Part 3: Chapter 8: Why We Should All Vote, even in lame elections
Chapter 8: Election Day
Frost coated the grass the next morning. The rising sun shone on it, turning the valley a dreamy coral under the blue bowl of sky. The milkweed and goldenrod and cattails in the marshes stood rigid, like icy spears shimmering in the sun, and the last gooseberries withered on the vine.
In homeroom, they were all given ballots and told to vote, though no one felt much like it after last night’s party.
Valerie had gone down slightly after midnight, dressed in a hangman’s costume, and sent the last guests home with an ominous speech about old basements and spirits that frequented them in the wee hours. She considered the event a success: in the morning she beamed at Imogen, spooning coffee beans into the grinder, and said, “I talked to all the parents. It was boring, but I’ve got a bunch more votes for D.A. I think a few folks will do a one-eighty at the polls today. I managed to convince some old-timers who thought I was a bleeding heart on crime.”
Imogen listened politely, though she thought most people couldn’t be bothered to care who got elected district attorney of a county where ninety percent of the crimes you ever heard about were dirt-road drunk driving and break-ins at rich people’s summer cabins.
She felt much the same about the class election, where even less was at stake. Who was even running? Imogen vaguely remembered that Jeremy Bliss was Kristen’s running mate - of course - and that Britta Golp was the other main presidential contender. The third and final candidate was a boy named Brendan Becker who wore bowties to school like his hero, some famous political columnist in a magazine. Every time he talked, he made a speech, and Imogen had never bothered to listen to the end of one.
You could write in candidates. She nibbled on her pencil, then neatly printed Fafnir the Dragon under Junior Class Treasurer. For Secretary she wrote Snorri Stursomething and for Vice President Loki McJotunson. She was about to vote for Sigurd Volsung for president when it occurred to her that Kristen Hawke might win.
Might? No, she would win.
Britta and Brendan were the kind of people who get elected to real-life positions of power, but they were boring. Besides, no one knew what, if anything, the junior class president actually did, other than appointing people to next year’s prom committee. It was the kind of title you wanted so you could put it on your college application as evidence of leadership potential.
Kristen Hawke would not be boring.
Imogen let her pencil hover over the Britta box, then over the Kristen box. She wrote Sigurd Volsung in the blank, then erased it, then wrote it again, in pen this time.
What could Kristen do as president that would hurt anyone? She couldn’t command students to stop coming to class, or teachers to stop teaching, or the principal to declare the school closed. She couldn’t keep anyone from taking the PSAT or the SAT or applying to college. She couldn’t announce that the prom would be held in the Jotuns’ cave lair, or that everyone would wear black. All she could do, really, was keep saying strange things. At worst, those strange things would make people think.
You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to want anything.
Both those statements sounded pretty accurate, if you put the emphasis on have to. Imogen wanted to do things and want things. She chose to do things and want things. But she had no intention of letting someone else - whether it was a guidance counselor, Granny, Evie Carlsson, a TV commercial or Stephen Wildasin - tell her what those things should be.
She drew a winky-face over the I in Sigurd’s name and handed in her ballot.
Stephen didn’t bother to vote at all. He had study hall first period in the same room as homeroom, and he used it as an occasion to put his head down on the desk and catch up on his sleep.
When ballots were collected, he heard the teacher pause at his desk, then simply move on. Some faculty seemed intimidated by him, he’d noticed, maybe because he was taller than they were. Or because of the fight.
Students tramped in and out of the room, bringing a hum of talk. Papers crackled, laptops chimed, and phones buzzed to announce the arrival of texts. The teacher in charge took roll, but didn’t bother to call Stephen’s name.
He dozed on. He could feel the sun on his shoulder, warming him even through two shirts and a jacket, and he could feel the faint itch of his runes. They had stopped burning the way they did when he first looked in the mirror.
And he had told Imogen. What a relief it was to tell someone, even though he’d managed to get only a piece of truth out of his mouth. She still believed his stories about Alaska. But that was all right, because the stories contained important bits of truth. It was true he was different from everyone else in this classroom, different because of his past. Did it really matter where or when that past was?
