Europa (15 page)

They rejoined Erik and Arfast at the crossroads just above the lake’s shore, and after a little while on the road Freya felt her clothes and hair drying out, though the stench of rotting plants clung to her. An hour later on the westward road, Freya heard her sister whispering in her sleep. Katja’s ears felt even larger and more pointed than before, and tiny white hairs and red hairs stood up on the young vala’s cheeks and neck and hands.

“She’s getting worse,” Freya called out. “We should stop and rest, and try to break her fever.”

“Hush! Not so loud.” Wren trotted back to them. “There’s no help for your sister here.” She swept her arm out at the bleak yellow hills dusted with snow, which stretched on and on with only the bluish outlines of the mountains in the distance. “And it’s too dangerous to rest in the open, not with the reavers prowling about. They could be anywhere. We need to keep moving, and quietly at that, or we’ll all be dining with the good lord Woden this evening.”

“Well, how far is it to Hengavik now?”

“Not far. Just another hour or so, I think.”

“I don’t remember Hengavik at all,” Freya said. “Is it large? Well-defended?”

“I don’t know. Gudrun took me from my parents when I was tiny, barely walking. And I’ve never left Denveller except to gather herbs.”

“Then how do you know that Hengavik is only an hour away?”

Wren smiled brightly. “Vala’s intuition.”

Two hours later they paused at the crest of a low rise and looked out over a flat plain of grass rippling in the breeze. In the far north Freya saw a great mountain smoking against the pale afternoon sky, and to the south another, smaller volcano squatted at the edge of the world, a thin trail of black rising from its summit to the heavens. But down on the plain lay the town of Hengavik, a man-made warren of hundreds of stone houses and earth houses, most sunken into the plain or clustered back-to-back to form unnatural looking hills at regular intervals along the meandering lanes.

But none of the travelers were looking at the houses or the roads.

In the center of the city there rose an enormous skeleton, a vast sun-bleached ribcage resting at an angle, as though the Allfather himself had hurled a frost giant across Ysland and the demon had speared into the ground head-first, and been left to rot where he fell. There was no sign of limbs, no skull, no shoulder blades or horns or wings or fins to tell what gargantuan beast might have actually died there. Only the ribs remained, partially silhouetted by the late day sun.

“Ever seen anything like that before?” Freya asked.

Erik shook his head.

Wren shook her head and glanced skyward. “Lord, in all our little chats together, especially the ones that were all about you, you might have mentioned this. I’m not saying I deserve to know every little thing about you or me or Ysland, but this seems somewhat important.”

Freya stared at the ribs. They rose as tall as ten or twelve men above the floor of the plain, many times taller than the tallest buildings in Hengavik, which were no larger than Gudrun’s tower. And the ribcage stretched four or five times as long as it was tall from the center of the town down toward its southern edge. She tried to guess how many pigs or sheep or elk or even men might fit in the giant’s belly, but the sheer size of the thing defeated her. It was too large to imagine, too large to believe. Her mouth worked, but no sound came out.

Erik’s hand began to move. “If this was ancient, wouldn’t we have heard of it?”

Freya nodded. “Wren, when you lived in Denveller, did you meet many travelers from Hengavik?”

The girl nodded. “Many, when I was younger. Not so many lately. And none at all in the last year.”

“And you’ve never heard of this… thing?”

The girl shook her head. “I think I would remember if a tinker had mentioned the bones of a giant lying in the center of the town.”

Visions swam through Freya’s imagination, visions of frost giants and white whales and Fenrir, the demon wolf. As a child she’d always thought of the god-king Woden as a man, a man with unfathomable knowledge and power, but a man nonetheless. And the frost giants had merely been taller men, and the demon Fenrir had merely been a large wolf.

But now, as she stared at the otherworldly remains of a creature that must have stood half as tall as a mountain, the ancient stories came alive for her as never before, the universe expanding into a playground for gods and monsters unlike anything she had ever known. And she, and her home, and her life, which had all seemed so solid and real and important just a moment ago, were reduced to snow dust in the maelstrom of eternity.

