Part 4: Chap. 5: Winter Wonderland!

[leafmeal]

Chapter 5: Winter Wonderland

I headed for that star in the distance. And as I went, the walls seemed to fall back on either side, leaving the passage wide open. The light was straight ahead of me, white as day. I could feel a restless wind whipping through this part of the cavern, a wind from outdoors. Two gigantic boulders blocked my path, and I clambered straight over them, not caring when stone cut my hands.

Now I was there, and the star was a world. It was a way out, rounder and larger than the entrance I knew. My boots skidded on stone that was glazed with old ice and a thin coating of new slush.

When I stepped outside, into the light, at first I saw only snow. No trees, mountains, houses. The ground was white; the air was white. The wind I’d heard in the cave still vibrated around me, but now it was a low, constant hum. The air was cold, much colder than I remembered. I took a step into the whiteness. My leg vanished to the knee.

I heard a low laugh. And then he was beside me, steadying me with a warm hand.

I asked, “Where have you been?”

“Not far,” said Loki.

He wore his old-fashioned, coarsely woven clothes again, plus a cape lined with what looked like five or six arctic fox pelts. His hair shone red-gold, as if he were standing in the sun. “I had to wait for you to come to me this time,” he said.

“Why?”

“A deal I made a while ago, sweet Aslaug.” He took my hand and led me away from the cave, out into the blizzard.

I tried to pull back, but he was strong. “Where are we going? I can’t see anything.”

“No worries,” said Loki. “I know the way.”

As he held my hand, warmth traveled up my arm. Warmth hit my heart and pulsed into all my limbs, and soon I felt as if we were standing in a bubble, insulated from the cold. This was pleasant, but it didn’t change the fact that I could see barely a few feet in front of me. Trudging beside him, I asked, “Where are we?”

“Winter.”

“That’s a when, not a where.”

“It’s a where now,” said Loki.

“What do you mean?”

“You heard the weather man.”

I was going to ask him to make sense, but someone was walking toward us through the blowing snow.

It was an old woman with permed white hair and fogged glasses, wearing a terry-cloth robe and shuffling her invisible feet as if she wore slippers. I stopped short, willing my boots not to slide and making Loki stop, too. “Mrs. Wildasin!”

Old Mrs. Wildasin missed us by inches and kept walking. When I turned, I saw her still on the same trajectory, disappearing between shifting curtains of white.

I tried to make Loki follow her. “She’s lost out here. She doesn’t even have a coat!”

“She’ll be fine,” said Loki. He clamped my arm and kept walking.

“But she’s my neighbor!” I stumbled along beside him, breathless and wanting to explain that Mrs. Wildasin was a little strange and unfriendly, but didn’t deserve to die in a blizzard.

Before I had two words out, another person cut in front of us, hanging his head and dragging his feet. He was a young man, a stranger, wearing a nice suit like an office worker in the city, with no coat. He plodded along purposefully, as if he had somewhere to go.

“Hey!” I called. The young man didn’t turn his head. When I looked back this time, he was already gone.

“They don’t hear you,” said Loki. “There are tons of them out here. If you stop to talk to all of them, I won’t be able to show you a thing.”

“Why can’t they hear me? What are they doing?”

“They’re doing what all the touched do. Walking in circles in the snow.”

“These people are Jotun-touched?”

“Of course,” said Loki. “If we go far enough in this world, we’ll see all the friends you’ve been fretting about.” He snapped his fingers. “Speak of Odin and he appears! There’s one of them now.”

At first I had no idea what he meant. Then I saw the small shape approaching, several yards off, walking with eyes downcast like the others. She wore an ice-blue down parka with a fur hood, and her blonde hair was wet and starred with snow.

“Call her,” said Loki. “Call her loud. Don’t worry about her looking up. Don’t worry about looking into her eyes.”

“Kristen!” My voice died in my throat, and I hissed her name more than I called it.

Kristen Hawke raised her head.

She looked at me, if you could say she looked at anything. Frost furred her brows and lashes. An opaque layer of ice covered her eyes, hiding the iris and pupil. Her eyes were white like a Jotun’s.

I dug my nails into Loki’s hand. At the same time, something deep inside me went calm. Maybe I was starting to understand. “What is this?”

“The Big Freeze,” Loki said.

