The Strange Maid

SIXTEEN

THIS IS WHAT a funeral should be:

Me standing atop a table beside a wide bowl of honey-dark mead, in a torchlit warehouse before an entire band of berserkers. They put two fingers to their hearts and together cry, Hangatyr! God of the Hanged.

I let the words wash over me, closing my eyes for only a moment, hunting for a response in the bowels of my memory. My head swims, my body buzzes with the heat of Odinist frenzy that exudes from the berserkers, with fierce joy and heavy, heavy sorrow. I dunk my goblet into the cauldron of mead, let the cool alcohol swirl around my fingers and into the cup. I lift it, mead streaming down and dripping onto the table. As I hold it high, I say, “To the glorious dead!”

The Mad Eagles roar in response and the warehouse rings with the echo of our cries.

It’s a huge metal cavern in the center of the berserker camp. They’re tucked far into a corner of the North Ice joint military base, between the airfield and the ocean, separated from the army by curling barbed wire and a small guardhouse at the gate. Tiny windows high against the warehouse roof glow with moonlight, but the metal catwalks hang with torches and oil lamps. Real fire, not the false flicker of stage lights like in the old circus feast hall. The orange light dances over chipped and abused round-shields, rows and rows of spears that line the walls, dust-covered wooden rifles, and one autocannon crouched like a wolf in the corner. The Mad Eagles have created a strange, dark home that’s half ancient, half modern here in this industrial building.

When the roar fades, I drink all that will fit into my mouth, and the berserkers pound the floor with their boots, the table with their fists. The air vibrates, my bones shake, and I let myself laugh wildly.

Then I dunk the goblet again and crash down along the table to kneel before Darius. I wrap my hands around the cup and say, “Captain Darius Strong, drink mead with me as your fallen brothers drink mead with the Alfather.”

I put it to his lips and he drinks.

One by one, I offer my cup to the berserkers. I ask for their names and repeat them back, inviting each to drink mead with me. Some murmur my name, Signy, and some Valkyrie.

Sharkman covers my hands with his and feeds alcohol back to me. Another, called Thebes, ducks bashfully but meets my eyes. He’s got a strip of burn scars distorting his face from temple down past the iron collar of Odin. Another warrior has tears in his dark blue eyes, and the oldest of them all says not my name nor my title, but calls me Nine.

I’m flushed and sweating midway through the ritual. Fire and alcohol and the fevered madness that spins under the heart of every berserker raise the temperature in the warehouse. It’s a sauna. I shed the top layer of my dress onto the floor while Darius holds Unferth’s sword, and when I take it back I leave it unsheathed. Cup in one hand, sword in the other, I use Sharkman’s shoulder to climb onto the table again. There I stand in my underdress and jewelry, Jesca’s silver and Ned’s copper rings on my fingers, and I fill the goblet again. I drink long, tossing back my head, and when I wipe my mouth with my forearm they laugh and salute. They come to me and I pick up cups and goblets and drinking horns from beside the mead cauldron, passing out full cups to every berserker. When we’ve all a drink, I lift the sword and tell them a piece of my story I’ve not told anyone.

“I was afraid,” I call, “and numb and desperate—but it did not matter because I burned, too, with rage and grief, and when I saw that herd picking their teeth with the bones of my own glorious dead, when I raised my sword—this sword—and charged, there was a great roar behind me. The roar of power, the roar of our grim god of madness and death, pushing at my back like wind, like massive black wings.”

My throat is hot, and my stomach and heart, too, tingling with alcohol and passion. The poetry tumbles out of me, fast and strong. “They were wings, though they did not grow from my back. They were your wings, every dark feather a finger of your craze, your passion. My heart spun with the Mad Eagles as you charged from the sky like my own battle wolves, to tear apart my enemies. That madness has hounded me, has lived inside me, ever since.”

They cheer.

The cry raises the hairs on my neck, and my head falls back. I shut my eyes as they yell. We drink together.

