The Strange Maid (46 page)

My stone skin shatters and Valtheow shoves me back with a scream.

I hit the hard sand, dazed. My hands are coated with dark troll blood.

The troll mother looms over me, huge and bulbous and monstrous again. There is no sign of Valtheow. Her massive, moon-bright body blocks the last bright violet sunset, the first evening stars. She is my entire world.

And here are Soren and Ned appearing beside me to drive her back. Their swords together are like fangs, my warrior and my poet.

The UV lights are gone, bulbs blown out, and lesser trolls swarm around. The Mad Eagles and even Rathi bat at them, cutting and slicing.

Ned cries out as the mother cuffs him away; his sword flies. But Soren shoves his sword into her throat. He lets go of it, buried up to the hilt in her chin, and swings to grab up Ned’s lost sword. With it, he slashes at her belly, at her thighs and groin. His dance is so fast he’s a blur of steel, hacking at her, dodging her claws. She bleeds from every limb; from her chest and sides bright purple blood spills.

He stabs her again, all the way through, with a cry like a lion.

I get up as she struggles to remain standing. There is a gaping wound that gushes in the rhythm of her heart, where my seax remains lodged.

I reach into the wound and tear my blade free.

The troll mother falls.

My heart rages and sings, but my mouth is a line, my eyes do not burn.

Soren pins her to the mud with two swords; his breath harsh, hers like a sigh. Ned staggers to us, catches himself on her great shoulder. He leaves a violet handprint like a bouquet of flowers.

I kneel at her head, and I kiss her brow.

“It screams,” she whimpers.

“It’s supposed to,” I return. I climb onto the boulder of her chest, push aside iron necklaces, chains of bone, and with both hands I thrust the blade of the seax down into her again.

She crumbles beneath me, chunks of marble and bone falling away, in a puff of sweet breath. The moonlight finds rainbows in her breaking flesh: amethyst and emerald, ivory-white and lines of pink rubies, trails of gold, the oily sheen of obsidian. Up to my elbows in sticky dark blood turning to powder and tiny sharp crystals, into flakes of glass that cut my knuckles, that bleed my wrists.

It throbs in the center, small as a pinecone. A sharp rock of fire, hot to touch. I gather it in my palms and cradle it to my chest. It reaches hot fingers through my skin, teasing at my breastbone, calling at my heart with tingling pleasure.

There is no poem I know to describe it.

Like sunlight and kisses, like Ned’s tongue on my skin.

I close my eyes, let my head fall back.

This is the line between death and life, the line between fire and air. It whispers to me as the Tree whispered to me: here is the first heart, forged by elf-queens, by Freya herself, the goddess of magic and dreams. It whispers that we will be glorious; together we will transform the world into anything I like.

I controlled it moments ago. I could do so again. I’ve defeated it, I’m strong enough. Stronger than her.

A smile spreads on my face. The heart whispers
yes yes yes.

I want it forever, hardening my skin and beating in my breast. With it I cannot die; with it I can save everyone.

I will be the greatest Valkyrie.

Pleasure rolls through me, and these tiny licking tendrils of power. “Yes,” I say, allowing them to hook into my heart. I bring the beating stone to my mouth, where it is warm and silky-soft.

“Signy Valborn.”

My name rings out.

My name.

Again and again.

“
Valkyrie. Sister.
Signy.”

It’s all of them, their eight voices from eight points in the sky. Precia and Myra, Elisa, Siri, Alana and Gundrun and Isabeau and Aerin.

I open my eyes. They’re all here, in a circle around us: me and the troll mother, Soren and Ned. Starlight horses cast such a shine to push back all the shadows, to keep the lesser trolls at bay. My mounted sisters watch with bright runes in their eyes, hair in braids but for Myra, who keeps hers short and spiky. They wear silver corselets over armor and T-shirts, over pantsuits and summer dresses, with leather boots or loafers or high heels or, in Alana’s case, house slippers. They came when I needed them, dropped everything. Undignified but ready.

Precia dismounts, rushes to me with her fine dress tossing up sand. She kneels and thrusts out a gilded jewelry box. She opens it, and the inside is empty but lined with dark green velvet.

The heart burns my fingers as I set it inside and shut the lid.

THE VALKYRIE OF THE TREE

It was the night before the summer solstice, and I was Signy Valborn, the Valkyrie of the Tree.

