“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Fenris cupped my hand. “Don’t be. It’s over. I’ve proven myself. We have a place here, now. A safe place for the baby.”
He stepped toward me and dropped his hands to the gentle curve of my stomach. Had it only been this afternoon when Fenris had dropped to his knees before me and called to our child? I blinked hard as I watched the moon climb into the darkness above the slowly shifting ocean.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said. “Something I heard Óðinn say.”
Fenris pressed his lips to mine softly, almost as if he expected to be turned away. I opened for him, and he kissed me gently, slowly, like we had all the time in the Nine Realms.
“Tomorrow,” Fenris whispered when we finally pulled apart. “I don’t want to talk about anything right now.”
With a smile, I pulled him back into my arms. As the moon shimmered off the waves and the night birds of Asgard cried their salutations into the velvet sky, my husband and I let our bodies do the speaking for us.
THE MONSTER CHAINED: CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
I woke to a stab of pain in my shoulder. With a groan, I rolled over and blinked in the thin, pre-dawn light. Waves crashed and thundered behind me. The pale, gray sky unfurled above me, with a thin strand of gold burning on the eastern horizon. I pushed myself off the dew-wet grass and rolled my shoulder, which was filled with tiny jabs of fire after being pressed into the hard, cold ground all night.
Well, not all night. I smiled at the memory. Fenris could somehow make a dark field in Asgard feel as sensual and decadent as the feather mattress he’d stolen for my bridal present. I pictured that mattress, an ocean of soft, downy white spread from one edge of our cave to the other. What would happen to it now that we were gone? Perhaps generations of mice would build a palace of their own inside it. The thought made me feel inexplicably sad.
No, I was being a fool. Fenris had promised me he’d just earned us a place among the Æsir and Vanir of Asgard, a home in Val-hall itself, and here I was feeling nostalgic for a stars-damned cave.
But, did we have a place here? My gut shifted uneasily as I turned around, searching for my dress. I found it under Fenris’s head, bunched up like a pillow. Fenris was spread across the grass on his stomach, his hair draped over his shoulders, his muscular backside looking pale in the soft light. Silently, I sat down beside him and stared at his body. The bruises had vanished, but his back and legs were crossed with thin, white scars. Maybe, in time, those would vanish as well.
I wasn’t so sure.
A bird began to call from the shadowed safety of the forest, followed by another, and then another, until the entire forest seemed to be singing. As I watched, the golden fire of the sun gilded the tops of the trees, then burned behind them, turning their highest boughs into dark, lacey shadows.
“Beautiful,” Fenris murmured from behind me.
“It is,” I agreed.
“I was talking about you.”
I turned to Fenris with a smile, and he reached for my arm, pulling me down into another kiss. We breathed together as the birds cried around us, kissing until the sunlight rose above the trees and fell across the grass around us, making the dew sparkle like diamonds.
“Just think,” Fenris said, spreading his arms wide. “Someday we’ll walk here with the baby, and you can explain how Daddy broke the biggest chain in the Nine Realms.”
At the sight of his wide, cheerful smile, something broke inside me. The morning light felt cold, and the cries of the birds turned sour. Haltingly, almost as though I had to fight to press the words from my lips, I told Fenris what I’d overheard last night.
“They’re making another chain,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
Fenris sighed and fell forward, burying his head in his hands. His fingers dug into his hair and, for a long time, neither one of us spoke. Finally, his back straightened, and he turned to me with the ghost of the smile he’d just worn.
“My tutor used to say everything has a price.” He paused to take a deep breath. “I hated that. What’s the price of the sunlight? I’d say. What’s the price of the air? But, maybe he was right. Maybe that’s the price of life in Asgard.”
Fenris shrugged as he turned back to me. “They’ll bring another chain, and I’ll break it.”
My hands began to tremble; I clasped them together in my lap to silence their mute protests. Images from last night surged through my mind. Fenris’s massive, dark bulk, chained and heaving. Mud and blood pooling beneath his body. The grass flattened by his breath as his great head sank to the earth, his eyes closed, his body still.
