Mist (48 page)
Maybe he’d seen it coming.
“Back upstairs,” Mist told them.
“But it’s time for—” Gabi began.
“Later,” Mist said, and they went. Bryn came up beside her.
“What now?” she asked.
“The Einherjar can have the living room for now, if they can all fit in it,” Mist said. “There’s some Peet’s in the fridge, if you want some coffee.”
Bryn raised her voice. “Listen up,
huskarlar.
Mist and I are going to have a talk. You can have the living room, but don’t make too much noise. There are kids sleeping upstairs. Coffee’s on the house.”
A couple of the men muttered under their breaths, silenced by a stare from Bryn. One of the women found the coffeemaker. The rest—a hodgepodge of tall, short, thin, husky, large, small— trooped without comment into the living room. Dainn lingered in the kitchen with Vali. Odin’s son seemed sanguine enough, but she didn’t like the expression in Dainn’s eyes.
“Vali, you said you could start setting up your equipment,” Mist said. “Dainn, get some sleep.”
The elf hesitated. “May I speak to you alone, Freya’s daughter?”
Not good, Mist thought, when he started talking that way. “Bryn,” she said, “go to the second door to the left down the back hall. We’ll talk in my bedroom.”
“Freya’s
daughter
?” Bryn repeated.
“Just go, Bryn.”
The small Valkyrie nodded slowly and backed into the hall with obvious reluctance.
“Gym,” Mist said curtly to Dainn.
She turned on the light, trying again to pretend the whole place hadn’t been an ocean of blood twenty-four hours ago.
“I didn’t exactly appreciate your spilling the beans out there,” she said, facing Dainn with a hard stare. “What’s so important that it couldn’t wait?”
His gaze never left hers. “While you were sleeping,” he said, “I attempted to reach Freya again.”
“And?”
“I could not find her.”
“If Loki sent her away, maybe she needs a little time to lick her wounds.”
“You do not understand. There was
nothing.
I had no sense of her presence, no consciousness of the Shadow-Realm where the Aesir reside.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“I wish I were not.” Dainn looked through her as if he saw only the emptiness he was trying to describe. “There was a great silence no voice has ever broken, as if Ginnungagap itself had vanished.”
“That isn’t possible.”
“No.” He looked at her again, and she saw what he saw: a negation of all life, a barrenness and desolation beyond words to describe.
Freya couldn’t survive in that. No living being could.
“What are you telling me?” she asked. “Are the bridges gone?”
“Yes. Completely gone, not merely closed. And we can only assume that that the Aesir—Freya—can no longer reach us, nor can her allies.”
“You mean we’re alone,” Mist said.
“It may not be a permanent state. But we must go on as if it is.” Mist stiffened her legs, half afraid they might give way beneath her. “If what you’re saying is true,” she said, “Loki won’t be able to get any more Jotunar, either.”
“We do not know how many he has left,” Dainn said, “but you can be sure that he will soon realize that he, too, is alone. He will certainly redouble his efforts to claim mortal servants. Every Jotunn he can spare will be seeking your Sisters and the Treasures. Without the Aesir, there is no one to prevent Midgard from becoming the kind of world Loki desires. No one but us.” He held up one hand, palm cupped toward her as if in supplication. “You must take up a role I know you want no part of.”
Mist knew what he was going to say. She’d always figured that Freya wasn’t going to be taking direct charge of their mortal allies or distract herself with the day-to-day details of putting together an army that could fight Loki on his own terms.
Dainn had been trying to tell her all along.
She’d
told Loki she was only a foot soldier, even when she’d known her claim had been meant more to protect her own illusions than to deceive him. She just hadn’t wanted to accept the obvious truth.
“You must become a leader,” Dainn said. “The leader of everyone who fights for Midgard.”
“That’s crazy talk,” Mist said, desperately searching for a way out. “Bryn would be better. She already has followers loyal to her, and—”
“She has only the magic of the Valkyrie,” Dainn said. “You are the only one of your kind in this world. The only one who can stand against Loki in single combat.”
“With the Vanir magic. But you said I couldn’t use—”
“As long as Loki continues to believe that you are in Freya’s thrall, he will not risk throwing his full forces against you until he is certain the Lady can be defeated without provoking her to use the Eitr. And when you have learned enough to wield the ancient magic again, it will not matter what he believes.”
