“You’re right.” Freya exhaled and dug her fingers into Erik’s shirt, feeling the heat pouring off his skin. “Come on. Let’s go find someplace to sleep the rest of the night, away from these bodies.”
Chapter 12. Ghost stories
Wren sat in the dining hall, luxuriating in the heat of the braziers. The guards sat at the far end of the room finishing their mead and wandering off to bed one by one. She was starting to think about going back to her own room when she saw Halfdan pass through the hall. He paused a moment to talk to one of the old guards, then nodded at her, and left. She started to wave, but he was already gone.
She yawned.
It had been a long day sitting in the snow with no one to talk to but the Allfather and the deranged woman in the cell, who occasionally grunted or growled or snarled behind the steel door. Halfdan had come out in the afternoon with a plate of cold meat and kept her company while she ate, telling her more about Ragnar and the other malcontents who were so eager to complain about the plague but were never about when Leif called for volunteers to venture outside the walls of Rekavik.
After sunset, Wren had stood shivering in the deepening shadows, casting uneasy glances down at the locked door of the cell and out at the locked door of the castle wall. She knew no one could come inside during the night, that Katja would be safe until morning, but it took her a long moment’s worrying to make up her mind to go back inside and leave the beastly Katja alone, out in the cold and the dark.
When Halfdan stepped out of the dining hall, Wren stood up and gathered her blanket around her shoulders again. She picked up a few cold lumps of fish from her plate and left. Outside the snow was falling again, but there was no wind inside the castle walls, so despite the noisy gusts up on the roof and out in the streets, the courtyard was quite silent. Rounding the corner of the building she saw the sunken entrance to the cell, and she felt all over again what a lonely, desolate place it was. No torches or braziers glowed there, and even the starlight couldn’t fall near to it because of an overhang in the roof above.
“Well, lord, if you wanted to punish her for some crime, you’ve dreamed up a hell of a way to do it.” Wren shook her head as she trudged down the steps to the dark steel door and peered through the barred window. “Katja? I’m going to push some fish in there to you. No biting, please.”
One by one she poked the meat through the bars with a single, shaking finger, but the prisoner did not cry out, did not crash against the door, did nothing at all.
Wren sighed and turned to go, and found a young boy sitting at the top of the steps wearing nothing but a thin cotton tunic. He stared at her with a blank expression, and then suddenly smiled. “Hi,” he said.
“Hi.” She gave him a little wave and a smile. “I’m Wren.”
“Rolf.” The boy stood up and backed away from the steps to let her come up beside him.
As she moved closer to him, and around him, she realized quite suddenly that he wasn’t standing in a shadow. He looked dim because he was dim, his shade only half-visible in the moonlight falling upon the aether mist on the ground.
The ghost called Rolf dropped his gaze to his bare feet. “You’re new here.”
“That’s right.” Wren stepped back from him, partly to see him better and partly to avoid accidentally touching him, or passing through him. She had stumbled through a ghost once before in Denveller and was in no hurry to repeat the sensation. “I’ve come to help the queen. I’m a vala. Well, an apprentice, sort of. Except my mistress is dead, so I suppose I can’t be her apprentice anymore, and if I’m not an apprentice, then I am a vala after all.”
“Oh.” Rolf stood very still, not swaying in place, not shuffling his feet. His hands hung at his sides, perfectly still.
Wren paused, then said, “Have you come to tell me something, or are you looking for someone?”
The boy grinned. “It’s not like in the stories, you know. Being dead, I mean. I can do whatever I want. I don’t have to find something I lost, or tell people secrets about treasure, or that their friends are going to hurt them.”
“Oh, I know, I just thought that maybe you came here for a reason,” Wren said.
“Well, I heard about the reaver in the cell,” he said quietly, his eyes straying to the steel door. “They were talking about it at the alehouse up the lane, so I came to see.”
“Haven’t you seen reavers before?”
“Yeah, lots.” The ghost shivered. “But always running or fighting, or dead. I’ve never seen one just sitting in a room before.”
“Oh. Well, now’s your chance.” Wren waved at the door.
The boy grinned and silently descended the snowy steps and then stood in front of the cell, and then he pushed his head through the door. Wren looked away, not wanting to think too much about what it would be like to have her body and her head in two different places.
“Huh.” Rolf came up beside her. “It’s just sleeping on the floor, like a rabbit. I thought it would be meaner.”
Wren flashed a nervous smile at him and started pacing away toward the outer wall of the castle. “So, Rolf, how long have you been-”
“A ghost? I don’t know.” He pouted thoughtfully. “A while. Since before the reavers came. I died of the cold one winter, I think, in my sleep.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
He shrugged. “It’s okay. Are there lots of ghosts where you come from?”
“Not too many. I’m from Denveller. There’s a lake there, a warm one. We don’t get much aether there.”
“That’s too bad. Ghosts tell the best stories. All about battles and the raids in Alba. And the really old ones’ll tell you about the gods and the monsters.”
Wren turned to pace along the edge of the wall for a bit and then turned again back toward the cell steps. “My mistress used to tell me those sorts of stories. But she liked the ones about Lady Hel, and the dead gods, and the sagas about the blood feuds. She said I needed to know them to be a vala. I needed to know about death, and the evil things that people do to each other, and why.” Wren paused and stared down at the gray door of the cell in the shadows. “She’d tell me the stories at night, when it was too dark to crush herbs or clean fish or mend clothes.”
“Was it scary?”
Wren nodded. “I hated those stories. They were all blood and curses, and souls being ripped out and guts on the floor, and fire, and ice, and screaming. She had a terrible voice, my mistress, sort of raw and broken. Like she was drowning or dying. And I had to listen to it every night, in the dark. I hate the dark.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“These ghost friends of yours. Have they ever told you about Bloody Tyr?”
“No,” Rolf said. “But I’ve heard people say that name before.”
“Tyr was the king of the gods in the old days. He loved war, and battle, and slaughter. He was the first one to fight the demons of the earth, to tame the earth, so that men and women could live here.” Wren swallowed. “Tyr drank the blood of the dead, and ate their hearts, and wore their skulls as a necklace. He had no love for anyone, no loyalties, no friends. The other gods feared him, feared his strength and his power and his pride. Tyr was fearless.”
“So what happened to him?”
“Woden happened to him. When Fenrir came to Ysland, not even Tyr could defeat it in battle. But young Woden was already wise in the ways of battle and magic, and he forged a magic chain to bind the demon wolf. The chain was made of a fish’s claws, and a bird’s fangs, and a snake’s horns.”
Rolf grinned. “But those aren’t real!”
“Don’t be stupid. Of course they aren’t real, not anymore, because Woden used them all up for the magic chain,” Wren said quietly. “But to bind the demon Fenrir, someone had to hold the wolf down and Tyr was all too eager to do it. So while Tyr held the wolf, Woden bound its legs. But the wolf grabbed Tyr’s arm in its fangs, and Woden saw his chance. He bound the wolf’s maw shut with Tyr’s hand still inside its mouth, and so the war god was forced to tear his own hand off to escape. And this meant he was no longer fit to command the gods, and Woden took his place as king.”