Seek Under Stone (Finish-a-thon)
Author: persephone_kore
Title: Seek Under Stone
Rating: PG?
Summary: Helga Hufflepuff, in her youth, seeks out the cave where Loki lies bound to learn from his longsuffering wife Sigyn.
Author's note: For the Finish-a-thon at multific.
Helga chose her hour carefully. She had traded duties with her second sister so that the night her family had the Christian priest to dinner, she prepared the meal. It was one of her finer efforts, carefully seasoned and with generous use of the honey and mead from her bees.
Her father chewed the last bite of his bread-plate slowly, savoring it, and at last fixed Helga with an amused gaze and arched an eyebrow. "Excellently done," he said. "And very lavish with the fruit of your labors particularly, when it wasn't your turn to cook. You have something you want to discuss, don't you, Helga?"
Helga flushed slightly. "Yes, Father."
"Well, out with it. But if you're looking to marry that Salazar fellow, he'll have to come talk to me himself."
Caught quite off guard, Helga spluttered and then began laughing. "No, Father. I'm sure he'll be returning to his home one day, and that's not where I want to travel. Besides, I think he wants to marry a witch born to a witch and wizard."
"But you want to go somewhere?"
She drew a long breath. "I want to seek out Sigyn, to learn skill from her."
Her parents stared at her. The priest frowned deeply, and Helga bowed her head for a moment and then met his eyes. He was the main one she had to persuade. He was the only wizard in the village other than the odd foreigner Salazar, and he had been the one to teach her when she proved to be another magic birth.
He was more likely to object to dealings with the Aesir than her parents, but if he agreed, she thought they would too.
She could start her search without their consent, but she was unwilling.
"Why?" he said at last.
"To learn from her," she said. "She is loyal, loving, longsuffering. And she is powerful." Her mouth quirked. "Though I certainly don't envy her her husband."
"The Christ is all those things," he pointed out, "and is not a heathen goddess."
"Forgive me, Father Erik, but He is also not a witch. You were very clear on the difference between miracle and magic. If I find her, I hope she can teach me more about the power I was given in myself at birth." She paused. "I am not planning to worship her."
"That might be a problem in itself!" he said. "I would not tell you to, but I should imagine she might be offended if you don't."
"I will be polite," Helga said. "I will treat her as a queen. I think that might be enough."
"Perhaps." He frowned deeply. "Helga, do you truly think you have learned all the knowledge and skill of your teachers here?"
Helga let out a breath. If he had turned to that objection, did it mean the religious one was met and passed? "Of course not," she said. "But I think perhaps I know all they can teach me without more experience on my part. Mother has taught me about being a wife and mother, but she's also told me I'll have to learn more after I marry."
Father Erik snorted briefly. "Perhaps by spending more time observing people, too, but that also fits into your argument." He sighed. "If you go, be careful. My prayers will follow you."
"I think I'd rather you were proposing to marry Salazar," her father said with a sigh. "Even if he does fight with magic." Not being a wizard himself, her father was still skeptical of the idea of a man having a legitimate use for magic in battle. Magic was for women and gods, and women weren't supposed to use it to interfere with a fight. The priest still worried him.
Helga refrained from mentioning that she could beat Salazar dueling one time in four now, which was rather good considering he'd been doing it for several years longer. "He's not bad with a blade either," she said, "but I don't think it's likely."
"We ought to find you someone soon," he said, "but I suppose there's time enough when you come home."
-----
So that was that. It was nearly winter, which was a poor time for beginning any sort of search, but Helga knew she would never be able to bring herself to leave in spring when there was so much more work to do. It was winter, or high summer before the harvest, or nothing.
She tried to leave her chores in good order. She consulted all the elders of the village for advice, though she didn't tell all of them what she was doing. It didn't matter. It was good to have spoken to them, whether the advice was applicable or not.