He dreamed in a vague, broken way about the chores he used to do at home. There, of course, he did not go to school. Mainly he peeled potatoes and tended the fire and helped with washing and planting and milking, because there was too much work at the castle for toothless old Beyla to do by herself. He played cards with Vingi the steward. He kept out of the Lord’s way, whether the Lord was sulking by the fire in his study (usually) or hunting in his wood, or practicing sword thrusts and parries in the yard. The Lord’s weapons were everywhere, bright and sharp and exquisitely shiny, but Stephen was not allowed to touch them.
Once a week, more or less, he was sent with a message and the gift of a dead hare or pheasant to the Witch who kept goats at the other end of the valley. In the summer it was an hour’s walk each way; more in the winter. Stephen welcomed the chance to leave Sigurd’s keep, even when he had to wrap rags around his feet to keep them from freezing. He marched smartly down one hillside, along a flat track and up another. The pasturing goats skipped to meet him, their bells jingling. At the door of the cottage, a handmaiden came to take his gift and offer him fresh goat’s milk. The handmaidens were pale and pretty. But they had been dead a long time, and their hands were cold, so he tried not to touch them.
The Witch had been dead for centuries, too. But, like Sigurd, she burned with an inner heat that made her seem alive. She was tall, with broad shoulders and a graceful neck and long, tangled, golden-brown hair and angry eyes. She was beautiful.
The very first time Stephen came to her with a message, she made him sit down and tousled his hair. “You were born recently, child,” she said. “When?”
He told her he had been born fourteen years ago, in the Year of Our Lord 1268, and she said, “I don’t know this year or this lord. But your master knows I like to look at young things. I like to see how the world changes as it rolls.”
Then she unrolled the bark scroll and pointed to the runes scratched on it. “You can’t read these, child,” she said. “Want to know a secret? My noble love Sigurd can barely read them either. What little he knows, he learned from me. I know more runes than any mortal, alive or dead.”
As the years passed, Stephen learned that the Witch liked jokes and compliments. He teased and flattered her, hoping very much she would teach him to read the runes, too. But the Witch, whose name was also Lady Brynhild, laughed and slapped his hand away when she caught him trying to copy pieces of the message. “A slave can learn runes about as easily as a donkey,” she said. “And a good thing, too. I was born with sharp eyes and a sharp mind, and fate has prepared nothing for me but a world of woe.”
Both Sigurd and Brynhild often talked like this. Stephen was bored by it, but he was too respectful - and, to be honest, scared - to roll his eyes. He wondered why two such fine, strapping, well-born, heroic people had to complain all the time, just because they happened to be dead.
And the funny thing was, despite being so eloquent and arrogant and full of themselves, both of them were like Aslaug. For all her shyness, she had Sigurd’s way of blinking hard when she was angry, and Brynhild’s voice that could go from a throaty command to a whine in seconds.
Stephen’s eyes snapped open. Someone’s phone was blasting a ringtone with a hard rock beat.
“Who was that?” said Mrs. Krebs from the desk up front. “Maura, was that you? No. Chris, you know I’ve already warned you. Bring that thing up here.”
Stephen closed his eyes again, but his mind refused to switch off. He remembered how it felt to go to sleep in a pile of straw in a medieval castle. And then wake to find himself sitting in an airplane that was about to land in a twenty-first-century city.
When that happened, he was glad for the runes and the false memories they gave him. Without some experience of this new world to fall back on, he would have torn off his seatbelt and run down the aisle screaming. As it was, he sat tight and stared through the double-paned window at the clouds and the houses so far below- more human dwellings than he had ever seen in his life, let alone in one place. He remembered being in a plane; otherwise he wouldn’t have known they were houses. He remembered Alaska. He remembered Stephen Wildasin’s mother, who was not his mother. And Toby, who was not his stepfather.
Runes. Memories written on him.