A throne-like seat is brought for me and I slouch in it, Unferth’s sword slung across the back and the goblet of mead in my hand. They tell their stories now, boasting about the trolls they killed, their visions of me, the spinning fury of the madness inside them. I hear of rending limbs, the sweet smell of troll ichor, crushed bones, and tears that streaked their faces from the hot wind of death. I learn the names of their fallen and we salute their brothers with more mead.

My head is lost in dizziness, my nose numb from drink. I eat roast pork with my fingers and stomp with them in the rhythm of our united heartbeats. I down the last drops of mead and laugh.

Here’s red-haired Marcus tugging the goblet from me and lifting me to my feet. He swings me close and spins me around, and I still laugh. I’m pulled from him into another’s arms, and then another’s, my head cloudy and the entire world spinning. Brick, with a scar cutting his tattoo apart, grabs my elbow too hard and I swing it up into his face. There’s blood in the mix now, and a frozen moment before Brick laughs outrageously and the others follow. I dance with him then, heady and wild. There are hands on my ribs and my arms, loosing my braids, and then a hot mouth against mine. I allow it, embrace it, sinking into the kiss for one brief turning of the magnificent world, and then put my hand on his cheek and push back.

It’s wicked-eyed Sharkman, one eyebrow tilted and his face still close. His shoulders slope with muscles bursting out of his black vest; he’s a head taller than me. He’d take me away right now and give me everything I desire, and there’s no hiding it on that wide, flushed face of his. He doesn’t even try to hide it. Everything the opposite of Ned.

“Valkyrie,” he whispers. I grab his face and I kiss him again.

I’m still in his arms when the sun rises.

It spills through the wide-open doors of the warehouse, where tables and benches are pushed back or turned over and so many berserkers snore, sprawled out or with heads together. My eyes ache and nausea digs spindly fingers into my stomach. From this dark corner, I spy Darius at the main table reading a book, a mug of something steaming in hand. It smells like hot chocolate and I think of Unferth.

There’s no hard, sharp pain at the thought of him, but only a sorrowful echo.

Slowly I push out from beneath Sharkman’s arm. My underdress is twisted uncomfortably and my braids a disaster, boots I have no idea where. Sharkman grumbles and I shove him off the hem of my dress. I creep to my feet.

“Signy?” Darius murmurs.

“Darius,” I whisper. I walk to the bench as if on a tightrope, and Darius hands me the mug. It’s coffee, not chocolate, and I smile sadly down at it.

There’s a fuzzy aura around everything, but a cool breeze snakes inside, dragging away the sticky heat of stale berserker frenzy. I sip the coffee. My stomach revolts and I feel like an idiot, though I wouldn’t change last night. It was magnificent and wild; it was mad frenzy; no control!

I lay my head down against the cool wooden table, and Darius puts his hand beside my face, not touching. “I can get you some water.”

I murmur something, actually wanting a toothbrush and a shower. My thoughts drift like thin spring clouds. I danced hard and laughed; I abandoned my family to their Vinland graves, and Ned Unferth, too. I ran off with strangers who are just like me, sang for the dead, kissed, and forgot my own name for a little while. And it was a relief.

It is a relief. I want to remain here, soak it up, let it go, cycle through it again and again until I’m spent and exactly this loosened, this relaxed every morning.

But I can’t. I have too much to do. I can’t only be wild and free like they are, waiting for their orders to rend and destroy, to set loose their madness and rage.

They embody the destructive passion and death in the Alfather’s fiery heart, this scream inside me, and sharing it made even my bones ache with glory and pleasure. Yet this place has taught me a thing I never understood before: the Mad Eagles, the berserkers, they are controlled. In their hearts they’re pure, but they’re caged from the outside by military laws and barbed-wire fences. Like Soren said, they’re tools. They’re not a part of the world.

The Valkyrie are. The Valkyrie walk free among the people; the Valkyrie lead. Because they are not feared, because they are their own control.

Two sides of a coin, the Valkyrie and the berserkers. The voices of Odin, and the hands of Odin.

I don’t fit with either. Like Soren Bearstar did not fit with his wild brothers, I do not fit with my cool sisters. He transformed himself into a servant of hope and light, but the difference between us is that I want Odin. I could not give my god of the hanged up if I tried.

