The sky was violet and the world beneath it was gray and cold when Freya reached the first of the giant’s ribs. Erik and Wren lingered in the road behind her as she stepped forward and touched the massive bone.
“It’s not bone,” she said. “It’s steel. Old and rusted. And look, there’s moss growing on it here, and grass inside there.” She pointed. “But not much. It’s been here a few years, but not many.”
Wren crept up to her side. “Steel? Frost giants had bones of steel? No wonder only the Allfather could kill them.”
“Maybe.” Freya scraped her spear’s blade along the face of the rib in front of them, watching the rust flake away and flutter to the ground. Above them the rib swept up in a dramatic curve to touch the slender spine of the creature. “Or maybe this isn’t a frost giant. Look there.” She pointed down the belly of the beast to a twisted, blackened mound.
“The heart?” Wren clasped her hands to her chest, her fingers rubbing at the rinegold ring on her right hand. “Gudrun says to beware its heart.”
“Let’s take a closer look.” Freya led the girl inside the enormous cage of steel ribs to the small mound and they looked down on the tiny bits of steel melted onto the broken rubble of the house that no doubt had stood where the giant had fallen. Freya squatted down and scraped her bone knife along a charred lump nailed to the ground with a small metal spike. The lump made a crackling sound, and chips of blackened char fell from it.
“What is that?” Wren asked.
Freya picked up the chips and sniffed them. “You’re not going to believe this.”
“Why? What is it?”
“I think… I think it’s wood. Old, burnt wood. Real wood, from a tree.” Freya pocketed the strange treasures, along with a few more bits from the scorched lump, and then she led Wren back out to the street where Erik and Arfast waited with Katja in the deepening shadows of Hengavik.
“So much for finding Skadi,” Freya said. “No one’s here. No one’s been here for over a year.”
“It’s getting late,” Erik signed. “We need to find a safe place to sleep.”
“Yeah, I know.” Freya pointed up the road. “Let’s take a look up that way.”
They resumed their earlier formation and the huntress led the others up the gravel lane, away from the giant’s ribs, and up to the open doorway of a long house buried in a man-made hill side-to-side with a second identical house. Both houses ran in a straight line with a second door at the far end, and the earth had been piled over them like a husband and wife lying together under the blankets in bed. With a bit of effort, they wrestled Arfast’s antlers through the doorway and Wren saw to making Katja comfortable while Freya and Erik spent the next half hour piling heavy stones in the southern doorway, and making the northern doorway narrower.
Night fell quickly, draining the last remaining shreds of light from the sky, and a thousand tiny eyes winked open in the darkness above, staring down at the dead town in uncaring silence. Erik took the first watch, so Wren and Freya both lay down beside the feverish Katja and went to sleep with empty bellies.
Freya woke quickly when Erik touched her arm, but he was smiling and yawning, not telling her that there was some new danger.
“It’s midnight. Mostly quiet,” he signed. “There was some howling, but it was far to the north, and that was more than an hour ago.”
She nodded and glanced at her sister and the young girl in black beside her. Both were sleeping soundly, though Katja was panting through her open mouth in quick shallow breaths. Freya frowned, but turned away. There was nothing she could do for her sister at the moment, so she reached for her spear to take the watch. But Erik caught her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist, and then the side of her neck, and she closed her eyes and felt the heat of him moving across her skin to her mouth and she let him press her back down onto her blanket, his tongue surging between her lips, his hands massaging her neck and hips as he lay down beside her.
Freya wrapped her arms around his head, trapping his mouth against her own for a moment, and then she pushed him back and saw the disappointment and understanding mingled in his eyes as he leaned back and let her sit up. She leaned over to bite his ear, and then stood up, fetched her spear, and went to sit by the open doorway. A soft breeze sighed through the empty streets and the sound of the grassy plains rustling filled the night with a chorus of distant whispers.
Her bones were tired but her mind was not, and the cold air kept her eyes feeling sharp. Wrapped in her heavy wool blanket with her arms and legs curled around her spear, she sat in the doorway and stared up at the stars, at the thousand cold eyes staring back down at her. When she looked down at the empty road beyond the door, it was covered in a thick white mist.
Aether. Damn.
Freya glared at the fog. It flowed past the doorway like a river of clouds and sea foam, swirling and rippling and rolling upon itself. She stood up and stepped outside, checking the road in both directions, but there was nothing to see.
Not yet, anyway.
With the speed and grace of a mountain lion she leapt up the side of their earthen house to stand on its grassy roof and look out across the town with her spear planted beside her. The mist lay thick and white upon the ground, blanketing the gravel roads and lapping silently at the empty doorways of the abandoned homes. And to her left, toward the western end of the town, Freya saw the shadowy figure of a man walking slowly down the center of the road toward her. The huntress frowned.
Ghosts. I hate ghosts.
It took the man several minutes to come down the road to the house where Freya stood exposed on the roof, and when he arrived the ghost paused and looked up at her. “Have you seen a fair-haired girl come by this way?” he asked. He held his hand by his waist. “About this tall?”
Freya blinked and tightened her grip on her spear. The steel felt cold and clammy. “No,” she said softly.
The ghost nodded and continued on his way down the street and around a corner out of sight.
Then a shadowy woman emerged from a house across the street and wandered off to the south without sparing Freya a glance. And then the shade of an old crone shuffled by. And two solemn children. And a husband and wife. And on and on they came by the dozens, drifting silently through the streets, occasionally pausing to look at something or someone, even exchanging a few quiet words with each other, and then continuing on their starlit strolls through the streets of Hengavik.
After several minutes of watching the aethereal dead wandering the town, Freya jumped down from the roof and stepped back into the open doorway of their shelter. Sometimes a ghost would appear in the road in mid-stride, and sometimes one would vanish just as suddenly. Their quiet voices murmured through the streets as they spoke to each other, offering bland greetings and asking simple questions, usually about whether the other person had seen a certain lost soul lately.
An hour passed and Freya came to realize that there were no more than a dozen faces among the ghosts, but because they kept wandering in circles, appearing and disappearing suddenly and randomly, it seemed that there were more.
The aether at her feet began to thin, revealing patches of the road, and the ghosts appeared less and less often around her, staring into empty houses and asking each other if they had seen this little girl or that old man. Freya watched them with an anxious gnawing in her belly, wondering how they died, and when, and why. And why were they wandering the empty lanes of Hengavik at all, instead of sleeping in the cold earth? Ghosts were common enough in Ysland, but never so many in one place, and never wandering for hour upon hour.
Leaving her spear leaning against the wall, Freya stepped out into the street into the path of a shadowy woman, her features drawn in wisps of aether that fluttered in ragged lines in the weak breeze.
“My name is Freya,” the huntress said.
The ghost paused and glanced away. “I’m Dalla,” she whispered.
“What happened here? What happened to this town? Where are the people?”
“Dead.” The ghost lowered her gaze to her feet. “All dead.”
“How did they die? War? Famine? Or was it the reavers?” Freya resisted the urge to reach out and take hold of the dead woman, to force her to look her in the eye.
“The fox plague…” The ghost of Dalla wrapped her arms around herself and shivered as the breeze stiffened and threatened to tear apart her fragile form of mist. “The fox plague took some away, and left others dead.”
Freya nodded. “When?”
Dalla shook her head. “I don’t know. A day, a year? I can’t tell one night from the next.”
