callused fingertip.

  “And when... how... did this happen?”

  Swallowing the lump of anxiety lodged in my throat, I answer into the ravaging gale, “He saw my scars. He told me he ended Dias... that I owed him... explanations. When he saw the damage he vowed to make it right, speaking riddles about running from the fate he was chosen for, it all making sense...”

  I let my words peter out, my sorrow too great to maintain a steady tone, saying in emotional huskiness, “What does it mean?”

  “It means he has chosen you as his soulmate, his lover, his everything, the one he'd die to protect.” Ewan drops my hand, looking over my head while expelling a dramatic sigh. “How do you feel about being his chosen?”

  He doesn't even make eye contact, staring far away into the distance, his voice deadpan, and in that inflection revealing his wretchedness.

  Tears gather storms in my eyes, rushing to drown my grief in sudden death. “I... I don't know him, I don't trust him. He's supercilious at best. I need your succor, Ewan. Help me understand why... why him?”

  “The mist gave you the choice. It is meant to be your choice, him or me. Did he give you the choice?” This time he glances down, giving me enough of a glimpse of the torment clenched in his visage to answer my sorrow with a resounding gong of resonance. “Deliah, tell me. Did he give you a fucking choice in the matter? Was he man enough to ask you, to give you the option of declining his proposal?”

  I shake my head, desperate to find my voice, managing to squeak through the tight constriction in my throat, “He said I was his. That you told him so. He said if I didn't believe him to ask you.”

  Ewan twists, giving me his side while he stares at the ground, his silhouette as bitter as the weather. “Tell me your heart's desire, Liah. If you could choose a handfasting partner, who would you choose, if any?”

  The tears are overwhelming me, my nose blistering as the waterworks turn on full blast, trembling my soul in bottomless dejection. Sitting down with suddenly weak legs, I fidget with the vibrant grass under my calves, mumbling through shuddering inhalations, “You, no doubt, none.”

  He crouches in front of me, offering me a handkerchief, “Do not cry, sweetheart. He's a big boy, he'll get over the infraction.”

  I shake my head, my mouth wrestling to pin my lips into a frown, taking the hanky and wiping my eyes, clutching to it as if he just handed me his heart for safekeeping.

  “Deliah, do you understand? I can sever the handfasting with my authority. You are destined to choose, it is not our role to choose on your behalf. Now you have an offer from both your ordained choices. You are a catch my darling, we are lucky to have the option to handfast with you at all.”

  Laughing caustic scorn under my breath, my throat burns as if I've been screaming at a rock concert. “Why? I'm as drab as the clouds above us. I'm not pretty and desirable like Emma. I wish I could turn into a swan too, like she has with her magical eye and sultry voice. She's fucking perfect.”

  “You already have turned into a swan, your eyes have the fleck of Odin's fire. You are an ari now that you have eaten the apple of Asgard. When you become you will be greater than a Thur, you shall be my match and my equal.”

  Hunching into my cloak, I avert my head, hiding behind my hair, feeling small and pathetic right now.

  “Why do you wish to look like an ordinary moth when you could stop the universe as yourself? A butterfly should never harbor dull aspirations. You can't go back to being a caterpillar once you've become a butterfly,” he murmurs into my ear, heating the hair where he speaks. I lean in, savoring the solid sanctuary of a living haven. “You say you'd choose me, why do you feel so certain of that choice?”

  Unable to look up, sucking in his calm through spiritual osmosis, my words agitate the cloying mist with revelation, “You are safe, you make me smile, and laugh, and scream. You're the first home that's felt like home. I belong even though I am strange, I fit, it's just... it's safe and... perfect.”

  Folding my hands between his, he presses them tightly, asking again, “Emma, will you do me the honor of handfasting with me?”

  Daring to reengage his stare, I look up into his serious face, “What does that mean? Marriage?”

  He nods, once. “It is eternity. Forever and always, here and long after we join the Wild Hunt. If you handfast with me there is no going back, I will hold you to the commitment without mercy.”

  I expected cartilage to crack when a man goes down on bended knee for the only time in his life, the rest of it would be spent in a power struggle where I long for the day he looked up to me instead of down on me. Call me a cynic, but I've witnessed enough screwed up marriages in my time shipped between foster homes, always experiencing the lacerations of broken dreams and ego's righteous hatred.

  I've never been proposed to before. Somehow I pictured this including a ring, but I guess the cloak should have pinged that realization. He put his mother's cloak on my body, it's as good as the family wedding ring isn't it? I won't see a boatload of money spent on princess gowns in my future, for the ugly stepsister the day she pretends to be Cinderella.