“Last night,” I began. “There was a moment when I thought—” I swallowed hard and willed myself to continue. “I thought you couldn’t break Dromi.”
His smile vanished, and Fenris tilted his head up toward the morning sky. “Yes. Me too. But you changed that.”
“Me?”
A small half smile crept across his lips. “Of course. Sol the Fearsome. You threatened the All-father, little wolf.”
My cheeks burned as the memory rushed back. “Oh. That.”
Fenris shifted on the ground, stretching his arms before him. “I didn’t think Óðinn would take too well to being called a coward.”
I bit my lip. I’d planned to do worse than call him a coward if he’d raised his spear against my husband.
“You scared me,” Fenris finally said. “And that gave me strength.”
“What?”
Fenris leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “When I was just trying to free myself, well, it almost wasn’t worth the effort. But when I saw you standing up to Óðinn, putting yourself in danger—”
His lips moved from my cheek to my mouth, and he gave me a soft, gentle kiss. It was almost a tease, as though he were holding himself back.
“I promised I’d protect you,” Fenris whispered. “And I will, my love. My wife.”
His arms wrapped around my waist, pulling me closer. I relaxed into his embrace, letting the light of the new day wash over us both.
But, when I closed my eyes, I saw the dark form of Fenris’s bound body writhing in the mud of Asgard.
“LOOK AT THAT!” FENRIS cried. “It’s like last night never even happened!”
After pulling on my damp, wrinkled dress and finding pants for Fenris in a weapons shed on the edge of the practice grounds, we’d walked hand in hand across the green meadows of Asgard, which seemed soft and gentle in the golden glow of early morning. Val-hall sparkled before us, its rows of windows winking in the light as a soft mist rose from its wooden and sod roof. Goats and sheep called to each other from the grass, and even from the parts of the roof which sloped back into to rolling hills.
Fenris was right. The damage from last night, all the walls and windows shattered by Dromi, had been completely restored. It was almost like Val-hall were another one of Óðinn’s warriors, battered the previous day but healed and ready to fight the next morning. With just a few scars, I thought as my eyes traced the pale lines crossing Fenris’s arms and chest.
Several knots of warriors were in the feast hall when we entered, sitting together over a breakfast of blood sausages and potatoes. The room fell silent as we crossed the threshold, and dark eyes followed our progress. Fenris ignored them. It slowly dawned on me that he must have grown up like this, in a vast castle filled with people who treated him as though he were different from them.
We turned down the hallway, and Fenris’s fingertips brushed the door to our room. It swung open silently. Both of us stood in the entryway, stunned into silence.
“It’s the wrong room,” I finally said. I took a step backward. “We’ve made a mistake.”
The room before us was twice as big as ours, with a door to the practice grounds nestled beside a row of four windows. The hearth looked similar, as did the looming wardrobe and the bed, but now there was also a table with four chairs. And what looked like a small, inverted wooden box next to the b
ed.
“It’s a cradle,” Fenris said, his voice almost hushed with wonder.
He walked into the room and ran his fingers over the smooth, dark wooden box. When he pushed it gently, it rocked back and forth. Fenris turned to me with an awed smile.
“Look. They’ve given us a cradle.”
A shiver worked its way down my spine, and I swallowed hard, trying to ignore it. Fenris stepped around the cradle and pulled open the doors of the wardrobe. All the dresses Freyja had given me were inside, lined up like plush velvet soldiers.
“It’s our room,” Fenris said.
He walked to the row of windows and opened the door, then let out a cheer. The lush fields of Asgard spread before us, reaching down to the sparkling sea. He turned back to me with his arms spread and his eyes sparkling.
“Look at this!” he cried. “Sol, look at this!”
He ran to me, threw his arms around me, and picked me up off the floor. Fenris spun me in the air, then carried me over the threshold and into the newly transformed room.
“They gave us a place to stay,” he said. “It worked. I asked for a place to raise the baby, and look at this!”
