Descendant

“Imprisoned and tortured? You’re okay with that?”

“Imprisoned, yes. Absolutely.” Hel’s voice was firm. “And as for what you call torture . . . I know it seems cruel, but it keeps Loki weak. Distracted. The pain directs his energies elsewhere, energies that otherwise would be wholly dedicated to finding an avenue of escape. That cannot happen.” Hel turned and lifted a hand, laying it gently on Mason’s cheek. “I so loved the world when I walked upon it. I would do anything to preserve it. Even if it means keeping that treacherous beast chained and hurting in the darkness. Even if it means sending you back into the world . . . when all I want to do is keep you by my side and never let you go again.”

The warmth of her mother’s sad smile almost made up for the fact that her hand, where it lay along Mason’s cheek, was ice-cold.

“But,” she said, “here we are.”

She turned and led Mason around a last sharp bend of the cavern path that led to where an arching hole in the mountain opened up onto a wide rock shelf. Hel gestured Mason forward and she stepped through into the open air and marveled at the vista that spread before her. It was the most breathtaking landscape she had ever seen. In the far distance, a range of high, sharp-peaked mountains rose, purple in the fading light of what seemed to Mason like late afternoon, although she couldn’t see the sun and didn’t know exactly where the light was coming from. Snowcaps shimmered silvery white on top while below, situated at the center of a lush green vale several miles wide, the golden roofs of a cluster of buildings surrounded by a high, palisaded wall sparked blinding fire. The largest structure of all was a huge, long hall, with a roof tiled with what looked like thousands of gold and silver scales—warriors’ shields—and its gables curved upward like the fore and aft of a great dragon-prowed ship. Mason knew, instinctively, what this place was. Asgard.

Valhalla.

Home . . .

She shook her head to dispel the subtle voice that whispered that last word inside her head. It had sounded a little bit like Loki, but she knew that it had to be just her imagination playing tricks on her.

The cave they had just come out of was a little ways up one of the lesser mountains that ringed the valley plain. Mason took another step forward so she could better take in the view. She walked to the very edge of a steep descending staircase cut into the side of the mountain and peered over a rocky outcropping to look straight down. Directly below where she stood, she could see the green plain that stretched out toward the Asgardian halls. . . . At least, Mason imagined it would be a green plain, when it wasn’t covered in fighting men and blood and body parts.

“I thought you said I wouldn’t have to fight anyone!” she said, drawing back from the edge of the rock shelf, horrified. There were so many men fighting, and it wasn’t just on one front. The fighting actually completely encircled the cluster of buildings that was their destination. They didn’t have a hope of reaching it . . .

Beside her, Mason heard her mother laugh for the first time.

“What?”

“Those are Odin’s Einherjar. The Lone Warriors.”

“None of those guys is alone,” Mason said. “There are a bazillion of them. And they are what’s standing between us and the hall.” She couldn’t even tell if there were two sides to the battle. It just seemed to her that, once a warrior had dispatched the man in front of him, he just turned to the next nearest and repeated the process. Friend and foe seemed utterly indistinguishable to her. It was chaos.

“They will not lift a hand against you,” her mother said, and started forth. “You must trust me.”

Mason didn’t, but she didn’t say so out loud. She was admittedly running out of options. As her mother began their descent down the steeply sloping path that led down to the battlefield and Asgard beyond, Mason fell in beside her.

“Why are they fighting?” she asked as they got closer and closer to the edge of the terrible melee.

Her mother answered, “Because they are fighters. It is simply what they do. They are Odin’s personal war band, chosen in ages past by his Valkyries to die glorious deaths and join him here to await the ending of days. Ragnarok.”

“Right. The thing we’re all trying to avoid have happen by maintaining the status quo. Get me out of here, keep Loki bound and snaked . . . And hey, I’m all for the world not ending. It just makes me wonder”—she waved a hand at the Einherjar—“what’s in it for these guys if it doesn’t?”

“This is the honored Viking’s promised reward. A glorious death, followed by endless days filled with battle, endless nights replete with mead and meat. The possibility, one day, of something even greater.” Hel gazed at the spectacle, her expression hard to read. Mason wasn’t sure whether she was actually endorsing the idea of Ragnarok, or just offering the Norse perspective on it, but she sincerely hoped it was the latter.

“Sounds like it’d be an excruciating bore after about three days,” Mason said.

At least, she thought, it would be the way they were doing it. The closer they got to the warriors, the more it seemed to Mason that they were kind of just . . . going through the motions. But of course, she wasn’t blind to the irony of her offhand dismissal of their pastime. Especially where she herself was concerned. After all, she’d done very little else but fight and practice for the last several years—and with a similar kind of mindless determination. She had approached fencing with a kind of zealous tunnel vision. And yet, in all the time she had fought and practiced to be the best, honing her skills, her strength, her speed, she had never even approached the kind of finesse as she had over the last few weeks working with Fennrys. He’d instilled in her a kind of genius instinct with a blade. Made her one with her weapon.

She was no longer just a product of technique and grim determination. When she fought with Fenn, she fought with joy. Mason felt a brief surge of panicked despair at the thought of never experiencing that sensation again.

No. She slammed the door on that thought with all her mental might. I’m going home.

And Fenn is fine. He had to be.

Yes, she’d seen him hurt, terribly. A hole torn in his shoulder. But it wasn’t as if she hadn’t done the very same thing to him herself—accidentally stabbed him in the very same shoulder—only a few days earlier, and he’d recovered from that just fine. Fennrys was tougher than anyone she’d ever met. A bullet hole and a tumble off a train? That was like most people getting a hangnail.

Mason took a few deep breaths to calm herself down and shake her panic.

Her footsteps slowed as they approached the leading edge of the battle.

“You must go first,” her mother said, nudging her forward.

Right. Of course I must.

Mason thought of Fennrys—of his fearlessness in the face of a fight—and clamped down on the urge to turn and fly as a wall of noise and the stench of blood and spilled viscera washed violently over her. The thunderous sounds of war were a physical assault on her ears and the surface of her skin. They beat on her like hammers on drums, and she knew that at any second, those hacking, slashing berserkers would turn and charge at her and she would be dead and in pieces before she’d even drawn her elegant little blade, which seemed like a toy sword in comparison. Her hand tightened on the hilt. . . .

No. Don’t give them a reason to attack.

Her mother promised her she’d be fine.

Trust her. . . .

Suddenly, the two warriors fighting closest to her abruptly disengaged. They lowered their weapons and stepped back, making a space in the chaos for Mason to step into. Then so did the men beyond them, and the ones beyond them. Mason held her breath and strode purposefully forward into the breach, her eyes fixed unblinking on the glittering eaves of Valhalla in the distance. As the path continued to open up in front of her, she could sense that, as soon as she and her mother had passed, the men behind them would close ranks and start fighting again, as if nothing had interrupted them.

Once she was halfway across the battlefield, Mason relaxed enough to glance surreptitiously at the men fighting on either side of her. Some of them were great hulking beasts and some were lean and lithe, skirmishers and melee bruisers and all sorts in-between—there was no one distinct “type.” And yet, they all seemed the same. It was strange. Wrong. Mason had sensed it from a distance, but in close quarters it was