The Strange Maid (27 page)

“All right?” Brick says through a yawn. I hear the tinny song beating from his abandoned earphones.

A small SUV turns the corner onto the road leading directly for us. It’s shiny and dark blue, cleaned of all the salt spray and Vinland mud. He drives slowly—it must be exactly the on-base speed limit—along the low gray fence surrounding the airfield and stops ten meters back from me and the guardhouse.

Soren turns off the engine and climbs out. He glances briefly at Brick, who’s clamoring out of the little wooden house, then keeps his gaze on me through the gate.

“Good morning,” I say.

“I didn’t think you’d be waiting.” The sun behind him turns his buzzed black hair into a trim halo and makes it rough to see his tattoo.

“Odinists only, boy,” Brick says.

I sigh. “Then let me out to speak with him.”

“Valkyrie …”

“Brick. Soren Bearstar is a hero of Asgard and my friend. I recognize his worth, and I will not speak to him through a chain-link fence.”

Making his reluctance known by dragging his feet, Brick levers the gate lock open and we slide it aside. “Come on,” I say, waving my hand for Soren to follow. He does as Brick gets on his radio to warn Captain Darius what I’ve done.

I lead Soren away from the warehouse to the edge of the camp where the asphalt meets star-shaped pylons and the wide, cold sea. Mist and low clouds obscure the sun. “You could have called, saved yourself that,” I say, nudging his wrist.

“It wouldn’t have mattered. That’s how they treat me.”

“Odd-eye, Soren, you’re such a martyr. You
should
be devoted to the god of sacrifice.”

The little jerk of his shoulder is all the answer I get. The wind scours salt against the concrete pylons, rushing past my face. “The Mad Eagles have Red Stripe, the runt troll Ned and I captured last winter. I want him, but the captain says Baldur has put a claim on him already. You need to explain to Baldur that Red Stripe is mine.”

Soren eyes me sideways. “Explain to Baldur.”

“Well.”

“I’ll call him. See what he says.”

“Tell him Red Stripe lost an arm and is ridiculously tame.”

“A pet. You have a troll for a pet, even after all of this.”

I scrape the toe of my boot against the pylon, scraping off a few little flakes of concrete. “Also I’d like to see about having the Mad Eagles—or at least some of them—assigned to me. A Valkyrie usually has a small band of berserkers, and even though I’m not technically on the council, maybe Baldur could help get around that.”

“I’m starting to think it isn’t my help you want so much as whose help I can get you.”

I offer Soren my best smile. “Can’t it be both?”

“There was a report in Vertmont last night of a sighting of a greater mountain troll mother.” He says it so casually I’m halfway to answering I don’t care about Vertmont before the meaning sinks in.

I clutch his arm. “Last night. Vertmont. The north part? That’s … near Montreal.”

“I have the bags from your truck in the backseat.”

The urge to throw my arms around him, to kiss him or drag him into an impromptu dance, is nearly irresistible. But all I do is hold out my hand. “Take me, Bearstar,” I say, pitching my voice low and flirty.

Soren glowers down at me until I laugh. This is it, we’re going after her, and nothing can muffle the violent thrill spiking around my heart.

SEVENTEEN

LONG SALT IS
a walled town in Vertmont kingstate, situated along the North River about forty kilometers southwest of the ruins of Montreal. We arrive midmorning the day after leaving the Mad Eagles. Pain stabs the back of my eyes, since I woke up again and again last night, despite the completely decent hotel room Soren bought for us with a fancy credit card he sheepishly admitted had been supplied by Baldur the Beautiful.

In my dreams the troll mother raked her claws across my eyes, her tusks hooked into my ribs as she buried her face in my chest, tearing me apart, until all that remained was my bright, beating heart. Soren dragged me up after midnight to run laps around the hotel parking lot until the sun rose. We piled into the SUV then, with Styrofoam cups of bad lobby coffee, and I leaned my head against the window, eyes shut, while Soren kept me barely awake with stories of the Berserker Wars. He’s no poet, and his voice faded into the gentle rumble of the engine more often than not, but he knows more grim details about the five-year back-and-forth between berserkers and the last of the frost giants. He almost manages to distract me from all my worries about whether this troll mother they saw in Vertmont is
my
troll mother.

The walls of Long Salt are four meters tall and at least one thick, meant to deter most types of trolls or at least slow down a greater mountain herd. We roll slowly through, though there’s no guard, into a charming town that bustles with life. Early spring flowers burst from long boxes lining the main street, and colorful prayer flags flutter from the tall light posts. A handful of temples raise the only skyline, their white steeples reaching toward the perfect cotton-ball clouds. Children run through the school yard, mothers push strollers along the sidewalks, and every block has its own crossroads shrine strung with plastic beads and incense sticks.

As we reach the whitewashed downtown with its antiques stores and coffee shops, a long banner stretches across the road, bright yellow with green and pink daisies, that reads:
WELCOME TO LONG SALT GARDEN FESTIVAL.

There’s nothing here to indicate the presence of trolls. With the national troll alert so recent, it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t have reacted even more strongly than usual.

“You’re sure this is where the report came from?” I ask.

“It was an anonymous caller who claimed to be fishing out by the old locks and saw her rooting around near the northern wall of town.”

“Who’d he call? The militia?”

“The Mjolnir Institute.”

