The Sea of Trolls

“Rune says they decide when Ragnarok happens.”

“What’s that?”

“The final battle between the gods and the frost giants. It’s when everyone dies and everything is destroyed.”

“That’s a bleak view of the future,” murmured Jack.

“Odin selects the bravest warriors for this final war. They train each day until it’s time to die.”

“But they come back to life,” said Jack, remembering something Olaf had said about warriors getting killed and rising to feast all night in Valhalla.

“Not after Ragnarok. Darkness falls over everything.”

“Even the gods die?”

“When the Norns say so, yes.” Thorgil watched the door at the far end of the room. Her hand kept straying to the knife on her leg, but that was merely habit.

“What could be more powerful than a god?” Jack asked. He, too, watched the door. The torches blazed and wind beat uselessly against the heavy white curtains covering the windows.

“Time,” said Thorgil. “Rune says the Norns are Time itself. He doesn’t quite understand it and neither do I. Shh!”

Jack saw the door move and froze. But it was only the Mountain Queen coming to take her seat on the throne. She didn’t look at them, and they knew better than to speak to her. Then all three of them sat and waited.

Gradually—Jack couldn’t tell exactly when—a presence gathered at the far end of the hall. It was a crowd of people, or perhaps it was only a few. It was hard to tell. The curtains stirred and the torches dimmed. Voices came from a great distance, voices that sent alarm through Jack’s body. They were like something he’d heard in a terrible dream. They murmured of every fear he’d ever experienced—of falling down a cliff or of losing his parents or of being in a dark place where he could weep forever and never be found.

Thorgil put her hand on his arm. Jack realized he’d been about to do the very thing he’d been warned against: flee the room. Thorgil looked pale. No doubt her own private terrors were being revealed.

It was a world of loss far more terrible than the songs of vanished Utgard. It was more devastating than the destruction of Gizur Thumb-Crusher’s village. It was Everything Gone. The voices of the Norns whispered about the passing of all that was bright and brave and beautiful. You could only watch it die. You could only go down to defeat and darkness.

Jack heard a slight noise. He turned and saw Thorgil holding her knife before her. Her message was clear. She would go down bravely, and if fame truly did die, she would still run to meet her fate.

Jack clutched the rune. A Norn looked up. She was young and fair. She stood at the beginning of the vast procession that shuffled through the hall. Round the table they went. One put her hand out over a bowl of fruit, and it withered. They sat down, and now Jack saw there were only three, though the air shifted and whispered behind them. They arranged the chess set.

One watched and the other two played. The game went on for a long time. Jack blinked. It seemed as though the chess pieces moved by themselves. They were no longer on a table in a darkened room, but standing in front of houses or tilling fields or shearing sheep. They went about their lives, unaware of the silent Norns watching them, and now and then a hand reached down and took them away.

The game went on until only a few pieces were left on either side. A Norn with a cavernous mouth and hollow eyes made the final move. Checkmate, she soundlessly murmured.

The other player, the young and beautiful Norn, bowed her acceptance. The third Norn was far more difficult to see.

She kept flickering and shifting, like a shadow under a windswept tree.

Then all three looked up and beckoned to Jack.

He couldn’t move. His legs had lost their strength, and his mouth had turned bone-dry. Thorgil nudged him. He couldn’t obey. She stood, took his hand, and drew him forth. In her other hand she held the knife. Her face was almost white in the dim light. Merciful heavens, was she going to try to stab a Norn?

Jack clutched the rune. To his surprise, it responded with a rush of warmth. He squeezed Thorgil’s hand and willed the warmth into her as well.

It came to him that they were not pawns in a game that only led to destruction. The Norn’s way was not the only one. There was the Bard sitting under a tree in the Islands of the Blessed. There was the sad-eyed woman Olaf had slain during the storm. She surely was on her way to Heaven with her lost daughter. And Mother believed, though she hid this from Father, that souls returned with the sun to be born anew into the world.

I serve the life force, Jack thought. I do not believe in Ragnarok.

They walked forward together, and as they went the ice walls fell away and the rustling white curtains vanished. The air was soft on Jack’s face, and a stream flowed along the floor of a little valley with a chuckling sound. On either side were bushes full of raspberries and blueberries. The ground was covered with sweet mountain strawberries.

“We’re here again!” cried Thorgil. “This is where Mimir’s Well was hiding?”

The capercaillie stepped out of a thicket with her ten speckled chicks behind her. She lowered her head and clucked softly, deep in her throat. “It seems so,” Jack said uncertainly. “I felt something before, but I was afraid to look for it.” The two of them watched the capercaillie sweep majestically on into a leafy glade.

“One thing’s the same,” Thorgil said. “Those stupid birds are still going on about their utterly boring lives.”

Jack led the way. He took them past the field where the snowy owls had collapsed. He found the woodland of apple, walnut, hazelnut, and pear trees. “So this is where you got that food,” the shield maiden said.

“Listen.” Jack held up his hand. The hum of thousands and thousands of bees rose and fell ahead. It sounded as though you’d have to push them out of the way just to squeeze through.

“I don’t like bees,” Thorgil said. “I was stung by a lot of them once, when I tried to rob a hive.”

“They’re all right if you don’t upset them,” Jack said. “My mother taught me a charm to calm angry bees.”

“I’m not sure… I don’t understand their language as I do Bird, but it seems they’re not angry. And they’re too wild to be merely happy. I’d say they were frenzied.”

“Berserk?” Jack guessed.

“Something like that.”

You’d know, Jack thought. He remembered the kind of mad joy that had possessed Olaf and his men before they slaughtered Gizur’s village. Jack and Thorgil stood for a long time, listening to the incessant hum.

“Would your charm work on berserk bees?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” he replied.

“Well, it’s better than nothing.” Thorgil drew both her knives.

“What are you going to do? Stab all the bees?” Jack said. “We’ve been allowed to come here by the Norns. They’ll either let us get to the well or they won’t. Nothing either of us does is going to change that.”

Thorgil reluctantly sheathed her knives. She took Jack’s hand, and they went on through the grove. The land gradually inclined upward until it led to a large hill. “Look!” Thorgil cried. At the top rose an enormous ash tree—the Ash Tree, Yggdrassil itself rising up and up and up until you could hardly believe human eyes could see that far.

Branches swept everywhere, teeming with life. All the birds in the world roosted on its arms, and all the insects, too. Some bored into the bark and destroyed it. Some nibbled the leaves. Wherever the Tree went, creatures fed on it, but they also bent it into bowers for their young. Jack saw deer with their fawns, wolves with their cubs, and men and women—for the branches reached into Middle Earth as well—sitting with their children in the leaves.

The roots plunged down on either side of the hill, some to the World of Fire and others to the icy halls of Hel. A giant serpent coiled in the depths and sank its fangs into the blood of the Tree. But in the high branches a giant eagle fanned its wings and drove the breath of life back into the leaves.

Up and down the mighty trunk scampered a bedraggled squirrel, shrieking insults. “That’s Ratatosk,”