The tattoo on his cheek curves as he smiles, a spear that bends but doesn’t break. “And your sword?” he asks. “It looks incredibly old.”
“Ah, a ring-sword.” It’s my turn to glance away. Odd-eye, and rag me, I think, curses the only words I can seem to apply to all this longing and the ache of missing Unferth. Especially hunting with a partner again, all day I’ve thought of Ned, as we approached the base of the Lonely Shadow, as I repeated his words to myself, as I drove with the weight of his sword across my lap.
I push off the rough ground and grab up Unferth’s sword. Facing Soren, I unsheathe it with a slick motion. The short old blade catches the gentle orange of the flames.
Soren meets me on his feet. He’s slightly taller than me, and I step near enough I have to tilt my chin to see the rune in his eyes. “It belonged to my friend who died in the troll attack,” I say, no prologue to soften it. “He told me once the blade was unhallowed and so could kill monsters. That it had killed monsters before. But he left it with me, and she killed him.” I hold it out as a horrible blaze of anxiety turns my blood into nausea or ice or both. “I loved him.”
Soren touches the tiny garnet and nudges the loose ring welded to the pommel but doesn’t lift it out of my hands. “Does the sword have a name?”
“I don’t know.” I don’t know. “I thought I had forever to ask that sort of thing.”
He slides his hand to cover mine so we’re holding the blade together.
“His name was Ned,” I whisper, “which was the plainest name for him. I called him Unferth.”
“Ned the Spiritless,” Soren says.
We’re alone under low, dark clouds so even the stars cannot see us. Wind blows hard off the lake, makes the trees dance. Soren steps closer. I do the same until the hilt touches both of our shoulders.
He says, “Her name was Astrid.”
“Astrid.” For the slightest moment I know everything there ever was to know about her. But she slips away and there’s only Soren staring back at me.
“Some days my greatest fear is that I will die and nobody will remember her name,” he adds hoarsely.
I stretch my hand out and find his fingers. “I will.”
With every breath his hand seems to grow hotter, and he flexes it but doesn’t pull away.
Soren takes a breath deeper than any three of mine, then blows it out in a continuous stream. When he finishes, his temperature has dropped noticeably. “I had hoped maybe Fate was finished with me,” he says.
Is that bitch ever really finished with us? Unferth whispers in my ear.
FIFTEEN
THE TROLL MOTHER doesn’t appear. I take my frustration out on a few of the trees and hunt with my nose to the ground around and around the lake until I find four tiny broken branches at her shoulder height that maybe she crushed in passing. If so, she definitely is headed for Lonely Shadow. I feel like I’m grasping at shadows.
We abandon the trucks as near the foot of the mountain as we can get, load up supplies, and hike the entire circumference together, hunting her. If we didn’t travel so slowly, searching through the forest and spreads of granite scree, it would be strenuous. But stretched over five days it’s only exercise. Though we find a few marks of lesser trolls again—grass woven into the low branches of a yellow birch, the carcass of a red fox pulled apart and skinned—there’s nothing to show she was ever here.
In my dreams she and I grapple together, both of us as large as the mountain, crushing lakes and towns as we wrestle. Unferth’s sword melds with my arm and my bones turn to steel, her skin becomes iron and we start massive fires when we spark together, when we clash. Soren wakes me up several mornings before dawn. I’m stained with sweat, but he doesn’t ask why. He silently hauls me into stretches and boxing warm-ups until my sweat is just from hard work.
Overall, he’s a quiet companion, speaking little but to point out the dark backs of caribou moving across a distant field or ask if I want the grilled chicken MRE for dinner. At night I tell him stories about the Vinland I knew, the Summerlings and Unferth, the festival, and even the massacre itself. I talk about the Valkyrie, about how different they all are but that together they’re the voice of Odin. I tell him about climbing the Tree and meeting the god of the hanged, and he tells me of his own encounter with Odin, how everyone believes the boon he asked was to be allowed to serve Baldur as a berserker, but really he begged not to forget Astrid’s name. I learn his mom was born in Baja California and is a U.S. citizen, but her parents were Savaiian, that she was Lokiskin and met his dad while working where he was stationed. He learns how my parents met at a Freyan leadership camp but died far away in Guathemala.
We discuss the riddle, and I tell him what the troll mother said, that it makes me chill with fear but also hope, because I’m certain we’ll meet again. Soren says there must be more to the riddle’s answer than only presenting a heart of stone to the Death Hall, that there will be a catch or a trick because Odin Alfather does nothing without a catch.
I ask him why he dedicated himself to Baldur, and he only shrugs and says, “When you meet him, you’ll know.”
“A lot of people meet him and don’t change their dedication to him.”
“I …” Soren drags the pause out, not to avoid me, I think, but because he’s never put it into words before. “Baldur is the first god I’ve ever believed in.” He’s quick to add, “I know they all exist—there’s nothing to believe in that way—but I mean that I know he cares what happens to me, and that he’s good. He believes in me, and none of the rest of them do.”
Hanging behind his words is the question: Does Odin believe in you?
It’s such a light word, a gentle word: to have confidence in, to trust in. I put my fingers over my heart. “When my parents died, I felt this desperate longing, this growth in my heart that made me want to scream and drag others behind me until they felt that scream in their own hearts. I still feel it, and so does the Alfather. He recognized it in me, and instead of saying I was too wild or wrong he embraced it. He’s the god who not only lets me need to feel the troll mother’s blood between my fingers; he encourages it. The god of the hanged understands how violence is part of life. Creation itself is an act of violence, and everything I do is violent.”
Even your way of kissing, Unferth whispers.
“So I believe in that. And Odin does, too. We want the same thing. That makes us allies.”
“Dangerous ones,” Soren says.
“Danger is necessary to life.”
“If you can contain it, control it.”
“Ride it; use it! Dance with it! You can’t control life, Soren. That’s what people try to do with troll walls and seat belts; it’s what the Valkyrie do with their rules and costumes, but you can’t. Horrible things still happen. Trolls attack; people die. People who shouldn’t.” My throat tightens and I realize I was near yelling.
Soren doesn’t try to comfort me. The tiny fire casts him in bronze and earthy tones, like he’s a statue. A calcified hill troll.
I look away. I want Unferth here so badly to argue on Soren’s side, to cut me down with a well-placed barb, to twist what I say into a riddle so I’ll spend hours delving deeper into myself. That’s what he did. He drove me deeper.
Ned Unferth believed in me.
It’s no use. The day we reach the trailhead, and there’s the lightning-scoured spruce as proof we’ve gone all the way around, I take my backpack off and fling it to the ground with a cry. I pick up a rock and throw it as hard as I can toward the mountain. It clatters through branches and lands softly, rolling several paces. I throw another and another.