His mother had died seven hundred years ago. He clutched the armrest, breathing the plane’s strange not-cold, not-warm air - the air of an enchanted place. His memories told him the third millennium had begun, which meant he too should have died centuries ago. Was he like Sigurd and Brynhild and the steward and the handmaidens - a ghost?
No. Flexing his warm hand and watching blood pulse in his wrist, he couldn’t believe it. He was alive.
Chris was done making excuses for his phone, and Mrs. Krebs was reading something on her computer. Behind Stephen, in the last row, a boy and a girl had begun whispering. He recognized their voices after the first few words.
“What do we do about Corcoran?” asked the boy, who was Jeremy Bliss.
“Why do we do anything about him?” said Kristen Hawke.
“He’s been awesome, but he’s starting to get annoying.”
“Billy just wants to do bad things.” Kristen yawned. “He’s noisy. He’ll help till he gets bored.”
“We could do him, too.”
“Do him?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I guess.”
“We don’t have to do it ourselves. We could take him to the cave.”
“I’m too tired to walk up there,” said Kristen. “You know what? I think I’m too tired to be class president. It was more Evie’s idea. And she doesn’t like me anymore.”
“We could take her up there, too.”
“I just told you, Jer, I need a break. People keep wanting me to do stuff.”
“But see, look,” said Jeremy. “I’ve been thinking about this. The more people who don’t want to do stuff, the less stuff everybody has to do.”
“You think, like, way too much. Bet your head hurts.”
“Seriously, though. You’re getting spread around. We’ve got almost a hundred thousand already.”
“I’m famous,” said Kristen without enthusiasm. “But, like, big friggin’ deal, OK? You didn’t have to do it. It all happens anyway, sooner or later.”
“And the snow will drift,” said Jeremy.
Something about the word drift, or the droning way Jeremy said it, made Stephen’s mind drift toward unconsciousness again. The next thing he knew, the bell had rung, and people all around him were chattering and typing on phones and snapping laptops shut.
He sat straight up and looked into the reproving eyes of Mrs. Krebs. She asked, “Had a nice nap, Stephen?”
Stephen didn’t answer. He turned in his seat to look for Kristen and Jeremy, but they were gone.
At dusk, when the three of them climbed the mountain, he told Aslaug and Imogen what he had heard.
Aslaug was unusually talkative that day, and Imogen was quiet. It did not occur to Stephen that this was because she was still thinking about the runes he wore on his back, and whether he would want her to tell Aslaug about the runes, and whether she should tell Aslaug, whether he wanted her to or not.
If she had asked, Stephen would have said it didn’t matter. Without giving much thought to it, he assumed Aslaug would not care who or what he was. She was the daughter of Sigurd, who had slapped him whenever he asked questions, and Brynhild, who had compared him to a donkey. He himself knew - and the runes reminded him - that the only thing she should care about was killing Jotuns, whether she did it here in twenty-first-century America or in old Norway. Noble folk had Tasks. Thralls had chores.
So he marched up the slope, secure in the certainty that Aslaug was currently focused on Jotuns. His chest swelled with happiness when she said, “I think we can’t wait outside this time. We need to go right to the door of the cave, just in case that calls them out somehow.”
“It’s kind of dark,” said Imogen.
But Stephen held up his flashlight and turned it on and said, “I’ll switch it off when we’re there,” and Imogen frowned, but did not protest.
When they came to the passage between the rock ledges, he stepped back and let Aslaug lead the way, and he didn’t feel ashamed. Imogen needed protection; his Lord’s daughter did not. He shone the flashlight to one side so she could see. He felt proud and humble at the same time, like a mother watching her son strap on weapons and go to war.
Imogen tried to get in front of him a few times, but he stopped her. When they reached the dirt clearing and the cave entrance - a triangle of trembling reddish darkness under his flashlight beam - he said, “I’m switching it off.”
“Do it,” said Imogen.
They waited in the dark - Aslaug directly facing the hole in the mountain, holding her sword, and the other two in a shallow cavity a few feet to the side. After a few minutes, Stephen found a sort of uncomfortable seat in the rock and leaned on it, while Imogen crouched behind him. Aslaug stood.