Fenris set me down on the bed, swept his arms around the room once more, then spun back to kiss me. I returned his kiss, trying to ignore the vague sense of disquiet that crept up my spine at the sight of this room, with its cradle and table and door. Why would Óðinn give us a room like this while he asked his messenger to order something unbreakable?
Something flashed through my mind, a halting image as wavering and unsubstantial as a face viewed from underwater. But Fenris pushed me back into the warm embrace of the bed, covering me with urgent kisses, and the idea flickered past my conscious thought.
It was only much later, as I let myself fall into sleep, that the thought returned, this time clear and distinct. It was the cradle in our new room, which had been made with bars on its sides instead of smooth, curved walls like the one Da made from purple oak when Ma was pregnant with Jael.
If I flipped the thing over, it would look exactly like a cage.
THE MONSTER CHAINED: CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
I woke to darkness. Beside me, Fenris’s slow breathing filled the room, comforting in its regularity. As I waited for my eyes to adjust to the moonlight shining through our windows, I ran my fingers across the noticeable bulge of my stomach. I hadn’t felt any movement yet, but the new life Fenris had sparked within me was clearly growing.
And I was hungry. My earlier nausea seemed to have faded as we came to Asgard, and I was now constantly ravenous. Shifting in the darkness, I pulled myself up to sitting, then came to my feet. The moon had risen as we slept. Now, it cast luminous patches of white across the floor. Our new living space was larger than my parent’s cabin in the Ironwood, but I still couldn’t quite bring myself to think of it as home.
I pulled on a pale sleeping shift from the wardrobe and padded through the darkness to our door. We had a table now, but Fenris and I still had to walk to the feast hall and bring food back to our room. The entire arrangement delighted Fenris; I’d realized he must have spent his entire childhood eating alone, the prince separated from his attendants.
The whole thing made me uncomfortable. The way Óðinn’s warriors looked away when we entered the feast hall; the way no one ever spoke to us. The strange absence of familiar faces, as if Óðinn’s sons Týr, Baldr, and Thor had been inexplicably called away from Val-hall. Fenris had assured me there was no reason for us to attempt to befriend the warriors, so we’d gone back to spending our days walking through the woods. He’d earned our place in Asgard, Fenris told me. All we had to do was enjoy it.
I tried to enjoy it.
Fenris and I talked about our childhood memories, and about our hopes for the baby. We held hands like a storybook couple and made love for hours beneath the rustling crowns of the pine trees. But I still woke in the night, my heart pounding as I gasped for breath, as if I were being chased by a monster I couldn’t yet name.
The door to our room swung open silently as soon as I raised my hand to the knob. The torches in the hall beyond had burned low, and shadows loomed along the walls. My stomach groaned in protest, but still, I hesitated, wishing we’d thought to bring a third plate with us when we’d shared dinner hours earlier.
Another groan from my stomach finally pushed me out the door. As far as I could tell, the feast hall on Asgard was always laden with food. I’d just grab a plate of whatever was offered—with my nausea gone the exact dish didn’t seem to matter much anymore—and then return to our room. Perhaps Fenris would wake and join me. I thought of the moonlight spreading over the ridges of muscles on his abdomen and smiled to myself.
The feast hall itself appeared to be deserted. Good. Torches flickered dimly from the walls, and the hearth fires were nothing more than flickering, crimson nests of embers. I crept into the room. Most of the tables were clear, but I could still smell roast meat. I followed the curving wall further into the feast hall. Now I heard the low murmur of voices, and shifting flickers of light pierced the darkness ahead. Someone was still up at this hour, then. Several someones, by the sound of it.
I followed the shadows, trying to make as little noise as possible. The table in front of me was spread with the remnants of dinner, great sides of roast mutton with carrots, potatoes, and onions, as well as thick, black bread, smoked fish, spicy stewed apples, pickled cabbage, and thick custard. Someone had stoked one of the fires further down the hall, and I could see the long, dark shadows of several warriors huddled around that hearth. I tilted my head, trying to listen to the murmurs of conversation as I filled a plate.
