Mist (5 page)

But he was of the light-elves, who had fought and died alongside the gods. Even if she’d never had much use for the lofty, superior aesthetes who had been much too grand to spare so much as a glance for a lowly Valkyrie, she badly needed answers.

“My name is Mist,” she said.

In a burst of speed his hand shot out and encircled her wrist, long fingers curling around her tattoo. It seemed to catch fire again, and she wrenched her arm out of his grip. He closed his eye and released a shuddering breath.

“It is as I hoped,” he said.

Mist was too angry and startled to wonder what he’d hoped. “Whoever you are,” she said, “don’t do that again.”

He rubbed at his swollen mouth with his other hand. It was shaking. “Where is the frost giant?” he asked.

“He fled.”

“He did not . . . harm you?”

“No. I think I scared him off.”

“You fought him?”

“He attacked me. I didn’t have much choice.” She leaned closer to the elf, studying his face in search of anything familiar. “What do you know about him? Where did he come from? Where did
you
come from?”

Wincing, the elf pushed himself up on his elbow. “I will . . . answer all your questions, Mist of the Valkyrie,” he said, his voice regaining a little of the melodic cadences of his kind. “Is it safe?”

Mist shivered as if Hrimgrimir’s icy vapor had sunk deep into her flesh and muscle and bone.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

He stared at her, his sole visible eye filled with mild contempt. “Do not pretend ignorance. It is not plausible.”

“I don’t much care what you find plausible. Who
are
you?”

“I am . . . Dainn. Dainn Far-seeker.”

Dainn. It was not an uncommon name for elf or dwarf. There were two most famous among the Alfar. The first was Dainn Rune- bringer, who had given the Rune-magic, the Galdr, to the elves, as Odin had brought it to the Aesir after days of bitter suffering. Mist had never seen Dainn Rune-bringer in Asgard, and it was no wonder: that Dainn was said to have vanished many ages before the fall of Asgard.

And then there was the
other.
Memories of the Last Battle flooded into Mist’s mind, images of bloody conflict and hopeless courage. She and her Sisters had only been present at the start of the fight, but she knew that the Alfar, though they never lifted a single weapon amongst them, had fought bravely with their potent magic. All but one.

He, too, she had never met, but she knew all about him. Dainn Faith-breaker, slain by Thor for the foulest treachery against Odin and the forces of good.

The Dainn before her was as ordinary as any elf could be . . . which would have been dazzling enough if he hadn’t just come out of the wrong end of a fight.

“Dainn Far-seeker,” she said. “The Jotunn attacked you?”

He nodded and gingerly touched the lump on his forehead. “It was not my intention to let him catch me.”

“He was after you, too?” she asked. “Why? What did you mean when you said—”

He held up a grimy hand to silence her. “Do you still have it?”

His voice had taken on an imperious note, which might have been more convincing if he hadn’t been covered with filth and rags that probably hadn’t seen anything resembling soap for years. He obviously wasn’t going to let her get away with playing ignorant again.

Simple, everyday annoyance began to wear the edge off Mist’s shock. “Odin gave me no leave to speak of it to anyone,” she said, “not even the Alfar.”

“You can trust me.”

Sure,
Mist thought. But even if an elf had improbably gone over to the dark side, he couldn’t break the warding spell..

“It’s concealed and shielded with magic devised and gifted to me and my Sisters by the All-father himself,” she said. “And now I think you’d better start explaining—”

“What did the Jotunn say to you?”

“You seem to know that already,” she said, lapsing into English.

“You said nothing that could lead him to it?” he asked, his own English like something straight out of an Austen novel.

“No, I didn’t,” she said. “And no Jotunn could get through the wards. It would take a god to do it.’ ”

“And yet you have clearly been unprepared for any attempt to take it from you.”

“I didn’t exactly expect to meet a Jotunn or an elf when I got up this morning.”