There was no moon, but he could tell the black sky had clouded from its low, soupy look. Wind blew in the crescent of trees; wind blew through the hundreds of crevices and unevennesses in the rock face and made hollow, eerily singing sounds. Stephen’s bare fingers went numb, and he breathed on them to warm them.
“Who’d you vote for today?” Imogen asked.
“Britta,” said Aslaug.
“I didn’t vote,” said Stephen.
“Mr. Blanding’s going to say you have no sense of civic responsibility. But if he’s really Loki, he probably doesn’t have civic responsibility, either.”
“I don’t know what ‘civic responsibility’ is,” said Stephen.
“I don’t think Loki’s an American citizen,” said Imogen. “If he’s Old Norse, he wouldn’t know about democracy.”
“Mr. Blanding was Australian,” said Aslaug. “Kristen’s going to win anyway.”
Then Stephen told them about the conversation he had overheard. He looked mainly at Aslaug while he talked, though all he could see was a glint of her sword when it caught distant light from the valley, and sometimes a hint of her cheek or her hair.
“Jeremy wants to make Billy like them,” said Aslaug. “Jotunized. Can they do that?”
“Sure,” said Stephen. He felt the runes working - telling him what Sigurd’s daughter needed to know; forcing his head to nod firmly. “They can bring him here to the cave and hope a Jotun comes out, or they can do the job themselves. It passes through a hand on the heart, when the touched touch others. Easy as passing a cold.”
“But if it’s like germs, it can keep spreading and spreading,” said Aslaug. “Like flu.”
“Like bubonic plague,” said Imogen.
Stephen thought of what Jeremy had said: We’ve got almost a hundred thousand already. He hadn’t mentioned it, because it made no sense. How could Kristen and Jeremy have touched a hundred thousand people? Even if each person they touched touched five others, how could they know how many had been Jotunized? Besides, from the skittish, reluctant way they talked about doing something to Billy, he thought they hadn’t done it to many people. Not yet.
“They want to come here,” said Aslaug. “Maybe they think the Jotuns will tell them something. Like what to do.”
“But they don’t want to do anything,” said Imogen. “That’s the whole point with Jotun-touched people, I thought. Kristen said she was tired. People who are tired can’t be a movement.”
“If everybody on Earth stopped doing anything, it would be bad enough,” said Aslaug. “We would all starve.”
Stephen scowled at the cave entrance. People nowadays liked to talk and talk, much like Loki. They had to talk about their duty before they could do it. They called it getting their two cents in. But what if, while Aslaug and Imogen were getting their two cents in, Jotuns came out of the hole in the mountain and took over the world?
“If you looked right at Kristen Hawke and Jeremy Bliss,” he said, “they would never be able to touch anybody. They would never be able to make another person’s heart cold.”
“Because they would die,” said Imogen, as if Stephen and Aslaug didn’t already know this.
The wind rustled dry leaves that had caught in a fissure above the hole, making them hiss like witches’ tongues. It was a wind from the north, and Stephen shoved both hands in his jacket and shivered.
Damn it, I’ll find that Loki, he thought. The Jotun folk are his brothers and sisters - or at least his uncles, aunts and cousins. I’ll make him tell me why they aren’t coming out of their hole anymore.
But what good would that do? Aslaug would remain Sigurd’s daughter. He would remain a thrall - or possibly the ghost of one. And Loki would remain a god who couldn’t be made to do anything he didn’t want to.
The runes inked and burned into his skin continued to repeat one message: Jotuns must die. But if they did… so what? All those years in Sigurd’s keep, years that blurred together and had scarcely aged him, Stephen had hoped for something better. What was it? To learn runes? To wave a sword around? To die and go to heaven? What does a slave dream about?
He couldn’t remember. They had given him the memories of someone named Stephen Wildasin, and in the transition he had lost himself. The things he thought about now as part of his future - going to college, traveling the world, kissing Aslaug - could not be part of his future. He had no future.
Only runes. Only things he must do.