Kristen was already past us, a shred of blue in a sea of white. Something new rose up in the snow, and I jerked backward. But it was only a fat black spruce towering over our heads.

“Close your eyes for a second, Aslaug,” said Loki. “We don’t need to stay in this part.”

I shook my head. “Is this the winter Stephen was talking about? The snow strike? Is it what happens when all the Jotuns come out of their caves?”

“It is,” said Loki. He had that story-telling voice I remembered from our earlier conversation: soothing, almost chanting. Charming.

“Let me tell you a bit about me, Aslaug,” he said. “The gods were unhappy with me. They put me in prison, and I stayed there for a very, very long time. Time collapsed, the way it does when nothing changes. I was there much longer than I thought.”

I remembered this. It was in one of Fiona’s books. “They tied you up because you killed Baldr the sun god.”

Loki shrugged modestly. “Well, I didn’t exactly kill him. Possibly I was involved, but that’s not important. It was thousands of years ago. Anyway, when I woke up - it felt like waking up - and found my bonds had melted, everything had changed. The world was not the same. Aslaug, close your eyes.”

This time I closed them without thinking. His voice could do that.

When I realized it a second later, my lids snapped open. And the two of us were standing in a snowy forest, looking through an opening in the trees into a narrow, sloping valley. The snow was lighter now, just flurries, and I could see far enough to know I didn’t recognize anything. There were no houses or lights, no signs of people.

Just to our right, a man stood hunched over, digging. He plunged his shovel into the frozen earth under a wide oak tree, over and over, panting with the effort. He wore what looked like stitched-together animal skins. His hair was flame-bright. He turned wild, blue-white eyes toward us for a second, seeming not to see us.

“That’s you.”

“Very observant,” said Loki. “I’m showing you what already happened, you understand? You can’t interfere, because it’s over and done. Like a movie. This is how I looked after I escaped from prison and found out the gods had abandoned this world.”

“Abandoned?”

Loki pointed straight into the sky. Looking up, I saw a bank of clouds, salmon-pink and gold. The gold part looked like a door, curved at the top with three massive hinges.

“Valhalla,” said Loki, as if he were pointing out the door that led into Weiner’s Diner. “The hall of pleasure where my lord Odin liked to hang out with his favorite fighting men and maids. Heaven, if you prefer.”

“The Norse heaven,” I said.

Again Loki shrugged. “I hiked up there. I opened the door and went in. I meant to ask them if I was forgiven. I found . . .”

In the sky, I saw events unfolding like a cartoon on a distant TV screen. Standing in the clouds, a tiny figure of Loki seized the handle of the glowing door and pulled it open. A pink and gold room stretched into the distance, suffused with light. I could see long tables and chairs in there, and what looked like beer mugs on the tables, but no people. The tiny image of Loki went from one table to the next. He opened his mouth and called out silently.

“No one answered,” said the Loki standing beside me. “Abandoned, see? I waited there for over a century, making up new runes and twiddling my thumbs, but no one came back. The gods had left our Earth. They’ve left our sky. They’ve left us.”

“There are no gods anymore,” I said.

Loki didn’t seem to hear. “This was all prophesied, of course,” he said. “Ragnarok - have you heard of it? I think you people still talk about it, even if you don’t believe. The seer spoke of a time when Jotuns and their kindred would rise up and defeat the gods of Earth, and ice and snow would cover all.”

“The Big Freeze,” I said. “The end of the world.”

“Right, right,” said Loki. “So, naturally, waking to ice and snow with no gods in sight, I thought the end of the world had come and gone, and I’d missed it. My kin had killed off Odin, Tyr, and Freya and the rest, and here I was, the last human type of thing on Earth. Alone.”

“It must have been lonely.”

“Oh, it was.” He squeezed my hand. “It was the most boring world you can imagine. Jotuns are my kin, you know, as I’ve said, but they’re the relatives you never want to talk to, not even for five minutes on the phone, because they’ve got nothing to say. I felt like slitting my wrists for a bit.

“Then I came out of the forest and realized some of you human beings were still up and about. Cutting wood and making fires and grazing cattle like you always had. As long as you were here, I knew I’d be able to have some fun.”

“Tricking us?” I could feel my voice taking an unfamiliar tone, sarcastic, as if I were Stephen listening to Loki and not me. I imagined what Stephen would tell me. You don’t have to believe a word out of his mouth.