He shook out his long black hair— the feature that all Alfar took most pride in—as if he might shed the leaf-litter and dirt that matted it almost beyond recognition. “I cannot fault you for holding true to your duty.”

“I don’t know
what
I’d do if you disapproved of me,” she said with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “Now maybe you’ll deign to tell me how you and Hrimgrimir managed to survive the Last Battle.”

Dainn rolled onto his knees and tried to stand, a little of his Alfar’s natural grace returning, then sank back down again with a very unelvish grunt of frustration.

“The Last Battle?” he said. “Is that what you thought it was?”

There was no mistaking his mockery, blandly delivered with that oh-so-superior elvish attitude. “It’s been centuries since Ragnarok,” she snapped. “Since none of us heard from Odin or any of the Aesir in all that time—”

“You naturally assumed that the gods had met their final destruction, as the Prophecies foretold.”

“What are you talking about?” she demanded. “What in Hel’s name is going on?”

Dainn sighed, staring out into the darkness. “The Seeress also foretold a new existence of peace and harmony after the gods met their final end,” he said with exaggerated patience, as if he were dealing with a naïve child. “Look around you. Does it seem to you that the world has been reborn?”

She knew cursed well it hadn’t. When she’d moved to San Francisco some fifty years ago and found Odin’s sons, Vidarr and Vali— two of the handful of Aesir foretold to survive Ragnarok—she’d quickly learned that they had no more idea what had happened than she did. In fact, they didn’t even remember how they’d come to be in Midgard in the first place. But that didn’t mean Ragnarok hadn’t wiped out the residents of the other Eight Homeworlds.

So she had told herself long ago. So she’d had every reason to
believe.

“Midgard is as it always was,” Dainn said. “The Sword’s Age never ended. Not for this world.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” she said, getting to her feet. “What’s your point?”

“My point is that there
was
no Ragnarok.”

In a way, Mist was far less startled by his answer than she should have been. But she wasn’t ready to concede just yet.

“Before I and my Sisters were sent to Midgard,” she said, “I saw everything happen just as it was supposed to. Baldr murdered. The Wolf loosed. Loki—”

“There was an ending, yes,” Dainn interrupted, looking up at her. “But not the one we expected. Paradise never came because the Aesir and their enemies did not perish.”

2

It was the revelation she had been bracing herself to hear, and yet fresh shock pumped through her body and settled in her gut, roiling and churning like worms in a bloated corpse.

“They’re still alive?” she asked. “How? Where are they?”

“Odin believed he could forestall Ragnarok. He failed, and all but one of the Homeworlds—
this
one—were destroyed. But before the Aesir, Alfar, and those they fought could destroy each other, they were thrown into Ginnungagap.”

“The Great Void?” she said, feeling her way through a morass of thoughts as sluggish as stagnant water. “Nothing lives there. Nothing can.”

“It is simply another plane of existence. Not entirely physical as we know it, but it maintains life.” Dainn rotated his right shoulder. Something popped, and he winced. “The Aesir and their enemies have been trapped there in a form of stasis since the Last Battle.”

She scraped her hand through her hair, nearly yanking half of it out of her braid. “Who trapped them?”

“That is a discussion for another time.”

Of course it is,
Mist thought,
just a minor detail, after all.

“What does ‘stasis’ mean?” she asked.

“The gods exist in a state one might call semicorporeal. They do not age, nor do they experience the physical sensations living creatures do. They, the Alfar, the Jotunar, and the dwarves live in separate regions we call Shadow-Realms.”

Mist settled back into a crouch, too dizzy to trust her balance. “Shadow-Realms,” she repeated mechanically. “And all the Aesir live there? Odin, Freya, Heimdall, Frigg, Thor?”

“All but those already in the Underworld.”

Baldr, he meant—gentlest and, it was said, wisest of the gods, dead because of a filthy trick that had sown the seeds of Ragnarok.

Dainn scraped dried mud from his chin with the heel of his palm. “Since Ginnungagap was the original source of all magic, the gods have learned to shape that raw magic to re create something of what they lost during their exile.”