He said aloud in a rough voice, “It’s been dark practically an hour now. We should go.”
Frost coated the grass the next morning. The rising sun shone on it, turning the valley a dreamy coral under the blue bowl of sky. The milkweed and goldenrod and cattails in the marshes stood rigid, like icy spears shimmering in the sun, and the last gooseberries withered on the vine.
In homeroom, they were all given ballots and told to vote, though no one felt much like it after last night’s party.
Valerie had gone down slightly after midnight, dressed in a hangman’s costume, and sent the last guests home with an ominous speech about old basements and spirits that frequented them in the wee hours. She considered the event a success: in the morning she beamed at Imogen, spooning coffee beans into the grinder, and said, “I talked to all the parents. It was boring, but I’ve got a bunch more votes for D.A. I think a few folks will do a one-eighty at the polls today. I managed to convince some old-timers who thought I was a bleeding heart on crime.”
Imogen listened politely, though she thought most people couldn’t be bothered to care who got elected district attorney of a county where ninety percent of the crimes you ever heard about were dirt-road drunk driving and break-ins at rich people’s summer cabins.
She felt much the same about the class election, where even less was at stake. Who was even running? Imogen vaguely remembered that Jeremy Bliss was Kristen’s running mate - of course - and that Britta Golp was the other main presidential contender. The third and final candidate was a boy named Brendan Becker who wore bowties to school like his hero, some famous political columnist in a magazine. Every time he talked, he made a speech, and Imogen had never bothered to listen to the end of one.
You could write in candidates. She nibbled on her pencil, then neatly printed Fafnir the Dragon under Junior Class Treasurer. For Secretary she wrote Snorri Stursomething and for Vice President Loki McJotunson. She was about to vote for Sigurd Volsung for president when it occurred to her that Kristen Hawke might win.
Might? No, she would win.
Britta and Brendan were the kind of people who get elected to real-life positions of power, but they were boring. Besides, no one knew what, if anything, the junior class president actually did, other than appointing people to next year’s prom committee. It was the kind of title you wanted so you could put it on your college application as evidence of leadership potential.
Kristen Hawke would not be boring.
Imogen let her pencil hover over the Britta box, then over the Kristen box. She wrote Sigurd Volsung in the blank, then erased it, then wrote it again, in pen this time.
What could Kristen do as president that would hurt anyone? She couldn’t command students to stop coming to class, or teachers to stop teaching, or the principal to declare the school closed. She couldn’t keep anyone from taking the PSAT or the SAT or applying to college. She couldn’t announce that the prom would be held in the Jotuns’ cave lair, or that everyone would wear black. All she could do, really, was keep saying strange things. At worst, those strange things would make people think.
You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to want anything.
Both those statements sounded pretty accurate, if you put the emphasis on have to. Imogen wanted to do things and want things. She chose to do things and want things. But she had no intention of letting someone else - whether it was a guidance counselor, Granny, Evie Carlsson, a TV commercial or Stephen Wildasin - tell her what those things should be.
She drew a winky-face over the I in Sigurd’s name and handed in her ballot.
Stephen didn’t bother to vote at all. He had study hall first period in the same room as homeroom, and he used it as an occasion to put his head down on the desk and catch up on his sleep.
When ballots were collected, he heard the teacher pause at his desk, then simply move on. Some faculty seemed intimidated by him, he’d noticed, maybe because he was taller than they were. Or because of the fight.
Students tramped in and out of the room, bringing a hum of talk. Papers crackled, laptops chimed, and phones buzzed to announce the arrival of texts. The teacher in charge took roll, but didn’t bother to call Stephen’s name.
He dozed on. He could feel the sun on his shoulder, warming him even through two shirts and a jacket, and he could feel the faint itch of his runes. They had stopped burning the way they did when he first looked in the mirror.
And he had told Imogen. What a relief it was to tell someone, even though he’d managed to get only a piece of truth out of his mouth. She still believed his stories about Alaska. But that was all right, because the stories contained important bits of truth. It was true he was different from everyone else in this classroom, different because of his past. Did it really matter where or when that past was?
