Giants of the Frost Read online

  “Where is he really?” Loki asked. “He’s in Midgard again, isn’t he?”

  Aud thought about the carefree, excited Vidar she had seen that afternoon. All that joy for somebody else. “Promise you’ll never tell.”

  “Of course not.”

  Aud sat up, her pulse jumping guiltily. “He’s in Midgard,” she said, and it felt good to say it. “You’re right, that’s where he is.”

  Loki narrowed his eyes, looking at her closely. “You know what he’s doing there, don’t you?”

  Aud bit her lip. She’d waded out too far. The current was tugging at her legs.

  “No, Aud, don’t back out now,” Loki said, reaching out to stroke her hair.

  She tried to flinch away, but his grip on her hair tightened.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Let go of my hair.”

  Loki allowed her hair to run through his fingers, but he grasped her wrist. “You are all open to me, Aud,” he said, and, for the first time this evening, the familiar cruel glint lit his eyes. “Mind and body, I see it all.”

  With her spare hand, she pulled the blanket up to cover her breasts.

  “Too late for that,” he said. “You confirmed for me that Vidar is in Midgard and now I know everything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you are so lonely that you come to me for comfort, then Vidar has finally broken your heart. You have abandoned any hope that he’ll return your feelings. So you must think he’s in love with someone else.”

  She sat silent, gazing at him, her face flushed.

  “As he has gone to Midgard, I assume that his lover lives there. And as he had not been to Midgard for a thousand years before I helped him with Heimdall’s cloak, he can’t have met anybody new. It’s her, isn’t it? The missionary’s niece? She’s back, somehow.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  Loki slapped his thigh in triumph. “I’m right! I never would have thought of it. You look sick with dread, Aud. Is it really so bad that I know?”

  She felt vulnerable, naked in every sense. “Don’t you tell a soul,” she managed.

  “It’s desperate, isn’t it?” he said. “Odin mustn’t find out.”

  “Vidar would kill you.”

  “I’ve no doubt about that, Aud, but I won’t tell anyone. I have no reason to hurt Vidar. He never troubles me. He never stands in my way.” He turned to find his clothes and pull them on. “I’m curious, though. Aren’t you?”

  “About what?”

  “About the woman. About why he feels so strongly for her.”

  “Love has neither eyes nor good sense, I suppose,” she said grudgingly.

  “I’d like to see her,” he said. “I’d like to meet her.” Then he burst into loud laughter. “Perhaps I’ll drop in for a visit.”

  Aud grabbed his shoulder and turned him toward her. “No,” she said, “Vidar will find out. He’ll know that I told you, he’ll never forgive me, he’ll hate me.”

  “Ah, well. We can’t have that,” he said, shifting his weight onto his side to lie next to her. “I’ll try to restrain myself.”

  The pain of guilt and regret swirled in her stomach. Vidar had been right not to trust her.

  “I wish I hadn’t come here tonight,” she said.

  “I’m glad you did. Aren’t you a little bit glad?” He dropped a kiss on her collarbone.

  She smiled ruefully. “Maybe a little bit,” she said.

  “All your secrets are safe with me, Aud,” he said, gently twining a strand of her hair around her throat, then letting it free. “Just so long as we remain friends, you have nothing at all to worry about.”

  II

  Wanton woman, you have awakened

  the grim wrath of the gods.

  —For Scírnis

  Nineteen

  [Midgard]

  Carsten ordered five days of rest, and at first that seemed like it would never be enough. I was absolutely flattened. I felt sore and afraid. I wanted to go home very badly and if it hadn’t been for the hope that Vidar might return, I probably would have. My world had been twisted on its axis and I couldn’t make sense of what had happened to me. Beliefs can hold their integrity through a lot, but chip away and chip away at them, and eventually they start to shiver and dissolve. How much faith we maintain in them becomes dependent only on how tight we hold on. I was white-knuckling by then.