“Well, yes, maybe occasionally tricking you,” said Loki. “But also helping you, Aslaug. See, here’s the thing. I still wasn’t sure if Ragnarok had come and gone or not. The seer speaks in riddles. I wasn’t sure if I was looking at the aftermath of the end of the world or the before-math, so to speak. The humans I came across were all stupid, stumbling peasants. They’d half forgotten the gods and started worshipping some man hanging on a cross.”

“You just assumed they were stupid,” I said.

“Well, they seemed that way to me. Anyway. To find out what had happened, I realized I would have to revive the spirit of someone who’d lived back then. Someone who still remembered the days when the gods walked the earth.”

I gazed at the second Loki, the one digging under the oak. He had thrown down his spade now, and his bare hands were fumbling in the hole, desperately turning the earth.

When he rose again, he held a human skull. I saw other bones scattered on the dirt in front of him. They were ancient remains, cracked and waxy.

“When I found him, that was all that remained of proud Sigurd Volsung,” said Loki beside me. “Your father.”

The second Loki, the one who wasn’t really here, set another skull beside the first. I saw he had arranged ribs and pelvises and limb bones under the skulls, roughly outlining the shapes of two bodies.

“The smaller skull is Brynhild,” said Loki. “Your lovely mother, mistress of the runes. You didn’t exist yet, of course.”

Now the memory-Loki drew out a small, gleaming knife and began carving on the bones. Somehow, without going closer, I could see he was making groups of long vertical lines and short, slanting ones. Runes.

“As you can see, runes,” said Loki. “It’s the best and quickest way to raise the dead. If you do it right, they have to stick around until their bones are destroyed and the runes with them.”

The other Loki was drawing on the air with his pointer finger, the way I’d seen him do, leaving tiny runes of flame to glimmer there. From the laid-out bones rose two misty shapes.

The first shape solidified into a tall, haggard man with shoulder-length blond hair. He immediately drew a sword from his hip and tried to attack Loki. Loki smiled as the sword went through him, then shrugged and began talking inaudibly. The ghost of Sigurd - I guessed - glowered back.

Meanwhile, mist from the second bone pile swirled and hardened into a woman. She had a torn dress, a long gold necklace and an imperious curled lip. Her bodice was all embroidery, and soaked with blood. She pointed her finger at Sigurd, then at Loki, and her face filled with cold fury. Her mouth opened, and I could tell she was yelling, though no sounds came out.

“Yeah, your mom was a bit annoyed to be woken,” said Loki. “She left this life by her own choice, and she was hoping to stay in Hel. That didn’t suit me, though. Your dad, once he understood what I wanted, he cooperated just fine. He wanted something, too. His kingdom back. So I did the best I could and gave it to him.”

He nudged me forward. We walked together past the oak and the bones, past the long-ago images of two bewildered, angry young ghosts - which had frozen now, like a DVD on pause - and through the gap in the woods.

Before us slanted the valley. As I watched, snow melted from the fields, and they filled with green grass and grazing sheep and goats. The movie was fast-forwarding. The sky turned that powdery blue it sometimes does in the spring. The trees budded, and starry white flowers bloomed in the pastures.

In front of us, the air shivered, and a small stone building with two floors and four turrets appeared. It was smaller than a Burger King, but I guess you could have called it a castle. It stood across a yard from a shabby wooden barn. I could see a boy forking hay from a wagon into the loft, just like Pike does every August.

“I built Sigurd a castle,” said Loki, striding past the barn, still towing me by the hand.

Just as I hadn’t felt the cold of the Big Freeze, so now I didn’t feel the balmy breeze rippling the grass. When we passed the boy with the pitchfork, I dragged Loki to a halt. “Stephen!”

“He can’t hear you any more than the others,” said Loki impatiently. “And he’s barely in this story.”

We were moving again, down into the fields. It was a beautiful day to walk, but I craned to look back at Stephen. He wore the same kind of coarsely woven clothes as Loki, and he was barefoot. His hair hung long and ragged, and his teeth looked yellow, but I would have recognized his scowl anywhere.

“What are you saying?” I asked. “Is Stephen a ghost, too?”

“No, your precious little friend is no ghost. But he’s not Stephen, either.”

