The Strange Maid Read online

  I set down my chopsticks. “How old are you?” I ask.

  “As old as the flower that blooms and dies every year.”

  I scoff. “Where are you from?”

  “A country where the sun rises and sets every other day.” Unferth turns over an egg roll and meets my eyes as he spears it with his fork.

  “Who is your father?”

  Now a lazy smile stretches across his face and he slumps back into the booth. “As much a king as I am.”

  His answers are riddles, too, and could mean he does not age, he is not from the Middle World, or he is as divine as his father. As Odin. The thrill of leaping to a conclusion makes my toes dance in my boots. “You’re one of the Lonely Warriors,” I guess.

  The Einherjar, Odin Alfather’s undead soldiers, drawn from the greatest of our heroes from all the ages to serve him in Asgard. They train constantly in the fields outside the Valhol to fight at his side when the end of the world comes. They eat with him and drink from the Poet’s Cup to retain their memories even in death; they are his spies in the Middle World, his brothers-in-arms. Perhaps he learned to call me little raven from Odin’s own lips.

  But Ned Unferth laughs dismissively.

  I wait. Rain slashes the windows. We’re practically alone in the restaurant, in a quiet bubble. “Well?” I finally push.

  “Was there a question?” he asks, not bothering to hide his mirth.

  How delightful that I can amuse him so well. I narrow my eyes. “Are you Einherjar?”

  “I am a man.”

  Frustration squeezes my fists.

  Smile gone, he says, “Ask the right questions and I’ll answer them.”

  “Why are you sure the riddle means I need the heart of a troll?”

  “I am a poet and riddler, little raven. I know words and their meanings inside and outside, and from angles you cannot imagine. I know all riddles have more than one answer, and the heart of a troll is one answer to your riddle.”

  “Is it the right one?”

  “They’re all the right one.”

  “Will you explain it to me? All the angles I can’t imagine?”

  Unferth curls his lips. “It would take a hundred days.”

  “The Valkyrie of the Tree will prove herself with a stone heart,” I bite out.

  “Prove herself to whom?” he asks.

  “To the Valkyrie. To Odin.”

  “Where does it say that?”

  I open my mouth but say nothing.

  He shakes his head. “You assume too much. All that is there is that the Valkyrie, whoever she is, will prove herself to someone or something with a stone heart. As no doubt you have assumed, many things could be symbolized by a stone heart. It’s a poetic device, isn’t it?” Unferth puts one finger against the polished wood of the table and draws an invisible heart. “The only thing that is absolutely, by every angle, a stone heart, literally, is a once-beating bloody heart transformed entirely into marble or obsidian by the sun’s curse upon the trollkin. Perhaps not the only answer, but the best answer.”

  “And proving?” I ask. “Who am I proving myself to?”

  “Who is mentioned in the riddle?”

  “The Valkyrie of the Tree.”

  He wipes out his invisible heart, colorless eyes on mine.

  “Me?” I say.

  He shrugs one shoulder as if he doesn’t care in the least.

  “Prove myself to myself?”

  “The Alfather hung in the windswept tree for nine nights and nine days, sacrificing himself to himself.”

  “You’re seeing things not there!”

  “I see many things others do not.”

  I grit my teeth again and spin the conversation back around. “You’re saying that the riddle doesn’t explicitly say who I’m proving myself to, or even that I’m the Valkyrie in question. And the only … concrete thing in the riddle is the stone heart, which literally could be a troll’s heart.”

  Unferth sighs. “You certainly know how to strip the poetry out of a thing.”

  “This isn’t a poem; this is my life!”

  The words echo out through the mostly empty buffet. The hostess glances over, fingering the thin necklace at her throat. I can’t even smile at her or see what god’s charm she’s worrying at.

  Unferth watches me patronizingly. It’s in the tilt of his eyebrow and the smile half-hidden behind his mouth.

  I collect myself, clench my teeth. Smooth my hands down my jeans. When I look up, the expression is gone from his face.

  He says, “Your god is the god of madness, war, and poetry. Don’t dismiss it. Isn’t poetry what you long for? The symmetry, the meaning, the destiny in ancient songs and stories?”