Mist backed away, raising her hands. “This won’t work, Dainn. Look, even assuming we gather enough mortals willing to believe us and risk their lives for their world, we can’t have battles in the streets. The only way we can fight Loki is through some kind of guerrilla action, like the Resistance in—” Her vision began to go dark. “Oh, gods. I can’t do this. I can’t be responsible.”
“You can. As a wise man once said, ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ You have a clear responsibility, Freya’s daughter. One must lead. One must inspire men and women to do deeds they will believe are beyond their capacity, and convince them that their survival depends upon it.”
“You don’t know,” she whispered. “You didn’t
see.
”
Dainn grabbed her arms, his fingers digging deep into muscle. “Will you pity yourself at a time such as this?”
He had said nearly the same thing to her before, when she had blamed herself for not recognizing who Eric really was. She didn’t despise herself any less now.
“I’m not what you think I am,” she said. “I never was.”
He dropped his hands. His eyes were filled with contempt, but there was no beast lurking behind them. They belonged wholly to Dainn.
“Perhaps you are right,” he said, “and this world will fall into chaos because you would not accept the burden of the gifts with which you were born. I will tell your Sister that she has made a mistake, and send Vali home to his brother. The children will be sent away, and I . . .” He closed his eyes. “Loki will kill me eventually, but I believe I can slaughter a few dozen of his Jotunar before he can stop me.”
Mist understood. Dainn would let himself go, because he would see no reason to fight any other way. He had been sent to find her, protect her, help her prepare the way for the Aesir. If she gave up, he would truly have no purpose except to kill whatever the beast could hunt down.
That was the choice he had been given: to help her fight for Midgard, or let the beast take him. That was his fate.
His decision,
she thought. But Dainn knew her too well. He knew she would blame herself if he became the thing he hated. He knew she understood that what would happen to him was nothing compared to what would become of the people of Midgard: kids like Ryan and Gabi, men and women like the bikers in her living room, the receptionists in Century Tower, the patrons of Asbrew— millions of mortals who didn’t deserve what was coming.
Mist knew she had a one-in-a-million chance of stopping it, even if she had every one of her Sisters and thousands of mortals on her side. But the Norns couldn’t have revealed her destiny more clearly if they had been spinning the thread of her life right in front of her.
“I recognize you now,”
Ryan had said.
“You were always there, in the middle.”
He’d just gotten the position slightly wrong.
“Odin-cursed elf,” she said. “You always knew you’d win.” When she looked up, Dainn’s eyes had changed. There was sadness in them, yes, but there also pride. In her. As if
he
had any right to—
Oh, Hel.
“There’s one question you’ve never answered to my satisfaction,” she said.
“Only one?”
She couldn’t help but smile, but it didn’t last. “What ever ‘exiled’ everyone to Ginnungagap during the Last Battle . . . how do we know it won’t happen again?”
“We do not. But if there was some force responsible, it has almost certainly long since vanished.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to have to worry about that on top of everything else.”
“Worry only about what you have the power to change,” Dainn said. He started toward the door. When she didn’t follow, he stopped and looked back.
“Are you coming?” he asked softly.
“Tell Bryn I’m on my way.”
He bowed his head as he might to one of the most powerful of elf-lords and walked out of the gym. Mist lingered, looking around the room as if for the last time.
In a way, it was. There wouldn’t be any more friendly bouts with lovers followed by a shower and a laughing tumble between the sheets. If Dainn was right and firearms couldn’t be used by either side in this war, the weapons displayed on the rack—and all the others she could make—were badly going to be needed, and the gym would become a training ground for warriors.
They’d all have to learn very, very fast.
Turning off the light, Mist went to join her army.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With special thanks to my editor, Lucienne Diver, my husband, Serge Mailloux, and my good friend Geri Lynn Matthews, for their ongoing support and enduring faith in me;
To Mary Kay Norseng, Professor Emerita, Scandinavian Section, UCLA , for her help with Norwegian words and phrases;
To my sister, Lauran Weinmann, for taking me on a tour of San Francisco after all my years away;
To Jeri and Mario Garcia, for their help with colloquial Spanish;
To MacAllister Stone, for her information and advice about blacksmithing.
And also to Genevra Littlejohn, for information about Kendo terminology.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
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23
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
