Giants of the Frost Page 16

  The area directly around the lake was muddy, but we found a grassy verge at the edge of the trees on the eastern side of the water and spread out our blankets. I lay on my back and looked at the sky through branches, and listened to the sounds of the picnic being unpacked, of plates and glasses being handed about, of conversations and laughter.

  Gunnar crouched down on my blanket. “Vicky, why are you the only one not doing anything?” he asked.

  “I am doing something. I’m watching Magnus’s kids.” I turned my head, saw they were still shouting to each other as they ran round the lake, and turned back. “See?”

  He settled next to me. “So you’re still babysitting?”

  I sat up and said, mock-cheerfully, “Magnus says I’m the best babysitter he’s ever employed and he wishes he could take me home to Oslo one day.”

  “I think you’ll have some competition from Maryanne.” He pointed to Magnus and Maryanne, head to head, talking quietly.

  “That’s progress,” I said.

  “I saw him leaving her cabin first thing this morning.”

  “Do you think they . . . ?”

  “I’m fairly sure.”

  I screwed up my nose. “Yuck.”

  “It’s like a social experiment, this place,” Gunnar said, folding his long hands around his knees. “Eventually they all pair off. Frida and Carsten. Magnus and Maryanne. You know that Alex and Josef . . . ?”

  “I guessed.”

  “So that leaves me a choice between Gordon or you,” he said.

  “Gordon’s a safer bet,” I said lightly.

  “You have better teeth.”

  I laughed. Gordon had big protuberant teeth, with a gap between them wide enough to sail the Jonsok through. “But really,” I said, “teeth or no teeth, I’m not—”

  “I know, Vicky. It was only a joke,” he said quickly.

  I felt uncomfortable, but tried to pretend I wasn’t. “I know,” I said.

  “Victoria!” This was Magnus, calling from a hundred feet away where he and Maryanne had started a bottle of champagne. “Can you tell the children to be careful not to slip in the water?”

  I looked around and spotted the kids on the far side of the lake, faking a sword fight with branches. I got up and walked around the lake toward them. They saw me coming and ran away.

  “Hey!” I called. “Be careful you don’t slip into the water.”

  Matthias turned and brandished his sword. “I want to go swimming.”

  “Well, you can’t. It’s dangerous.”

  “I’m the best swimmer in my school. Far said I could go swimming.”

  “No he didn’t. Now behave or I’ll make you come and sit with me and Gunnar.”

  He turned to run after Nina with his sword held high, but I noticed he put three more feet between himself and the muddy edge of the water. I returned to the picnic site to see Maryanne looking at me smugly. Gunnar and Josef had pulled all the picnic blankets into a communal square, and champagne and sandwiches were served. Carsten and Frida made an official engagement announcement and the two sips of champagne I took as a toast were my limit for the day. After Wednesday night’s debacle, I was easing off on the social club’s alcohol. Magnus clearly had a different agenda, and he and Maryanne both became Saturday-afternoon tipsy and exchanged desiring looks for the entire picnic. Nobody was more embarrassed than Magnus’s children, who dealt with it by taking a plate of sandwiches and a flask of orange juice to the far side of the lake for a private picnic.

  At around four, the warmth of the afternoon gave way to the first chill of approaching evening. Magnus buttonholed me while I was patrolling for plastic wrap that had blown into the edge of the forest.

  “Will you watch the children?” he slurred.

  “I’m watching them,” I said distractedly, glancing over my shoulder.

  “For the rest of the day,” he added. “Maryanne and I are . . . heading back to her cabin.”

  I was glad my back was turned to him. The look of horror on my face was best kept a secret. “Fine.”

  I gathered rubbish and, when I turned around, Magnus and Maryanne were scurrying off like American teenagers at a frat party—she was giggling, his hand was firmly attached to her bum—and everyone else at the picnic looked away politely. We gave them a half hour lead, then started saying how late it was getting and it was probably time to head back.