  He slaps me flat on my back so fast the word eddies in a manic spiral, the sky doing pirouettes until two fiery eyes pin me to the spot, blotting out the carnage, his voice thirty shades of dangerous, “You are so fucking beautiful. If it wasn't broad daylight I'd strip you right now and have my wicked way with you on the altar of my ancestors, but today I don't have the time for hedonistic pursuits. Damn it woman, if you think of yourself that way again I will turn you into an eagle permanently, so you will never think of measuring your worth by humanity's vanity but rather by your wingspan and your intuitive strength. You are worthy of a god's affections yet you doubt and berate. If you can distract me from a war smashing in my sanity, then beloved you are so perfect that you blind me from my responsibilities and incite me to act like an irresponsible foo
l.”

  “I'm damaged, scarred... fucked up beyond all recognition–”

  He cuts me short, saying emphatically, “And I am a warrior who wears scars with pride. They do not speak of loss but wisdom, they are a map of ascension from acolyte to master, they do not detract from beauty but add texture to what is already perfect to behold. You are distracting and so magnificently sexy, your skin softer than a puppy's tummy, the scars merely being sacred sites on your landscape for me to anchor my wayward tongue because you vanquish my ability to reason.”

  Who can't say yes to a man who's willing to throw his pride into the desperate laps of a morbid loch to tell a girl what she means to him. Nodding, laughing and crying like a pathetic hormone freak, I smile, “Yes, I would love to handfast with you. But you knew that.”

  “Good,” he snaps, yanking me off my back and onto my feet, making me face the one eyed stone. “This is a promise advocated and witnessed by my forebears in Asgard and Valhalla, by clasping through the stone they surround our bond, sealing it with the multitudes of fate and the will of divinity. Once I make this oath to you, no god nor man can break it, not death nor fire, not Hel or Leug, not curses or prayers.”

  I'm unsteady, breathless, the wind burrowing into my face as if trying to banish me to the edge of the hebrides. Ewan marches around the ethereal stone, placing his left hand in the hollowed gap, “Clasp my left hand with yours, Deliah. Burn your spirit into my heart, never again shall we exist apart.”

  I'm shivering, the air static and frissoning my scalp with esoteric friction, then I carefully clasp my diminutive hand onto his, locking our palms together through the stone.

  The yellow glow which I've seen on his hand in the past flares in acroamatic brilliance, detonating up my arm, clashing my heart in a tidal surge of seraphic power, my aorta polyping before engorging back to life in a sludgy pump. Fever scorches across my chest, down my torso, sizzling my blood with celestial zeal, forcing me to kneel in wracked weakness to rest my forehead against the icy stone, kneeling in front of Ewan who stands stock still on the opposite side of the mystical portal to his grandfather.

  Every heartbeat pulps my vision, wavering the world in and out as light lances across the sky, the astral plane overlapping the glum planet, filling my bones with hallowed secrets and blessing my misery with empyral bliss.

  Ewan releases my hand, smiling at me with the ecstasy of a man come home from the trenches, waving his eagle hand, forcing the mystery stone to evanesce, falling to his knees in front of me, a solid thumb resting on my chin, tilting my head back to seal our destinies with the bonding of kissing the mouth where spirit exhales and inhales.

  His lips are soft and plump, his tongue so hot, his breath tinged with coffee. I recall once reading that the perfect conceive with a kiss. I can believe it, it's how this kiss feels; hallowed, sacred, a union of time, destiny, body, soul, spirit, aura, mind, will, the revealed and concealed, culminating in the supernal adjustment of melting the metal of who we were to reforge us anew.

  It rips my heartbeat apart, the world singing in my ears, crooning vespers of adulation.

  Breaking the sigil of two mouths locked in an infinity loop, I recognize the familiar Ewan, the normal Ewan, grinning his naughty scandalous smirk, slinking his hands under my cloak and murmuring, “Och, I think we should do it anyway. Who's gonna stop us?”

  “You don't have time–”

  “The master of umbra always has time for his woman, and I still owe you for last night.”

  “I thought we had a war to prepare for – and what happened last night that you owe me?”

  Giving me a rascal wink, he cups his hand around my ear to whisper, “I came in your mouth, I think you owe me the same pleasure.”

  “But I did–” I begin to object, clearly recalling the incident, when he lifts me bodily into his arms and goes storming off to a tuft of grass and a slab of stone.

  “Are you arguing with me already? This is going to be a long eternity if you keep that up.” Nudging his head toward the crown jewels, he smirks, “But if you keep that up, it'll go so fast I'll be lining up for reincarnation.”

  Chapter 24

  He is filled with flesh of fey men

  ~ Völuspá

  Deliah:

  Giddy and feeling a little stupefied, I walk on jelly legs with Ewan in front of a grassy knoll.

  “This is the entrance to the draugr. Be quiet while I call ahead and tell them of our arrival.”

  “What is it? Where are we?” I say softly.

