The Strange Maid (10 page)

“Hold it, Signy,” Unferth says calmly, evenly. “Take my sword in your other hand.”

He transfers the grip to me and I try not to shake. The tip of the sword scrapes against the troll’s shoulder and the light bobs, tracing an uneven line of calcification from the troll’s head down its chest. The poor thing moans, digging its fingers into its hardening skin.

Unbelievably, my heart aches. It must be in pain. Afraid and alone.

Even as small as it can make itself, the troll remains a solid two meters at the shoulder, and if it stood straight it would certainly be three. Unferth tightens the chain around its neck, puts more around its wrists and feet, too, punching it to get it to shift and let him in. He’s unafraid, methodical, and excellent at looping the chains. He has a sledgehammer from somewhere and hammers the ends of the chains into the wooden floor.

Just before my strength gives out, Unferth gently takes back his sword, and the UV light as well.

Outside the snowstorm howls.

“Happy birthday, Signy,” Unferth finally says.

SIX

SNOW CRYSTALS HANG
off the troll’s blunt tusks, glittering in the thin morning light from the broken windows. Because he’s young, his calcified features are a rough sketch carved into the stone. He’s a beautiful pale blue, with darker blue veins like polished marble. His right arm is missing from just below the shoulder, torn away—recently, too, by the thick purplish blood now crystallized into amethyst. The edge of the shoulder is sharp and rough, like broken rock. A line of reddish lichen crawls down his spine. Unferth says it’ll get thicker as he ages.

We’ve waited until the sun arrived in order to take this next step in a more controlled fashion, so the troll is trapped inside the meadery just in case.

“Shut it,” I say, gripping my seax in my fist.

From atop a ladder missing several rungs, Unferth reaches out and swings the shutters closed. Snow puffs down. “He might be too young, and so even this ambient light could keep him calcified …” His voice fades away as the beast’s entire body shivers.

I lift my seax to put the sharp tip of the broken back blade against the troll’s marble chest. Over his heart. I hold my breath, wondering why the entire world doesn’t pause for the occasion. Here I am, ready to slice into this martyr who came to me like a gift. The stone heart will be crusted with blood crystallized to amethyst.

As the troll wakes, dust flakes away from his skin and settles onto the mangy rug. The chain looped around his neck rattles. Tiny cracks appear all over his body, like the bed of a sun-baked river.

A fissure catches my eye: it looks like the rune
child.

I suck in a quick breath and pull back the seax.

“The gift of mothers,” I whisper to myself. A kenning for sacrifice. Mothers always lose the most, they say.

A thin layer of stone sloughs off from his chest. The pieces clatter and clink down to the floor.

This is too easy. Here is a lost troll, crippled and weak, hardly ferocious as trolls are supposed to be. I’m not even afraid of him. Defeating him barely counts as a triumph.

“Signy,” Unferth says softly from right beside me. “Why do you hesitate?”

The troll opens his mouth, revealing square molars, and he moans. His breath is sweet like rotten bananas.

“This is wrong,” I say, thinking of the rune
sacrifice
in Malchai Elizabethson’s iris. I will know my martyr when I see him.

Big yellow eyes creak open and the troll cries out, pushing away from us, but he’s chained to the floor and can’t go anywhere.

Unferth lowers his sword and says tentatively, “Wrong?”

The troll is at least a meter taller than me, thick and shaped like a giant gorilla. He winces from the light, one wide yellow eye on me. He’s awkward and broken and how can his heart possibly mean anything to the Alfather?

I spin and stalk away, kicking a dusty mead bottle. It skitters across the floor and shatters against the far wall. “It’s not right! I could never sacrifice a half-broken animal or man to my god. What honor could he bring to Odin? What could this heart possibly prove?” I jam the seax back into its sheath.
“Rag me.”

The troll groans loudly enough to shake the shards of glass that litter the floor. I have a devastating urge to feed him.

“Here, stop.” Unferth thumps the troll on the chest, and the troll swipes at him with his one good hand. Unferth touches his sword to the troll’s stomach and presses lightly, but enough that the tip cuts in. The troll howls as tiny streaks of violet blood drip down his belly.

“This sword is unhallowed blade and made to kill the likes of you, so behave,” Unferth says to the troll, then turns his back. The beast leans down onto his haunches, curls his only arm around his belly pathetically.

I stare at Unferth as he limps toward me. “Unhallowed? What does that mean?”

Eyes tight and leaning onto his good leg, Unferth wipes a smear of purple blood off his blade and onto his pants. “Cursed. A blade that has been used for ill. You have an imagination, little raven, use it.”

“How was it cursed?”

Unferth’s mouth opens, but for once he remains silent. There is no sudden mean cut of a smile, no disarming poem.
He doesn’t want to tell me.

“How, Truth-Teller?”

His lips tighten. “I killed my brother with it.”

Like a hammer thrown down, the words hit hard.

Kinslayer.

Unferth goes fast, ungracefully, toward the stairs.

Something like anticipation thrills through me, hot and melting. I hug myself and take deep breaths; I turn to the troll. “Red Stripe,” I murmur, naming him for the strip of scarlet lichen. “Do you think it’s not you or me but Ned Unferth who has a heart of stone?”

The troll sings a low note to agree with me.

Unferth stomps back upstairs with a stained and many-times-folded map to lay out our new options for the winter. He says Red Stripe was probably alone only because he was thrashed out of his herd for being puny or for this groaning he does. We need to find safe ground because if this troll knows of the place, so will his mother. Unferth’s refrain is the same as it was at the ruins of Montreal: we want to be the hunters, not the hunted. We should leave the troll here and continue up the coast as was the plan. But I can’t shove Red Stripe back out into the harsh wilderness to face his tormentors already missing an arm.

