The Strange Maid (14 page)

I drag tourists into the dancing with me, hold their hands and spin and spin. The clown Peachtree leaps onto me from behind, enveloping me in a monster hug. “That was amazing!” she shrieks. “Stay with us, Signy!” Her hair flairs blue and pink around her head and a hundred tiny plastic sequins stick to her face for a mask. I only laugh, and she flaps at my boring raven mask. We share a plastic glass of mead before diving back into the dancing.

Fiddles make raucous noise, and shrieks of laughter carry it along. Everyone wears a mask: some are plain from the bin like mine, some feathered or long-nosed, others bejeweled, painted, or scattering glitter with every step. Who can tell tourist from townie? Husband from wife, or Odinist from Freyan? We all crowd together on Baldur’s holiday, dancing, drinking, and readying paper lanterns to send up into the sky as a trailing beacon to guide Baldur home at dawn.

The raven mask lets me be one of them, not Signy Valborn, if only for a night.

Jesca bustles through the crowd, her hair uncharacteristically loose and a flute of champagne in her delicate hand. “Signy!” she calls out. Her hip bumps into the woman beside her, and she playfully apologizes before reaching for my hand. I kiss her cheek, and she says loudly in my ear, “I just spoke to Rathi before the feast! He’s accepted a summer fellowship at a church in Mizizibi, isn’t that wonderful! He said they fought for him!”

I look into her bright eyes and see only
home
there. Only a tipsy glaze and happiness. She pushes my mask off my face to better study it. “He’ll be here next week to visit, and I thought perhaps you might want to wait for him, to stay just a little bit longer …”

“Jesca!”

“You two were always so good for each other.”

“We were little kids, that’s not who we are anymore.” My vivid joy is sinking away, but I cling to it, wanting to keep hold of this high bliss as long as I can, before I have to go away tomorrow and leave this perfect night behind me.

Jesca touches my cheeks. “That isn’t what he told me last summer, maidling.” But she shakes her head before I can answer. She kisses my cheeks and murmurs, “Happy Baldur’s Night,” into my ear.

She vanishes into the crowd again and suddenly I’m desperate to find Unferth. Where did he disappear to? Isn’t he finished putting Red Stripe to bed yet? I turn in a full circle, scanning the crowd.

Thin, straight clouds point toward the vanished sun, dragging lines of pink with them. The air is cold but bright and very much alive. People smile at me, hold out hands to pull me back into the dancing. They call her name,
Valtheow!
or
Vinland Valkyrie!,
not Signy. They want me to join them, offering another drink or piece of roasted apple. I take it all, eating from their fingers, drinking the mead or sparkling wine until my head spins.

What I want is Ned Unferth, right now. I want him to see me being part of all this, bright and heady like he was at the Shipworm, a piece of this whole.

I hurry toward the boundary of the meadow, heart beating harder than it should. The evening presses in and I blink fast, trying to find my best balance. I search the shadows for him, the edges of the crowd where he must be if he’s not in the center of it all. “A creature of thresholds.” I whisper a drunken poem to myself. “Spiritless because nothing exists between nothing.”

There he is, standing on the slope of the moor, flask in hand, still wearing his feast costume. A green goblin mask covers his face, with apple-round cheeks, crescent eye slits, and a wide, clownish nose. But under it is his dangerous smile, his sharp white teeth.

“Finished gaping?” Ned says lazily, one corner of that smile hooking up.

“I don’t think I am,” I whisper, stepping forward. I snatch his hand and pull him farther up the rocky slope to where the shadows dance, too. The beak of my mask is too long for what I want, and I shove it up over my forehead, catching it in my hair with a tangle. Ned widens his colorless eyes but says nothing as I pull off his mask. It leaves two small red lines on his cheeks where it pressed.

He’ll never be beautiful, never free of the gouges pain leaves around his mouth. Always tight angles and narrowed eyes. But there’s a charged string connecting us and it’s the only thing I understand at all.

As the firelight flickers across his thin lips I hear nothing but the howl of blood in my ears. I kiss him.

His chest is hard against mine and he touches my elbows. I cup his face; my fingers skim the rough edges of his jaw. A tiny sigh escapes him, and the moment he breathes into my mouth I sink in, dropping forward forever, but not like falling. Like floating.

“Oh, little raven,” he whispers, and I smile, thinking,
I want those teeth cutting into my lips.

But when I move to kiss him again, Unferth holds me back.

“Ned?” I say, blinking. The slope puts him centimeters higher than me, so he looks down with an ache in his eyes, except that it might merely be pity.

“You shouldn’t do that again,” he says.

Confusion makes me spiky.
“Do that?”

“Kiss me,” he snaps.

I push my hands into my stomach. “You liked it,” I say, knowing, knowing,
knowing
he kissed me back.

But he’s silent, as if he has no idea, for this one single time, what he can possibly say.

I grab his coat in my fists and kiss him again, pushing our teeth together, making it a fight. He’ll fight me to the end of the world if that’s the sort if kiss it has to be.

“Signy,”
he hisses, shoving me away.

Everything inside me combusts.
“Unferth,”
I spit back. “What is
wrong
with you?”

He lifts his eyebrows in that arrogant way and I feel small and stupid.
What is wrong with me?