“Explain that,” I ordered.

But we’d already passed the lowest point in the valley - we moved quickly here, as if gliding on air - and were heading uphill again, toward a hedgerow and a pretty little thatched cottage. Goats grazed around it. A pale young girl sat milking one of them. With fluffy clouds on the horizon, the whole scene looked like an old Disney cartoon.

“Patience. We’re coming to that part,” said Loki.

He sighed with exaggerated exasperation and went on: “There are places in this world where ghosts can coexist with the living and not disturb them, and this godforsaken valley is one of them. The problem is, your parents refused to live together. He was still furious at her over the whole murder thing, and she was still furious at him for some silly jealousy reason or other. Your basic passionate lovers. The best I could do was get them to take up residence about a mile apart. They wouldn’t speak to each other, which made a messenger necessary. Young Sturli fulfilled that function.”

He pointed, and I followed his finger down the hill.

I saw Stephen, dressed in a different set of rags but still barefoot, climbing the slope far more laboriously than we had done. Finally he arrived at the cottage door and knocked twice, mopping his brow with the back of his hand, which was so dirty it left black smudges. The door opened, and the tall ghost woman appeared with her shining jewelry and long golden-brown hair. She nodded at Stephen to come inside the way one would to a servant, her face still set in that proud, chip-on-shoulder expression. He bobbed his head. I could tell, just from the way he moved, that he hadn’t eaten in a while.

“I don’t think those people are my parents, Loki,” I said. “Well, I know that woman certainly isn’t my mom. My mom has her issues, but not like that.”

Loki sighed again. “It was a difficult magic that made you,” he said. “It took enormous effort from both the lovely Brynhild and me - your dad was useless, really. Good swordsman, and clever on occasion, but couldn’t rune to save his life. Still, he had to do the actual work.”

“Work!” I said. Picking up my mother in a bar? Having a one-night stand?

“We arranged for him to go and plant the seeds of your brother and you in the distant future, where you’d most be needed. Your mother stayed behind, working the runes with me, but her essence went with him. It took both Sigurd and Brynhild to make you, believe me. The mortal woman who gave birth to you - well, there’s some of her in you, too. At least, I assume so. I chose her carefully. She’s a distant descendant of Sigurd, though she doesn’t know it.”

But I was barely listening anymore. I said, “My brother? You don’t mean my brother Till?”

“Obviously not,” said Loki. He raised his hand, and the valley before us shimmered and dissolved.

Before I could wonder what was happening, we were standing in a different place: a small clearing in a forest of bare, brown bushes and black firs and spruce. It was shaggy, wild country, but it no longer looked like the Middle Ages. The house in front of me had modern roofing, and inside I could see the glitter of kerosene lamps. An old maroon pickup was parked at the mouth of the clearing where it narrowed to a dirt road. “Where’s this?”

“Alaska,” said Loki. He crooked his finger, and my eyes zoomed in on a wide first-floor window.

Inside, the plain house looked surprisingly comfy. A woodstove stood in its center, with futons and bookcases on one side and kitchen counters and a stove on the other. A round table held a steaming teapot, and red and white quilts hung on the wall.

A woman lurched into my frame of view. She held a mug in one hand, and she was burning.

The stranger was burning the way I had seen Mr. Blanding and Rowanne’s mother burn - flailing in a mechanical, dream-like way, those pale flames engulfing her body. I felt like I was watching something obscene. I wrenched my hand from Loki’s and pressed both hands over my mouth. I closed my eyes.

“Don’t be silly,” Loki said. “You didn’t do it. Open them.”

“Is she gone?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure I believe you. You knew I wouldn’t want to see that.”

“I keep forgetting you’re so sensitive,” said Loki.

Wuss, he meant. Weakling. I opened my eyes.

The fire was gone. The first thing I saw was a boy about my age, tall with a skinny, angular face and pale brown hair like Brynhild’s. He stood beside the woodstove, staring at a pile of something gray on the floor. Though his back was to me, I knew from his contorted posture how his face would look. I was glad not to see it. I knew the gray pile was ashes. I knew they belonged to someone he cared about.

“That,” said Loki, “is the real Stephen Wildasin. Your brother.”

I shook my head. “That’s not Stephen.”

