“Katja? Are you awake? Can you understand me? Katja? It’s Wren. Well, you probably don’t remember me, especially now that you’re a ravenous monster and all, but I’m a friend of your sister’s, and I’m going to keep you safe, all right? You just need to stay quiet, just like you are now, and everything will be fine. You’ll see. The Allfather won’t abandon us now, not after coming so far. Journeys like this one, they don’t end in the middle. They go on and on, like in the old sagas. Sometimes they go on for years, but they always end the right way. You didn’t survive all this time just to die in some cell, in the middle of the story, and I-”
Wren paused to frown. “Unless of course, this might not be your story at all. It could be my story. In that case, maybe you will die, and it’ll make me sad, so sad that I can’t cure the plague until a handsome young man comes along to make me smile again.”
She smiled at the cold door. “But no, that won’t happen. You and I aren’t exactly close, so it wouldn’t make me that sad if you died. I mean, I would be sad, Allfather knows I’d hate for anything to happen to you, but I can’t say it would break my heart more than anyone else’s death. After all, we’ve never even met really. Never even spoken.”
The young vala hunched down on the cold steps for a moment to blow some warmth into her thin fingers. “Then again, maybe this is your sister’s story. Oh, now that makes more sense. After all, she’s the one on the long journey and actually doing all the work, isn’t she? And if you died, it really would break her heart, I suppose. She might fall into a black state indeed, full of sorrow, maybe even starving herself in a tower by the sea, refusing to see her own poor Erik. Or she might go berserk and kill us all, kill every last person in Rekavik and burn the city to the ground, and then spend the rest of her life wandering the earth to repent her crimes and earn her way back into Woden’s good graces. Aye, I can see that story well enough. Worthy of a saga.”
Again she frowned and picked at her lip. “So I suppose, if you do die, I’ll have to leave the city. I mean, I’d hate to die in Freya’s blood-fury. But then, maybe I could find her again, years later, and help her atone for her crimes and-”
A hand jerked her back from the door and Wren tripped and fell down hard on the stone steps behind her. She hopped up, rubbing her rear and glaring at the four men standing in the snow above her. They wore sealskin coats without a trace of fur among them, and each of them clutched an axe or a hammer in one hand.
The men from the courtyard.
She pressed her lips tightly together for a moment before saying to the leader, “You must be Ragnar. I think you’re lost. The door to the castle is back around the other side.” She jerked her head toward the main door as she brought her hands together under her blanket and unwound her sling from her wrist.
“Get out of the way, girl.” The speaker was a huge old bear with saggy jowls and thin white hair on his head and thick white brows over his squinting eyes. He had a deep voice and he spoke with a soft, unwavering drone. “We’ve come for the beast.”
“She’s not a beast,” Wren said. “She’s a woman, a vala from the east. She’s just sick, poisoned. But we’re going to cure it. Skadi and me. I’m the, well, the vala of Denveller. We’re going to find a cure for it just as soon as Freya comes back.”
“Freya? Is that the woman Leif left with this morning? “ Ragnar shook his head a little. “You won’t be seeing her again.”
“Why not?”
“No one comes back from the north. Even the warriors who go south lose half their numbers each time. Your friends will be dead by the end of the day.”
“As the Allfather wills,” Wren said. “But Katja stays here. She’s not hurting anyone. She’s locked up. Can’t you see that?”
“She’s got the plague. She’s one of those things now. An animal. A killer.”
“No!” Wren shrugged her blanket off her shoulder so they could see the loaded sling in her hand.
The men chuckled.
“Get her out of there,” Ragnar said quietly.
One of the men knelt down at the side of the stairwell and reached down toward Wren, but she whipped her sling around and smashed his fingers away. The man yanked his bleeding hand back with a hiss and he clutched his broken fingers to his chest. Wren kept her sling spinning in front of her. “I promised to protect her.”
“And I promise she’ll be dead in a few moments.” Ragnar hefted his axe and started down the steps toward her.
There were only six steps and no room at the bottom for a second person, and as soon as the old man had taken his second step, Wren swung her sling at his face. He took the blow on his fist and then raised his axe to strike her with the butt of its bone handle.
“Ragnar!” Halfdan shoved through the men and grabbed the head of the raised axe. The two of them struggled over the weapon for a moment and Halfdan lost his grip, leaving Ragnar off-balance on the stairs. Wren grabbed the walls on either side of the sunken stairs and hurled herself up onto the snowy grass just as Ragnar tumbled down into the bottom of the steps at the foot of the steel door.
Finding her sling empty, she grabbed a stone from the pouch on her belt and lurched up to her knees, but Ragnar’s three friends hadn’t moved. They all leaned back, arms folded over their chests, axes standing in the snow against their legs. They were frowning down at Ragnar. The old man groaned and tried to push himself up, but he had fallen at an awkward angle into the stone well at the bottom of the steps and his legs were wedged against the wall under his body.
“You!” Halfdan shoved one of the silent three. “Get him out of there.”
The man took his time, lingering to give Halfdan a few dirty looks and to make it plain that he wasn’t afraid of the burly guard, but he did go down the steps and he hauled Ragnar up off the floor and helped the older man back up to the frozen earth.
Halfdan grabbed the man’s shirt and yanked him forward. “That girl in there is Skadi’s prisoner, and Skadi says she doesn’t die. Understand?”
Ragnar tried to shove himself free, but Halfdan’s huge fist remained buried in his shirt. Ragnar said, “She’s no girl anymore, she’s one of them!”
“That’s right, she’s got the plague,” Halfdan said. “And the queen’s going to cure the damn thing, and to make a cure she needs a beast to test it on. So either you leave that girl in there, or we can send you out into the hills to find another one on your own.”
“Look at you, thinking you’re somebody because your cousin was king. Well, Ivar’s dead now, isn’t he? And you’re nobody.” Ragnar struggled with the warrior again and this time managed to get his shirt free and he limped back a few steps. He spat in the grass. “And the only cure for the plague is a blade through the neck.”
Halfdan nodded. “Maybe. I’ll keep that in mind if you ever get bit. Or if I think you’ve been bit. Now get out.” He looked at the others. “All of you, get out.”
The men rocked slowly from foot to foot, shifting their weight and casting dark glances at one another, but they all turned and trudged back toward the castle gate. Wren avoided the eyes of the man whose hand she broke, and when they were all gone around the corner of the castle, she dropped to the ground to sit on the side of the stairs and blew out a long breath.
“You all right?” Halfdan shuffled a little closer and squinted down at the steel door of the cell.
“As fine as fine can be,” she said. “I just hope Freya comes back soon with that ring. It’s exhausting being this brave all the time.”
Chapter 11. Flies
Freya looked at the huge drill on its rusting steel legs. Inside its body she could see chambers and boxes, tubes and strings, all made of different hues of steel and copper and tin. She tapped her spear on the long shaft of the drill and listened to the sound echoing down into the tunnel. The machine’s position on the slope made it lean out at a precarious angle, made all the more precarious by the crumbling appearance of the steel legs gripping the mountain’s face. The tunnel struck downward at the same vicious angle, its walls ribbed and grooved by the mechanical drill’s passing.
“It’s going to be hard to climb down there,” she said. “And even harder to climb out. We should have brought
