“Oh, little raven,” he whispers, and I smile, thinking, I want those teeth cutting into my lips.
But when I move to kiss him again, Unferth holds me back.
“Ned?” I say, blinking. The slope puts him centimeters higher than me, so he looks down with an ache in his eyes, except that it might merely be pity.
“You shouldn’t do that again,” he says.
Confusion makes me spiky. “Do that?”
“Kiss me,” he snaps.
I push my hands into my stomach. “You liked it,” I say, knowing, knowing, knowing he kissed me back.
But he’s silent, as if he has no idea, for this one single time, what he can possibly say.
I grab his coat in my fists and kiss him again, pushing our teeth together, making it a fight. He’ll fight me to the end of the world if that’s the sort of kiss it has to be.
“Signy,” he hisses, shoving me away.
Everything inside me combusts. “Unferth,” I spit back. “What is wrong with you?”
He lifts his eyebrows in that arrogant way and I feel small and stupid. What is wrong with me?
My heels catch on gravel and I trip, righting myself with a furious grunt. Without a backward glance I stomp away, wishing my boots could pound bruises into the island and tear the night up.
Wind tosses mist off the surface of the sea and I scrape my hands against lichen-crusted rocks to balance in the near dark. At the far end of a narrow peninsula a fleet of standing stones waits, as though the island holds them in the palm of its outstretched hand. It’s precarious, but the easier path out to the death ship ruins is also longer by a kilometer.
I hurry through scruffy grasses and clumps of heather, kicking at stones and cursing, furious. Anger and hurt burn through me, keeping my fingers warm in the frozen evening, but not humiliation. Never humiliation. I did not misread anything, I did nothing wrong. I don’t know why he pushed me away, but odd-eye! It isn’t because he doesn’t want me.
The ruins are thirteen death ships in all, each built of sixteen standing stones over a thousand years ago as a holy place to burn the dead. The ships are worn smooth by high tides and cracked from ice, but their prows still aim at the ocean and the long way home to Scandia. Some of the rocks are collapsed upon themselves or crumbled, and a good ten of them tilt to one side or the other. But at least three of the ships are untouched by time, ruins in name only.
Few come here, even of the most adventurous tourists. There’s no marked path and no advertising. It’s lonely and cold and haunted. I found it accidentally, on one of my lonely winter marches.
Here at the western edge of the grassy beach, a shallow cave is dug into the hillside. Probably erosion and ice did all the work to create the three-quarter circle of shelter. Over the weeks I’ve left supplies there: candles and matches, blankets and extra mittens. The wind has died down, and cuts off completely when I’m in the dugout. With a fire and the blankets, it’ll be nearly cozy.
In the last light, I take the candles and pick my way out into the fleet. The very last of the sun sets behind me, casting gold against the edges of the icebergs that dip and soar with the gently rolling ocean. I stick a taper onto the prow-stone of each ship and set them aflame. Thirteen candles to light Baldur’s way.
I tried to celebrate it in community. I tried. I danced and I performed and embraced joy the way the Freyans do, yet here I end up again, alone in my red therma-wool dress and heavy boots, my hair braided like a Valkyrie and the darkness around my eyes, red on my mouth. I’m half Signy, half Valtheow, and all pretense. I touch my lips, and I think of Unferth’s teeth. “Odd-eye,” I whisper. The curse slinks through the ghostly fleet.
With my hand on the prow of the front ship, I lift my eyes to the stars.
Speak to me, Alfather. I miss you.
There is no answer.
My heart hurts, and I bitterly think maybe it is turning to stone. Maybe that’s why Unferth is here. To wound me. Valkyrie are supposed to know suffering, to understand pain and betrayal. In the old stories they hunt vengeance and cast curses, destroy cities when they need to and set fire to the world.
Light in the east catches my attention. A tiny glow rises up from the black horizon, flying slowly up and up.
There’s another, and another. Three more.
The lanterns being released back at the meadow for Baldur. Two hundred of them rise. They bob and twirl in the wind, dancing out over the sea. Like constellations come to life.
As I stare, as I sink down among the death ships, I imagine they spell out a burning, vibrant rune.
Chaos.
Again and again it appears against the starry sky, weaving in and out of itself like a message for the entire world.
EIGHT
THE SUN WAKES me, groggy and chilled. The ocean sighs and I get up, walk to the threshold. During the night a chunk of ice broke free from one of the larger bergs and drifted near enough I could swim out to it if the water were any warmer. The blue ice winks in the sunlight. I splash my face with the freezing salt water to clear my head and wander down the coast to relieve myself.
The death ships are peaceful and whisper to me, and I’m reluctant to return to town and find Unferth. Though today is the day we’re supposed to leave.
Can I still face this destiny with him at my side?
Just the thought of going without him, of hunting alone, grips my stomach like a vise.
To calm down, I crouch along the shore to draw rune poems into the sand, wishing it were spray paint on the sidewalk. Siri of the Ice used to make me write poems with her on snow or the sand of a beach, teaching me the point was to relax, to give the words to our god, not to seek fame or accolades. Poetry is for Odin, and from him, in a cycle like breathing, she would say as the snow melted or the tide wiped our songs away. Once I was on my own, this was one of the only ways I could relax. But I always found ways to leave a stain, to draw the rune poems with permanent marker or paint. Signy Valborn was here.
Beginning with chaos I link words and ideas together into one massive, scrawling poem, runes atop runes, in lines and spirals. The runes flow from the nothing-space in my memory, from the gossip of the ocean waves. I let my hand wander—chaos chaos chaos changes the fate-strings of any life, we the death-born in years gone by walk out gold-adorned, walk in tinged with blood. We rest in stone under the sun. Hear the bear star be born, the seether fall into darkness. Lost sun answer me when the sky is cold, and fate unravels—on and on, one rune after another.
As the tide slowly moves in, pushing dark streaks of seaweed up the beach, I back farther into the field of stone ships.
Fate unravels.
Hear the bear star be born, the seether fall into darkness.
I could never admit it to Siri, but she was right. Poetry is like the very breath in my lungs: alive for one moment and gone in the next, never the same because poets change, our voices change, our rhythm and accents, our purpose and meaning all change.
This poem will never exist again. There is no pressure in it, no future. I whisper the words of my rune poem and the ocean drags them away one line at a time.
Signy Valborn was never here.