The longer I spend along the river, the crankier I become. She is my destiny, I tell Soren, and she recognized my heart, too, somehow. I have to find her.
He says, “You choose, Signy. You make your destiny; don’t just let it pull you along,” and I remember saying exactly that thing to Unferth our last night together. How he would scorn me for accepting the drag of destiny now, because it aligns with what I selfishly want.
Soren continues to push for us to head south to Port Orleans. I’m torn because I want Baldur’s resources, but I don’t want to risk losing her trail. If only I could sense her somehow, or use my dreams as a guide.
For she comes to me every night now, from slimy swamps, rising out of the water with long grasses that slide off her head and shoulders. She bears rune scars carved into her hard marble chest. My rune scar, which Unferth translated: death-born, servant of death. Strange Maid. She comes with it painted in blood over her heart. She crouches on a white sand beach, drawing a rune poem into the sand, but before I can read it the tide washes it away and the mother is behind me, ripping runes into my flesh, and I scream prayers for my skin to harden like hers.
The fourth night in Ohiyo, I soar over a battlefield on a massive gray horse, at the head of a flight of Valkyrie. Below us the dead burn in a single great bonfire. We point, my sisters and I, at one man, and then another, drawing their spirits up with us as we gallop across the clouds. I laugh and shriek at the glory of it all, at the blood, the hunger. But when I twist to look back, they’re not golden women at my flanks but eight troll mothers in feather capes, the one near me as wide as the moon and graceful as a swan. She bats me out of the sky, but a rope around my neck snaps and I hang from her thick hand as she flies over the battlefield. Tall flames lick up at my legs. I scream and struggle. I flail my legs and claw at the noose.
Someone says my name, over and over, calmly. Puts cool hands on my face, unwinds the noose and gently kisses me.
Little raven.
I’m awake, and he’s gripping me tightly, pinning my hands between us. Ned, Ned, Ned. But it’s Soren, light streaming around him from the desk lamp. I bury my face against him and try to breathe.
“Skit, Signy,” he whispers, “are you sick? You’re on fire.” He slides his hands down my bare arms until he reaches my hands. “Let me get you water.”
I grab his hands, gouging him with my nails hard enough that he grunts. I let go. “Sorry,” I whisper.
I flee to the bathroom to splash water over my face. We’re on the top floor of a standard highway hotel with free hot breakfast and an interweave connection if we had a computer. The walls are covered with gilded paper to remind us of another era, and these bathroom fixtures are overly elaborate. The kind you have to stare at too long before you figure out which is hot and which is cold.
Soren puts his shoulder against the wall and waits for me. After I pat my face dry and manage a few clean breaths, I face him, wrapping my arms around my stomach. “I’m all right. It’s only more of the same.”
“Do you need a workout?”
“I think I need a drink.” I duck around him with a flirty smile.
“My … Astrid … would say if you figure out what’s scaring you, you can face it.”
I stop beside my bed, head down. “I’m trying to, Soren. I’m looking for her. She’s looking for me.”
He says, “Nightmares like this aren’t normal, not even for post-trauma.”
My knees melt and I plop onto the floor with my back against the bed. He joins me and I only stare at him for a long moment. The lamp casts rather dim light onto us, and Soren lacks that guarded expression he normally wears.
“You don’t have to be alone,” he finally says.
“What would Astrid think of that?” I snap.
Soren frowns and studies his right palm. He slowly says, “She’d agree. She’d like you, and she’d know you helped me already.” He lifts his gaze to mine again, and when he speaks again his tone brooks no argument. “She wouldn’t be worried about us at all.”
I dig my fingers into the carpet. “Well, good.”
Silence drags through a couple of minutes.
“Maybe your dreams are trying to tell you something,” Soren finally says. “Something your imagination has already put together but you can’t parse yet.”
I think of the troll mother, of the imagery that she hanged me, that I died. That first we flew as sister Valkyrie. We were the same. I cover my face with my hands. But he gently pulls them away, folding them between his own hot hands. “Tell me.”
“She’s in a swamp, or on a white sand beach. My rune scar is carved onto her, like we’re connected—and we are connected, Soren. We both draw poetry into sand; her eyes are full of runes for the Valkyrie. She said to me, Your heart, when she held me close to her face. I used to dream of killing her, but now she kills me. She flays my skin; she knocks me out of the sky. It’s like instead of me becoming her mirror, she’s become mine.” I squeeze his fingers.
“Your mirror?”
“Valtheow the Dark, the Valkyrie? She hunted a troll mother centuries ago and said that in order to hunt the beast, she had to become a beast.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Of course you wouldn’t, Sun’s Berserk.”
He lets go of my hands. “You don’t have to be mean.”
I work my jaw and eventually grind out an apology.
Soren just watches me.
“I hate being afraid,” I confess.
“When I’m afraid, I take deep breaths. I remember who I am. I pray.”
“What are you afraid of?”
He’s so still, the least fidgety person I’ve ever met, and for a moment it’s like he’s become a statue. “Killing innocent people,” he says quietly.
Like his father, like the trolls. I touch the tattoo on his face gently, knowing better than to offer any easy comfort to that.
“I’ll tell you what I’ve learned about dreams,” he says, his voice almost too quiet for me to hear. I climb onto my bed while Soren stretches out on the floor at the foot. I wonder if it’s easier for him to talk when he can stare up at the ceiling, pretend I’m not really listening as he tells me how the berserking madness woke in him a few years ago, that it gave him insomnia and made him afraid of himself. Until he met a girl who dreamed true dreams, and Baldur the Beautiful, who always dreams of his death, and they taught him he wasn’t a monster.
I scoot sideways on the bed, hair loose and hanging to the carpet, arms splayed out like wings with my palms up. Unferth’s sword lies beside me, just near enough I can skim my fingers against the garnet. With my head tipped back the blood rushes into my eyes, filling my skull near to bursting. Fear can be a sacrifice, too, Ned whispers. I don’t want to hear him now, and take my hand away from his sword.
“It isn’t natural to dream your own death again and again,” Soren says. “But Baldur does. And Astrid’s were sometimes frightening, sometimes uplifting, sometimes about people she didn’t know and never would. They were always true, though. Because she was a seethkona. And her goddess is the goddess of dreams. That same goddess Baldur sleeps with every winter, in death. The goddess who connects them.”