There must be another way. A middle ground between Valkyrie and berserker, between voice and hand.

A tiny laugh strangles in my throat. The heart.

I want to be the heart, passionate and wild, but with a pulse. A rhythm to keep myself in check. Poetry and passion together.

Like Unferth’s story about Freya creating the trolls by tempering the fire of the earth with the fire of the sun.

Odd-eye.

In that story it was a magical charm the goddess put into a woman’s heart, and the wisest troll mothers, Unferth said, could use rune magic.

Magic like keeping her herd out under thin clouds? Safe from morning light?

Is it possible the troll mother who destroyed Vinland is that first mother? Could she live so long? If it’s her, that means my stone heart, the answer to my riddle, is no average troll heart, but the original, the magical charm Freya, the goddess of dreams, created.

We were destined to meet; I saw it in her eyes, I told Rathi. Choices and consequences.

We recognized each other. Stone heart. Your heart.

I have to get back to it. Find her.

“Signy?” Captain Darius says, concern painting his tone.

I raise my head and look at Darius. His dark eyes wait for me. “Captain, I have some questions about your hunt for the Vinland herd.”

“I will answer them, but first you should see something.” He pushes up from the bench and gestures for me to follow him outside.

Sunlight burns blue and white spots into my vision and I blink it away. I smell ocean and oil, hear distant gulls cry out, and the hum of machinery and propellers. We stand on black asphalt painted with bright yellow lines where armored trucks are parked, emblazoned with the band’s screaming-eagle emblem. It’s all harsh colors, no softness, like the berserkers themselves. But tiny dandelions and curled grass push through the cracks in the pavement.

Darius says, “We have one. One of the trolls.”

I gasp. “One of the Vinland herd?”

He nods toward the north end of the warehouse. “It did not fight us when we came, and so we captured it instead of killing it. All the rest are dead, or vanished off the island.”

A thrill courses through me. “Not the mother?”

“No.” He leads me silently to the only door at that far end and punches a code into the keypad beside it. A lock clicks, echoing up to the rafters, and we go in, closing the door behind us. Darius takes a large key from a box built into the wall that he forces open and leads me down a short hall to a second metal door. He unlocks it, then pushes his shoulder into it and sets his feet firm. It takes all his muscle before the door groans open.

This next hall is a prison built to hold berserkers. Lining the way are cells of solid steel, three to a side. One door is open and the metal is at least ten centimeters thick. It’s stainless steel and stone, locked together into a wall that must be nearly impossible to break.

The prison ends in another door with a large wheel lock sticking out. Darius says, “It’s easier with two,” before gripping it and throwing all his weight into it. The metal grates together and I hear pieces churning and clinking deep inside the wall. When finally it snaps unlocked, he strains to pull it open. A waft of cold, sweet-smelling air flows out.

My skin flares in a million itchy points and my stomach crawls up my throat, burning like screech. I know that smell, oh, how well I know it.

Troll.

UV light shines hard out of four spots set up in each corner, glaring at the monster.

Like a great boulder, it huddles in the center of the room, its neck and ankles chained to six-finger bolts dug into the ground. A meaty hand covers its head, as it protects its sensitive pig eyes.

My hands tremble and I splay my fingers rigidly. I walk to it.

Sweet Mother Frigg, have mercy.

In this light the troll’s skin shines blue and is marbled like polished granite. A long weeping scab trails purple down his shoulder, and there is a line of dark red lichen growing along his spine. His right arm only a broken stub.

Red Stripe. He’s alive.

“He’s not public knowledge,” Darius says calmly. “Though of course the General Berserk knows, and the Valkyrie of the Ice, and Baldur. Baldur has claimed the troll for himself, though there’s also an etin-physiology doctor who’s already put in a request to have any remains we recovered remanded into her custody.”