“—very delicate craftsmanship,” someone said.
“Our finest work yet. See how the—”
A man coughed, and I lost the rest of the conversation. Carefully, I set down my plate and inched forward. Now I could make out what looked like a dozen figures around the fire. The tallest was an enormous, hulking mountain of a man; the only warrior I’d seen on Asgard who looked like that was Thor.
“How’d you make it?”
I jumped. That deep, booming voice had to be Thor. But I hadn’t seen the Thunderer since Fenris broke Leyding. What was he doing here now? With my heart hammering against my breastbone, I crept forward.
“It was tricky work,” one of the smaller figures said. His voice sounded like it had been dipped in black oil. “Took a great deal of magic, you know.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
I froze. I knew that voice as well.
Óðinn.
“We combined six impossible things,” the oily voice continued. “The sound of a cat’s footfall. A woman’s beard. The roots of a mountain. The sinews of a bear. A bird’s spittle, and a fish’s breath.”
There was a laugh which made my skin crawl, and a second dark voice entered the conversation.
“More than that, dear Óðinn, we dare not tell you.”
“More than that I need not know,” Óðinn said. “What do you call it?”
“Gleipnir,” the voice answered. “It is the strongest fetter the Nine Realms have ever seen. But see, look for yourself. Have your son here test it.”
The figures shifted, and I sank back into the shadows. Thor moved forward. In the sudden rush of firelight, I saw three things. Two small, hunched figures raised their arms to Thor. Between them, and glistening in the firelight, they held what looked like a small, silken ribbon. Óðinn stood beside Thor with his arms crossed over his chest, and a scowl across his features.
And Týr, our one-time lover, stood beside his father.
My heart jolted against my breastbone. Týr. Thor. Óðinn. Shit, I had to get out of here! I stepped back as silently as I could, still watching the strange conglomeration of figures before me. Thor took the thin ribbon from the two men and raised it above his hands. He looped it around his fist several times, then pulled it taut between his arms.
“Now, test it,” the dark voice hissed. “Reall
y test it.”
Thor yanked the cord with his fists, but it held fast. With a grunt, he pulled at it again. The muscles in his arms bulged with the effort. The thin ribbon flashed with bright, white light, almost like a streak of lightning across a darkened sky. Thor cried out with a voice like thunder.
My back hit the wall, and I turned to creep away as delicately and silently as I could. I’d seen enough. Thor wouldn’t be able to break that fetter.
It wasn’t meant for him.
THE MONSTER CHAINED: CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
I slammed the door closed behind me, then leaned against it, panting for breath. I’d traveled the passages of Val-hall as quietly as I could while my mind rolled over what I’d just seen. Fenris was strong, but stars! Against something like that? How could we break magic that powerful?
“Sol?” Fenris muttered sleepily from the bed. “Everything fine?”
I took a deep breath to steady myself.
“No. No, it’s not fine. Fenris, there’s a—”
The door behind me shook as someone pounded against it. I jumped away from the door as if it had just caught fire. Fenris was on his feet in an instant; the dull gleam of his dagger flashed in the moonlight.
“Fenris!” a voice called. “Fenris, please. Open up!”
Fenris moved to press his body against the door. “Týr?”
My body felt numb, as if my mind had detached and decided to float away. Yes, of course, that was Týr’s voice. I’d recognized it, on some level. I just hadn’t allowed myself the luxury of identifying it.
“Yes.” The pounding stopped. “Please, Fenris. It’s important.”
I shook my head in the darkness, but Fenris didn’t wait for me to speak. The door swung open on its silent, hidden hinges, and Týr stepped over our threshold. He carried a torch, which he promptly set in our sconce, and what looked like a heavy traveling bag.
Stars, he looked terrible! The last time I’d seen Týr, he was standing drunk in the middle of Val-hall’s practice fields, urging us to leave the Realm. He’d looked rough that morning, as though he hadn’t slept in days.
The Complete Fenris Series Page 48