Freya blinked and glanced at her sweating, wheezing sister sprawled on the back of a dirty white elk, and suddenly the vast universe seemed just as unreal and irrelevant as it had to her as a child, and she was about to tell the others to get moving when Wren whispered, “The old stories are true, aren’t they? All of them. The reavers and Fenrir. Woden and the frost giants. It’s all true.”

“You doubted?” Freya asked quietly as the wind whipped her long blonde hair around her face.

“I’ve spent the last seventeen years alone in a tower with a crazy old woman, and the last several seasons in a deserted village with monsters wandering the countryside.” Wren sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I figured the gods had forgotten about me.”

“But you talk to Woden all the time.”

The girl shrugged. “I guess I needed to talk to someone, and a god makes a good listener. Do you think he minds me talking to him the way I do?”

Freya shook her head. “Well, if he’s a decent god, then I’m sure he appreciates the attention. And if he’s not, then to hell with him.” The huntress nodded at the giant skeleton. “But either way, it looks to me like Woden’s had other things on his mind than you or me, lately. Come on. Let’s go.”

But Erik held up his hand. “Where are the people?” he signed.

Freya looked again at the empty fields and the empty streets, and she listened to the breeze playing softly through the tall yellow grass. “You think the reavers have been here too? The reavers killed all the people?”

“If not the reavers, then whatever that thing was.” Wren nodded at the skeleton.

“Right, well, either way, we need to keep moving.” Freya led Arfast down the gentle slope to the flat plain and together they crossed the fields to the gravelly edge of Hengavik. They paused before entering the town and listened to the utter silence of the stone ruins before them. No voices, no footsteps, no animals, not even the wind. Just the stillness of an empty grave. Using hand signs, Freya told Erik to take Arfast and told Wren to watch their rear. And then, with the tip of her spear leveled at the empty road ahead, she led them into the town.

They walked quietly down the first road, following its gentle curve to the south past empty homes that gaped and stared like skulls at the travelers, just as the ones in Denveller had, only here the cottages were in better repair. Walls were straight and roofs appeared water-tight, and leather curtains flapped in several windows and doorways. Overturned, lost, and broken pots and jugs lay in the road, some completely intact and others smashed into dust that ground beneath their boots as they passed. Freya sniffed in the lanes and she poked her head into doorways to sniff in the shadows, but she smelled nothing at all. No food, no rot, no dung. Time had swept all of Hengavik clean.

Freya moved carefully down the empty lanes, pausing here and there to listen or to sniff, or to bend down and peer at the dust at her feet. But if there were any tracks, she couldn’t recognize them on the gravel roads. And every step they took brought them closer to the great ribcage towering over the town and casting nightmare shadows across the plains by the light of the setting sun.

The sky was violet and the world beneath it was gray and cold when Freya reached the first of the giant’s ribs. Erik and Wren lingered in the road behind her as she stepped forward and touched the massive bone.

“It’s not bone,” she said. “It’s steel. Old and rusted. And look, there’s moss growing on it here, and grass inside there.” She pointed. “But not much. It’s been here a few years, but not many.”

Wren crept up to her side. “Steel? Frost giants had bones of steel? No wonder only the Allfather could kill them.”

“Maybe.” Freya scraped her spear’s blade along the face of the rib in front of them, watching the rust flake away and flutter to the ground. Above them the rib swept up in a dramatic curve to touch the slender spine of the creature. “Or maybe this isn’t a frost giant. Look there.” She pointed down the belly of the beast to a twisted, blackened mound.

“The heart?” Wren clasped her hands to her chest, her fingers rubbing at the rinegold ring on her right hand. “Gudrun says to beware its heart.”

“Let’s take a closer look.” Freya led the girl inside the enormous cage of steel ribs to the small mound and they looked down on the tiny bits of steel melted onto the broken rubble of the house that no doubt had stood where the giant had fallen. Freya squatted down and scraped her bone knife along a charred lump nailed to the ground with a small metal spike. The lump made a crackling sound, and chips of blackened char fell from it.

“What is that?” Wren asked.

Freya picked up the chips and sniffed them. “You’re not going to believe this.”

“Why? What is it?”

