The Strange Maid Page 8

  Rome Summerling is as golden as I remember, even in my dreams. Big and bright, his reddish beard braided with tiny charms still, his hair shaggy around his ears, with thin streaks of gray. Hazel eyes and wide shoulders, hands on his hips, and a smile of greeting that fades into drawn shock when he sees me.

  He wears a wool tunic and thick pants wrapped up the leg with more wool. Leather boots. A thick belt. Dark copper torc around his neck. Like he walked out of a painting of Old Scandan farmer kings. It suits him so much more than jeans and jackets and ties ever did.

  “Signy.” His voice is as filling as ever, finding all my spikes and smoothing them out. My grip on the table loosens.

  I don’t say anything, which is enough agreement for Rome. He’s here in three broad steps and laughing and hugging me in those bear arms, beard soft at my temple. He smells like smoked meat and charcoal. He releases me but cups my elbows to look down at my face. “You’ve got your mama’s eyes still.” His voice is husky with emotion. Deep wrinkles pull at his eyes and vanish into his beard. There in his left iris, like a beacon, I see the rune faith.

  My tongue sticks in my mouth and I swallow. I try for anything to say. The inn around us might have vanished. I manage, “Rathi—he looks more like you than he used to.”

  Rome chuckles and there’s an answering scatter of happy laughter from the room. My ears buzz. “My little son, Hrothgar, is not so little anymore,” he agrees.

  “I saw him, ah, last summer in New Netherland.” That was the last time I was held like this, hugged in relief and also with expectation. As if I owe these men something. Which, of course, I do. And my wish-mother, too.

  “He mentioned it. Said you were doing … well.”

  I imagine he said quite a bit more than that.

  “Want a beer, Rome?” calls someone. My wish-father nods absently, gaze roaming behind me. His eyes snap back to me and his eyebrows lift. “You’re the girl Ned brought? His apprentice?”

  I twist around to shoot Unferth a hideous glare. He stands and spreads his hands. “Rome, you likely know better than I how our Signy resists labels like that.” He says it fondly, curse him. Rome laughs and so do all these people who don’t know a thing about me.

  Ned Unferth is like a different person here. A good-old-boy poet.

  For all the truth in his irises, he certainly is an excellent player. I say, “Ned wants to be part of the feast,” and watch Unferth’s eyes narrow. It goads me into adding, “We have a troll for your show, too.”

  Two tiny spots of pink appear at the sharp edges of Unferth’s cheeks, but he doesn’t naysay me.

  Patty exclaims and Rome asks for more details, proudly holding me under one arm as I tell them all about our Grendel. I weave a story that’s almost completely a lie about how we tracked and captured him, about the trolls we fought off to get him to safety, finishing with a wide grin just for Unferth. He smiles back at me, and there’s a clear promise of retribution in the pinch of his lips.

  The thrill of battle raises elf-kisses up my arms.

  Jesca Summerling arrives with a tiny cry like a songbird, and she feathers her hands up and down my arms, touches my tangled braids, and then presses a firm kiss to my lips. She’s small but sturdy, freckles staining her face unevenly. An apron dress as historically accurate as Rome’s tunic and leggings pulls in attractively at her waist. There’s a sheen of tears in her pale green eyes, but what catches my attention, what breaks me and remakes me, is the circle of tiny runes twining themselves like a bracelet around her pupil.

  If I had any doubts about the past month, about my riddle or the specifics of the answer, about following Ned Unferth and learning his troll hunting, his bitter, beautiful poetry; if I had any doubts about my destiny finding me, they’re all shattered by that single rune in the eye of my wish-mother.

  Home.

  SEVEN

  IN THE DIM light of a stuffy dressing room, I become Valtheow the Dark.

  Black liner drawn thick evokes the eye Odin Alfather gouged out at the Well of Mimir in return for wisdom. Both eyes marked black turns my face into a skull, the death Valkyrie carry in their hearts. Crimson lipstick cuts across my mouth like a mortal wound, but I smile and it becomes a lover’s mouth to speak the Alfather’s words.

