A soft caress on my ankle startled me and I glanced down at a small gray cat. She flicked her tail at my knee, looked over her shoulder as she sauntered away. Toward the garden.
I followed.
My Tree was lush with summer and the green and yellow elf-lights I had wound through the branches. Red, pink, and yellow papers were tied among the leaves, each one a prayer from a citizen, like flowers budding on the limbs of fate. I walked over cool grass, past marigolds and extravagant lilies, falls of iris and rocket clusters of coneflowers. All the colored lights trembled in the wind, casting rainbow shadows on my hands and on the snaking black roots of the Tree. I sank into the crook of two roots, hands against the rough, damp bark, and breathed in the perfume all around me. My Tree. My throne.
The riddle was gone, grown over with gnarled, ropy bark, a scar there on the Tree that would slowly fade as my lifetime faded.
“There remain strands of the future where you do not get all you desire, Signy Valborn.”
She perched on the thick root beside my shoulder, ankles crossed. The colored shadows mottled half her face so it appeared ruined, burned, melted, and weeping with blood and pus. But her cool gray eyes fixed on mine, threaded with scarlet like the loom of fate itself always impressed upon her sight.
I whispered, “My poem began with a god in a tree, and here it ends with the same.”
Freya, the goddess of dreams, the Witch and the Weaver of Destiny, laughed just like the troll mother, “ha ha ha,” her teeth white and her mouth pretty. She said, “I am not here for your ending. Yet.”
“Why are you here, then, at the foot of the New World Tree?”
“I see roads diverging from this moment, and I’ve come to choose one to follow.” The goddess smoothed the velvety skirt over her thighs. She wore a long dress off her shoulders and a medieval girdle that looped low against her hips, all of it too heavy for such a summer night. But I saw no gleam of sweat, no curl or frizz in her loose, waving hair. In fact, she glowed pale and cool like the moon. Like the troll mother. Even her hair and the ruffle of her dress seemed carved of stone. “Will you ask?” she murmured at me.
Fear trickled down my spine. “What paths do you see?”
“One: you destroy that heart at your throat. Two: you wear it until it is taken from you violently. Three: you give it to me now.”
“You want it. That’s what you’ve always wanted.”
She smiled a cruel smile. “Never.”
“Tell me what you want now, lady moon, and maybe I will do it.”
“You, little raven, do exactly what you’re told?”
I shoved my back against the rough bark, the warm damp Tree alive where she was still and cold. “Try me.”
“Destroy it, for it was never meant to be in the world like this. Destroy it and it will never ruin your daughters.”
“Why did you make it if only to wish it broken?”
“That is what hearts are for.” Her gaze skimmed away from me, back toward the Death Hall. “You know my words are truth.”
“Are you threatening Ned?”
“He’s mine, little raven. I rule all the unsung dead, and he made promises to me.”
Words burned like bile at the back of my throat. I swallowed them. I whispered, “He will not remain unsung, no matter if he dies tonight or in fifty years. I am a Valkyrie and I choose. You cannot use him against me.”
“But you would miss him, if he were gone again.”
“Yes.”
We were silent, the goddess and I, while a breeze played through the branches above, hinting at stars and the changing paths dancing around us like elf-lights.
I said, “The Alfather forged this necklace for me. I am his, and he wants me to wear the heart. To discover what I can do with it. I have it from his own mouth, Freya.”
“Yes, my love craves power in you, but he does not see the future.” Her sigh tilted toward petulant, and I glanced at her, startled. The goddess pursed her lips. “Some day, Signy, you will come to me to ask a thing, and I will say no. Because of this. Because of tonight.”
She leaned nearer to me then and kissed me. I felt her breath in my mouth, sharp and sweet like a flower. I gasped and the heart blazed against my skin. Its tendrils curled through my ribs, searching for my own heart, making pleasure and madness burn through my body.
“Can you resist its song forever?” the goddess of dreams murmured into my ear. “Will your daughters? Will your priests and lovers?”
I didn’t want to resist. But I grasped the stone and said, “Tonight.”
“That is all you will have, a thousand tonights and a thousand tomorrows, always tempted, always choosing for the rest of your life, Signy.”
“That is everyone’s destiny,” I said. “Always choosing.”
I pushed to my feet. I held my hand to her, and she took it as she gracefully stood. She remained near, her cool presence and my wild, hair-raising passion pushing off each other like magnets.
“Everyone’s destiny,” the goddess intoned, transforming my words into reality. “Always choosing.”
“Maybe someday you’ll convince me to do it.” I drew chaos onto her chest with my finger. It glowed as green as death against her white, white skin. She drew destiny onto my cheek.
Together we passed through the garden, back into my sanctuary, where my family drank and cheered and danced.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’D LIKE TO thank everybody who’s still my friend after the writing of this book. I swear, it won’t happen again.
Most especially I want to thank my editor, Jim Thomas, for not giving up on me. I know I made your life exponentially harder for a few months in 2013.
Thanks to everybody at Random House: Michelle Nagler, Nicole de las Heras, Mallory Loehr, and especially Jenna Lettice for all the legwork; Aisha Cloud, Rachel Feld, Nora MacDonald, and the publicity and marketing teams; and Tracy Lerner and everybody in library marketing. (Paul Samuelson and Mary Van Akin, I hope it wasn’t me who drove you away! You were so great to work with.) Jennifer Prior and Alison Kolani for their painstaking detailed work. I am constantly blown away by the things you all do for my stories.
My agent, Laura Rennert, I wouldn’t have succeeded without your dedication and faith in what I was trying to do.
Maggie Stiefvater, we survived!!!!
Brenna Yovanoff, knowing you got over your revision PTSD helped me keep pushing.
Myra McEntire, xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo give me your moonshine.
Stephanie Burgis, I wouldn’t have climbed back on my horse without you.
Tara Hudson, Sonia Gensler, Josie Angelini, Anna Carey, Amy Plum, Julie Murphy, Rae Carson, Kate Johnston, Chris Kennedy, Emily Kennedy, Robin Murphy, Lydia Ash, and everybody who listened and nodded and filled up my wineglass.
My entire family: thank you for only gently rolling your eyes as I worked on this book at Disney World.
And Natalie, you lived it with me, what can I even say? I don’t deserve you.