  As my body recovered, I dealt with my fear by not thinking about it. I pulled all my notes into bed with me and worked at my thesis with white-hot single-mindedness. When I couldn’t read anymore, I lay there with my eyes closed, performing meaningless calculations by importing Mum’s lottery numbers into some of my key formulae. By Wednesday, I couldn’t bear the thought of another day in bed. So when Gunnar dropped by to tell me that an afternoon tea for Gordon’s fiftieth birthday was planned for four o’clock, I insisted that my missing it because of illness would be petty considering the percentage of Gordon’s entire life so far which an hour’s tea break represented. I got up and dressed.

  “Hear that?” Gunnar called to me from the lounge room while I wriggled into my panty hose in my bedroom.

  “What?”

  “The Jonsok. That’s the sound of Matthias and Nina leaving.”

  “So soon?” I called, with a fake tremor of sadness in my voice. I pulled on a turtleneck and a pinafore, carefully tucking the good luck charm out of sight.

  “They’ll be back, don’t worry. They come four times a year.”

  I was a little shaky on my legs, but I was certain that was attributable to being so long in bed. I joined Gunnar in the lounge room. “Once every thirteen weeks precisely, or at irregular intervals?” I asked.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” he said.

  “I feel fine.”

  “You look very pale.”

  “I’m naturally that way,” I said self-consciously. “Do you think Carsten will be cross with me?”

  “Attending an afternoon tea isn’t particularly taxing,” he replied as we closed the cabin door behind us. “I’m sure he’ll understand.”

  Carsten stopped me in the office and insisted on listening to my lungs before letting me go to the rec hall for afternoon tea. By this time, Gunnar had already gone ahead and Magnus accosted me in the galley.

  “You’re better, then?” he asked gruffly.

  It was the first I’d seen him since the accident and I was taken aback by his lack of warmth.

  “I’m feeling a lot better, thank you,” I said warily.

  “Good. I need you back at work on Friday.”

  “Friday? But you promised five days off.”

  “You’ve had four,” he said, looking genuinely puzzled.

  “Yes, four sick days.”

  “It’s not my fault you were sick on your days off. I’ll need you on Friday.”

  Then he bustled past me and, of course, 1.2 seconds later I thought of the perfect response, which was, “Actually it is your fault I was sick on my days off because I had to save your son’s life while you were busy shagging the cook.” But it was too late, he was in the rec hall and I could hear him laughing and being his usual congenial self with Gordon. I was as baffled by his bluster as I was by Maryanne’s pointed frostiness when she offered around the scones with jam and cream.

  “Why do you think Magnus and Maryanne are being so cold to me?” I whispered to Gunnar when I could guide him discreetly into a corner of the room.

  Gunnar was matter-of-fact. “Frida told me that Maryanne told her that Magnus had confessed to a secret desire for you, and that Maryanne has forbidden him from your company so long as he wants to keep sleeping with her.”

  It took a moment for all this to sink in. “Gunnar, there’s a gossip code of conduct,” I said. “If you hear gossip about a friend, you are honor-bound to inform them of it immediately.”

  “I didn’t want to worry you. You were sick,” he said, and bit off a huge chunk of fruitca
ke.

  “Magnus fancies me,” I groaned. “Just what I need.”

  “Who can blame him?” Gunnar said through a mouthful of cake. A few crumbs sprayed out down the front of his shirt.

  “I need a drink of water,” I said.

  “Get me a champagne, please,” he said, picking at the crumbs.

  I ventured toward the bar, ably manned by Josef and Alex.

  “One champagne, and one glass of your finest desalinated water,” I said, resting on the bar.

  Carsten leaned over my shoulder. “I wouldn’t recommend alcohol just yet, Vicky.”

  “It’s not for me, it’s for Don Juan,” I said, indicating the corner where Gunnar stood, attempting to cram the rest of the fruitcake into his mouth in one piece.

  Carsten moved on. Alex handed me two glasses and leaned close. “Don’t eat the soup!” he said, with a dramatic lift of his eyebrows.

  “What?”

  He flashed his big white teeth and indicated Maryanne. “Whatever food she serves you is bound to be laced with poison.”

  “Is everybody but me in the loop?”

