Bryn shrieked, diving at the first shooter’s face with claws extended. He batted her away, his shots going wild. Bryn swooped up again, but her course was erratic, broken with strange dips and starts. Mist jumped up and ran toward the soldiers, snapping off the remaining six shots in rapid succession. She rolled into the scant cover of a depression in the snow and reloaded. When she came up, Bryn was diving again.
Not diving, but falling, her wings hugged to her sides. Mist emptied the cylinder at the German running toward her. He staggered, and Mist dived back for the depression. Flames engulfed her right hand. She lost her grip on the gun, and it flew out of her reach. She felt blindly for Kettlingr’s hilt with her left hand, but her fingers, slick with blood, couldn’t find purchase. She chanted the Runes as she tried again, praying it wasn’t too late, and tugged the blade free just as it began to change.
Bryn lay sprawled on the ground near the German’s covert, her body half covered by the cloak. Mist screamed and raised Kettlingr high as she charged the two soldiers who remained on their feet. They stared, caught by the bizarre spectacle of a woman attacking them with a sword.
But the weapon refused to obey her commands. There was something wrong with the hilt; it was too long, impossible to swing.
Because it wasn’t Kettlingr at all. She held Gungnir in her fist, the spear that could never miss its mark. Her feet tangled under her. The breath seized in her throat. She hesitated for a single second, and during that second one of the Germans aimed his Schmeisser at Bryn and brought her down in a flurry of blood and feathers.
There was no more thinking then, no fear. Mist flung Gungnir, impaling Bryn’s murderer. The German who had stood to face her at the beginning hardly blinked. He finished replacing his magazine and took aim.
If luck and skill had abandoned Mist, rage had not. It carried her across the space between them, driving her body like a Panzer tank to smash him down. She wrapped her bare, bloodied hands around his neck, watching his disbelief with savage satisfaction as she snapped his neck. She pried his Schmeisser from his dead fingers and plunged toward the fallen soldiers.
Only one was still alive. She finished him off, dropped the gun, and threw herself down beside Bryn’s body. If Bryn had been human, she would already have been dead. But she was breathing in spite of her terrible wounds, gulping air into punctured lungs and bleeding from the mouth. Her eyes were glazed and unseeing.
“Mist?” Bryn lifted her hand, clutching at the air.
“I’m here.” Mist clasped Bryn’s hand gently in her own unwounded one and smoothed the dark hair away from the Valkyrie’s forehead. “Did we win?”
“Yes. Because of your courage.”
Bryn tried to shake her head. “I failed. The cloak . . .” She gasped, and Mist lifted Bryn into her arms.
“I failed,
Fresh blood bubbled over Bryn’s lips. “Take the cloak. Swear you will . . . guard the Treasures. Keep them safe, as we were meant to. They will . . .” Bryn sighed and closed her eyes. “Swear.”
Mist swore. Denying Bryn’s unwavering faith was beyond her power. When she had finished, Bryn released her hold on life, as surely gone as if she had lived no longer than an ordinary woman.
Mist bowed her head. There would be no one to carry this warrior to Valhalla. If some other afterworld existed, it would be a cold one where valor and pride and loyalty had no meaning.
The sun was sinking below the trees, and Mist knew she had no time to commit Bryn’s body to the fire. Carefully she untied the cloak and slid it free from beneath Bryn’s shoulders, her injured hand aching in the cold. She brushed stained snow from the feathers, draped the cloak over one arm, and selected a fallen twig lying nearby, sketching Runes of protection in the bloody snow to ward scavengers from Bryn’s body. The raven circled overhead, watching for a chance at a fresh feast, but even it could not pierce the wards.
As the Rune-staves slowly lost their shapes beneath the steady snowfall, Mist chanted a second spell. The cloak seemed to fold in on itself, growing smaller and smaller until it was nothing but a bundle of feathers. Gently Mist tucked the bundle into its silken pouch and hung the sturdy cord around her neck.
Yanking Gungnir free from the German’s chest, Mist cleaned it and returned it to its sheath. She had just retrieved one of the Schmeissers when she heard the gunfire. Without stopping for her skis, she ran back through the woods, leaping like a stag through the deep snow and jumping onto the broken trail as soon as she reached it. Her vision adjusted to the dark as easily as a cat’s, but in that moment she wished she were blind.
The utter silence warned her before she found the trail’s end. She saw Mrs. Dworsky first, lying facedown in an uneven circle of bloodblackened snow. The others were scattered like seeds carelessly tossed from a giant’s hand, sprinkled with a dusting of white like fresh earth from a spade.
Mist picked her way from body to body, searching for signs of life. None had survived. But Rebekka was not among the bodies, nor was Geir, or Horja.
Without hope Mist continued on, her heart pumping steadily, her breath moving in and out as if her body insisted on living long after her mind had lost the will. Someone croaked her name. She stopped and looked at the figures hunched together in the lee of a stunted pine.
The first thing she saw was Geir’s face, pinched with pain and grief. Rebekka crouched huddled in his arms, her head cradled in the hollow of his shoulder. Horja lay on her side, one broken half of Thor’s staff still clutched in her right hand. She, too, was alive.
The last of Mist’s strength drained from her body. She forced herself to continue until she’d reached the pine and fell to her knees. The bodies of two German soldiers lay a few meters apart a dozen paces away. The ones that hadn’t been with the others Bryn had told her about. The ones she’d forgotten.
“There was an ambush,” Geir whispered. He stared through Mist, his eyes reflecting the horrors of massacre. “We couldn’t . . .”
“Rebekka?”
“All right.” Frozen tears glittered on Geir’s cheeks. “But the rest . . .”
Horja tried to push herself up. The piece of carved wood she held fell from her fingers. “It snapped,” she said with a strange, almost childlike bewilderment. “Where is Bryn?”
Mist swallowed and shook her head. Horja fell back with moan of despair.
“Why?” she cried. “How could this happen?”
They stared at Mist, man and Valkyrie, as if she held the answers. And she knew. She knew why this had happened, why the divine Treasures had failed, why they had suffered defeat at such a terrible cost of lives entrusted to their care.
Pride.
Bryn and Horja had warned her. She hadn’t listened. But it was all the others, not she, who paid the price.
She crawled closer to Geir and touched Rebekka’s shoulder. The girl flinched and turned her head, one eye visible above the scarf wrapped around her nose and mouth.
“Rebekka, I—”
“You left us!” Rebekka said, her voice rising in a wail. “You ran away!”
Mist let her hand fall. It didn’t matter whether or not she had done what Rebekka accused her of. She was still to blame. She met Geir’s haunted eyes.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
He nodded, his gaze sliding away. “I couldn’t stop them. I shouldn’t be alive.”
Echoing anguish roughened Horja’s voice. “I wasn’t strong enough to protect the mortals. Forgive me.”
Mist sucked in a frozen breath. “Can you walk?”
“Yes. But Gridarvol . . .”
“Take the pieces. Perhaps someday . . .”
Somehow she shaped the ravaged fragments of her thoughts into a semblance of order. “The most important thing now is to get Rebekka across the border,” she said, looking at Geir. “Can you do that?”
Geir searched her eyes. “You aren’t coming.”
It wasn’t a question. He knew her too well. “I left Bryn and four dead Germans on the other side of the wood,” she said. “I’ll watch for pursuit. When I’m sure you’re safe, I’ll look after her . . .” She closed her eyes.