She carved a basin out of stone, using her wand for the rough work and then polishing it smooth by hand. She had a new knife from the smith in exchange for a complex set of enchantments to keep his roof in good condition and knowledge of her tricks to lure bees to thatch. Salazar, the traveler, taught her how to make a collapsible house.
She set out wandering. She thought she was on the right track when the mountain slopes began to change at night.
She was sure when she found a hot spring hissing rotten-egg steam out of a crack in the rocks.
Helga set up her collapsible house on the nearest piece of level ground and made herself a bed. She lay in it each night at sundown, and closed her eyes, and did not know for certain whether it was her body that rose at midnight or if she left it behind. Either way, it was tiring; as the days lengthened and the nights grew shorter, she was grateful for the warmth but found herself waking all too often to full sun instead of the dawn.
With the first full moon after the snow began to melt, she woke just before midnight instead. There was a growling outside her door that made the fine hairs on her neck rise. Her scalp prickled, and her skin puckered up like that of a plucked goose even though she was lying under a warm blanket.
She slept with her hand on her wand. She was just raising it toward the door when the collapsible house collapsed.
Helga growled in return and struggled free as the house continued trying to fold itself up into an easily carried bundle of sticks. Sweat broke out over the gooseflesh as she saw what had come after her.
It was four-footed, humpbacked, and covered in thick ragged fur. The eyes were red, the teeth long enough that they would surely tear through the creature's lips if it ever shut its mouth.
Helga recovered from the first mad impression that she was dreaming of Fenrir and started to form a spell. The thing leaped across the debris of the limping house and was on her before she got past a syllable. Helga curled instinctively; she threw her arm across her throat, gagging at the hot breath and the slaver that dripped on her, and slammed the sole of her foot up into its ribcage.
The shock of it jarred all the way up her leg, and a hot jolt of pain ripped into her knee, but the creature tumbled away with a yelp. Helga's first three hastily-cast spells hit it with no discernible effect; the fourth drove it back again, and that gave her time for three more battering-ram curses that finally cracked its skull against a rock.
She set up her house again, examined herself for bite marks, and tended her knee, all sitting outside in a patch of ground she'd melted clear and dried. She wasn't sure whether the thing was dead, and she wasn't willing either to go within reach and finish it off or to take her eyes off it. The slopes seemed to shift around her, and she was vaguely queasy by morning.
Sunrise turned the werewolf back to woman. Helga limped over and determined that there was still breath in the unconscious body, then felt the woman's head and neck for broken places before hauling her up to the spring. She washed the werewolf and combed her for lice before taking her into the house.
The werewolf stayed for two more moons without giving a name. Helga, testy about this, called her Fenrir's Daughter and Nightmare in between feeding her soup laced with healing spells. She bound the woman on full moon nights in dead grapevines and enchantments sealed with her mother's silver ring, and Helga did not have a chance to dream until the woman gave her name, and begged her to keep it secret, and fled away at the full moon. Helga made her take the ring.
That night, Helga walked barefoot out at midnight, stood in the scalding basin worn under the hot spring, turned around twice to her right, and then threw her knife as far up-slope as she could. She scrambled after it, and cursed herself for a fool when she found nicks in the blade; of course she could smooth them back out, but what else had she expected?
Then she noticed that the ground was still warm under her feet and that the mountain rose higher above her than she remembered; in fact, she was nearly in a valley. She started to turn and look for her tent, but the warning given in tale after tale through the ages pressed against her cheek to stop her. Don't look back.
She started downhill and to the right instead, where the deepest shadow lay, and found a path that looped down to the jagged triangular mouth of a cave.
Helga's pulse quickened, leaping toward the cave, and she scrambled toward it. But then the ground bucked beneath her, and the rocks screamed. Helga fell to her hands and knees on the lurching stones. The screaming went on, a worse howl than the bound werewolf, a sound that stung her skin and grated in her bones. It was not coming from the stones, she realized, but from underneath. She clung to the sharp-edged rocks, even as they cut her, until the slope stilled with the lightening of the eastern sky.