My Death Hall was a grand old hall of stone and sweeping buttresses in the center of Philadelphia’s historical district. Heartwood pillars rose toward the ceiling, and in the very middle a massive black pillar carved like the trunk of the Tree spread branches that were truly rafters out across the ceiling in a web. Green banners hung, painted with silver binding runes. My throne was carved into the base of that central pillar, soft and gleaming with inlaid marble. Before it squatted a short altar for laying out a body. Most days, concentric half circles of pews waited empty for a congregation, and wisps of evergreen incense sharpened the air.

But that night, I’d had all the pews pushed away, had torches and a thousand green candles lit. It was like a cave on fire.

In an intimate ritual at the foot of the New World Tree, I had finally, irrevocably, been named onto the Council of Valkyrie. In attendance were only the Alfather himself, my sister Valkyrie, everyone I loved who still lived in the Middle World, and the entire country through the wide black lenses of television cameras. We preempted the solstice, not for any concern that Thor Thunderer, whose holiday it was, would mind, but in order that Soren could attend before rushing to see his Astrid for this single night.

After I spoke my name, and the Valkyrie spoke it back to me, Odin Alfather kissed my mouth and locked an iron chain at my neck. The small heart shimmered inside the delicate iron and steel setting.

I led everyone into the sanctuary for a wild reception. I kicked off my shoes and tied up my skirts and walked to the barrels of mead and street-shine. I climbed up onto one and held out my arms so the feather sleeves dripped off my elbows like wings and called,
Welcome to the New World Death Hall; if you don’t dance here you might as well be dead!

The bluegrass band took their cue and in a blaze of banjo and tin drums and fiddle I dragged Soren Bearstar onto the wide floor in front of my throne and dared him not to move his feet.

I danced with everyone except Ned Unferth, who shot me a look that clearly said,
I have already died, and so what have I to fear from your hall?
Even the Valkyrie of the Rock and Gundrun Graycloak danced with me, even Captain Darius Strong. I ached when I thought of Sharkman, who had loved to dance as wildly as me.

Only the Valkyrie tapped and poured from the kegs and barrels, because we serve death, and the mad passion of death is what filled that sanctuary like heavy humidity. We passed out plastic goblets dripping with golden mead, and tiny shots of shine, and Elisa surreptitiously hid bottles of water where guests might find them.

My bare feet slapped the marble floor, I let my braids loose, and I showed the world my teeth and my laughing, while the stone heart in my necklace winked pink and blue and violet as if alive, kept cool on my skin by the silver and iron entwined around it like lace. A collar of power created to contain the heart by the Alfather himself.

The band cried poetry.

I sank into my throne, carved smooth and small into the wide, round pillar at the center of the sanctuary, an epic column of limestone and shale that reached up to the spanning roof like the Tree itself. It fit me now, like it was grown for me, for my hands to reach the raven-beaked ends of the armrests, for my knees to bend where the seat bent, for my feet to rest firm and flat on the floor. I gripped it and closed my eyes. Whirlwind music and talk flew in every direction, teasing at my smile.

I drifted until my heartbeat found the pace of the celebration, until I breathed with the rhythm of it. Until my party became a song and the lyrics whispered under it all, or above it all, like the constant drum of the ocean against the rocky shore of the death ships, high north on Vinland.

The queen walked out, gold-adorned.

I dipped my finger into my goblet of mead and smeared the sticky stuff onto the still-healing tattoo over my heart: a horizontal spear, Sharkman’s ninth, in honor of him who would never complete his own. The tattoo remained slightly raised and stung when I touched it. I wished it always would, a tiny sacrifice of pain to remind me.

Everyone else was present.

There was Rathi Summerling in green for me, arm around the son of the Philadelphia jarl, laughing and talking fast. There Soren dancing with Precia of the South, earnest and sure-footed while she teased him. There Siri of the Ice not-quite-smiling, with a line before her as she doled out shine to any who answered her riddles. Baldur the Beautiful slid behind the bass to pluck one string at a time while the player smiled so wide it was a grimace. Thebes Berserk loomed with a goblet of mead while a tipsy death priest flirted so hard it turned his fire scar white. Brick and his brother Gabriel laughing behind their hands. Myra Quick and Elisa’s modest, strong husband admiring Myra’s newest pauldron design.

And there was Ned, watching me without a smile, in that muslin shirt I made him put on, slacks that slouched at his ankles because they weren’t meant to be worn with tired old boots. He tugged at the end of one of his braids, a slick eyebrow raised. I ran my fingers through my free hair.
Come fix it,
I mouthed.

No fixing you,
he mouthed back.

Come here anyway, I wanted to say, and pull him onto my throne and make him kiss me right there in front of everyone, right where it could never be taken back.

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.