Freya twisted left and right, only able to see a short distance with her eyes bobbing just above the waves, but she couldn’t see any frogs or splashes, and the sounds of the croaking had faded into a distant echo within the vast stone bowl of Delver Island.
They’re gone.
Freya kicked and jumped and crawled up into the floppy reed boat with Wren tugging at her slick, wet clothes. They fell into the boat together and lay still for a moment, chests heaving as they raced to catch their breath.
Freya grinned. “Don’t let it bite you?”
“Yes. So what?” Wren sat up and wiped her hands on her skirt. “It was perfectly sound advice.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
They both laughed, and after a moment Freya sat up and began paddling with her hands, steering them around the edge of the island toward the western shore of the lake.
Wren shifted around to help with the paddling. “They had teeth,” she said softly.
Freya nodded. “Yes, they did.”
“Why? Why did they have teeth, and ears, and hair?”
Freya looked back at the mouth of the lagoon, and saw only the dark waves lapping at the gray shore of a quiet island. “Maybe the whole world’s gone mad.”
Wren shivered. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
Freya laughed again, a tired and shaky laugh, and she wiped her wet slimy hand across her mouth. “Everyone dies, sooner or later. There’s no escaping that, so there’s no use worrying about it. No, what you’re really scared of is getting eaten by frogs with teeth and big hairy ears, aren’t you?”
Wren managed a tired smile. “Well, sure. After all, they can hear us coming better than the usual sort.”
“Well, don’t you worry,” Freya said as she felt her heart finally calming in her chest. “If a frog tries to eat you, I’ll be sure to give you some helpful advice.”
“Like what?”
“Like, don’t let it eat you.”
Chapter 5. Ghost town
They rejoined Erik and Arfast at the crossroads just above the lake’s shore, and after a little while on the road Freya felt her clothes and hair drying out, though the stench of rotting plants clung to her. An hour later on the westward road, Freya heard her sister whispering in her sleep. Katja’s ears felt even larger and more pointed than before, and tiny white hairs and red hairs stood up on the young vala’s cheeks and neck and hands.
“She’s getting worse,” Freya called out. “We should stop and rest, and try to break her fever.”
“Hush! Not so loud.” Wren trotted back to them. “There’s no help for your sister here.” She swept her arm out at the bleak yellow hills dusted with snow, which stretched on and on with only the bluish outlines of the mountains in the distance. “And it’s too dangerous to rest in the open, not with the reavers prowling about. They could be anywhere. We need to keep moving, and quietly at that, or we’ll all be dining with the good lord Woden this evening.”
“Well, how far is it to Hengavik now?”
“Not far. Just another hour or so, I think.”
“I don’t remember Hengavik at all,” Freya said. “Is it large? Well-defended?”
“I don’t know. Gudrun took me from my parents when I was tiny, barely walking. And I’ve never left Denveller except to gather herbs.”
“Then how do you know that Hengavik is only an hour away?”
Wren smiled brightly. “Vala’s intuition.”
Two hours later they paused at the crest of a low rise and looked out over a flat plain of grass rippling in the breeze. In the far north Freya saw a great mountain smoking against the pale afternoon sky, and to the south another, smaller volcano squatted at the edge of the world, a thin trail of black rising from its summit to the heavens. But down on the plain lay the town of Hengavik, a man-made warren of hundreds of stone houses and earth houses, most sunken into the plain or clustered back-to-back to form unnatural looking hills at regular intervals along the meandering lanes.
But none of the travelers were looking at the houses or the roads.
In the center of the city there rose an enormous skeleton, a vast sun-bleached ribcage resting at an angle, as though the Allfather himself had hurled a frost giant across Ysland and the demon had speared into the ground head-first, and been left to rot where he fell. There was no sign of limbs, no skull, no shoulder blades or horns or wings or fins to tell what gargantuan beast might have actually died there. Only the ribs remained, partially silhouetted by the late day sun.
“Ever seen anything like that before?” Freya asked.
Erik shook his head.
Wren shook her head and glanced skyward. “Lord, in all our little chats together, especially the ones that were all about you, you might have mentioned this. I’m not saying I deserve to know every little thing about you or me or Ysland, but this seems somewhat important.”
Freya stared at the ribs. They rose as tall as ten or twelve men above the floor of the plain, many times taller than the tallest buildings in Hengavik, which were no larger than Gudrun’s tower. And the ribcage stretched four or five times as long as it was tall from the center of the town down toward its southern edge. She tried to guess how many pigs or sheep or elk or even men might fit in the giant’s belly, but the sheer size of the thing defeated her. It was too large to imagine, too large to believe. Her mouth worked, but no sound came out.
Erik’s hand began to move. “If this was ancient, wouldn’t we have heard of it?”
Freya nodded. “Wren, when you lived in Denveller, did you meet many travelers from Hengavik?”
The girl nodded. “Many, when I was younger. Not so many lately. And none at all in the last year.”
“And you’ve never heard of this… thing?”
The girl shook her head. “I think I would remember if a tinker had mentioned the bones of a giant lying in the center of the town.”
Visions swam through Freya’s imagination, visions of frost giants and white whales and Fenrir, the demon wolf. As a child she’d always thought of the god-king Woden as a man, a man with unfathomable knowledge and power, but a man nonetheless. And the frost giants had merely been taller men, and the demon Fenrir had merely been a large wolf.
But now, as she stared at the otherworldly remains of a creature that must have stood half as tall as a mountain, the ancient stories came alive for her as never before, the universe expanding into a playground for gods and monsters unlike anything she had ever known. And she, and her home, and her life, which had all seemed so solid and real and important just a moment ago, were reduced to snow dust in the maelstrom of eternity.
Freya blinked and glanced at her sweating, wheezing sister sprawled on the back of a dirty white elk, and suddenly the vast universe seemed just as unreal and irrelevant as it had to her as a child, and she was about to tell the others to get moving when Wren whispered, “The old stories are true, aren’t they? All of them. The reavers and Fenrir. Woden and the frost giants. It’s all true.”
“You doubted?” Freya asked quietly as the wind whipped her long blonde hair around her face.
“I’ve spent the last seventeen years alone in a tower with a crazy old woman, and the last several seasons in a deserted village with monsters wandering the countryside.” Wren sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I figured the gods had forgotten about me.”
“But you talk to Woden all the time.”
The girl shrugged. “I guess I needed to talk to someone, and a god makes a good listener. Do you think he minds me talking to him the way I do?”
Freya shook her head. “Well, if he’s a decent god, then I’m sure he appreciates the attention. And if he’s not, then to hell with him.” The huntress nodded at the giant skeleton. “But either way, it looks to me like Woden’s had other things on his mind than you or me, lately. Come on. Let’s go.”
But Erik held up his hand. “Where are the people?” he signed.
Freya looked again at the empty fields and the empty streets, and she listened to the breeze playing softly through the tall yellow grass. “You think the reavers have been here too? The reavers killed all the people?”