There, in the crisscrossed shadows, the Valkyrie of the South finishes hanging a sparrow. She’s speaking to the teenage couple as they watch the little bird swing. A red love charm dangles from its claw.
As they back away, Precia unties the sparrow’s noose from the branch and hands it to her green-hooded assistant, who then takes it to a ladder and hangs it higher into the tree with the corpses of a few dozen other martyrs. They’ll hang for three nights and days before being burned in a fire at the Death Hall.
She stands straight and turns this way to welcome the next martyr to the tree.
And she sees me.
I lift my chin and hold my breath. Here I am in jeans, boots, and a T-shirt, my hair braided in messy loops, while Precia is in full summertime regalia: ankle-length dress the color of the sky, with a wide gold and copper belt and a chain made with silver and brilliant blue glass that cuts across her collar from shoulder to shoulder. From it hangs a diaphanous feather cape, every white feather fluttering individually. Silver cuffs hold the hem to her elbows and wrists, so when she lifts out her arms the cape spreads like wings. Her dark hair is puffed into curls, swept back with mixed-metal combs. True to form, she wears blue and copper earrings so large they swallow everything around them.
She smiles through gentle lipstick and beckons for me with manicured fingers. I bring Soren with me, like a shield.
“Signy,” Precia says, “and Soren Bearstar, you honor our hanging tree with your sacrifice,” calm and certain, as her assistant and a few lingering people listen. “This is not where I expected to see you,” she adds more softly, putting her hand on my shoulder, then sliding it around to half embrace me. She smells of lilac and sharp mint, oils dabbed beneath her ears and on her wrists to keep away the scent of death.
Precia turns her attention to Soren, clucking with approval at his prayer card. She releases me and I close my eyes as I feel the soft feathers brush down my bare arm. My dove bats her wings against the thin bars of her cage.
“Signy.”
I open my eyes to Precia’s, and for a flash I see glory in the rich brown irises.
Shock silences me for a moment. In ten years, I’ve never been able to read a rune in a Valkyrie’s eye before. It raises courage in me and I say, “Precia, I’ve come for your help. You told me to ask.”
Her gaze lingers on mine, cool but interested. She flicks her hand at her assistant, who begins clearing space for us. Soren waits beside his mouse, a tiny dead thing swinging at eye level.
“Paint a prayer card, Signy, and ask.” Precia ushers me to the long table, dismissing her death priests with a glance. She spreads rainbow-colored cards for me in an arc.
I choose one that is pale green with silver vines at the edges. “Tell me what you know about my riddle.”
She taps a peach-colored fingernail against my card. “We prayed that night, too. Elisa, Myra, and I. We prayed together for an answer, for help managing you because the three of us have always been … the ones most behind you.” She offers me a pot of dark green ink. I take it without touching her fingers.
“We came out to find you and there it was, emblazoned on the trunk of the New World Tree. It was for us as much as you, Elisa and I thought. That it meant you would always fight us, that your heart is a stubborn one, and one perhaps we should strive to understand instead of dismiss. But Myra said, That riddle is future tense. And then you woke up.”
“I woke up and ran away.”
“You didn’t ask us what we thought. You never asked. We’re supposed to be your sisters.”
I draw the rune for glory onto my card, and Precia’s hand goes still. I add sacrifice and death and transformation into a binding rune. Precia murmurs, “Sacrifice transforms death into its own glory.”
“That’s what Odin said to me when I was a little girl.” I lift my gaze to hers. “Do you still think the riddle’s answer is about my being stubborn? Or is it a prophecy?”
Precia’s coiffed hair and conservative wardrobe make it easy to forget she’s not even thirty years old yet. But the emotion in her eyes is young. “I think you proved yourself against the Vinland herd. I think you were there because of fate, and you were brave; you were a leader, Signy. That’s all we need you to be.”
“If I went home to the Philadelphia Death Hall right now, you would argue to include me now? Officially?”
“Yes. I already have. But the others—Gundrun and Siri and Aerin, in particular—will not agree until you ask to be one of us again. They argue that you can’t have proven yourself if even you don’t believe it.”
“I have to prove myself … to myself.”
She nods.
I smile sadly. Unferth said that to me the very day we met. “Do you believe Odin is the one who created the riddle?”
Precia flips over my card irritably. “Signy, really.”
“It’s not only a riddle but a prophecy. Like Myra said. Future tense. The Valkyrie of the Tree will prove herself with a stone heart.”
Her mouth curls into a frown. “If the heart is your heart, everything in that riddle was built from pieces of you, from pieces our Alfather could see and understand in that moment.”
“I think the answer is the troll mother’s heart. The one I’m hunting. Her heart is literally stone, Precia, and when I cut it out of her, I’ll have my vengeance. I saw runes in her eyes, too: stone and heart.”
“She has the worth of a Valkyrie,” she breathes.
I knew Precia would understand. “She’s my mirror.”
“I make myself a mirror to understand the beast.”
That my sister made the same leap to Valtheow as I did relieves me like the perfect couplet at the end of a poem. I take a long, deep breath. The air here is thick, heavy. It tastes of rain and wet leaves. “And so I’m faced with two options, Precia.”
“Two?”
“Either the riddle is all of Odin, and the answer is with me and me alone, pieces of my heart and the Valkyrie I wanted to be. I’ve always been the answer. Or the riddle is a prophecy, and the answer the troll mother’s heart. A thing to come that Odin could not have seen on his own and asked Freya to look forward into fate for me.”
The Valkyrie grasps my face, peers into my eyes. “And you’re convinced it’s the troll mother. A fated answer from the queen of Hel.”
“I dream of the troll mother every night, and she uses runes, Precia. She does what I do; she wears my poem on her stony skin. She recognized me, too, somehow. Her heart is the stone heart of the riddle, and Odin does not see the future.”
“But, Signy, the Alfather cast it. If his sister-god looked at Fate for him, he saw her answer and approved of where it would lead you. That riddle is from the god of the hanged.”
The certainty in her voice, the firm grip of her hands on my face, makes me wilt against her. “And so he did send Ned Unferth to help me, when it was time.”
“What?”
“Last year, at my birthday, I met a poet called Ned the Spiritless, who brought me to the trolls, who taught me about the riddle and, odd-eye, Precia, he …” I don’t know where to go from there, what detail to give her that will make her understand my connection to Ned Unferth.