She had fallen farther than she thought and had to climb to reach the cave-mouth. But the first pre-dawn glimmers lit it up and showed it only a shallow crevice by a rough ledge. Helga set her jaw and poked into it, but she was too late.
She went back to bed and did not feel much guilt when she rose at noon.
-----
The full moon fell at Midsummer, bathing the whole of the year's shortest night in brilliance. Helga had not seen the cave since the night after the werewolf left, but she felt this was probably a good omen.
She rose under warm moonlight and went out onto the mountainside. She had never found the cave or anything resembling it in daylight, but tonight the moon-rays picked out the jagged rocks in a wash of silver, and showed her one tarnished shadow deeper than all the rest. There.
Helga felt at the edges of the cave with her hands and extended one arm into the shadow as far as she could reach. Reassured that it was no illusion this time, she stepped inside.
She clambered barefoot down a rocky path she could barely see. Whether her body or her dreaming mind went walking, she always found herself dressed as she had lain down; therefore she had worn a shift to sleep in spite of the hot weather. She wished at times for better equipment and considered sleeping in her boots; at other times she wondered if perhaps she might do better to approach her goal alone, bared, unarmed and empty-handed. But she made a light with her wand nonetheless, when she was too deep for the glimmer of the moon to follow her, and the heavy stone basin she carried banged against her leg.
The air grew hot and heavy and snatched the moisture from her nose and mouth and eyes, and there was a sharp acrid smell in her nostrils.
And there was light ahead.
Helga killed her own spell and moved forward more quickly. She did not want to be caught here when the screaming began again.
She edged around the last bend, barely able to get the basin through, and the light spilled around her. The air was worse here, dry and caustic and choking. A woman easily twice her own height knelt over a man even taller, who lay chained on a bed of stone, with the stillness of exhaustion.
White arms like columns of marble supported a bowl near to brimming between the man's face and that of a serpent with dripping fangs. The serpent flung its head up and hissed, its venom arcing past the man's feet in a fine spray to pit the stone before Helga's.
Helga flinched and wished she had tried inviting Salazar along after all. Possibly they hadn't known each other long enough for that sort of suggestion, but he might have been interested anyway.
Instead she sank down to her knees and bowed with her face to the stone. "Lady Sigyn," she said, "I beg leave to serve you, and hear your teachings."
Sigyn's head turned toward her, and Helga felt her head pulled up as if by the hair, her mortal gaze jerked up to meet the Ásynja's in a way she would have been hard put to dare alone. After a long moment, Sigyn said, "What would you do?"
Helga rose to sit back on her heels and held up her basin. "I am only a mortal woman, but I am a witch and I am strong from work. I would take your place while you empty your basin of venom, to keep it from your husband's face."
Sigyn's mouth twisted. "Do you not fear Loki?"
Helga blinked. "Of course I do. But I want your teaching more."
A slow, slow smile. "Come and try it now. If you succeed, you may stay until your bowl wears through."
Helga swallowed and walked forward, her eyes drawn over and over again to the serpent, wondering if it would strike out or spray her. She could not kneel, as the bed was too high, so she stood beside Sigyn and tried not to let her hands tremble as she extended her bowl beneath the Ásynja's.
Sigyn nodded. Helga braced herself, and Sigyn swung her bowl smoothly away to the side between drips.
Helga raised stinging eyes to the serpent again and watched the droplets of venom gathering and swelling on its fangs. She fought the temptation to adjust her basin again, or to cough.
Splat.
The fall of the venom drops seemed to strike her bowl with as much force as the werewolf had once struck her knee. Helga's arms jarred, her eyes watered, and she feared she might spill until frantic blinking cleared her vision enough to see that the venom in the bowl was barely deep enough to wet a fingertip.
Of course, the fingertip would probably burn away to nothing.