He dreamed in a vague, broken way about the chores he used to do at home. There, of course, he did not go to school. Mainly he peeled potatoes and tended the fire and helped with washing and planting and milking, because there was too much work at the castle for toothless old Beyla to do by herself. He played cards with Vingi the steward. He kept out of the Lord’s way, whether the Lord was sulking by the fire in his study (usually) or hunting in his wood, or practicing sword thrusts and parries in the yard. The Lord’s weapons were everywhere, bright and sharp and exquisitely shiny, but Stephen was not allowed to touch them.
Once a week, more or less, he was sent with a message and the gift of a dead hare or pheasant to the Witch who kept goats at the other end of the valley. In the summer it was an hour’s walk each way; more in the winter. Stephen welcomed the chance to leave Sigurd’s keep, even when he had to wrap rags around his feet to keep them from freezing. He marched smartly down one hillside, along a flat track and up another. The pasturing goats skipped to meet him, their bells jingling. At the door of the cottage, a handmaiden came to take his gift and offer him fresh goat’s milk. The handmaidens were pale and pretty. But they had been dead a long time, and their hands were cold, so he tried not to touch them.
The Witch had been dead for centuries, too. But, like Sigurd, she burned with an inner heat that made her seem alive. She was tall, with broad shoulders and a graceful neck and long, tangled, golden-brown hair and angry eyes. She was beautiful.
The very first time Stephen came to her with a message, she made him sit down and tousled his hair. “You were born recently, child,” she said. “When?”
He told her he had been born fourteen years ago, in the Year of Our Lord 1268, and she said, “I don’t know this year or this lord. But your master knows I like to look at young things. I like to see how the world changes as it rolls.”
Then she unrolled the bark scroll and pointed to the runes scratched on it. “You can’t read these, child,” she said. “Want to know a secret? My noble love Sigurd can barely read them either. What little he knows, he learned from me. I know more runes than any mortal, alive or dead.”
As the years passed, Stephen learned that the Witch liked jokes and compliments. He teased and flattered her, hoping very much she would teach him to read the runes, too. But the Witch, whose name was also Lady Brynhild, laughed and slapped his hand away when she caught him trying to copy pieces of the message. “A slave can learn runes about as easily as a donkey,” she said. “And a good thing, too. I was born with sharp eyes and a sharp mind, and fate has prepared nothing for me but a world of woe.”
Both Sigurd and Brynhild often talked like this. Stephen was bored by it, but he was too respectful - and, to be honest, scared - to roll his eyes. He wondered why two such fine, strapping, well-born, heroic people had to complain all the time, just because they happened to be dead.
And the funny thing was, despite being so eloquent and arrogant and full of themselves, both of them were like Aslaug. For all her shyness, she had Sigurd’s way of blinking hard when she was angry, and Brynhild’s voice that could go from a throaty command to a whine in seconds.
Stephen’s eyes snapped open. Someone’s phone was blasting a ringtone with a hard rock beat.
“Who was that?” said Mrs. Krebs from the desk up front. “Maura, was that you? No. Chris, you know I’ve already warned you. Bring that thing up here.”
Stephen closed his eyes again, but his mind refused to switch off. He remembered how it felt to go to sleep in a pile of straw in a medieval castle. And then wake to find himself sitting in an airplane that was about to land in a twenty-first-century city.
When that happened, he was glad for the runes and the false memories they gave him. Without some experience of this new world to fall back on, he would have torn off his seatbelt and run down the aisle screaming. As it was, he sat tight and stared through the double-paned window at the clouds and the houses so far below- more human dwellings than he had ever seen in his life, let alone in one place. He remembered being in a plane; otherwise he wouldn’t have known they were houses. He remembered Alaska. He remembered Stephen Wildasin’s mother, who was not his mother. And Toby, who was not his stepfather.
Runes. Memories written on him.
His mother had died seven hundred years ago. He clutched the armrest, breathing the plane’s strange not-cold, not-warm air - the air of an enchanted place. His memories told him the third millennium had begun, which meant he too should have died centuries ago. Was he like Sigurd and Brynhild and the steward and the handmaidens - a ghost?