  I’m glad for this quick moment alone in the dressing room usually reserved for the clowns. Peachtree, the only clown my age, is out leading the audience through a Wild Hunt number, and I can hear the screams and laughter through the thin wooden walls. This afternoon the Viker Festival is a crush of people. Baldur’s Night is the unofficial first day of the season, and they’ve come in droves from New Scotland and mainland Massadchuset to see us perform. To see me, and my troll, for one night only. Come one, come all!

  I wear an old-fashioned scarlet dress and an apron the deep green color of decay. It hooks at my shoulders with abalone brooches, and a belt of iron loops heavily against my hips, dragged off-center by my seax in its sheath. I’ve braided my hair into two ropes, framing my face in the traditional Valkyrie’s way. My sleeves are cuffed with silver bracers tooled to gleam golden in the stage lights. Rings set with colored glass decorate my hands.

  Here is Signy Valborn in the mirror, looking for all the nine worlds like an ancient Death Chooser.

  But it’s only an illusion. I think of what my sisters would say, who spent nearly ten years trying to make me see how much of a Valkyrie’s job is performance. Here I am, doing what they always wanted: translating the raw power of death into a palatable display for the masses.

  Much to my irritation, I couldn’t avoid it any longer.

  The past three and a half frozen months have been one constant negotiation; between Unferth and me, Unferth and the town, the town and me, Unferth and Rome, me and Rome, me and Jesca, on and on until I wished the ice would fall harder, the snow pile on tons of layers. Anything so I could hole up in the tower and never be expected to smile for a crowd or explain one more time to one more resident of Jellyfish Cove why I’m learning to kill trolls when Red Stripe is so tame, what it all has to do with my riddle and my eventual triumphant return to the New World Tree.

  It wasn’t me who spilled the connection between trolls and my riddle; it was Ned Unferth the first night Rome and Jesca joined us for dinner at the signal tower. Unferth and his cursed truth-telling, his refusal to just sit silent when they asked how we met. Like revenge for my thrusting him into the festival as a performing poet, the answers just fell out of his mouth. He wasn’t even drunk.

  Rome and Jesca knew from Rathi enough about my situation they weren’t surprised, and Rome immediately started in on a number of historical examples of quests like this involving the great beasts of legend. By the time he and Unferth were halfway through a bottle of mead and a thesis on dragon hoards in history, Jesca pulled me aside to clean up and gently but firmly reminded me that living openly with a man like Unferth wasn’t entirely decent.

  She hardly cared about the riddle or troll or my winning my place on the Valkyrie council. She cared about my virtue.

  I promised her that I had no virtue left to tarnish.

  As they left on their gas-guzzling ATV back for the Cove, I wondered how long it would take Jesca to bring it up with Rathi. Judging by how fast the whole town knew Unferth was helping the Child Valkyrie solve her riddle, she likely called him in the middle of the night.

  Avoiding everyone became my mission. Unferth helped or hindered, depending on his mood. He either pushed me harder than ever with the troll-spears and sword work so I legitimately had no time for conversations, or he meandered into town like he had nothing better to do and told people I was open to visitors. They poured in, always in couples or groups, as if too nervous to face me alone. They asked about Odin, about the Tree, about trolls and hunting and whether Elisa of the Prairie dyed her jet-black hair or Gundrun slept over at the White Hall as rumors suggest.

  I made it a point of honor to lie about everything.

  Once or twice I caught ten-year
-old boys running up to the tower door, knocking, and then fleeing as if their lives depended on it.

  Though I refused to perform, I helped Unferth create a troll-baiting show for the festival, with Red Stripe as the main attraction. Thankfully, once it was Yule there was no tourism to speak of on the island. We had two blissful weeks snowed into the tower, just us because Red Stripe hunkered down unchained against the outer wall and buried himself in the snow to snore all day.

  To pass time Unferth and I made the tower into an obstacle course and I ran it again and again while he graded me from the kitchen counter. My grades tended to be less about success and more about flare, as he awarded me with cries of “You look like a donkey!” or “There are those beautiful Valkyrie wings!” depending on how well I finessed a corner. I built a huge nest of old sweaters and blankets near the ground-floor hearth, the only place warm enough that my voice didn’t puff out in icy fog. We’d fall asleep side by side, though sometimes I stayed awake on purpose, just to listen to him breathe.