My heels catch on gravel and I trip, righting myself with a furious grunt. Without a backward glance I stomp away, wishing my boots could pound bruises into the island and tear the night up.

Wind tosses mist off the surface of the sea and I scrape my hands against lichen-crusted rocks to balance in the near dark. At the far end of a narrow peninsula a fleet of standing stones waits, as though the island holds them in the palm of its outstretched hand. It’s precarious, but the easier path out to the death ship ruins is also longer by a kilometer.

I hurry through scruffy grasses and clumps of heather, kicking at stones and cursing, furious. Anger and hurt burn through me, keeping my fingers warm in the frozen evening, but not humiliation.
Never
humiliation. I did not misread anything, I did nothing wrong. I don’t know why he pushed me away, but
odd-eye!
It isn’t because he doesn’t want me.

The ruins are thirteen death ships in all, each built of sixteen standing stones over a thousand years ago as a holy place to burn the dead. The ships are worn smooth by high tides and cracked from ice, but their prows still aim at the ocean and the long way home to Scandia. Some of the rocks are collapsed upon themselves or crumbled, and a good ten of them tilt to one side or the other. But at least three of the ships are untouched by time, ruins in name only.

Few come here, even of the most adventurous tourists. There’s no marked path and no advertising. It’s lonely and cold and haunted. I found it accidentally, on one of my lonely winter marches.

Here at the western edge of the grassy beach, a shallow cave is dug into the hillside. Probably erosion and ice did all the work to create the three-quarter circle of shelter. Over the weeks I’ve left supplies there: candles and matches, blankets and extra mittens. The wind has died down, and cuts off completely when I’m in the dugout. With a fire and the blankets, it’ll be nearly cozy.

In the last light, I take the candles and pick my way out into the fleet. The very last of the sun sets behind me, casting gold against the edges of the icebergs that dip and soar with the gently rolling ocean. I stick a taper onto the prow-stone of each ship and set them aflame. Thirteen candles to light Baldur’s way.

I tried to celebrate it in community. I tried. I danced and I performed and embraced joy they way the Freyans do, yet here I end up again, alone in my red therma-wool dress and heavy boots, my hair braided like a Valkyrie and the darkness around my eyes, red on my mouth. I’m half Signy, half Valtheow, and all pretense. I touch my lips, and I think of Unferth’s teeth. “Odd-eye,” I whisper. The curse slinks through the ghostly fleet.

With my hand on the prow of the front ship, I lift my eyes to the stars.

Speak to me, Alfather. I miss you.

There is no answer.

My heart hurts, and I bitterly think maybe it
is
turning to stone. Maybe that’s why Unferth is here. To wound me. Valkyrie are supposed to know suffering, to understand pain and betrayal. In the old stories they hunt vengeance and cast curses, destroy cities when they need to and set fire to the world.

Light in the east catches my attention. A tiny glow rises up from the black horizon, flying slowly up and up.

There’s another, and another. Three more.

The lanterns being released back at the meadow for Baldur. Two hundred of them rise. They bob and twirl in the wind, dancing out over the sea. Like constellations come to life.

As I stare, as I sink down among the death ships, I image they spell out a burning, vibrant rune.

Chaos.

Again and again it appears against the starry sky, weaving in and out of itself like a message for the entire world.

EIGHT

THE SUN WAKES
me, groggy and chilled. The ocean sighs and I get up, walk to the threshold. During the night a chuck of ice broke free from one of the larger bergs and drifted near enough I could swim out to it if the water were any warmer. The blue ice winks in the sunlight. I splash my face with the freezing salt water to clear my head and wander down the coast to relieve myself.

The death ships are peaceful and whisper to me, and I’m reluctant to return to town and find Unferth. Though today is the day we’re supposed to leave.

Can I still face this destiny with him at my side?

Just the thought of going without him, of hunting alone, grips my stomach like a vise.

To calm down, I crouch along the shore to draw rune poems into the sand, wishing it were spray paint on the sidewalk. Siri of the Ice used to make me write poems with her on snow or the sand of a beach, teaching me the point was to relax, to give the words to our god, not to seek fame or accolades
. Poetry is for Odin, and from him, in a cycle like breathing,
she would say as the snow melted or the tide wiped our songs away. Once I was on my own, this was one of the only ways I could relax. But I always found ways to leave a stain, to draw the rune poems with permanent marker or paint.
Signy Valborn was here.

Beginning with
chaos
I link words and ideas together into one massive, scrawling poem, runes atop runes, in lines and spirals. The runes flow from the nothing-space in my memory, from the gossip of the ocean waves. I let my hand wander,
chaos chaos chaos changes the fate-strings of any life, we the death born in years gone by walk out gold-adorned, walk in tinged with blood. We rest in stone under the sun. Hear the bear star be born, the seether fall into darkness. Lost sun answer me when the sky is cold, and fate unravels
on and on, one rune after another.

As the tide slowly moves in, pushing dark streaks of seaweed up the beach, I back farther into the field of stone ships.

Fate unravels.

Hear the bear star be born, the seether fall into darkness.

I could never admit it to Siri, but she was right. Poetry is like the very breath in my lungs: alive for one moment and gone in the next, never the same because poets change, our voices change, our rhythm and accents, our purpose and meaning all change.

This poem will never exist again. There is no pressure in it, no future. I whisper the words of my rune poem and the ocean drags them away one line at a time.