  “You know too much about me, Ned Unferth.”

  Twangy harp music, so delicate and minor-key, nothing like the bombastic music of our gods, invades my thoughts. A discordant element to remind me that nothing is as it seems, but I have to act anyway. I cannot see the paths of fate—only Freya the Witch can, and her fortune-tellers—but not knowing where this leads is part of the point. Acting is the point. Leaping ahead is the point. Reaching for what I want—and what I want is to be the Valkyrie of the Tree. I owe it to myself to follow this opportunity, no matter who Unferth is, no matter how or why he’s here.

  “If your life were a poem, little raven”—Unferth leans across the table—“what would the hero do next?”

  I take a deep breath. Raising my bottle of beer, I say, “Let’s go find me a troll.”

  THREE

  THAT NIGHT WE push north around Lake Mishigam a couple of hours to camp in an old trailer park he knows. He says we’ll start again when the sun rises, because as we head into troll country it’s safest to drive only during the day. It’ll take nearly two days that way, heading east on the Trans-Canadia Highway toward the ruins of Montreal, where Unferth will teach me what he knows of hunting and fighting trolls until the ice is thick enough for the greater mountain trolls to migrate down to the coast of Quebec to hunt seals. There I’ll make my kill. By Yule if I’m lucky, he says, in a tone that suggests he doubts it.

  “I’ve never seen one,” I say out the dark window, remembering illustrations in kids’ books of the greater mountain trolls, with massive yellow eyes and bloody tusks and claws exactly sized to drag children away for midnight snacks. There are five distinct types of troll on our continent: the dangerous but small cat wights; curious iron wights; their larger cousins the hill trolls, with ape-like arms and thick, rough skin; vicious prairie trolls, who prefer human flesh to any other; and, worst of all, the greater mountain trolls.

  It’s the mountain trolls that are the stars of the old stories, the oldest and smartest of all, who hunt and haunt ruins or swamps or the crags of mountains that dragons have abandoned. The sort that gather in massive herds and have been known to use tools and paint their stone bodies with mud or blood before attacking. Their attacks are rare, but when they charge, they destroy everything in their path. I hardly know a thing about them that I didn’t learn from bad TV movies and picture books.

  Unferth says, “A troll?”

  “A greater mountain troll. This last year while I was wandering, I used to see iron wights all the time—they make little houses under steel bridges and sometimes squat in the same warehouses the other street kids and I did.” I recall the odd way the wights’ huge eyes blink one at a time.

  Iron wights look like human toddlers from a distance, except their skin is flaky and orange or reddish. They might wear mismatched clothes and are hardly capable of language. They hoard lost tools and random shiny items, though, and we offered them snacks of rusted nails or the chunk of an old car in return for the copper pipes and knives they didn’t use but collected anyway.

  “You won’t be ready the first time you face a greater mountain troll,” Unferth says. “They’re massive, and smarter than you can imagine.”

  “Fantastic.”

  He slows the truck to a stop in the middle of the highway.
The engine rumbles, but I hear the creaking trees beside the road. Unferth glances at me, hands on the wheel. The glow from the dash paints bluish shadows across his face. “Now is the time to give up if you’re going to.”

  I wipe damp palms on my jeans.

  “You’re afraid,” he says.

  “I’m excited.”

  “I thought we weren’t going to lie to each other.”

  Leaning back into the cloth seat, I put my boots on the dash. “I never agreed to that.”

  The darkness swallows his smile, but for the glint of teeth. The hairs on my forearms rise as he dives lovingly into a retelling of the murder of Luta Bearsdottir’s family by greater mountain trolls in the Rock Mountains, followed by the saga of the Nordakota Prairie Massacre, and finally The Lament of the Mere Troll. He illustrates broken limbs and blood spatter and battle frenzy, all with a surprising number of rhymes for carnage. I’ve heard the stories before, recited the elegies, but inside the small truck cab, with his odd rhythmic accent and nothing outside but acres of wilderness, it all comes horribly alive.