  “This is Maes Howe in Orkney. It is a holy cairn which aligns with the winter solstice sun in honor of our grandmother Cailleach. It is important that it is next to water, the mist around us comes from the close proximity of loch Herað. There are many haugr's around here as it is the epicenter of the draugr population. We call it Orkahaugr. Sigurd once ruled here and was a staunch raven supporter, siding with them rather than his own kin. But that's ancient history. Now hush a moment, poppet.”

  Looking up at the drizzle, the cloud around us frothing thick puffs of impenetrable gloom across the ground, for once I'm grateful for such shitty weather. It means no one is out and about this early in the morning. Giants do not sleep late, at least not since I've been in the fold.

  Thinking back, I try to guess the time. We had breakfast at six, I sparred with Gunn until about seven-thirty, so I'd garner an estimate of the time to be around eight. It seems isolated here, and nothing reaches me from the shifting fog to announce activity or human movement, but then for all I know we've stepped into the hidden veil behind the world's awareness.

  “They are opening for us, come, hurry,” he says in a voice still warmly laced in lover's ardor.

  His arm is about my waist and I scoot quickly with him inside the low chute into the hill's heart.

  An exceptionally glorious man waits for us in a stone vault.

  Ewan dips his head, smiling wide, “Frith be with you, Fornjót.”

  The elegant tower inclines his head at Ewan, “And with you, Eoghan. To what do we owe this unexpected pleasure?”

  Ewan's warmth melts from his visage to leave behind an expression of grave enmity, “Leug and his fenrir rise against us. I have come to request you fortify my ranks in this skirmish.”

  The pale man smiles, his eyes flickering ambient luminescence of Arctic blue, “I have longed for this combat in the winter of swords. It was the owl who shook the mountains with Thur's thunder which announced the peal of the final battle. She woke the beast from his visions when she sent the call to her beloved. Who shall gain the maiden's hand when all beneath her vow their allegiance?”

  Her beloved? I thought the elusive 'Mac' was her beloved.

  Ewan's mouth flattens in a grimace, “She has the beguiling effect on the Jotünn, but not all who fly, soar. She is but a fledgling. Too many would stand between Leug and his acquisition. If Emma should join his lair and fenrir, we would have no option but to slay them both in the culmination of their lust.”

  What? He'd kill Emma after protecting her? I learned plenty at breakfast and this sure is news to me.

  Fornjót nods, clasping his hands with their alabaster fingers behinds his back, pacing to our left, “We shall meet you in the dale at high moon. You will not see us, but we'll be there.”

  Ewan inclines his head, “Admiration and appreciation to your kin. May frith be with you my brother.”

  “May frith be with you, Eoghan. But pray tell, who is this lady in the selkie protection?”

  Standing erect and inflating his stature, Ewan looks chagrined but proud, “Forgive me, I have lost my manners in my plotting. This is Liah, Eagle's new beloved.”

  The tall man steps right up to me, smiling a feral warning of sharp teeth, “Greetings sister, may merriment and blood be yours to squander after tonight's sojourn, then I shall feast at your side and learn of your hardships.”

  Bloody hell, this is weirder than LSD. Nodding shyly, my E.S.P is in overdrive. I mutter politely, “
Nice to meet you.”

  Gripping my hand in his frozen cold one, he turns my hand over to stare at the yellow spiral Ewan left in my skin. “We shan't be acquaintances long, you are brethren.”

  Seizing my hand too tight, he pricks the center of my Ewan tattoo with his pointed fingernail, breaking open the skin to release a button of blood. He lifts it to his mouth, licking it, his irises burning a hole through my vision with the contact.

  Returning my arm and hand to me, he smiles again, “You now have our protection, a vow bonded between our fluids, this night no man shall locate the chosen companion of Eoghan, Eagle chief.”

  Ewan slaps the crazy man's shoulder, “You are too kind Fornjót. Now when she shifts even I will not be able to find her.”

  “What?” I ask, alarm snapping the nerves all the way up my spine.

  Giving me a sly wink, Ewan shakes his head, “We'll be playing hide and seek until my brother's gift wears off. So before you vanish I need to get my arse over to Finfolkaheem.”

  Fornjót gives me a once over, ferreting a secretive wink in Ewan's direction, “Be gone from my home, it is time for me to gather the guardians.”

  Ewan clasps hands with the spindly fellow, both men too tall to blend into the masses, Fornjót being taller, paler, threatening in an understated suggestion rather than overtly.

  They speak foreign words, then disengage, and Ewan clasps a solid arm around my waist and swings me about, “We have no time, we must hurry.”

  The mound tinkles like a thousand bells being dropped down a well, and I stoop with Ewan, running to the cold sky beyond the entrance.

  Breathing in the misty morning, the glare now too bright, it makes me brutally aware that the air inside that place was as bitter as the tundra.