Another pair of drops fell, and Helga gritted her teeth and bore up a little better this time. The underside of the basin felt hot in her hands.
She looked down and flinched a little, so that with the third drip one drop of venom hit high on the side of the bowl. Still inside, though, and Helga adjusted quickly without looking up.
Loki was looking at her.
Helga had to admit he was handsome, though she was still in no danger of desiring him. She'd heard too many stories of what Sigyn had put up with before he was bound. His face was ravaged by old scars, but he healed better than any mortal. Craggy features, red hair, and his eyes--his eyes were the sight that had arrested her attention, black blazing fire, nothing human.
The serpent kept dripping. Helga clenched her jaw, then released it, and wondered at Sigyn's endurance. And then, as her arms began not only to ache but to spasm slightly, she wondered just what took so long about emptying a bowl. Maybe it had to be poured slowly to avoid splashing.
"Who," Loki rasped after some time, "are you?"
Another drip. Helga shuddered. "I am Helga, a mortal witch who came to learn from your wife."
"Ah," he said. "This is how you pay her?"
"This is how I pay her," Helga confirmed, and then all the skin on her arms tried to twitch off. The last drop had splashed, not much but enough to send a very fine spray over the edge. Loki only blinked a little. Helga bit her tongue until it bled to keep from screaming.
Loki's mouth twitched up at one corner, and his eyes moved past her. "It's all right to cry out," he told her, in a gentle voice that made the skin creep along her spine. "I do."
Sigyn's massive basin moved in over Helga's. "Go, mortal-woman."
"Her name's Helga," Loki said, sounding almost cheerful.
Helga's attention was occupied with trying to withdraw her basin. She had practiced holding it up before, even full of water, but the position was more awkward for someone her height than she'd realized, and the venom was heavy. She wobbled once when her knee twinged and feared she would spill the bowl, all over herself and Loki, which would probably have lost her at least the use of one hand and the good will of her hosts, and at worst her life. But she got free at last and followed the powerfully vile smell back to where Sigyn had emptied the larger basin.
The rocks were smoking. Helga poured out her bowl, standing well back, and finally let herself cough and wipe her eyes and nose on her sleeve. Her arms were lightly reddened, with angrier dots here and there. She declined to think of what her face looked like.
"She's not one of ours, you know," she heard Loki saying in a low voice. The hair on her arms tried to rise, and she noticed it had withered off. She resisted the temptation to put a hand to the hair on her head.
"Would you want her to be?" Sigyn sounded tired and annoyed, but almost as if she wanted to laugh anyway. "She'd be more likely to give allegiance to Odin's party than to you, these days. Given the choice, I'll take a lunatic devotee of mercy."
Helga suppressed a wild desire to laugh, herself. She wasn't sure how they knew or what she had done to show it, but from their perspective she supposed it wasn't a bad description.
Sigyn turned to look over her shoulder as Helga returned. "Sit," the Ásynja said, "and I will teach you."
She did. And Helga's turns at shielding never seemed quite as long as that first time, nor did the basin grow as full.
At last her heavy basin was merely a thin shell, light to the hand, and as Sigyn was returning the bottom of it burned through. Helga shrieked and snatched her hands back. The basin's full contents splashed onto Loki's face, and an earthquake shook the mountain as his unearthly yell hammered her ears.
"This is what you spared us," Sigyn said coolly, and her strong hand seized Helga's shoulder and threw her back. Helga dimly saw what might have been falling stone, or Loki's flailing arm, pass through the place she had been standing, but then her head struck the wall and she saw nothing.
-----
Helga woke to the rising sun and raised her arms to its light, turning them to see the fine pale spray of scars. She sat up and found her knife where it had been, and her wand where it had been, and several curved shards of stone. She gathered up the thinnest ones carefully, as they were dissolving part of her bed, and stored them in layers and layers of spells in case she ever needed to brew Basilisk's Breath.