  Every morning I looked for runes in my eyes. Torch and death and choice cycled through as they always had, with torch the most frequent as our isolation lasted, unsurprising because of my burning desire to get back out into the world.

  Finally the snow melted enough that we crashed into town for an impromptu celebration at the Shipworm. Amidst the laughter and fiddle and crush of everyone, I glanced once at Unferth and caught him in the corner with his shoulders against two other men’s, obviously sharing gossip like a clutch of chickens. His cheeks were bright, his mouth loose, and when he saw me looking his gray eyes shone. He was happy with the Freyans, knew all their songs and prayers. Some boys dragged him to the middle of the dance floor, where he first crouched and touched his fist to the wooden panels in an old Freyan act of devotion to the earth. Then he leapt onto a table with a yell and recited the opening lines of The Charge of Winter to much uproarious applause.

  The inn grew hot with his poetry and the enthusiasm of the crowd. He held them trapped in rhyme and rhythm so long that sweat melted through his shirt and he stripped it off during the dramatic transition from the warrior-king’s forces to the approaching army of frost giants.

  Two girls beside me gasped to see the jagged claw marks striping down Unferth’s chest and across his back. I shifted away, itching with tension as he performed for them. The scars shimmered in the firelight, forming runes against his skin like a message just for me. Truth and always truth.

  The final line rang through the fiery air and Unferth’s head fell forward in a bow, his hands turned palm out, his shoulders heaved. It was a moment when I could have called out a response, drawn his attention, gotten those rain-colored eyes on me and me alone. But we were surrounded and I didn’t want to share it—share him. I rubbed my arms as the inn exploded with cheering. They clapped his hands and pulled him off the tabletop, offering mugs of beer and requests for another or another. As he promised he’d perform at the festival feast when it started up again, the crowd swallowed him whole.

  He belonged there, shining with sweat and pleasure, and I wanted to destroy it all. I shoved my way outside into the white snow.

  Every time Unferth went into town after that, I stayed in the tower. I dug mazes in the snow, building my muscles until I could throw the troll-spears accurately. I tended to Red Stripe, picking dust out of the crevices of his stone skin, polishing the shards of amethyst at his arm stump until they shone. I wandered the island as I could, pretended there were trolls to hunt here, and twice tracked a pack of wolves swinging too near town. Using troll-spears on caribou is overkill, but I did it anyway.

  And if I heard Unferth’s familiar gait stomping through crusts of ice toward me, anticipation burned like never before. I started leaving the tower just to dredge up the buzz of expectation I’d feel when I went home to him again. It was pathetic, but I didn’t stop. I blamed the forced stagnation of the winter, the inability to act or get anything accomplished. There was nothing more fantastic to hold my attention, and so too big a piece of me latched on to him.

  But sometimes he would push me onto a stool to brush and braid my hair, or tease me with a string of riddles whose answers were always troll, and his hands would linger on my neck, his smile relaxed, and I’d have traitorous thoughts about staying in that tower with him forever.

  It was a rough winter.

  So when Rome and Unferth came to me last week, as the first icebergs in the harbor cracked open, it was easy for them to convince me to perform in their Baldur’s Night feast, as a sendoff for their temporary Vinland Valkyrie. Our show would open the season for the arrival of spring, and then Unferth and I would charge back to the mainland to seek out my sacrifice.

  And here I am, ready to perform the Valkyrie part on Baldur’s Night. It’s a holiday about hope, when across the USA we celebrate the god of light and his epic journey back to us from the darkness of Hel. He brings the sun with him, and the promise of summertime. Though on Vinland the ice remains, and there won’t be flowers for weeks, winter is officially over.

  I smile just to think of it. By the next high holiday, Disir Day, in six weeks, I intend to be back in Philadelphia, sitting at my throne beneath the New World Tree.

  My eyes in the mirror flash, and I lean nearer to see what rune will appear today. I hope for journey, because it’s time to move on, or fate.

  But there, winking beside my pupil, is chaos.

  Startled, I blink rapidly. Never before have I seen this rune.

  It means upheaval, a moment when anything can happen. Anything can change.