“Aren’t you following anything I say? I told you, the boy you call Stephen isn’t. His real name is Sturli, he’s a Norwegian peasant, and he was born centuries ago. He’s an imposter, and that’s my doing, too. The real Stephen Wildasin had your eyes, Aslaug. Just like your mom and dad. Your Jotun-killing eyes.” He paused for an instant. “Just his luck, though, that his mom’s boyfriend went out in the woods and found a Jotun.”

As I watched, the door of the Alaska house opened. A small, tired-looking man with a red beard came inside. He saw the boy standing staring at the ashes, and his mouth opened to say something confused or impatient.

The boy raised his head. He’d turned so I could see his face now, and his eyes shone with tears. His eyes weren’t Stephen’s, any more than his face was Stephen’s. They were dark blue eyes, deep like water and fierce like fire. He looked like me.

I knew that look in his eyes, too. I wanted to shout, Don’t!

But it was too late. The boy was looking straight at the tired bearded man. And the tired bearded man, just like the woman, burst into flames. He burned.

I closed my eyes again. I said to Loki, “I want to hurt you for showing me this.”

“Understandable,” said Loki. “It is a tragedy.” He snapped his fingers. “One more part, and we’re done.”

I opened my eyes and saw the Alaska house again. Flames were crawling all over it, inside and out.

Maybe the burning man had set fire to the pile of newspapers beside the woodstove, or maybe someone had poured kerosene on the floor. I could smell it dimly, and I could almost smell the smoke that clogged the living room, making it hard to see inside.

I could still make out the shape of the boy who looked like me. He crouched on the floor by his mother’s ashes. He was coughing, but he made no attempt to flee, as if he couldn’t see the flames that licked the quilts and raced along the carpet. The smoke darkened the air. It hid him from me.

The smoke made my eyes water, and tears pooled and streamed down my cheeks. I closed my eyes.

“You did this,” I said. “I don’t know how or why, but you did, Loki. You and Sigurd and Brynhild made that boy, the one you call my brother. And you made this happen to him.”

“You’re way off base this time, Aslaug,” said Loki. He pressed my hand again. “We couldn’t have known his mother’s lover would be Jotun-touched. It was an accident.”

“Toby went out in the woods,” I said, remembering things Stephen had told me and Imogen about “his” life in Alaska. (But how had Stephen known?) “He went hunting and met a Jotun. Then he didn’t care about anything anymore.”

“Right,” said Loki. “Eventually the boyfriend touched the mother. And when her son looked her in the eye . . . well, you saw what happened. Living out there in the boondocks the way he did, young Stephen didn’t have many people to look at. It was a bad way for him to discover his power.”

“He killed his parents,” I said. I was still looking at the dark behind my eyelids, and I preferred that.

“Yes.”

“And don’t tell me they weren’t his real parents. Don’t say your ghost Brynhild and ghost Sigurd were. First of all, ghosts can’t have kids. They’re dead. Second, it doesn’t matter if those other people weren’t his parents. They still were.”

As I spoke, I thought of Pike hunting with his friends in bear season, or skiing in the backcountry. What if a Jotun had found Pike, or Pike had found a Jotun? And I thought of my mom sitting in Mrs. Wildasin’s kitchen, eating almond cake and listening to one of Mrs. Wildasin’s long, rambling monologues about the weather, just to be neighborly. Both my parents could have been touched fifty times over.

“Yes, yes, sweetheart,” said Loki. He held my hand in one of his and patted it with the other. “An accident, as I said. A tragic accident. But you have to understand something.”

“I do understand.”

“I don’t think you do,” said Loki. “Your father, see - and I do mean Sigurd - he’d had such high hopes for his son. Back in Sigurd’s time, people didn’t expect much from girls. And boys of noble lineage - well, they weren’t supposed to care about anything but blood and honor.

“When I showed Sigurd what happened to your brother, he flew into a rage. ‘That’s no son of mine,’ he bellowed. ‘My son has no mercy. My son has no fear. My son would murder his whole adopted family if I gave the word. My son would dance on those ashes and laugh.’”

My eyes snapped open. I saw with strange relief that we were standing back inside the snowstorm. The Big Freeze, where things never changed.

“What you’re saying,” I said, “is that my dad is a bastard.”

“Maybe,” said Loki. “Some would call him a hero. And, you should realize, Sigurd was half crazy with grief. I had a hard time convincing him the whole experiment wasn’t a bust. He wanted to murder you on the spot before you could dishonor him, too.”

