“Signy?” Darius murmurs.
“Darius,” I whisper. I walk to the bench as if on a tightrope, and Darius hands me the mug. It’s coffee, not chocolate, and I smile sadly down at it.
There’s a fuzzy aura around everything, but a cool breeze snakes inside, dragging away the sticky heat of stale berserker frenzy. I sip the coffee. My stomach revolts and I feel like an idiot, though I wouldn’t change last night. It was magnificent and wild; it was mad frenzy; no control!
I lay my head down against the cool wooden table, and Darius puts his hand beside my face, not touching. “I can get you some water.”
I murmur something, actually wanting a toothbrush and a shower. My thoughts drift like thin spring clouds. I danced hard and laughed; I abandoned my family to their Vinland graves, and Ned Unferth, too. I ran off with strangers who are just like me, sang for the dead, kissed, and forgot my own name for a little while. And it was a relief.
It is a relief. I want to remain here, soak it up, let it go, cycle through it again and again until I’m spent and exactly this loosened, this relaxed every morning.
But I can’t. I have too much to do. I can’t only be wild and free like they are, waiting for their orders to rend and destroy, to set loose their madness and rage.
They embody the destructive passion and death in the Alfather’s fiery heart, this scream inside me, and sharing it made even my bones ache with glory and pleasure. Yet this place has taught me a thing I never understood before: the Mad Eagles, the berserkers, they are controlled. In their hearts they’re pure, but they’re caged from the outside by military laws and barbed-wire fences. Like Soren said, they’re tools. They’re not a part of the world.
The Valkyrie are. The Valkyrie walk free among the people; the Valkyrie lead. Because they are not feared, because they are their own control.
Two sides of a coin, the Valkyrie and the berserkers. The voices of Odin, and the hands of Odin.
I don’t fit with either. Like Soren Bearstar did not fit with his wild brothers, I do not fit with my cool sisters. He transformed himself into a servant of hope and light, but the difference between us is that I want Odin. I could not give my god of the hanged up if I tried.
There must be another way. A middle ground between Valkyrie and berserker, between voice and hand.
A tiny laugh strangles in my throat. The heart.
I want to be the heart, passionate and wild, but with a pulse. A rhythm to keep myself in check. Poetry and passion together.
Like Unferth’s story about Freya creating the trolls by tempering the fire of the earth with the fire of the sun.
Odd-eye.
In that story it was a magical charm the goddess put into a woman’s heart, and the wisest troll mothers, Unferth said, could use rune magic.
Magic like keeping her herd out under thin clouds? Safe from morning light?
Is it possible the troll mother who destroyed Vinland is that first mother? Could she live so long? If it’s her, that means my stone heart, the answer to my riddle, is no average troll heart, but the original, the magical charm Freya, the goddess of dreams, created.
We were destined to meet; I saw it in her eyes, I told Rathi. Choices and consequences.
We recognized each other. Stone heart. Your heart.
I have to get back to it. Find her.
“Signy?” Captain Darius says, concern painting his tone.
I raise my head and look at Darius. His dark eyes wait for me. “Captain, I have some questions about your hunt for the Vinland herd.”
“I will answer them, but first you should see something.” He pushes up from the bench and gestures for me to follow him outside.
Sunlight burns blue and white spots into my vision and I blink it away. I smell ocean and oil, hear distant gulls cry out, and the hum of machinery and propellers. We stand on black asphalt painted with bright yellow lines where armored trucks are parked, emblazoned with the band’s screaming-eagle emblem. It’s all harsh colors, no softness, like the berserkers themselves. But tiny dandelions and curled grass push through the cracks in the pavement.
Darius says, “We have one. One of the trolls.”
I gasp. “One of the Vinland herd?”
He nods toward the north end of the warehouse. “It did not fight us when we came, and so we captured it instead of killing it. All the rest are dead, or vanished off the island.”
A thrill courses through me. “Not the mother?”
“No.” He leads me silently to the only door at that far end and punches a code into the keypad beside it. A lock clicks, echoing up to the rafters, and we go in, closing the door behind us. Darius takes a large key from a box built into the wall that he forces open and leads me down a short hall to a second metal door. He unlocks it, then pushes his shoulder into it and sets his feet firm. It takes all his muscle before the door groans open.
This next hall is a prison built to hold berserkers. Lining the way are cells of solid steel, three to a side. One door is open and the metal is at least ten centimeters thick. It’s stainless steel and stone, locked together into a wall that must be nearly impossible to break.
The prison ends in another door with a large wheel lock sticking out. Darius says, “It’s easier with two,” before gripping it and throwing all his weight into it. The metal grates together and I hear pieces churning and clinking deep inside the wall. When finally it snaps unlocked, he strains to pull it open. A waft of cold, sweet-smelling air flows out.
My skin flares in a million itchy points and my stomach crawls up my throat, burning like screech. I know that smell, oh, how well I know it.
Troll.
UV light shines hard out of four spots set up in each corner, glaring at the monster.
Like a great boulder, it huddles in the center of the room, its neck and ankles chained to six-finger bolts dug into the ground. A meaty hand covers its head, as it protects its sensitive pig eyes.
My hands tremble and I splay my fingers rigidly. I walk to it.
Sweet Mother Frigg, have mercy.
In this light the troll’s skin shines blue and is marbled like polished granite. A long weeping scab trails purple down his shoulder, and there is a line of dark red lichen growing along his spine. His right arm only a broken stub.
Red Stripe. He’s alive.
“He’s not public knowledge,” Darius says calmly. “Though of course the General Berserk knows, and the Valkyrie of the Ice, and Baldur. Baldur has claimed the troll for himself, though there’s also an etin-physiology doctor who’s already put in a request to have any remains we recovered remanded into her custody.”
“I see,” I whisper, imagining Red Stripe’s skull sliced open while they train bland UV lights onto him, keeping him lethargic but not calcified. Then they’ll cut him up and send his head to one facility, his torso to another, his arms and legs perhaps given out as trophies. It’s law that no dead troll be kept whole—they’re to be shattered and spread so there’s no chance of re-forming.
A part of me itches to take Unferth’s sword and drive it into Red Stripe’s heart. Because I can’t stop thinking of the troll mother’s gruesome meal. The memory of her fist cracking against my chest, her hot breath and tusks, the screams and fire.
Darius touches my shoulder. “Lady, are you well? I shouldn’t have brought you. It’s too soon.”
I close my eyes to remember rubbing Red Stripe’s ears, scratching dust from his tusks. The calm way he would hunker down at Unferth’s slightest touch.