  Trolls could be hiding in the black forest as it flashes darkly past. This Trans-Canadia Highway we’re heading for is the farthest northern evidence of New Asgard in the east. Farther north in Ontario we’d only find isolated homesteads and walled farms, but usually they’re boarded up and abandoned this time of year against the greater mountain trolls who come down from the ice as winter presses at them, searching for greater sources of food. There’s not been a settlement attack along this stretch in twenty years, but isolated travelers are much more at risk.

  We reach the trailer park, a spread of abandoned electric hookups and overgrown picnic tables. The cab isn’t terribly comfortable for sleeping, even bundled under blankets Unferth drags out of the covered truck bed. He’s got thick spears back there, too, and a couple of axes, therma-wool coats and sleeping bags, and not a lot of food. But we only have to make it to his base outside the ruins of Montreal.

  I fall asleep with the blanket over my head to stop myself from imagining the mountain trolls from Unferth’s poems hulking between the trees. Their huge black shadows have piercing yellow or red eyes, tusks and hammer-fists, hot breath like fog in the cold night. As I sweat, I remind myself that the best glory will come from taking the heart of a greater mountain troll. They are the devils of our stories, and a stone heart from such a creature will be magnificent, the size of my head. How glorious it will look held in my hands when I bring it to the New World Tree. Perhaps I’ll cast it in silver and have it mounted over my throne.

  Our first full day together, the sun shines along flat fields of wild corn and wheatgrasses broken and brown for the winter. They stretch like patchwork blankets toward a horizon I can see clearly. The crisp lines between gray and gold, between blue sky and white cloud, and the distant green hills layer over each other carefully, even artfully. It reminds me of Elisa’s glorious prairie.

  We try the radio, but bad lyrics make Unferth cranky, and it’s half static besides. He asks me about myself for entertainment; first if I’ve got family, and second what I’ve done to keep myself fed the past few months. I tell him about my parents’ best friends, the Summerlings, devout Freyans who took me in when my parents died. Rome and Jesca and their son, Rathi. I miss them during the harvest months, when the leaves turn red and I remember the bonfires and sweet smell of horse barns where we lived briefly down in the Cherokeen kingstate. They moved up northeast to some historic settlement after I climbed the Tree, and I’ve not seen them but for Rathi last summer.

  And as for my life without the Death Hall, ah, that I can paint for Unferth as a glorified adventure, filled with my own band of scraggly, wisecracking friends, militia officers as our arch-nemeses, abundant street-shine, odd jobs that led to treasure, fortresses under city bridges, helpful matrons at the Lokiskin shelters, creepers, and secrets and wonder.

  He laughs and I like the spiky edges of it.

  I add, “Someday they’ll tell the story that the Valkyrie of the Tree fended for herself, that I became part of the city, lived in the shadows of New Asgard, with the lowliest, with the half-dead, the nameless. They’ll say I understand roots better, I understand decay better, because I surrounded myself with it.”

  He says, “And what is the truth?”

  “Doesn’t that depend on who’s asking?”

  “No. You know. The poet always knows.”

  “The truth … I found jobs, slept where I could, and …” I hesitate, but what’s to stop me from complete honesty other than fear? “The truth is, I did learn about longing and street miracles and cold and hunger; I understood decay and hopelessness and those magical, shadowy places where life forces its way through cracks in the concrete. But I never was afraid, because I could have gone home anytime. Called one of the Valkyrie anytime. I never was hopeless or starving or alone. Every moment of it felt like living a story, not living a life.”

  Unferth looks at me the longest he’s ever taken his eyes off the road, and again, and again, eyes flicking between my face and the highway, narrowing more each time as if he has to tear them away from me.

  I shrug my sudden discomfort away and slump into the passenger seat. The sun is low behind us, melting the rearview mirrors orange and pushing our shadow ahead of us. I always like that, when my shadow touches a place before I do.

  “Tell me a moment you did feel alive,” he finally says.

  “You first,” I whisper.

  He sighs as if letting go of a great weight. “The first time I faced a troll, swallowed his hot, rotten-berry breath, felt his iron claws scrape my bones hard enough to spark. Little feels as real as your own blood on your hands. Or the blood of someone you love.”

