The queen walked out, gold-adorned—
We, shadow-riders, singers of death, weave with blood-soaked thread—
Lines of poetry shuffle through my thoughts, from the oldest Valkyrie poems, where the Death Choosers ride all together, as sisters and friends, shield-maidens and allies. I long to pull out my marker and draw the runes down my arm, or to find a bottle of paint and spray them against the sidewalk—better yet, a great red scrawl of poetry across the Death Hall doors. Poetry always makes me feel stronger, whether songs in Old Anglish or Old Scandan, or new, never-heard, never-read, never-spoken word-shapes I pull from my black imagination.
My mouth curls and I want that so badly, to paint my heart against the limestone hall, to remind them I exist. Do you still think of me, Myra Quick? I almost sold this seax today.
“Have you come to pray?” a man asks from behind me, his voice a rasp.
I scowl and answer without looking. “Come to the Death Hall to sacrifice, or don’t come at all.”
“Is prayer not a sacrifice of breath?”
The riddling answer gives me pause. I turn to find a young man slouching against one of the iron streetlamps. Perhaps five years older than me, in a tattered gray coat. He’s got sharp cheeks and a thin mouth, slender shoulders, and eyes as colorless as the overcast sky. Most intriguing are his intricate pale braids, woven and pinned in extremely old fashion. Like a poet from before the Viker age, or a silent-film star. For a brief, vivid moment I think it’s finally my Alfather again, come to me after all my prayers and begging. Slowly I say, “The worth of a sacrifice is in the pain it causes, and breathing does not seem to cause either of us pain.”
He pushes off the lamp and approaches; a hitch in his step fails to strip his grace away. There’s a sword strapped to his back, but all I can see of it is the one-handed grip and a garnet winking from the pommel. This man doesn’t take his eyes off mine and stops at barely an arm’s length away. We’re the exact same height, eye to eye.
“That isn’t the worth of sacrifice,” he says.
Rain hits my nose, but I don’t look away from his eyes. I search his face for a rune sign to show me his merit. Seeing such runes is a Valkyrie trait, to see the truth in the hearts of men and women: Who is a hero? Whose fate is grand enough to be touched by a Valkyrie? The gift bled into me when Odin kissed my palm in the Tree. It burned into my bones and cannot be taken away by any less than the Alfather himself. The council may have given up on me, but as long as runes appear to me in the faces of others, in their eyes or their freckles or the curve of their smiles, I’ll know I still have a chance.
The man blinks as rain scatters over his cheeks. It sprinkles on us, tiny ice water drops seeping through my hair to trail down my scalp and spine. I shove my hands into my pockets and don’t look away, though no runes appear. It cannot be the Alfather. I would know him; I would sense the madness. See some sign.
Slender wisps of hair stick to this young man’s temples, water darkens his heavy eyebrows, and the corner of his mouth twitches as a long drop of rain slides like a scar down his chin. He’s not handsome, but I think I could stare at him for a very long time.
“Enjoy what you see?” he drawls.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Ned Unferth.”
I snort. His name is like a riddle, too: Unferth is an Old Anglish word scholars have argued over for ages. It means either full of spirit or spiritless. Brave or cowardly, nothing in between. It’s a word that contradicts itself. It’s also the name of the poet who challenges Beowulf Berserk in the famous poem about trolls and kings in long-ago Daneland.
I know it well, for my favorite Valkyrie, Valtheow the Dark, appears in its verses, too. “He who knelt at the foot of the king,” I recite.
Ned Unferth shrugs. “There are worse things to be called.”
There’s silence between us again, and he seems content to wait here while the cold pinpricks of rain burrow into our bones. The tattered hem of his coat flaps, and under the water-dark cuff of his jeans his boots are scuffed and old. I should abandon this stranger, turn my back carelessly. But to go where? Back to the orphanage? To huddle under a bridge somewhere? The Valkyrie of the Gutter.
I shudder, and my head aches from the slicing wind. “Is there something you want?” I finally ask.
Unferth smiles quick, but enough so I see a flash of teeth. “I have a birthday present for you, little raven.”
Every piece of me freezes. So the Alfather calls me, and none other. Was I wrong before and this is Odin, my god of the hanged, standing before me, teasing me with riddles? Finally come to me again? But there is no madness in this man’s left eye, no hint of godhood or anything.
Cold rain falls all around as Ned Unferth leans toward me and says, “I know the answer to your riddle.”
TWO
THE RIDDLE APPEARED at dawn the morning after my fifteenth birthday.
I’d slept shivering between two massive roots of the New World Tree, tears dried on my cheeks and a gnawing hunger in my belly, for I’d refused to eat with the Council of Valkyrie the night before. They’d come for my birthday, early, to surprise me, and instead of a celebration with honey wine and cakes we fought hard enough to shake the tallest limbs of the Tree.
They didn’t like my Yule plans. Gutless, old-fashioned cowards, I called them.
Impudent child, destructive, reckless! they called me back.
All because I took what the Alfather taught me and tried to put it into action.
The last time he’d come to me, we didn’t spar and we didn’t dissect dead birds or dig into the roots for perfect beetles. Instead, Odin allowed me to curl under his arm and listen to the beat of his heart while he told me stories of his favorite, ancient Valkyrie.
He told me of Signy Volsung, who turned herself into a dire wolf and destroyed her husband’s entire family with fire. He told me of Lady Hervor and her magical sword, of Sanctus Judith, who cut the heads off her enemies and tied them onto a loom of veins and intestines. They understood the violence of creation, he said with a sigh. Do you feel this, little raven? he asked, putting my fingers to his wrist, where his pulse raged with a strange beat like the hooves of Sleipnir the eight-legged stallion. To feel the god’s blood under the pads of my fingers teased at my fear, and at my excitement, too. I didn’t know which to feel, and he laughed. He said, Give me a sacrifice for understanding, and I grabbed up the knife from his boot. Without a thought, I cut open my hand. It burned like fire and I spilled blood and tears right there into his lap.
The Alfather used my braids to wipe the tears off my cheek, and the entire garden of the New World Tree smelled sharply of blood. For your tears I will say that fear and excitement belong in the same breath, and for your blood I will tell you of Valtheow the Dark, who was born my daughter as no other in the long history of our people.
I’d heard of her, Valtheow: she was a Valkyrie who lived sixteen hundred years ago and first hanged herself at the Yule sacrifice in Old Uppsala when she was thirteen, but Odin did not let her die. She cut her own throat to weave a necklace of blood and survived that, too. She married the king of what became Daneland, Hrothgar Shielding, rode with him into battle, and bore him two sons and a daughter, and when the troll Grendel came to destroy their palace, she fought him as wildly as any retainer. She conjured spells to empower the warriors’ swords, though none could penetrate Grendel’s cursed iron skin.