No. Flexing his warm hand and watching blood pulse in his wrist, he couldn’t believe it. He was alive.
Chris was done making excuses for his phone, and Mrs. Krebs was reading something on her computer. Behind Stephen, in the last row, a boy and a girl had begun whispering. He recognized their voices after the first few words.
“What do we do about Corcoran?” asked the boy, who was Jeremy Bliss.
“Why do we do anything about him?” said Kristen Hawke.
“He’s been awesome, but he’s starting to get annoying.”
“Billy just wants to do bad things.” Kristen yawned. “He’s noisy. He’ll help till he gets bored.”
“We could do him, too.”
“Do him?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I guess.”
“We don’t have to do it ourselves. We could take him to the cave.”
“I’m too tired to walk up there,” said Kristen. “You know what? I think I’m too tired to be class president. It was more Evie’s idea. And she doesn’t like me anymore.”
“We could take her up there, too.”
“I just told you, Jer, I need a break. People keep wanting me to do stuff.”
“But see, look,” said Jeremy. “I’ve been thinking about this. The more people who don’t want to do stuff, the less stuff everybody has to do.”
“You think, like, way too much. Bet your head hurts.”
“Seriously, though. You’re getting spread around. We’ve got almost a hundred thousand already.”
“I’m famous,” said Kristen without enthusiasm. “But, like, big friggin’ deal, OK? You didn’t have to do it. It all happens anyway, sooner or later.”
“And the snow will drift,” said Jeremy.
Something about the word drift, or the droning way Jeremy said it, made Stephen’s mind drift toward unconsciousness again. The next thing he knew, the bell had rung, and people all around him were chattering and typing on phones and snapping laptops shut.
He sat straight up and looked into the reproving eyes of Mrs. Krebs. She asked, “Had a nice nap, Stephen?”
Stephen didn’t answer. He turned in his seat to look for Kristen and Jeremy, but they were gone.
At dusk, when the three of them climbed the mountain, he told Aslaug and Imogen what he had heard.
Aslaug was unusually talkative that day, and Imogen was quiet. It did not occur to Stephen that this was because she was still thinking about the runes he wore on his back, and whether he would want her to tell Aslaug about the runes, and whether she should tell Aslaug, whether he wanted her to or not.
If she had asked, Stephen would have said it didn’t matter. Without giving much thought to it, he assumed Aslaug would not care who or what he was. She was the daughter of Sigurd, who had slapped him whenever he asked questions, and Brynhild, who had compared him to a donkey. He himself knew - and the runes reminded him - that the only thing she should care about was killing Jotuns, whether she did it here in twenty-first-century America or in old Norway. Noble folk had Tasks. Thralls had chores.
So he marched up the slope, secure in the certainty that Aslaug was currently focused on Jotuns. His chest swelled with happiness when she said, “I think we can’t wait outside this time. We need to go right to the door of the cave, just in case that calls them out somehow.”
“It’s kind of dark,” said Imogen.
But Stephen held up his flashlight and turned it on and said, “I’ll switch it off when we’re there,” and Imogen frowned, but did not protest.
When they came to the passage between the rock ledges, he stepped back and let Aslaug lead the way, and he didn’t feel ashamed. Imogen needed protection; his Lord’s daughter did not. He shone the flashlight to one side so she could see. He felt proud and humble at the same time, like a mother watching her son strap on weapons and go to war.
Imogen tried to get in front of him a few times, but he stopped her. When they reached the dirt clearing and the cave entrance - a triangle of trembling reddish darkness under his flashlight beam - he said, “I’m switching it off.”
“Do it,” said Imogen.
They waited in the dark - Aslaug directly facing the hole in the mountain, holding her sword, and the other two in a shallow cavity a few feet to the side. After a few minutes, Stephen found a sort of uncomfortable seat in the rock and leaned on it, while Imogen crouched behind him. Aslaug stood.
