“This,” he says as I catch my breath. “This is evidence of their power. Even in your grandmother’s day, with all the heliplanes and machine guns and technology of mankind, the trolls took back Montreal, where hundreds of years ago they’d ruled. The mothers worked together, brought their herds into one massive herd, and when the sun was gone they attacked. Again and again, disappearing at dawn into the Lawrence River, hiding in basements, and even using runework to appear like man-made slabs of concrete, they attacked every time the sun fell. They crushed skulls and set fire to homes, they chased men and women out of the city, and even when Thor’s Army arrived with their heliplanes and their bombs, even when hundreds of trolls died and were shattered into dust, the troll mothers did not let up the charge.”
“They say most of the troll mothers died.” I wave my hand at the distant skyline. “Thor tracks them; there are scientists, and that Freekin Project with the reserve in the desert. They say there are not enough of them left to be a threat.”
Unferth takes the flask of his screech out of the inner pocket of his tattered gray coat. “And yet … Montreal remains a ruin.”
I shrug. “We have a long memory.”
“Yes.” He offers me the drink and I take it. I lift it up so the metal catches the evening sun behind us. It’s only light, none of its warmth penetrating the winter air.
“To the slaughtered,” I declare. “The men and monsters both, the mothers and women, the children.” I knock back a burning gulp, and as the fire scorches down my throat I think I can hear screams echoing. I cough, bending to lean my hands on my knees. My throat is raw, as if I’ve been the one screaming.
Unferth snatches his flask back. “To the poetry the dead leave behind.” A pause as he drinks. “May it not be all that is left of you, little raven,” he mutters.
“Poetry is all any of us leave behind.” I lift my chin defiantly.
We plow north around part of the city, but see only a few trees scoured of bark that might suggest trolls crashed through here. I find no footprints. As the sun sets we hear a long, echoing cry, a moan from the far distant city, and Unferth nods at me. “Not a battle cry, but a simple communication that she is awake.”
“She?”
“The mothers wake first, always.”
I listen until the moan fades completely, just as the light does. I want to go down into the city and find her, but Unferth insists the time is not right, the place not right. We’ll hunt when we are ready, not before, not because it’s the first I’ve heard her promising cry.
We make camp in the shell of a farmhouse, surrounded by mostly intact troll walls. There’s no fire, but we have a small battery-powered lamp. Its even light is more eerie than flickering flames might have been, illuminating rotting old chairs and a table still set with a runner and vase. I sink onto the worn rug while Unferth settles with a groan on a short old sofa printed with dull cabbage roses. He sips his screech and says, “Tell me, Signy, why you love Valtheow the Dark most of all.”
I lick my lips and reach for the flask. The blistering trail it leaves down my tongue gives fire to my words. “Nothing about her was half-done. She did not symbolically bleed; she poured her own blood out for sacrifice. She tied a rope around her neck. She … embraced passion and war like they were poetry, not only things to be described by it.” I gather my knees to my chest. “Since Odin first told me her name I knew she never hesitated to embody death, the way it feeds life.”
“Why do you want to be like her?”
“It’s exciting! It—it thrills me. It’s this …” I close my eyes and recall my Alfather again, arm around me so my ear presses to his thrumming heart. “An itch like madness, that I was born with. That drives me forward.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“Everything worth doing is dangerous, Unferth.”
He contemplates me as he drinks, one hand loose on the arm of the couch, his injured right leg stretched out so his pose is languid. The more I talk about this, the more I want to make him understand. I grab the flask from his hand and plop down beside him on the couch. My legs hook over his outstretched thigh and our shoulders touch as I drink. He sets his head against the wall. I let the vertigo of liquor sway me against him until I’m leaning. The upstairs floor groans gently. The electric lamp buzzes. I can hear the rush of my own blood in my ears.
“What would you do with that power if you had it?” he asks.
“Change the world,” I murmur contentedly.
“Don’t you mean destroy your enemies and paint your face with their blood?”
“Isn’t that the definition of change?”
“Ambitious.”
“No good reason to aim low.”
His shoulder trembles and I realize he’s laughing. I poke his ribs and he catches my hand. He turns it over and smooths out my fingers until he can see the binding rune. As he taps my scar with his thumb, a hot line sears from my palm to my belly. “Death Chooser,” he says. “Strange Maid.”
“What?” I whisper. The runes bound together into my palm are an odd variation of death and choice and servant. After parsing them out years ago, I had assumed they only meant to mark me as a Valkyrie. A Death Chooser.
“This binding rune is from a very old thread of language …” His breath touches my temple, curling down my cheek until I turn into it. There are his rain-colored eyes, alight with truth. He says, “Death is linguistically connected to otherness, to foreigners and … strangeness. Death and stranger, like different fruit on the same linguistic branch. You can trace all kinds of names through the binding rune. Like … Alfather—Valfather. Valborn, Valkyrie, Valtheow, death-born, Death Chooser, servant of death, death maid … Strange Maid.”
My breath catches in my throat. We are the Strange Maid and Ned the Spiritless, finally together again. The thought comes from nowhere as Unferth closes his eyes and settles his head against the wall, his hand loose around mine.
FIVE
ON MY BIRTHDAY I wake alone in the cellar and slowly realize there’s no metallic click of tin cups or the unconscious groan Unferth makes when he sits or stands. He’s not sipping his doctored chocolate on a squeaky stool, waiting for the right moment to limp over here and nudge me awake with the toe of his boot.
I throw off the heavy sleeping bag and grab my seax out of the scabbard before heading up the cellar stairs.
Late-morning sunlight streams through the roof and cracked windows, bringing fire to the shards of glass spilled across the wooden floor. The front of the abandoned meadery is even sadder in daylight, and I crunch through it to the rear, where all the old shelves and bottle boxes are shoved to the side to create a clear arena. Three troll-spears lean against the wall; there are his bootprints and mine, scuffs and shuffles from sparring. A chipped wooden round-shield tilts upside down like a turtle on its shell.
And one of the old tarps is spread out at my feet, paint scrawled across it to read: Find me. He’s written the rune for spirit and crossed it out as an ironic sort of signature.
It’s a test.
I dash back downstairs for my belt and coat, though I dump the unnecessary items from the pockets: comb, hairpins, a copy of Birds of the Middle World, and a slim volume of Freyan songs Rathi gave me with a gentle inscription that always makes me feel guilty. I keep my fishing line, matches and lighter, mini-flashlight, insultingly small wad of notes, and pocketknife. I grab two of the protein bars and a bag of trail mix, stuffing both into the pocket that formerly housed the books. I wash up fast, use the toilet, and braid up all my hair into a messy crown. Before starting out I return to the meadery for one of the troll-spears and sling the shield across my back.