Then she sketched a cross on her forehead and packed up everything else. It was time to go home.
Title: Seek Under Stone
Rating: PG?
Summary: Helga Hufflepuff, in her youth, seeks out the cave where Loki lies bound to learn from his longsuffering wife Sigyn.
Author's note: For the Finish-a-thon at multific.
Helga chose her hour carefully. She had traded duties with her second sister so that the night her family had the Christian priest to dinner, she prepared the meal. It was one of her finer efforts, carefully seasoned and with generous use of the honey and mead from her bees.
Her father chewed the last bite of his bread-plate slowly, savoring it, and at last fixed Helga with an amused gaze and arched an eyebrow. "Excellently done," he said. "And very lavish with the fruit of your labors particularly, when it wasn't your turn to cook. You have something you want to discuss, don't you, Helga?"
Helga flushed slightly. "Yes, Father."
"Well, out with it. But if you're looking to marry that Salazar fellow, he'll have to come talk to me himself."
Caught quite off guard, Helga spluttered and then began laughing. "No, Father. I'm sure he'll be returning to his home one day, and that's not where I want to travel. Besides, I think he wants to marry a witch born to a witch and wizard."
"But you want to go somewhere?"
She drew a long breath. "I want to seek out Sigyn, to learn skill from her."
Her parents stared at her. The priest frowned deeply, and Helga bowed her head for a moment and then met his eyes. He was the main one she had to persuade. He was the only wizard in the village other than the odd foreigner Salazar, and he had been the one to teach her when she proved to be another magic birth.
He was more likely to object to dealings with the Aesir than her parents, but if he agreed, she thought they would too.
She could start her search without their consent, but she was unwilling.
"Why?" he said at last.
"To learn from her," she said. "She is loyal, loving, longsuffering. And she is powerful." Her mouth quirked. "Though I certainly don't envy her her husband."
"The Christ is all those things," he pointed out, "and is not a heathen goddess."
"Forgive me, Father Erik, but He is also not a witch. You were very clear on the difference between miracle and magic. If I find her, I hope she can teach me more about the power I was given in myself at birth." She paused. "I am not planning to worship her."
"That might be a problem in itself!" he said. "I would not tell you to, but I should imagine she might be offended if you don't."
"I will be polite," Helga said. "I will treat her as a queen. I think that might be enough."
"Perhaps." He frowned deeply. "Helga, do you truly think you have learned all the knowledge and skill of your teachers here?"
Helga let out a breath. If he had turned to that objection, did it mean the religious one was met and passed? "Of course not," she said. "But I think perhaps I know all they can teach me without more experience on my part. Mother has taught me about being a wife and mother, but she's also told me I'll have to learn more after I marry."
Father Erik snorted briefly. "Perhaps by spending more time observing people, too, but that also fits into your argument." He sighed. "If you go, be careful. My prayers will follow you."
"I think I'd rather you were proposing to marry Salazar," her father said with a sigh. "Even if he does fight with magic." Not being a wizard himself, her father was still skeptical of the idea of a man having a legitimate use for magic in battle. Magic was for women and gods, and women weren't supposed to use it to interfere with a fight. The priest still worried him.
Helga refrained from mentioning that she could beat Salazar dueling one time in four now, which was rather good considering he'd been doing it for several years longer. "He's not bad with a blade either," she said, "but I don't think it's likely."
"We ought to find you someone soon," he said, "but I suppose there's time enough when you come home."
-----
So that was that. It was nearly winter, which was a poor time for beginning any sort of search, but Helga knew she would never be able to bring herself to leave in spring when there was so much more work to do. It was winter, or high summer before the harvest, or nothing.
She tried to leave her chores in good order. She consulted all the elders of the village for advice, though she didn't tell all of them what she was doing. It didn't matter. It was good to have spoken to them, whether the advice was applicable or not.