  Josef joined in. “Carsten told me that Magnus told him—”

  I held up my hand. “I don’t want to know. Thanks for the champagne.” Everything I hated about the mating instinct was embodied in Magnus’s oiliness, Gunnar’s quasi-romantic fumblings, and the eager, knowing gazes of the others, starved for excitement and glutting on speculation about my love life. In those precious quiet moments with Vidar, love had seemed so far removed from such mundanity, it had seemed something divine and eternal and grand.

  As Gordon’s birthday party morphed into Wednesday night drinks and beyond, I remained the only sober soul on a ship of drunken fools, which made for a change if not an interesting one. Josef was scheduled on the night shift, and Alex and Gunnar fetched blankets from the storeroom, proclaiming loudly that they were going to stay up all night in the control room too. Everyone else took this as a cue to go to bed, but I was not ready for my own company yet. I joined them, cautiously sipping a glass of flat, room-temperature champagne while sitting cross-legged on the floor.

  Josef switched all the lights out so that the room was only lit by the glow of the computer screens. Gunnar and Alex shared drinking stories until Josef joined us.

  “What’s the time?” Alex asked, yawning broadly.

  Josef checked his watch. “It’s after one. You can go to bed, I don’t mind being by myself.”

  “But it’s a party,” Gunnar said.

  “The guest of honor left two hours ago,” I noted.

  “It’s not a party for Gordon,” Gunnar explained. “It’s a party for you, celebrating the fact that you didn’t drown on Saturday.”

  “I’ll drink to that!” Alex said, raising his glass.

  Gunnar was too drunk. He was leaning cosily against my shoulder.

  “Well, yes, I’m very pleased to be alive,” I said, shifting a few inches to discourage him.

  “I thought you were going to be victim number three,” Josef said.

  “Number three?”

  “We lost one in the lake in ’84, one in the control room in ’92.”

  The numbers poised in my mind’s eye, waiting to be employed in some pointless long division. I drove them out. “I knew about the drowning. But here? In the control room? What happened?”

  “None of us were here then, so I don’t know,” Josef said.

  “Wasn’t it a heart attack?” Alex offered.

  “I doubt it. He was only twenty-five.”

  “I’m sure I heard it was a heart attack.”

  “Now how does a twenty-five-year-old man die of a heart attack, Alex?”

  They bickered about this for a while, and I tried to hold my uneasiness at bay. I was angry at Gunnar for bringing it up. Denial was my new best friend.

  “I bet he was hagged,” Alex declared finally, a wild gleam in his eyes.

  “Hagged?” Gunnar asked.

  “You know. The old bitch that comes in if you dare to fall asleep in here.”

  Mention of the hag made me feel cold and twitchy. “Yeah, but that’s just a sleep disorder,” I muttered. “Really common.”

  “Especially common in here,” Alex said, leaning forward. “You’re not scared, are you?”

  My hand instinctively went to my throat, where the charm rested under my turtleneck. “No. But it’s scary when it happens, you’d have to agree.”

  “I have a confession,” Josef said, lying down and resting his head in Alex’s lap. “You know the thirty-minute timer?”

  We all nodded. He meant the timer that reminded us every half hour to check the wind direction, temperature and barometric pressure. It was the most annoying noise in the control room, intrusive and insistent.

  “It has four volume settings. I have it set to the loudest, just in case I fall asleep in here and she comes. It always wakes me up before she can—”

  “Steal your breath,” I finished for him.

  “Josef, you’re so full of superstitions,” Alex snorted. “It’s just a dream, you know.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “The best way to deal with nightmares is to face them head-on,” Alex said. “It’s unconscious material trying to get your attention. If you ask this hag what she wants, you might get a very insightful answer.”

  “Listen to us,” Gunnar said. “Telling ghost stories in the dark like teenage girls.”

  “I’m going to bed,” I said, standing and hugging my arms around myself.

  “I’ll walk you back to your cabin,” Gunnar said, a hopeful gleam in his eyes.