  We had packed up and were twenty feet into the trees when Matthias pulled my arm, and said, “Vicky, I’ve left my sword back at the lake.”

  “Can’t you find another?” I asked. “It was only a stick.”

  He shook his head.

  “Go on, be quick,” I said, waving him off. Nina ran away with him. I walked another hundred feet in conversation with Gunnar when I realized that I should probably not be so casual in my responsibilities to Magnus’s children.

  “Actually, Gunnar, I’d better wait for the kids.”

  “See you back at the station,” he said, and disappeared into the trees.

  I was halfway back to the lake when I heard Nina scream.

  My heart jumped. I ran.

  “Matthias! Matthias!” she shrieked. “Far! Far! Help!”

  I broke through the trees. Nina stood helpless and sobbing in the mud.

  “Nina, where’s Matthias?”

  She shrieked at me in Norwegian and pointed to the water. A stream of bubbles about fifteen feet out.

  “I’ll go in after him,” I said, throwing off my coat and shoes. “You run that way and call loudly for Gunnar.”

  She tore off, screaming Gunnar’s name while I splashed into the cold lake . . .

  A draugr is a thing to be feared.

  . . . and swam toward Matthias.

  Under the surface the water was grey-green and murky. Below me all was black, choked with weed and cloudy shapes. I spotted a pale flailing arm and headed in that direction, scooped up Matthias and broke the surface with him.

  “Are you all right?” I gasped.

  He spat out a mouthful of water and began to cry, pushed at me angrily and swam toward land. I guessed he was all right.

  Something brushed my ankle. A weed or . . .

  With a rush of bubbles I was yanked under. I opened my mouth to scream and swallowed the lake. I was spinning, something had me around the thighs. I struggled away. Had I been caught in a float of weed? I felt around near my legs and was horrified to feel fingers brush my own.

  They pulled me down farther. The water was icy. My throat was raw and I was running out of breath. My lungs felt hard, blocked. My brain was bursting its bounds.

  Out of the murky green darkness, a face loomed in front of me, a nightmare of weed and veins and algae. It was the last thing I saw before I blacked out.

  The next face I saw was Gunnar’s, close and hot.

  Then more blackness.

  Voices shouting. Being carried.

  Carsten’s voice above them all, shouting orders.

  Carsten?

  Our nurse, that’s right. I’ve been saved.

  “Am I alive?” I mumbled, and my throat felt as though it had been lacerated.

  Relieved laughter. Being pushed and pulled, and a warm towel gathered around me. I opened my eyes. I was sitting in a chair in the sick bay, a linoleum-floored room which saw most of its use in storing our alcohol. Carsten leaned over me and smiled. “Welcome back.”

  Gunnar stood anxiously in the corner. I touched my wet hair. Memories swung toward me and I shuddered. “What happened?”

  “As far as we can figure, you went in after Matthias and then got tangled up in some weed,” Carsten said.

  “I saw a face under the water,” I said, “just as I was blacking out. A nightmare—”

  “I’m sure that’s not unusual in those circumstances.”

  “You’re fine now,” Gunnar said. “Nina called me and I pulled you out.”

  I smiled. “Did you save my life, Gunnar Holm?”

  “Would that be all ri
ght if I had? Or would that contravene our ‘just mates’ rule?”

  “No, that’s all right.”

  “And the whole kiss-of-life thing?”

  “I don’t remember it, so it’s like it never happened.” I laughed and it hurt my lungs, so I stopped.

  “You were very brave to go in after Matthias,” Gunnar said. “He might have died in pursuit of his sea monster.”

  “Sea monster?”

  “He told Magnus that’s why he went in the water.”

  I closed my eyes and even that hurt.

  “Are you all right?” Carsten asked.

  “I thought drowning was supposed to be a nice peaceful death,” I said.

  “Not at all,” he replied emphatically. “Filling your lungs with liquid is very painful. Gunnar, could you tell Magnus what happened.”

  Carsten listened to my lungs and checked my eyes, gave me some painkillers and told me to go to my cabin, have a warm shower and get into bed.