“I see,” I whisper, imagining Red Stripe’s skull sliced open while they train bland UV lights onto him, keeping him lethargic but not calcified. Then they’ll cut him up and send his head to one facility, his torso to another, his arms and legs perhaps given out as trophies. It’s law that no dead troll be kept whole—they’re to be shattered and spread so there’s no chance of re-forming.

A part of me itches to take Unferth’s sword and drive it into Red Stripe’s heart. Because I can’t stop thinking of the troll mother’s gruesome meal. The memory of her fist cracking against my chest, her hot breath and tusks, the screams and fire.

Darius touches my shoulder. “Lady, are you well? I shouldn’t have brought you. It’s too soon.”

I close my eyes to remember rubbing Red Stripe’s ears, scratching dust from his tusks. The calm way he would hunker down at Unferth’s slightest touch.

“They can’t have him,” I murmur, stepping nearer Red Stripe. I touch his cool chest and draw a line toward the gash with its crystallized blood, like tiny chunks of amethyst growing out of him.

“My understanding is Baldur wishes to make him a sacrifice of some sort, so you don’t have to worry about him living long.”

“No.” I turn to put my back against Red Stripe, leaning into the hard marble of his bent chest. “I know this troll, and tamed him. That’s why he didn’t fight you. His name is Red Stripe; I captured him with Ned the Spiritless last year outside Montreal.”

Darius lowers his head slightly, thoughtfully. “I see. If it were up to me, lady, I would relinquish him to you immediately, but the gods have an interest now, and we’ll have to communicate properly and make requests.”

“I know a way to contact Baldur about him.”

His eyebrows lift, but he doesn’t question me. “Good.”

I walk to him, our gazes connected, and I look for a rune in his warm brown eyes. Darius is a decade my elder, I think, or twenty-five, young to be the leader of an entire berserk band. Maybe he has that little Frankish beard to appear more mature. There’s a tiny string of runes repeated in a line from his pupil to the darkest ring at the edge of his iris. It’s one of the runes in the binding rune scar on my palm: servant.

I call the Shipworm and leave messages for both Rathi and Soren. To Rathi that I’m well and with the Mad Eagles, and to Soren that I need to speak with him as soon as possible. I leave the private number for the warehouse.

Hopefully through Soren I can find a way to not only keep Red Stripe safe but maybe pull in resources for the hunt. Baldur might agree to help me get permission to have the Mad Eagles at my disposal, or a local militia unit. Anything that could help expand the search for her. I wonder how much to tell any of them about why I need to be there when she’s found.

Darius gives me a copy of his report, but there’s nothing useful inside, nothing I didn’t already assume. They made a thorough sweep and killed five more trolls, plus caught Red Stripe, but weren’t able to spend enough time, boots on the ground, to track the mother.

While I wait to hear from Soren, all I can do is keep myself busy with Red Stripe and learn what I can from the berserkers.

Most of them share duty shifts with soldiers in Thor’s Army. They patrol the coast in heliplanes and man the front gates of the base, and fly regularly over the Canadian sea to watch for trouble out of troll country. They wait to be called up by the president or the Council of Valkyrie as peacekeepers overseas or as bodyguards stateside. Guarding is one of their only allowed duties on New Asgard soil because of prejudice against them—the fear of their berserking, that they might lose control at the drop of a flag.

After scrubbing dust and amethyst flakes from Red Stripe, after waking him and feeding him under the watchful eyes of Darius, I insist on helping with chores like unloading the crates of supplies that arrive around lunchtime and scouring the feast hall tables of spilled mead and pork sauce. Anything to keep myself busy.

Captain Darius gives me a berserker uniform and the smallest black coat he can find. I work out with a contingent of them: Sharkman, who makes himself my informal chaperone, and Thebes and Marcus and Carrigan and Brick. They’re interested in my troll-fighting techniques, and I show them how I steady the troll-spears with my weight, though it isn’t much suited to their rampaging style. The fact that they never did catch the troll mother burns their pride. Sharkman swears to me that if I ask, he’ll track her down; we’ll find her together. With the Mad Eagles at my side we could destroy her. I promise I’ll do what I can to see it happen.