“Are you saying they’ve rebuilt Asgard?”

“Some elements of it, yes, after a fashion. The great halls of the gods, their palaces and lodging places.”

“And the rest? The forests and mountains and rivers?”

The pointed look he gave her was answer enough. “They are unable to reach Midgard in corporeal form, and only Freya has been able to communicate across the Void. But that problem the Aesir are also working to solve, and it is only a matter of time before they succeed in shaping true physical bodies of their own.”

“The Jotunn looked pretty cursed real to me,” she said.

“The frost giants have already accomplished what the Aesir are striving to achieve.”

Odin’s balls. This was getting worse by the second. “How?” she asked.

“That we do not yet know.”

“But I never saw a Jotunn here before today. How long have they been in Midgard?”

“Perhaps as long as two weeks.”

“Then they’ve been keeping a very low profile,” she said.

“They would not have wished to attract attention until they had achieved their goal.”

“And the Alfar? How did
you
get here?”

Dainn hesitated barely a moment. “I was already here. I have been in Midgard for centuries.”

She stared into his indigo eyes. “I don’t believe it.”

“I have walked this earth as far back as I can remember, Mist of the Valkyrie.”

Mist’s thoughts went round and round like Jormungandr the World Serpent biting his own tail. Until she’d met Vidarr and Vali, she’d never once been aware that she and her Sisters shared this world with other immortals.

“
Why
were you here?” she asked. “How did you survive Ragnarok?”

“That is the difficulty. I don’t remember.”

She laughed. She couldn’t help herself. But she had an idea that if she let herself go on too long, she’d never stop.

“That’s exactly what Vidarr and Vali told me,” she said catching her breath. “It’s a bad sign when gods and elves lose their memories.”

Dainn cast her a stunned look. “Odin’s sons? You know them?”

“For about half a century. They live right here in this City.
You
didn’t know?”

He shook his head slowly, and Mist allowed herself a brief, uncharitable moment of satisfaction. “Vid and Val were supposed supposed to survive Ragnarok,” she said. “If nothing happened according to Prophecy, didn’t the Aesir notice they weren’t around?”

His shock gave way to that annoying composure that made her want to give him a good, hard shake. “I am not privy to the gods’ thoughts beyond what they convey to me,” he said.

And Vidarr and Vali certainly hadn’t “conveyed” any knowledge about the Aesir’s survival to Mist. She was pretty sure they’d be just as shocked as she was.

“So you’ve come for the same reason Hrimgrimir did,” Mist said. “What exactly did Odin tell you to do?”

“It was not Odin,” Dainn said, in a tone that managed to suggest he found her question amusing. “It was Freya.”

Freya, the Lady, the beautiful, the goddess of love and desire, of fertility and battle, though most forgot that fiercer aspect. Freya had been born to the Vanir, the most ancient gods, who had been displaced by the warlike Aesir, defeated in battle by Odin’s children, and finally accepted among them. Her brother was Freyr, adopted as one of the first lords of the Alfar.

Freya was also the First Valkyrie, the found er of the Choosers of the Slain. It was she who selected women—some the daughters of mortal lords, some from among the lesser goddesses—to ride the battlefields in search of valiant warriors worthy of joining the Aesir until Ragnarok. Half of the Einherjar went to her hall, Folkvangr.

But Mist had ever been Odin’s servant, not the Lady’s. She’d had no dealings with Freya at all.

“Why not Odin?” Mist asked, struck by a fresh sense of foreboding.

“It is Freya’s Seidr that enabled her to breach the barriers of the Aesir’s Shadow-Realm with her thoughts.”

Seidr, called the Witch-magic. Mist knew very little about it, except that only Freya and Odin were said to possess it.

Dainn answered Mist’s unspoken question. “Odin and the other Aesir maintain the Shadow-Realm of Asgard. It is the Lady’s task to deal with Midgard.”