“What experiment?”

“Making you, of course. The whole purpose was to give the human race some sort of defense against Jotuns when you needed it most.”

Shapes plodded past us out there in the whirling whiteness, none close enough for me to see their faces. I wondered if these were all the Jotun-touched from every part of the world. How many were there? And how long would they walk in circles, their eyes encased in ice? “The Big Freeze is already here,” I said.

“That’s because we’re standing outside of time,” said Loki. “Unlike mortals, I can see through time - a few eons, anyway - and I can travel in it, too. But there is a point where my vision goes dark, just after the start of what Christians call the third millennium. I naturally assumed that was the true Ragnarok - not the death of the gods, because they left us long ago, as I’ve told you. But the end of the human race. The Big Freeze, when my colder kin swarm out of their underground homes and take over the Earth. You and your brother were supposed to delay that a bit. Not stop it, because it’s always already here, as you say. But postpone it.”

“Postpone it,” I repeated. “With our eyes.”

“With your eyes. Your mother and I, we weren’t ready to give up on our plan. We told your father you would be different from your poor brother. Stronger. Tougher. Colder. We would prove it.”

I felt myself shaking, and not from cold. “You decided to test me.”

“So you do know that,” said Loki. His voice grew distant, almost clinical. “We used Sturli. Your father’s slave.”

He pointed, and on the snow just a few yards away, I saw a scene unfold. It was smaller than life this time, TV-sized, and I could see flakes falling around and through it. Back in the courtyard of Sigurd’s castle - which looked more like a barnyard, with green grass and wandering chickens and piles of manure - Stephen knelt in the grass, struggling with somebody bigger and taller who had pinned his arms and pressed a knife against his neck. Sigurd. My good old dad.

As I watched, Loki entered the image. Though his back was to me, he was clearly trying to reason with Sigurd. I kept my eyes on Stephen. He looked terrified, but weirdly resigned, as if he’d been expecting this.

“Sigurd wanted to cut that boy’s throat and toss him on your brother’s pyre as a funeral tribute,” said Loki. “A fine warrior, like I say, but not always the sharpest tool in the shed.”

Now I was inside a dusty, jumbled room - a barn or stable. Stephen sat doubled over; I saw only his back. Loki appeared carrying something that glittered, a knife or possibly a chisel. While Sigurd stood to one side with his hands on his hips, Loki bent over Stephen and seemed to draw on him. But from the way Stephen writhed and clenched his fists at his sides, I could see Loki wasn’t just drawing. A red trickle ran down Stephen’s pale skin, ink or blood.

“You gave him the tattoos.”

“Runes,” said Loki. “Memories. I brought the boy through the centuries. I gave him your brother’s memories - most of them. I put him in your brother’s place. And he met you and showed you your task, the way we’d runed into him. He gained your friendship. He helped you understand your responsibilities. And when I saw he mattered a great deal to you, then - ”

Something broke inside me. And I knew it was my vision of Loki as that boy I’d met in the autumn woods - a sweet, golden boy who would always help and never harm me. “And then,” I said, “you sent one of those Jotuns, one of your relatives, to touch him.”

“His great-grandmother. You saw her just now in the blizzard. And I stopped her from touching him till the time was right. She was itching to do it from the moment he stepped through her door.”

I wrenched my hand from his. The images in the snow were gone. “Well, I failed your test. And you lost your power over Stephen, and he’s laughing at me and you both. You used him. Now he’s trying to bring Rag - Ragnarok down on all of us.”

“It’s the Jotun in him that makes him do those things.”

“And what about the Jotun in you?” I asked.

Loki chuckled. He was laughing it off, the way he always did, but I had a feeling I’d nettled him. “Don’t you feel like a traitor to other Jotuns?” I asked. “Helping humans find ways to kill them?”

“Nothing’s that simple, child. Whatever that fool Sturli may have told you…” He fell silent, gazing into the snowstorm. “Well, speak of Odin again.”

“Who?”

“It’s a funny thing,” said Loki. “They don’t hear or respond - they might as well be dead. But when you talk about them, sometimes they come, just as if you’d called.”

I looked. There was Stephen in his Army jacket, head down, trudging toward us through the snow.