That evening at dinner I paint runes onto the thumbnail of every berserker present. I look into their eyes and draw for them the blessing I see. I sleep with Sharkman (torch) near the round hearth in the center of the warehouse; he holds me close and intimately, stroking my nightmares away. There’s a tattoo on his chest: eight horizontal spears in a line down his sternum. He’ll add a ninth, he says, when I am in my proper throne.

The troll mother wakes me at dawn with a roar, tusks pressed to my cheeks, hot breath rolling over me. My eyes snap open, suddenly and sharply, my heart pounding. I slip free of Sharkman and gather Unferth’s sword from where it hangs on the throne by the fire. With it I run to the guardhouse, where the berserker Brick slumps in the chair with earphones tucked into his ears. He sits up at my approach, but I go straight to the chain-link gate, shut tight overnight. I curl my fingers through the links and peer out into the army base. The airfield is slowly waking up; a handful of men in flight suits crawl all over the heliplanes whose rotary blades droop like spider legs.

“All right?” Brick says through a yawn. I hear the tinny song beating from his abandoned earphones.

A small SUV turns the corner onto the road leading directly for us. It’s shiny and dark blue, cleaned of all the salt spray and Vinland mud. He drives slowly—it must be exactly the on-base speed limit—along the low gray fence surrounding the airfield and stops ten meters back from me and the guardhouse.

Soren turns off the engine and climbs out. He glances briefly at Brick, who’s clamoring out of the little wooden house, then keeps his gaze on me through the gate.

“Good morning,” I say.

“I didn’t think you’d be waiting.” The sun behind him turns his buzzed black hair into a trim halo and makes it tough to see his tattoo.

“Odinists only, boy,” Brick says.

I sigh. “Then let me out to speak with him.”

“Valkyrie …”

“Brick. Soren Bearstar is a hero of Asgard and my friend. I recognize his worth, and I will not speak to him through a chain-link fence.”

Making his reluctance known by dragging his feet, Brick levers the gate lock open and we slide it aside. “Come on,” I say, waving my hand for Soren to follow. He does as Brick gets on his radio to warn Captain Darius what I’ve done.

I lead Soren away from the warehouse to the edge of the camp where the asphalt meets star-shaped pylons and the wide, cold sea. Mist and low clouds obscure the sun. “You could have called, saved yourself that,” I say, nudging his wrist.

“It wouldn’t have mattered. That’s how they treat me.”

“Odd-eye, Soren, you’re such a martyr. You should be devoted to the god of sacrifice.”

The little jerk of his shoulder is all the answer I get. The wind scours salt against the concrete pylons, rushing past my face. “The Mad Eagles have Red Stripe, the runt troll Ned and I captured last winter. I want him, but the captain says Baldur has put a claim on him already. You need to explain to Baldur that Red Stripe is mine.”

Soren eyes me sideways. “Explain to Baldur.”

“Well.”

“I’ll call him. See what he says.”

“Tell him Red Stripe lost an arm and is ridiculously tame.”

“A pet. You have a troll for a pet, even after all of this.”

I scrape the toe of my boot against the pylon, scraping off a few little flakes of concrete. “Also I’d like to see about having the Mad Eagles—or at least some of them—assigned to me. A Valkyrie usually has a small band of berserkers, and even though I’m not technically on the council, maybe Baldur could help get around that.”

“I’m starting to think it isn’t my help you want so much as whose help I can get you.”

I offer Soren my best smile. “Can’t it be both?”

“There was a report in Vertmont last night of a sighting of a greater mountain troll mother.” He says it so casually I’m halfway to answering I don’t care about Vertmont before the meaning sinks in.

I clutch his arm. “Last night. Vertmont. The north part? That’s … near Montreal.”

“I have the bags from your truck in the backseat.”

The urge to throw my arms around him, to kiss him or drag him into an impromptu dance, is nearly irresistible. But all I do is hold out my hand. “Take me, Bearstar,” I say, pitching my voice low and flirty.

Soren glowers down at me until I laugh. This is it; we’re going after her, and nothing can muffle the violent thrill spiking around my heart.