“I think… I think it’s wood. Old, burnt wood. Real wood, from a tree.” Freya pocketed the strange treasures, along with a few more bits from the scorched lump, and then she led Wren back out to the street where Erik and Arfast waited with Katja in the deepening shadows of Hengavik.

“So much for finding Skadi,” Freya said. “No one’s here. No one’s been here for over a year.”

“It’s getting late,” Erik signed. “We need to find a safe place to sleep.”

“Yeah, I know.” Freya pointed up the road. “Let’s take a look up that way.”

They resumed their earlier formation and the huntress led the others up the gravel lane, away from the giant’s ribs, and up to the open doorway of a long house buried in a man-made hill side-to-side with a second identical house. Both houses ran in a straight line with a second door at the far end, and the earth had been piled over them like a husband and wife lying together under the blankets in bed. With a bit of effort, they wrestled Arfast’s antlers through the doorway and Wren saw to making Katja comfortable while Freya and Erik spent the next half hour piling heavy stones in the southern doorway, and making the northern doorway narrower.

Night fell quickly, draining the last remaining shreds of light from the sky, and a thousand tiny eyes winked open in the darkness above, staring down at the dead town in uncaring silence. Erik took the first watch, so Wren and Freya both lay down beside the feverish Katja and went to sleep with empty bellies.

Freya woke quickly when Erik touched her arm, but he was smiling and yawning, not telling her that there was some new danger.

“It’s midnight. Mostly quiet,” he signed. “There was some howling, but it was far to the north, and that was more than an hour ago.”

She nodded and glanced at her sister and the young girl in black beside her. Both were sleeping soundly, though Katja was panting through her open mouth in quick shallow breaths. Freya frowned, but turned away. There was nothing she could do for her sister at the moment, so she reached for her spear to take the watch. But Erik caught her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist, and then the side of her neck, and she closed her eyes and felt the heat of him moving across her skin to her mouth and she let him press her back down onto her blanket, his tongue surging between her lips, his hands massaging her neck and hips as he lay down beside her.

Freya wrapped her arms around his head, trapping his mouth against her own for a moment, and then she pushed him back and saw the disappointment and understanding mingled in his eyes as he leaned back and let her sit up. She leaned over to bite his ear, and then stood up, fetched her spear, and went to sit by the open doorway. A soft breeze sighed through the empty streets and the sound of the grassy plains rustling filled the night with a chorus of distant whispers.

Her bones were tired but her mind was not, and the cold air kept her eyes feeling sharp. Wrapped in her heavy wool blanket with her arms and legs curled around her spear, she sat in the doorway and stared up at the stars, at the thousand cold eyes staring back down at her. When she looked down at the empty road beyond the door, it was covered in a thick white mist.

Aether. Damn.

Freya glared at the fog. It flowed past the doorway like a river of clouds and sea foam, swirling and rippling and rolling upon itself. She stood up and stepped outside, checking the road in both directions, but there was nothing to see.

Not yet, anyway.

With the speed and grace of a mountain lion she leapt up the side of their earthen house to stand on its grassy roof and look out across the town with her spear planted beside her. The mist lay thick and white upon the ground, blanketing the gravel roads and lapping silently at the empty doorways of the abandoned homes. And to her left, toward the western end of the town, Freya saw the shadowy figure of a man walking slowly down the center of the road toward her. The huntress frowned.

Ghosts. I hate ghosts.

It took the man several minutes to come down the road to the house where Freya stood exposed on the roof, and when he arrived the ghost paused and looked up at her. “Have you seen a fair-haired girl come by this way?” he asked. He held his hand by his waist. “About this tall?”

Freya blinked and tightened her grip on her spear. The steel felt cold and clammy. “No,” she said softly.

The ghost nodded and continued on his way down the street and around a corner out of sight.

Then a shadowy woman emerged from a house across the street and wandered off to the south without sparing Freya a glance. And then the shade of an old crone shuffled by. And two solemn children. And a husband and wife. And on and on they came by the dozens, drifting silently through the streets, occasionally pausing to look at something or someone, even exchanging a few quiet words with each other, and then continuing on their starlit strolls through the streets of Hengavik.