She carved a basin out of stone, using her wand for the rough work and then polishing it smooth by hand. She had a new knife from the smith in exchange for a complex set of enchantments to keep his roof in good condition and knowledge of her tricks to lure bees to thatch. Salazar, the traveler, taught her how to make a collapsible house.
She set out wandering. She thought she was on the right track when the mountain slopes began to change at night.
She was sure when she found a hot spring hissing rotten-egg steam out of a crack in the rocks.
Helga set up her collapsible house on the nearest piece of level ground and made herself a bed. She lay in it each night at sundown, and closed her eyes, and did not know for certain whether it was her body that rose at midnight or if she left it behind. Either way, it was tiring; as the days lengthened and the nights grew shorter, she was grateful for the warmth but found herself waking all too often to full sun instead of the dawn.
With the first full moon after the snow began to melt, she woke just before midnight instead. There was a growling outside her door that made the fine hairs on her neck rise. Her scalp prickled, and her skin puckered up like that of a plucked goose even though she was lying under a warm blanket.
She slept with her hand on her wand. She was just raising it toward the door when the collapsible house collapsed.
Helga growled in return and struggled free as the house continued trying to fold itself up into an easily carried bundle of sticks. Sweat broke out over the gooseflesh as she saw what had come after her.
It was four-footed, humpbacked, and covered in thick ragged fur. The eyes were red, the teeth long enough that they would surely tear through the creature's lips if it ever shut its mouth.
Helga recovered from the first mad impression that she was dreaming of Fenrir and started to form a spell. The thing leaped across the debris of the limping house and was on her before she got past a syllable. Helga curled instinctively; she threw her arm across her throat, gagging at the hot breath and the slaver that dripped on her, and slammed the sole of her foot up into its ribcage.
The shock of it jarred all the way up her leg, and a hot jolt of pain ripped into her knee, but the creature tumbled away with a yelp. Helga's first three hastily-cast spells hit it with no discernible effect; the fourth drove it back again, and that gave her time for three more battering-ram curses that finally cracked its skull against a rock.
She set up her house again, examined herself for bite marks, and tended her knee, all sitting outside in a patch of ground she'd melted clear and dried. She wasn't sure whether the thing was dead, and she wasn't willing either to go within reach and finish it off or to take her eyes off it. The slopes seemed to shift around her, and she was vaguely queasy by morning.
Sunrise turned the werewolf back to woman. Helga limped over and determined that there was still breath in the unconscious body, then felt the woman's head and neck for broken places before hauling her up to the spring. She washed the werewolf and combed her for lice before taking her into the house.
The werewolf stayed for two more moons without giving a name. Helga, testy about this, called her Fenrir's Daughter and Nightmare in between feeding her soup laced with healing spells. She bound the woman on full moon nights in dead grapevines and enchantments sealed with her mother's silver ring, and Helga did not have a chance to dream until the woman gave her name, and begged her to keep it secret, and fled away at the full moon. Helga made her take the ring.
That night, Helga walked barefoot out at midnight, stood in the scalding basin worn under the hot spring, turned around twice to her right, and then threw her knife as far up-slope as she could. She scrambled after it, and cursed herself for a fool when she found nicks in the blade; of course she could smooth them back out, but what else had she expected?
Then she noticed that the ground was still warm under her feet and that the mountain rose higher above her than she remembered; in fact, she was nearly in a valley. She started to turn and look for her tent, but the warning given in tale after tale through the ages pressed against her cheek to stop her. Don't look back.
She started downhill and to the right instead, where the deepest shadow lay, and found a path that looped down to the jagged triangular mouth of a cave.
Helga's pulse quickened, leaping toward the cave, and she scrambled toward it. But then the ground bucked beneath her, and the rocks screamed. Helga fell to her hands and knees on the lurching stones. The screaming went on, a worse howl than the bound werewolf, a sound that stung her skin and grated in her bones. It was not coming from the stones, she realized, but from underneath. She clung to the sharp-edged rocks, even as they cut her, until the slope stilled with the lightening of the eastern sky.