  That gleam disappeared when I left him outside my cabin door without even a kiss on the cheek. I sat on my sofa and peeled off my shoes and panty hose, thinking about what Alex had said. Dreams were unconscious material that needed to be sorted. If I could believe that, then I could believe that Skripi was some kind of metaphor for one of my problems that I wasn’t dealing with. Lord knows, there were enough of them. My mother, my love life, my obsessive calculating . . . But could I overcome my natural aversion to all things pop psychology by engaging in some self-directed dream analysis? It sounded like the kind of solution Mum would suggest to a problem. Ask your higher self, dear.

  What was important here was that I had to do something. I couldn’t endure another day of math gymnastics. So what if the Queen of the Skeptics intended a little experimental dream therapy? Nobody would have to know except me. Ignoring my dreams of Skripi was probably making them more insistent. Next time, I would do as Alex suggested, I would face him head-on.

  “Take one step toward a mystery, Vicky, and it will take one step toward you.” This was my mother’s favorite saying to trot out whenever I tried to convince her that supernatural influence was really just coincidence.

  “Doesn’t it seem odd to you, Mum, that you dreamed your spirit guide was Cleopatra directly after you watched a documentary about Cleopatra?”

  “Not at all! Seeing the documentary probably woke my sixth sense. Take one step toward a mystery . . .” And so on.

  I vowed I would face Skripi and, shortly after I fell asleep that night, the familiar feeling of blue moonbeams was cool on my face and I wasn’t in my bed anymore. I sensed that if I kept my eyes screwed shut and willed myself, I could be back there and fast asleep again in seconds. Instead, I gathered my courage in both hands and opened my eyes. I was standing just beside the window of my cabin, on the outside, looking into the forest. Moonlight fluttered above me as clouds swept overhead. I was cold and afraid, but I stood firm.

  A rustle in the undergrowth.

  “Who’s there?” I called, and my voice was a thin, scattered echo in the dark.

  “Will you run away this time?” A little voice, childlike and sad.

  “Skripi? Is that you?”

  He detached himself from the shadow of a crooked tree and tried a tentative smile. “You invited me into your dream.”

  I studied him closely for
the first time. He was the size of a ten-year-old child, but there was something not-quite-human about his face: his irises were oily and black, his teeth were softly pointed, his nose and chin reminded me of a fox, and his hair looked like fine twigs. He wore a ragged brown tunic and pants, and dirty fur boots.

  “I suppose I did,” I said. I glanced over my shoulder at the window, but the curtains were drawn. Still, I knew that if they were open, I’d be able to see myself, warm and cosy in my bed.

  “Why did you want me? Can we be friends?” His eyes lit up eagerly and he took a step toward me, his pointy fingers reaching out.

  Instinctively, I flinched backward. “I’m facing my fears,” I said. “I’m trying to deal with whatever unconscious material is making you appear.” As the words left my mouth I recognized them for the overrationalizing nonsense they were, and I nearly lost my nerve and woke up. “So who are you?” I said softly.

  “I’m Skripi. I’m a wood wight. I once lived in Idavíd, a forest in Asgard, but now I live here with my brother and my sister.”

  “You have a brother and sister here?” I glanced around.

  “The draugr and the hag,” he confessed, kicking the ground with an embarrassed toe.

  “You’re related to them?”

  “We all come from Idavíd. We’ll never get back there.”

  I thought about asking him if the draugr was the collection of weeds and fingers I had struggled against in the lake. He answered as though I had framed the question aloud.

  “Oh, yes, that was the draugr. He would have made you his bride. But Gunnar had eolh.” He held his hand up in a stop gesture, and it looked similar to the rune on the stone. “You see, you see? I told you it was important.”

  “Why are you here on the island?”

  “The gods in Asgard put us here, all three. They sent down the hag and the draugr because they were wicked, and I had to go too because I’m related.” He shook his head sadly. “We can choose many things, but family are thrust upon us.”

  “I understand,” I said, thinking about my mum. Was this the message my dreaming self was trying to convey to me? “So you’re here as some kind of punishment?” I asked.