  “I’ll come over in an hour to check on you,” he said, giving me a fatherly pat on the shoulder, “but I think you’ll be fine once you’ve had a rest.”

  I did as he said, and as I was climbing into my bed I noticed something on the bedside table.

  The ward. Gunnar had left it there. I picked it up and clutched it in my palm. Did he leave it without saying a word because he thought I really needed it and was afraid to ask for it? He was probably right on both counts.

  I dangled it in front of me and it spun slowly on its chain. Matthias, despite being a good swimmer, had gone into the lake and been pulled under. I had gone in and been pulled under. Gunnar had come after me and he’d been fine. Anything to do with a certain good luck charm?

  Images from the last weeks crowded my imagination: sticks and weeds, night grey, lake-gloom, matter neither animal nor vegetable, sick moonbeams and nausea in my heart valves. If I lay still and thought hard enough, I might be able to pin all these horrors down, but my lungs ached and I wondered what was more important, thinking or breathing.

  I opened the clasp and fastened the ward around my neck. I decided I liked breathing.

  Fourteen

  [Asgard]

  The house at Gammaldal was silent and still as Vidar reined Arvak in. A thin streak of smoke curled from the chimney, but Aud did not emerge to greet him.

  “Aud?” he called, dismounting. He removed saddle and bridle and set Arvak free to walk about, then looked inside the house. The remains of a fire; the quiet darkness; the smell of old cooking. No Aud.

  He scanned outside. What day was it? Perhaps she was with Loki. Vidar cursed as he led Arvak to the stable to feed and water him. Vidar didn’t want to be alone. He needed company and conversation to break the obsessive circle of his thoughts.

  It had seemed so simple before he met Victoria. In his imagination, they would meet, fall in love, then together they would hide from his family, just for a lifetime. And yet, when he finally saw her again, reality weighed heavily on his heart. Had he really forgotten how fine her skin was, so pale he could see the blue veins at her wrist? Had he forgotten the lightness of her voice, the narrow circumference of her waist, the softness of her cheek? She was so vulnerable, so mortal. His whole time in Midgard he’d longed to hold her, to crush her body against his and burn his lips on the heat of her skin. In her presence, a longing so acute had gripped him that his whole body would have trembled had he not forced it to be still. But when the moment arrived for him to declare his feelings, he had become acutely aware of the possibility that he might attract to her a danger she was not equipped to battle.

  Vidar left Arvak in the stable, but couldn’t bear to return to the house, to sit quiet and cautious indoors when such a passion of indecision clouded his mind. He crossed the wide flat fields and found himself walking up and down the muddy beach in the early light.

  Nearly a thousand years he had waited. On each day of each week of those years, he had thought about Halla with longing and tenderness, knowing eventually she would return. He had yearned for that day so violently that sometimes he feared it would injure him. How could he turn his back on her now?

  It was simply that the obstacle that stood between him and Victoria was so great. His father. A beast—foul, brutal and malevolent. Not happy unless everyone around him was intimidated. Damn him. Vidar set his teeth. Sometimes the shadows of a fantasy taunted him. In his fantasy he went to Valaskjálf at night, burst into the cavernous hall, and killed all of them: his detestable father, his preening brothers, the hard-faced women they surrounded themselves with . . . But before the fantasy could spawn the kind of detail that would make it addictive and poisonous, he suppressed it.

  Vidar stopped, crouched on the beach and watched the waves for a long time, no closer to knowing what to do next. The sun behind him cast his shadow on the mud, as it rose over Valaskjálf many, many miles away.

  Aud had arrived at Loki’s house to find he wasn’t home. She stoked the fire and sat beside it, deciding she would wait one hour, then return to Gammaldal. Vidar had been gone for a week and the cottage was empty and forlorn without him, but returning was better than sitting among the towering shelves of dusty objects Loki had collected. Time crawled and she wished she’d brought some mending. She didn’t dare touch any of Loki’s things in case she broke something and found herself bound into his service two days a week.