  Chaos probably reigned in my stars the night I climbed the Tree. Under chaos destiny breaks and even Freya, the goddess of Fate and magic, cannot see true. I take a calming breath.

  The center cracked/no future seen/we fly into the chasm of fate.

  With the thinnest makeup brush and liquid eyeliner, I paint the dangerous rune onto my thumbnails.

  The back of my neck heats and I glance higher in the mirror to see him there, Ned the Spiritless leaning indolently against the door frame behind me. With him comes a spill of applause from the crowd waiting in the feast hall, but Ned’s expression is skeptical, studying my reflection. My heart pounds harder and I wonder what he would say if I told him I see chaos. But I tuck the surge of excitement away and lift my eyebrows. “Do I not suit?”

  “Signy the Valkyrie,” he drawls. His pale eyes meet mine.

  He’s already in his costume for the feast, where he plays court poet to Rome’s king. It’s a long wool shirt cut tight against his lean torso, a tooled belt, and loose dark pants tucked into heavy leather boots. His sword hangs over his shoulder, sheathed in a baldric that slashes a line from his right shoulder to his left hip.

  Ned stalks from the door to me. He takes up the iron collar from the dressing table, the final piece of my costume, and with exaggerated concentration pushes aside my braids to clasp it about my neck. His hands linger there.

  “Such a lowly thing for a Valkyrie to do,” he murmurs.

  Though I agree with him, I raise my chin. “It isn’t lowly by virtue of a Valkyrie doing it.”

  He laughs—just a single bark of a laugh—and leans his hip against the table to take weight off his injured leg. His gaze sinks to my mouth.

  Elisa of the Prairie whispered to me once that her husband’s first kiss brought the nine worlds together for a single moment. Brynhild was awakened from a curse by the kiss of her true love. Signy Volsung kissed her husband and instantly knew she would destroy him one day. She said, My heart does not smile with his, before burning his castle to the ground.

  I want to know what will happen if I kiss Ned Unferth.

  But he glances away and pulls a flask of screech from his pocket. I stare at his neck as he drinks, until he offers it to me. I take it, warm from his hand, and put my lips where his were. I toss back a sip that burns down my throat.

  As he screws the cap back on he says rather casually, “I’m to tell you we’re running
twenty behind from the extra crowds. Rome says you can choose a big entrance or come with me and take your place at the throne. But I know you’ll choose the former.”

  “What’s the point of a small entrance?” I shrug. It’s the heart of my problem with the council, with my riddle, after all.

  He hesitates, then gives a sharp nod and leaves.

  I head outside to prepare Red Stripe.

  Equal parts historical attraction and carnival, the festival has taken over an entire meadow just outside the town of Jellyfish Cove. As I march quickly through the muddy lanes to the pancake booth, I’m surrounded by re-creations of thousand-year-old sod houses, a smithery, and a spiral of canvas tents thrown open for selling traditional Viker fare and fried foods, dragon masks, and wooden swords and jewelry. Tourists in puffy, colorful coats stream through the aisles, pointing at the girls demonstrating how to feed our pygmy mammoth or at the smith’s apprentice as he works the giant bellows while the smith pounds out a red-hot sword. Iron-smelting bloomeries squat like man-sized eggs along the road, tended by two kids in long tunics and fur coats. Reenactors in old Viker costumes demonstrate weapon forms, and two elder ladies in apron dresses teach tourists to weave at the standing loom. On two small stages across the meadow, players compete for the crowd and hat tips, and soon they’ll usher their audiences to the feast hall to eat roast boar and drink fine mead while Rome presides like a king of old over poetry contests or boasting games.

  Today the meadow is decked out for Baldur’s Night. They’ve put up evergreen boughs and chalked sunbursts onto the tents and booths. Prayer flags flap in the sharp breeze. The air smells like ice and grease and tangy iron. Slush and mud slip under my boots, and yelling and laughter attack my ears. There is no room for peace here, and I love it.

  The impromptu troll cage is a small shed on the side of the meadow nearest to town, where most of the electric hookups are. Melting snow pours down the sheet-metal roof, dripping in long streams to the rocky earth, where it forms a moat of mud and ice I easily step over. An evergreen bow shakes glitter onto my face as I jerk the door open.