The king of Orleans claps a hand on my wish-brother’s back. “You speak like your father.”
Rathi bows. “My thanks.”
“Dance with me,” I say, and turn away into the crowd, bringing Rathi along. He’s warm and smiling back at me, those too-green eyes bright as he spins me onto the dance floor.
“Thank you,” I say.
Rathi turns me under his arm and then back. “Peachtree wants you to pay attention to how I do in a room with at least one person better-looking than me.”
“Surely she knows you’re used to it enough to hide your feelings?”
“Wounded!” He slips a hand from mine to slap it over his heart. The ruby ring on his forefinger catches fire.
I regard him. It might be a curse to have danced with Baldur and let him reframe my understanding of beauty, but as I study Rathi’s short eyelashes and smooth cheeks, the wave of his slick hair that’s not only one golden hue but a half dozen ranging from wheat-colored to sandy and brown, the scar just in front of his right ear and the small indent in his chin, I realize I can’t remember anything specific about Baldur’s face except those magical eyes. The god of light is too perfect to hold in my memory.
“God, Signy, what are you staring at?” Rathi laughs nervously.
I look down at the black horse pin holding his wide silk tie in place. “Oh, you.” Forcing myself to meet his eyes again. “I’m thinking I prefer your sort of looks to—to certain gods’.”
“Signy—”
“Hrothgar.”
He purses his lips and changes course. “You do look remarkably dangerous, but up close your eyeliner is like a raccoon.”
Smacking his arm absently, I glance around for Soren. There’s Baldur and Glory back up at the high table, but no Sun’s Berserk. The red eye of Unferth’s sword catches my attention, hanging there on the back of my seat. “Rathi.”
“Hmm?” Over my shoulder, he watches the ever-shifting crowd with his confident, relaxed preacher’s mask, which makes him seem both approachable and above it all.
“Did you know Ned’s sword has a name?”
Rathi frowns. “Hrunting.”
I release him and head for an abandoned chair near one of the white pillars. I smooth my hands down my skirt until they’re folded peacefully. “What does the name mean?” I ask as he joins me.
“It’s the name of the sword Beowulf used to slay Grendel’s mother.” Rathi raises one eyebrow.
I nod slowly, wishing I had Unferth’s flask. “Beowulf got the sword from Hrothgar’s poet, right?”
“Yes. The poet, Unferth Truth-Teller, gave it as a sort of peace offering between them. The theory was that maybe Hrunting would work against the trolls when no other weapon would, because Hrunting was tempered in blood. It was a kinslayer. Don’t you know all this?”
Unferth whispers, I killed my brother with it.
Is it possible my Unferth is the Unferth of the poem? He had the sword; he claimed to be a kinslayer; he knew that poem inside and out; he knew so much about me and the Alfather. But Baldur claims there are no Einherjar with his name. Unferth himself said he was only a man.
“Signy.”
With both hands on my shoulders, Rathi shakes me just once and ever so slightly. I refocus on his face, all the connections between Unferth and The Song of Beowulf knotted in my mind.
“Do you think it could be the real thing?” I glance past him up at my sword on the dais.
“The real …” Rathi looks hurriedly over his shoulder, then back at me. He laughs. “Signy, the real Hrunting has to be sixteen hundred years old. That sword is not. There are re-creations of famous swords all over the place, especially at a Viker Festival. Edd Smithson made copies of Gudrun’s Helblade every year.”
What game was Ned playing? Even if the sword is a replica, if he himself was born twenty-five years ago and took up the name, there must be a reason for it. He put the pieces before me.
Some may be the workings of Fate: my own attraction to Valtheow the Dark’s bloody story, the Alfather’s love of her. That my wish-brother is named for her husband, the famous Freyan king Hrothgar. But some were woven in by Ned Unferth: He brought trolls into my life; he used the ancient poet’s name. He told me my rune scar is linguistically linked to her name—Valtheow, Strange Maid—and the troll mother paints herself with that rune in my dreams.
A cold line of fear slides down my back. Red Stripe. One-armed Red Stripe, who Unferth led me right toward.
Beowulf Berserk killed Grendel by tearing off the monster’s arm. In vengeance, the troll’s mother destroyed the golden hall of Heorot.
Just as my troll mother destroyed Vinland.
Did she follow Red Stripe?
I see Unferth again, ice in his eyes, fingers hard on my elbows, when I told him Baldur was missing. He’d been afraid. Was it not for Baldur’s sake, but because he knew the troll mother was coming after her son?
“Sig?” Rathi says.
“I need to go outside,” I whisper, pushing away from him and darting through people, rushing for one of the open side doors.
TWENTY
MY SHOES BURY themselves in thick grass and I dash across the circle lawn, past a couple in intimate conversation and a group of old men debating something with flailing gestures. Past waxy-leafed magnolia trees and boxes breaking open with early summer flowers. I duck under a trellis crowded with vines and into a narrow path lined with conical trees blooming purple. At the end is a marble bench. It glows welcome to me.
I sit, grateful to the cool stone seeping up through the layers of my dress, grounding me here in the center of this garden. Against the red silk skirt my fingers are pale sticks, heavy with Unferth’s rings. Furiously I tear one off. I throw it into the dark foliage.
If Unferth knew what was coming, it can only be that he was in league with Freya. She sees the future. She stole Baldur’s ashes, and told him what to expect. But why?
“Hello?”
My head jolts up at the intrusion. A girl stands beside one of the purple trees, certainly not clad for a fancy ball. Her dress is light and cottony, not quite knee-length, her cardigan pale blue, and dusty thin sandals tie up her ankles. She has a mass of dark curls messily pulled into a bun but with tendrils everywhere. A necklace of obviously plastic pearls falls against her collarbone, and there’s no makeup to accent her pretty face.
I’m staring rudely, and she sighs before joining me on the bench. “You seem upset,” she says.
“I was here to catch my breath, privately.”
The girl’s eyes crinkle in amusement. “I see.”
I smell sharp, sweet flowers I don’t recognize, but not like any perfume, and I look more closely into her pale brown eyes. She widens them for me knowingly and tilts her face up to mine. Worked into the tawny wheat flecks in her left eye is the rune youth, and in the right, god.
A disir! But she’s nothing like Baldur and has none of the awesome charisma of Freyr the Satisfied or the wicked magic of my Alfather. She does not even affect me as my sister Valkyrie do. But there’s a simplicity to the way she holds herself, a calmness like the breeze cannot touch her, nor heat lick up sweat at her temples.