I don’t know much about the institute except that it’s funded through efforts of Thor Thunderer and tracks all kind of troll information. They aren’t the first responders in an attack, and so it’s odd this tipster would’ve called them. But I heard about it so fast probably because it went through Thor’s institute and straight to Baldur’s ear.

We stop for brunch at a bistro with outdoor seating, and Soren does his best to hunker down and not draw attention while I flirt with our waitress for information. I pretend to be interested in the history of the town and ask about the garden festival, about how the population did during Baldur’s disappearance, and with the troll alert if she thinks they’ll get as many out-of-town guests as usual. I bring up trolls at least three times, giving her ample opportunity to tell me about any actual sightings, but the nearest she offers is an anecdote about a place out by the river the kids call Troll Spot, where they can look toward the system of locks and some drowned cities called the Lost Villages. They go up there to smoke leaf and make out, and pretend to see trolls in the water. Since the anonymous fisherman mentioned the locks, too, I guess it’s our best bet. I give Soren a sidelong glance and say to the waitress, “A good make-out spot, you say? How do we get there?”

Soren, bless him, ducks his face, which is as good as a blush.

Full of caffeine and sandwiches, we get back into the SUV and follow her directions out the east gate, then north on a dirt road through a lovely forest. Spring leaves turn the light chartreuse as the road climbs over a slight hill and stops. The land slopes away toward the river, a quick-moving, wide-banked waterway here glinting brown in the sun. Soren stops the car and we climb out, armed with troll-spears and our swords. The view north stretches over flat fields and groves of green trees, and to the east the river narrows and we can see the concrete rectangles of abandoned locks. Farther east the horizon slides into a haze of clouds, but it must be where the Lost Villages were.

I pick my way downhill to the river. West where the water slows, a handful of motorboats laze in the current, and a couple of kayaks, too. Nobody here is worried about trolls. The couple who spot us give our spears a surprised look, though.

My boots sink into the mud. A few drowned trees cling to the bank. Insects buzz at my face and I swat them away. I shuck off my coat, wishing I’d left it in the car. We’re not on a glacier island anymore, obviously, and spring is in full bloom. Behind me, Soren sneezes.

For an hour I walk along the bank toward the locks, eyes down for troll-sign. There’s absolutely nothing. Frustration has me slashing with the spear at the thin branches that hang in my way, stomping down on grass that did me no harm. We get to the locks and I push easily through a hole in the rusty chain-link fence. The locks are huge rectangular chambers built into the river, with mechanisms for raising and lowering the water level in order to help boats get upriver. These are drained and defunct, since there’s nothing north since Montreal fell.

I climb the crumbling old stairs up to the top and look down into the first lock. Moss darkens the low, stagnant water, and it smells like rotten plants. The river flows free on the other side, splashing resentfully at the concrete.

Soren touches my elbow and points to the bottom of this first lock. Huddled down in the sunny corner are three small oblong stones. The water has them only partially hidden.

“Skit,” I say. Lesser trolls. There’s a broken and rusty old ladder beside them, missing several rungs. Fine dining for an iron wight. I don’t know if that makes it more or less likely the troll mother is here. Conventional wisdom would say they avoid their larger cousins, but the wights appeared on Vinland only when there’d recently been a herd moving about. If mine is the first mother, with Freya’s charm in her heart, there’s no knowing what effect she might have on the lesser trolls.

I hurry along the side of the lock, heave up onto the next one, and keep going. There’s evidence of claws and chewing on some metal drums lined along the land side of the locks, and one spillway has been torn out enough that water trickles slowly through, making a perfect little drinking fountain. But I spy no broken trees, no boulders of any size, and there’s nothing but flat farmland for kilometers. No caves, no veins of granite near the surface of the earth.

“There’s nowhere for her to hide,” I exclaim when the sun is at its apex, wiping away any shadows. “Unless she’s underwater.”

He squints against the glare off the river. “You aren’t about to propose diving, are you?”

“A few more sleepless nights and I might be.”

“We can come back when the sun is gone, and until then go interview the fishermen. Maybe find our anonymous informant.”

With a final glare at the little iron wights calcified into stones at the bottom of the lock, I agree.

But even interviewing all the hikers and kayakers we can find nearer to the town, there’s no sign of him.

When the sun sets we drive out to the end of the locks, farther east toward Montreal than we walked. We eat takeout in the cab, staring at the black river through the windshield. Stars pop out, brighter in the northeast than they are back toward the glow from Long Salt. Maybe she’ll show herself in the darkness.

I drift into sleep, waking as Soren shuffles around because a muffled pop song sounds behind the dash. He mumbles an apology as he reaches across me for the glove compartment. It unlatches and a cell phone falls out. He catches it and thumbs it on. “Hello? Ah, yes. No.”

The tinny voice on the other end sounds like Baldur. I think I hear
Port Orleans
and
your Valkyrie.

“Yes, thanks. No, we haven’t had any luck. Yes …” Soren taps his head back against the driver’s seat, staring at the roof. “That might be related, we’ll talk about it.” Turning his head away from me, he whispers, “Baldur,
stop.
”

There’s laughter from the god of light. I’m torn between wanting and not wanting to know what he’s teasing Soren about.

Soren closes the phone and clears his throat. “Can you put this back?” He drops it in my hand. “Baldur says he’s taking Red Stripe to Port Orleans for a Disir Day charity ball he’s throwing with one of the southern preachers, to benefit Vinland relief. He wants you to come claim your troll there and be his special guest.”