  “Is that why you limp?”

  “Among other things.”

  I glance at him, still standing by my first assessment that he’s only five years older than me—if he’s not immortal. “I can’t think of a troll attack in the past ten years, not a bad one where people died.”

  Unferth is silent. Because that was no actual question. I ask, “Where were you attacked?”

  “On the ice,” he murmurs with a tiny smile.

  I groan. “What ice?”

  “The long-since-melted kind.”

  “Unferth.”

  “Your turn. A real moment for a real moment.”

  The first thing that occurs to me is awful, but I spit it out. “Sitting on Rome’s—on my wish-father’s—lap when he told me my parents were dead. There was a tiny blue horse charm tied into his beard, and I stared at it and stared at it. He stroked my hair and it was like I could feel every individual strand where it connected to my scalp. I thought I might die from the pressure of it. I was so alive.” I touch my chest with my middle finger but don’t need to hold anything in. That desperation passed a long time ago.

  “I remember when my father died,” Unferth says. Before I can press, he flips on the headlights and peers at the gauges on the dash. “We need more gas.”

  We sleep that night inside the protection of a walled gas stop. Its tanks are refilled once a week by a convoy out of Toronto, Unferth explains.

  I’ve hardly slept at all when the day begins with a muffled dawn. Clouds cap the sky, but there’s a line of violet and silver at the eastern horizon. Today we’ll reach his base at the ruins of Montreal. As we drive, Unferth murmurs under his breath. It’s Old Anglish, like his name, and I know many of the words but am not fluent enough to parse the meaning beyond that it’s a prayer.

  “Teach me?” I ask, late in the morning.

  He darts a glance at me; I’ve surprised him.

  “I have a better idea,” he answers, and starts in with the first lines of The Song of Beowulf.

  Over the long hours of the drive, he recites the entire three-thousand-line poem.

  I put my feet on the dash and close my eyes. The vibration of the truck and cold, lonely wind lulls me into a space between waking and sleeping, where Unferth’s poetry evo
kes imagery of Heorot, the great hall of King Hrothgar Shielding, and the tragedy of its occupation by the monster Grendel for nine long years. The devastation and hopelessness of his people and retainers, the fury and desperation of his wife, Valtheow the Dark, who sacrificed and prayed to summon the power to defeat Grendel. Unferth shows me their relief when Beowulf came from over the sea to save them, and he twists his words as if drunk to voice the protestations of his namesake poet who challenged Beowulf’s worthiness before giving the berserker his own sword.

  I see the torn limbs and hear the wails of grief; my heart breaks when Grendel’s mother sings a lament for her dead son. I imagine Valtheow herself as she brings a goblet of mead to Beowulf in celebration.

  After lunch Unferth recites the confrontation between Beowulf Berserk and the troll mother, Grendel’s dam, who attacked Heorot in revenge. How Beowulf and Unferth and Valtheow followed her to the cave under the mere, and with Unferth’s sword Beowulf slew her. From my Unferth’s lips, the song describes their battle like a dance, like a meeting of lovers, and tears dampen my lashes when the troll mother dies. I can hardly believe he’s made me mourn the monster.

  There are lines I whisper with him, my favorite passages about Valtheow or the Frisian funeral, with its meditation on the glory of battle versus the viciousness of war, but his version differs slightly from the standard. His adds words or half lines to complete the alliterations or perfect the caesuras, as if his version was written in Modern Anglish instead of translated from more ancient tongues. The eloquence of his rhythm never falters, like it’s his natural way of speaking, and I realize that this is his accent: not a lilt of regionalism or upbringing. Ned Unferth talks as if he’s always reciting poetry, even when telling me how many kilometers to Montreal or ordering me to remove my boots from the dash.

  As the sun sets he dives into the final part, years after Beowulf defeated the trolls, when he goes as an old king to face the woken dragon. The rhythm of it shifts, not quite as eloquent, as if it were penned by a different poet. But my thoughts are all dragon fire and gold hoards, and though I have to pee, though my stomach reminds me it’s been hours since lunch, I wouldn’t interrupt him for even Odin’s sake.