There was no moon, but he could tell the black sky had clouded from its low, soupy look. Wind blew in the crescent of trees; wind blew through the hundreds of crevices and unevennesses in the rock face and made hollow, eerily singing sounds. Stephen’s bare fingers went numb, and he breathed on them to warm them.
“Who’d you vote for today?” Imogen asked.
“Britta,” said Aslaug.
“I didn’t vote,” said Stephen.
“Mr. Blanding’s going to say you have no sense of civic responsibility. But if he’s really Loki, he probably doesn’t have civic responsibility, either.”
“I don’t know what ‘civic responsibility’ is,” said Stephen.
“I don’t think Loki’s an American citizen,” said Imogen. “If he’s Old Norse, he wouldn’t know about democracy.”
“Mr. Blanding was Australian,” said Aslaug. “Kristen’s going to win anyway.”
Then Stephen told them about the conversation he had overheard. He looked mainly at Aslaug while he talked, though all he could see was a glint of her sword when it caught distant light from the valley, and sometimes a hint of her cheek or her hair.
“Jeremy wants to make Billy like them,” said Aslaug. “Jotunized. Can they do that?”
“Sure,” said Stephen. He felt the runes working - telling him what Sigurd’s daughter needed to know; forcing his head to nod firmly. “They can bring him here to the cave and hope a Jotun comes out, or they can do the job themselves. It passes through a hand on the heart, when the touched touch others. Easy as passing a cold.”
“But if it’s like germs, it can keep spreading and spreading,” said Aslaug. “Like flu.”
“Like bubonic plague,” said Imogen.
Stephen thought of what Jeremy had said: We’ve got almost a hundred thousand already. He hadn’t mentioned it, because it made no sense. How could Kristen and Jeremy have touched a hundred thousand people? Even if each person they touched touched five others, how could they know how many had been Jotunized? Besides, from the skittish, reluctant way they talked about doing something to Billy, he thought they hadn’t done it to many people. Not yet.
“They want to come here,” said Aslaug. “Maybe they think the Jotuns will tell them something. Like what to do.”
“But they don’t want to do anything,” said Imogen. “That’s the whole point with Jotun-touched people, I thought. Kristen said she was tired. People who are tired can’t be a movement.”
“If everybody on Earth stopped doing anything, it would be bad enough,” said Aslaug. “We would all starve.”
Stephen scowled at the cave entrance. People nowadays liked to talk and talk, much like Loki. They had to talk about their duty before they could do it. They called it getting their two cents in. But what if, while Aslaug and Imogen were getting their two cents in, Jotuns came out of the hole in the mountain and took over the world?
“If you looked right at Kristen Hawke and Jeremy Bliss,” he said, “they would never be able to touch anybody. They would never be able to make another person’s heart cold.”
“Because they would die,” said Imogen, as if Stephen and Aslaug didn’t already know this.
The wind rustled dry leaves that had caught in a fissure above the hole, making them hiss like witches’ tongues. It was a wind from the north, and Stephen shoved both hands in his jacket and shivered.
Damn it, I’ll find that Loki, he thought. The Jotun folk are his brothers and sisters - or at least his uncles, aunts and cousins. I’ll make him tell me why they aren’t coming out of their hole anymore.
But what good would that do? Aslaug would remain Sigurd’s daughter. He would remain a thrall - or possibly the ghost of one. And Loki would remain a god who couldn’t be made to do anything he didn’t want to.
The runes inked and burned into his skin continued to repeat one message: Jotuns must die. But if they did… so what? All those years in Sigurd’s keep, years that blurred together and had scarcely aged him, Stephen had hoped for something better. What was it? To learn runes? To wave a sword around? To die and go to heaven? What does a slave dream about?
He couldn’t remember. They had given him the memories of someone named Stephen Wildasin, and in the transition he had lost himself. The things he thought about now as part of his future - going to college, traveling the world, kissing Aslaug - could not be part of his future. He had no future.
Only runes. Only things he must do.
He said aloud in a rough voice, “It’s been dark practically an hour now. We should go.”