Reluctantly, Unferth says we might find a safe haven among the northern homesteads, except there’s no certainty that other trolls, other herds, wouldn’t find us. We’d have no chance against an entire herd. If I insist on caring for the beast, he thinks it’s better to wait through the coldest, iciest months and go hunting again with the thaw. I’ve already waited this long, what’s four more months?

An eternity.

“You can always change your mind about this one,” Unferth says as he thumps his fist against Red Stripe’s solid belly.

But I know better. This troll’s gentle, needy gaze is too innocent, too simple. He’s nothing like the trolls in the stories, and it’s difficult to imagine him razing a city to the ground. More like he’s a doe-eyed cow or pygmy mammoth to be protected. Some of his groaning sounds like
please.

Unferth nods tightly and says, “I spent last winter on an island nearby, where there are few people, an isolated tower for him, with ample practice grounds to continue improving your skills and hunting. They have electricity, running water, fine mead, and best of all they know me already and will trust me well enough when we drag this beast into their midst. We’ll be able to leave him there protected when it thaws if we position it well.”

I wait, expecting he offered such a long list of pros because it must have a rather hefty con.

Unferth smiles. “Jellyfish Cove, on the island of Vinland.”

My stomach twists.

Vinland is the northern territory where the Summerlings moved after I climbed the Tree. My wish-parents, Rome and Jesca, whom I’ve not seen in ten years. Who may hate me or, worse, have forgotten me. “That is not a good idea, Unferth.”

“Because you’re afraid of your family.”

“I’m not afraid of anything, you tick-eating old man.”

“Then give me your reason.” He smiles his challenge, for he knows I don’t have a better one.

Once the recent snow melts enough to drive—it’s early enough in the winter that the sun can still manage that—I wait with Red Stripe while Unferth returns to Toronto for a massive van we can pile the troll into without breaking the shocks. I follow behind in the truck. We make it to a tiny town named Seven Islands in about ten hours of very slow driving, and Unferth rents a ferry. Or rather, Unferth trades the van and two barrels of old wine for the winter’s use of the flat, sturdy boat. With ourselves, our gear, Red Stripe, and the truck all loaded up, we sail the Gulf of Lawrence. Unferth complains constantly but silently, and any time I think of cutting Red Stripe loose I can barely breathe. The beast looks at me as if I’m his herd mother now, and I won’t betray that, even if I should. We finally arrive seventeen days before Yule at the northernmost tip of Vinland.

An icy island of alpine tundra and inland mountains, Vinland was home to the oldest settlement of Vikers from Scandia. Gudrid Far-Traveler and her family landed here a thousand years ago, longing for new land to make their own. It was the ruins of her longhouse, found by archaeologists, that led to the National Historic Site the Summerlings currently run. I have vague memories of Rome’s excitement at being asked, Jesca’s worry that it would be too isolated for raising children. Rome thought it would be good for me especially, space enough to run wild if I liked and maybe drag Rathi out into freedom with me. But I never made it here until today.

Brisk wind blows across the ocean, making me think on the cold, deadly hand of destiny.

The island is untamed where we come ashore, no sign of people but for the signal tower. Boulders left by some ancient glacier tumble near the water, and the beaches are stone and pebbles. Cormorants and gulls hover in the salty wind. There are no trees at all, but tufts of dead grass and low, rough bushes cling to the shallow hills, and frozen streams cut through the valleys, shimmering with sunlight like diamond veins. Rathi told me about it last summer when we were together in New Netherland, about the detailed historical reenactments and elaborate theater of the Viker Festival, how he thought I’d adore the drama and poetry. He showed me pictures of the pennants and tents, the cobblestone lanes and whitewashed cottages. But mostly he showed me the wild land and loud ocean, the desperate beauty of everything. Rathi remembered I loved my beauty raw.

Unferth and I anchor the ferry as near the rocky beach as we can, using the butts of the troll-spears to shove chunks of ice out of our way. The bergs glare blue-white like the hottest of flames as they bob gently. We leave a sun-calcified Red Stripe on the ferry and jump into the water to wade to shore with bags held high over our heads.

My legs and hips grow so cold so fast I think they’ll shatter.

But we make it. Before we die of hypothermia, we head into the tower to strip and heat up the iron oven that warms the entire living space. It’s an old signal tower, three stories, with a giant bell hanging forgotten at the top. On clear days, Unferth says, there’s a view across Leif’s Channel to the Canadian coast. While digging around on the bottom floor last year he found fifty-year-old letters that claimed the bell was part of a troll warning system put in place after the Montreal Troll Wars. Leif’s Channel used to be one of the most dangerous crossing points for the greater mountain troll herds who wished to avoid the heavy patrols of the mainland.

And so it’s best not to show up unannounced in the Jellyfish Cove bay, even sixty years later, with a greater mountain troll.

Tonight we’ll take the rowboat leaning against the whitewashed side of the tower out to unchain Red Stripe, lead him through the water to shore. Tomorrow we’ll sail the ferry around to the eastern side of this long peninsula to the town of Jellyfish Cove. We’ll dock there and offload the truck. Give them all warning about Red Stripe.

Unferth and I wrap blankets around ourselves and get the oven going. It’s a wide iron chimney up one side of the tower, with a hearth on the first and second floors. He claims the bottom-level bedroom on account of his leg and says there should be some old clothes up on the second floor. Out of fashion, no doubt, but made for the Vinland winter.