She had fallen farther than she thought and had to climb to reach the cave-mouth. But the first pre-dawn glimmers lit it up and showed it only a shallow crevice by a rough ledge. Helga set her jaw and poked into it, but she was too late.
She went back to bed and did not feel much guilt when she rose at noon.
-----
The full moon fell at Midsummer, bathing the whole of the year's shortest night in brilliance. Helga had not seen the cave since the night after the werewolf left, but she felt this was probably a good omen.
She rose under warm moonlight and went out onto the mountainside. She had never found the cave or anything resembling it in daylight, but tonight the moon-rays picked out the jagged rocks in a wash of silver, and showed her one tarnished shadow deeper than all the rest. There.
Helga felt at the edges of the cave with her hands and extended one arm into the shadow as far as she could reach. Reassured that it was no illusion this time, she stepped inside.
She clambered barefoot down a rocky path she could barely see. Whether her body or her dreaming mind went walking, she always found herself dressed as she had lain down; therefore she had worn a shift to sleep in spite of the hot weather. She wished at times for better equipment and considered sleeping in her boots; at other times she wondered if perhaps she might do better to approach her goal alone, bared, unarmed and empty-handed. But she made a light with her wand nonetheless, when she was too deep for the glimmer of the moon to follow her, and the heavy stone basin she carried banged against her leg.
The air grew hot and heavy and snatched the moisture from her nose and mouth and eyes, and there was a sharp acrid smell in her nostrils.
And there was light ahead.
Helga killed her own spell and moved forward more quickly. She did not want to be caught here when the screaming began again.
She edged around the last bend, barely able to get the basin through, and the light spilled around her. The air was worse here, dry and caustic and choking. A woman easily twice her own height knelt over a man even taller, who lay chained on a bed of stone, with the stillness of exhaustion.
White arms like columns of marble supported a bowl near to brimming between the man's face and that of a serpent with dripping fangs. The serpent flung its head up and hissed, its venom arcing past the man's feet in a fine spray to pit the stone before Helga's.
Helga flinched and wished she had tried inviting Salazar along after all. Possibly they hadn't known each other long enough for that sort of suggestion, but he might have been interested anyway.
Instead she sank down to her knees and bowed with her face to the stone. "Lady Sigyn," she said, "I beg leave to serve you, and hear your teachings."
Sigyn's head turned toward her, and Helga felt her head pulled up as if by the hair, her mortal gaze jerked up to meet the Ásynja's in a way she would have been hard put to dare alone. After a long moment, Sigyn said, "What would you do?"
Helga rose to sit back on her heels and held up her basin. "I am only a mortal woman, but I am a witch and I am strong from work. I would take your place while you empty your basin of venom, to keep it from your husband's face."
Sigyn's mouth twisted. "Do you not fear Loki?"
Helga blinked. "Of course I do. But I want your teaching more."
A slow, slow smile. "Come and try it now. If you succeed, you may stay until your bowl wears through."
Helga swallowed and walked forward, her eyes drawn over and over again to the serpent, wondering if it would strike out or spray her. She could not kneel, as the bed was too high, so she stood beside Sigyn and tried not to let her hands tremble as she extended her bowl beneath the Ásynja's.
Sigyn nodded. Helga braced herself, and Sigyn swung her bowl smoothly away to the side between drips.
Helga raised stinging eyes to the serpent again and watched the droplets of venom gathering and swelling on its fangs. She fought the temptation to adjust her basin again, or to cough.
Splat.
The fall of the venom drops seemed to strike her bowl with as much force as the werewolf had once struck her knee. Helga's arms jarred, her eyes watered, and she feared she might spill until frantic blinking cleared her vision enough to see that the venom in the bowl was barely deep enough to wet a fingertip.
Of course, the fingertip would probably burn away to nothing.
Another pair of drops fell, and Helga gritted her teeth and bore up a little better this time. The underside of the basin felt hot in her hands.