  She wondered when Vidar would return. The longer he was away, the more likely it was that this Midgard woman returned his affection and kept him permanently from his home. She had hoped, bitterly and deep in her chest, that the Midgard woman would be indifferent to Vidar, sending him back to Aud broken and in need of comfort; although she couldn’t imagine that any woman could be indifferent to Vidar. What aspect of his great beauty or tender heart could be found wanting?

  The door slammed inward and Loki stood there, outlined by daylight. It gave Aud a start.

  “Did I frighten you?” he said, laughing.

  “No. Did you forget I was coming?”

  “No. I remembered.” He slid inside and closed the door behind him, plunging his features into shadow. “I’ve been out hunting.”

  “Hunting?”

  He produced a posy of yellow flowers. “Hunting wildflowers. For you.”

  Aud smiled in spite of herself. Warily, she took the flowers. “Thank you, Loki.”

  He crouched in front of her. “You see, I’m not so bad. I’m sweet and tender.”

  She laughed. “They aren’t the first two words that spring to mind when I think of you.”

  “What are the first two words, then?” he asked, leaning so close she could feel his breath on her hands.

  “Thief” and “liar.” “Master and servant,” she said, refusing to be flustered by his proximity or the hot little kisses he laid upon her fingers.

  “Oh, come,” he said, taking her hand, “we are more than that.”

  “Loki, I have very strict orders from Vidar. I’m to serve you. What would you have me do today?”

  He rose and began hunting through the objects crowded on a shelf on the other side of the room. “Vidar tells me you are a fine weaver and seamstress. Is that right?”

  Aud flushed with pleasure. “Did he really say that?”

  “Oh, yes,” Loki assured her. A shining silver pot fell and hit him on the head. He cursed and proceeded more carefully.

  “When I came to Gammaldal, he had two tunics and two breeches, both plain wool, both poorly woven and sewn by himself,” she confided, giggling at the memory. “I found madder and lichen, dyed some wool and spun it fine, then wove and sewed him new clothes. The old ones I threw on the fire.” Aud patted the apron she wore with her sewing tools in it. “It was very satisfying.”

  “I suppose you used an Aesir loom, though,” he said over his shoulder. “Big, heavy, rough.”

  Aud frowned, puzzled. “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  He turned. He had dislodged from the shelf a lightweight carved loom of maple, which he
presented to her.

  Her fingers traced the carvings. “These are Vanir runes,” she said.

  “It’s Vanir work,” he replied. “I found it on my last trip to Valaskjálf. I was looking for honey and this was tucked away in the back of the cook-room. Probably spoils of war, dusty and long since forgotten.”

  A sad-happy feeling tingled up her fingers and into her heart. Something from home.

  “Do you want me to weave a cloak for you?” she asked.

  “No. I have many fine clothes.” He rose and took the seat next to hers at the fire, stretching languidly. “It’s a present. Do what you want with it.”

  “Then what am I to do for you today?”

  “You were a witch princess in Vanaheim, weren’t you?”

  Aud savored the appellation. Before she’d left her own country, she had been developing a sense of how powerful she might one day become. The family’s seidhr magic was strong in her, and to have Loki acknowledge it filled her with pride. “I am,” she said. “Though a hobbled witch princess in Asgard.”

  “Can you make me an elf-shot to use against Thor?”

  “I’m forbidden from using magic except in service to the Aesir,” she replied.

  “It would be in service to me.”

  “Yes, but it would be against your own family. I wouldn’t risk contravening the terms of my service.”

  He pouted. “All right, then. Tell me stories.”

  “More stories? I don’t have any. I’ve told them all.” Even the animal fables she’d used to tell Helgi.

  “Make something up. Be inventive.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t, Loki. I’m not a storyteller. I’m—”

  “But I command you.” Loki’s pale eyes narrowed. “You must do as I say. You have very strict orders from Vidar.” He pronounced Vidar’s name in a whispery, feminine voice.