“Because.” His jaw works under my hands. I brush my thumbs along his cheeks and his eyelashes flutter. “I can help you kill her.”
Pressing his head into the wall, I release him. “Why should I believe that’s what you want?”
He grasps my wrist with rigid fingers. “You know me, Signy.”
I twist my hand around in his and grip his wrist, connecting us strongly. “If you are lying I will let Sharkman pull you into pieces.”
“I’m not,” he whispers. “I swear it, though my word has always been my curse.”
“No more riddles, I said.”
“By swearing to you now, I foreswear my former self. That is as plain as I can make it,” he hurriedly adds, voice hollow.
Soren crouches beside me. “There’s no risk to taking him with us. We want the troll mother to come to the island, so even if he’s leading her, that works for us.”
I lean my shoulder against Soren’s. “Let’s go.”
In the garage, I unhook the troll chains from the iron posts buried in the concrete foundation. Sharkman opens the garage door and the semi-trailer is parked in the gravel driveway, rear doors open like a gaping whale. Sharkman slides the ramp into place and latches it, then lifts two of the heavy troll chains so they don’t drag while I lead Red Stripe up into the metal container. I chain him under the UV lights rigged to the top corners of the trailer but don’t turn them on. The roof itself was cut away so while they drove in the afternoon, sunshine would pour inside. Now early evening sky glows pale blue, but the sun is too low in the west to cast its rays upon us.
For the ninety-minute drive to Bay Louis, where our ship awaits, Sharkman will pilot the semi, Ned’s knives and sword in the passenger seat, while the other four men are spread between the SUV and Soren’s truck with all the gear. I’m riding in the trailer with Red Stripe and Ned, and when Darius paused as if to suggest otherwise, I gave him such a mean look he only sighed and passed me a knife from his boot.
With two water bottles, I follow Ned up the ramp into the trailer. Sharkman shoves the ramp up behind me. Metal shrieks against the trailer floor. The outside lock rings into place.
I’m alone in shade with Red Stripe and Ned Unferth, and I feel a weight settle onto my shoulders. I sink onto the floor, back against the corrugated metal wall. Red Stripe squats as far from the rear doors as possible and hums at Ned. He picks his way to the troll as the engine roars and we jerk into motion. I watch him rub Red Stripe’s arm, pat his chest, and give the left tusk a friendly tug. “It’s good to see you, too,” he murmurs. Red Stripe moans softly, a contented sound like a cat’s purr.
Ned’s hand is dark against Red Stripe’s pale marble chest. He touches the healing gash.
I say, “If you’d been here, been alive, you could have taken care of it.”
Ned grunts and carefully walks over. He puts his back to the metal wall an arm’s length from me and sits slowly. The hiss of his breath as he adjusts for the pain in this thigh is so familiar I close my eyes and press the back of my skull into the wall.
We sit in silence until the truck stops slowing to make tight turns, stops moving in fits and starts from traffic lights, and instead picks up speed. A highway must rush beneath us, vibrating the entire trailer. I look up through the missing roof to the sky. By the time we reach the ship, it’ll be violet with sunset. Will she find us fast enough to come tonight?
“Signy.”
I roll my head to him. He’s drawn up his good leg to balance his elbow on the knee and looks at me. “What do you want, Ned?”
“It … doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is that you listen to me now.”
“I listened to you for five months, and at the end of it my home was destroyed, my heart broken.”
He falls quiet again. After a moment I shift to face him completely. “Tell me what’s different. Tell me why you came to warn us now, when you could have last night. You could have said then that she’d come faster, that the trolls would give our location away. But you said you couldn’t help, wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“I changed my mind,” he says dismissively.
“Oh, no. You do not get out of this so easily. What really changed?”
“You,” he snarls. “You—always you changing me.”
“Me!”
Fast as a cat he pulls me against him. I raise my hands to shove him away, but then he’s kissing me.
Startled, I gasp into his mouth. He scrapes his teeth on my lips and my eyes flutter closed. From those teeth down to my belly there’s a hot, tight cord. Ned kisses me harder and his arms crush me and it’s like being buried alive.
I reach for his face as a lifeline. He slows down, mirroring my gesture with his hands on my jaw, gentle and caressing. His mouth and tongue grow tender, kissing the aching places on my lips where his teeth bruised. I slide my arms around his neck and hold on, thawing against him with a little moan.
He tilts my head to reach farther inside me, to draw everything I have out through my mouth. It stops being a kiss and instead becomes a poem.
That’s the moment I pull away.
Ned whispers a sigh, and says, “So.”
My wits dance around, trying to form back up into thoughts and words. “So,” I repeat.
“Now it doesn’t matter; now everything is over.” He leans back against the wall, closes his eyes. “I have forgotten my promises; I have forgotten how to care if I live, forgotten my gods, forgotten what even a thousand years of dying is like.”
“Because … you … kissed me?”
“Because I kissed you.”
I draw away from the weight of that riddle and stretch down onto the floor of the trailer. The speed and engine vibrate through my bones as I take long and measured breaths, trying to compose myself, refusing to touch my hot mouth. “I don’t understand,” I finally whisper.
“I’m going to tell you a story. You’ve already guessed some of the pieces.”
I turn my head but his eyes remain closed, his head back against the metal wall, crushing his braids, and he’s touching his own hot mouth. His hand drops away and he says, “I was born when men did not dedicate themselves to gods but to kings.”
“To kings!”
“Don’t interrupt until I finish, or I may never finish.”
I clench my teeth, fist my hands at my sides.
He continues in a hollow voice, with nearly none of the rhythm I expect from him. “My mother called me Edolfr, and I was the son of Einrik the Widow-Maker, a king. But I was only a second son and so allowed to be nothing more than a poet, until my brother slew my father for his crown and I was forced to challenge him for our father’s blood price.”
His face twists and his hand clenches. “I killed him, avenging my father, but that made me a kinslayer, and I did not argue when the people, when my father’s and brother’s men, called me to hang myself for Odin at the summer sacrifice.”
Now I do press a hand over my mouth. It’s the only way to remain silent, to stay still. Lines from The Song of Beowulf tease at me, lines about Unferth the Poet, the kinslayer. His sword.
“I hung, Signy, but the Alfather did not want me then, and so I did not die. I had paid my blood price but couldn’t remain where my father and brother had died. And so I left my home to serve another king, who did not care of my past but only of my poetry and counsel. That is where I met her, Valtheow the Dark, the king’s wife and Valkyrie-born.”
“Ned!” I sit up, clutching at my chest. The knife wound smarts. “She lived sixteen hundred years ago.”