She looked down and flinched a little, so that with the third drip one drop of venom hit high on the side of the bowl. Still inside, though, and Helga adjusted quickly without looking up.
Loki was looking at her.
Helga had to admit he was handsome, though she was still in no danger of desiring him. She'd heard too many stories of what Sigyn had put up with before he was bound. His face was ravaged by old scars, but he healed better than any mortal. Craggy features, red hair, and his eyes--his eyes were the sight that had arrested her attention, black blazing fire, nothing human.
The serpent kept dripping. Helga clenched her jaw, then released it, and wondered at Sigyn's endurance. And then, as her arms began not only to ache but to spasm slightly, she wondered just what took so long about emptying a bowl. Maybe it had to be poured slowly to avoid splashing.
"Who," Loki rasped after some time, "are you?"
Another drip. Helga shuddered. "I am Helga, a mortal witch who came to learn from your wife."
"Ah," he said. "This is how you pay her?"
"This is how I pay her," Helga confirmed, and then all the skin on her arms tried to twitch off. The last drop had splashed, not much but enough to send a very fine spray over the edge. Loki only blinked a little. Helga bit her tongue until it bled to keep from screaming.
Loki's mouth twitched up at one corner, and his eyes moved past her. "It's all right to cry out," he told her, in a gentle voice that made the skin creep along her spine. "I do."
Sigyn's massive basin moved in over Helga's. "Go, mortal-woman."
"Her name's Helga," Loki said, sounding almost cheerful.
Helga's attention was occupied with trying to withdraw her basin. She had practiced holding it up before, even full of water, but the position was more awkward for someone her height than she'd realized, and the venom was heavy. She wobbled once when her knee twinged and feared she would spill the bowl, all over herself and Loki, which would probably have lost her at least the use of one hand and the good will of her hosts, and at worst her life. But she got free at last and followed the powerfully vile smell back to where Sigyn had emptied the larger basin.
The rocks were smoking. Helga poured out her bowl, standing well back, and finally let herself cough and wipe her eyes and nose on her sleeve. Her arms were lightly reddened, with angrier dots here and there. She declined to think of what her face looked like.
"She's not one of ours, you know," she heard Loki saying in a low voice. The hair on her arms tried to rise, and she noticed it had withered off. She resisted the temptation to put a hand to the hair on her head.
"Would you want her to be?" Sigyn sounded tired and annoyed, but almost as if she wanted to laugh anyway. "She'd be more likely to give allegiance to Odin's party than to you, these days. Given the choice, I'll take a lunatic devotee of mercy."
Helga suppressed a wild desire to laugh, herself. She wasn't sure how they knew or what she had done to show it, but from their perspective she supposed it wasn't a bad description.
Sigyn turned to look over her shoulder as Helga returned. "Sit," the Ásynja said, "and I will teach you."
She did. And Helga's turns at shielding never seemed quite as long as that first time, nor did the basin grow as full.
At last her heavy basin was merely a thin shell, light to the hand, and as Sigyn was returning the bottom of it burned through. Helga shrieked and snatched her hands back. The basin's full contents splashed onto Loki's face, and an earthquake shook the mountain as his unearthly yell hammered her ears.
"This is what you spared us," Sigyn said coolly, and her strong hand seized Helga's shoulder and threw her back. Helga dimly saw what might have been falling stone, or Loki's flailing arm, pass through the place she had been standing, but then her head struck the wall and she saw nothing.
-----
Helga woke to the rising sun and raised her arms to its light, turning them to see the fine pale spray of scars. She sat up and found her knife where it had been, and her wand where it had been, and several curved shards of stone. She gathered up the thinnest ones carefully, as they were dissolving part of her bed, and stored them in layers and layers of spells in case she ever needed to brew Basilisk's Breath.
Then she sketched a cross on her forehead and packed up everything else. It was time to go home.