Chapter 2
When I reach the lake that pocks our valley, the sun is just cresting over the mountains that lock in Clan Vale’s land.
Like my heart, my bare feet are tattered and bleeding, but so cold that I can’t feel them.
I can’t feel much of anything. Not the roll of the dark pebbles. Not the crunch of thin ice. Not the slick of moss. Not the bite of frigid water as it ribbons over my ankles, my calves, my thighs, my navel, my breasts. Once I lose my footing, I lie back and float like a leaf blown off its branch.
What happens to sodden leaves? Do they sink, dissolve, or glide endlessly?
Contemplating the mysterious life of foliage keeps me from dwelling on the mystery of my own existence. Of course, the instant I believe my mind has found some respite, Mor’s words hit me like hailstones.
A valkyrie…
Me…
I imagine that Ulf and the Council are aware of my heritage, but is Nordin? What if everyone knows, save for me? What if Saga—
“Zaskja Stormsson!” The roar is deep, masculine, and ireful.
I twist my neck.
The rising sun paints my savior in full color.
Gods, the male is breathtaking. Seven feet of brawn and sun-touched skin. Glorious cheekbones. Defined jaw shaded by a few days’ growth. Irises the blue of fjords, and hair like the snow that never melts on the ridgeline.
“Get out of the water this instant! Your lips are purple.”
I realize Nordin’s scolding comes from a place of love, but not the sort of love I yearn for.
“Did you know?” My voice is so flat and hard that it razors toward him.
“I know many things. You’ll have to be more specific.”
“What I am.”
As his heavy brows slam low, I turn onto my side and sink, but only to my chin. Even from the distance that separates us, I don’t miss how shrunken his pupils have become.
“Get out of the lake this instant.”
I’m not yet willing to leave the liquid haven that unfetters my body and soul.
“Now, Zas,” he growls. “Swim toward the shore and we can talk.”
“I’m not ready to get out.” As my toenails scrape against stone, water slips through my lips. I spit it out. I may enjoy its numbing grip on my skin but prefer to avoid its numbing grip on my bowels.
“Zas-k-ja…” He makes a mess of my name, clipping the letters and dropping them into the ether one after the other.
“I’m fine.”
“You are not fine! You cannot be fine. Not after—not after finding out all you’ve found out.”
“So, you did know.” I shake my head, or attempt to, but my neck has gone stiff from my arctic trek and ensuing ice bath. “Did Mor send you to fetch me?”
“No. She believed you needed time alone to take it all in. Evidently, you cannot be left to your own devices at the moment.”
I roll my eyes, but like my neck, they feel gummy. That, however, has more to do with the emotional storm I’ve weathered since daybreak.
“Don’t make me wade inside and carry you out.”
“The day you found me, did you believe I was some stranded pup from another pack?”
“I don’t fucking feel like swimming right now.”
“Then don’t.”
“There’s ice atop the fucking water.”
Below too. Sensing Nordin’s a heartbeat away from going berserk, I keep this to myself.
“I’m not cold.” I try to shrug, but my shoulder doesn’t roll.
His snort is so violent that it flares his nostrils. “Of course you’re not. You probably lost sensation in your extremities ages ago.”
“You didn’t answer my question. Did you think I was a shifter when you brought me back to the pack?”
Muttering curses under his breath, he unfastens his heavy fur cloak and flings it on a rock, and then he pounds into the water, boots and all. “I swear to Fenrir that I’ll make you pay for this dip.”
What does it say about the state of my sanity that I don’t construe this as a threat but, instead, as an opportunity? “Did you think I was a—”
“No. I knew exactly what you were.” As he reaches me, he adds, “A bloody pain in my behind, that’s what.”
My lips twitch as he snatches me around the middle and scoops me into his muscled arms. I burrow my hands into my linen shift that is so lucent, it reveals not only the triangle of dark-blond curls between my legs but the pasty pink nipples atop my breasts.
Did Nordin notice them? I tilt my eyes up to find his plunged on the dense quilt of pines and spruce that trims our village, his mouth a smear of lingonberry against his granite jaw.
“Do you know how I found out about my ancestry?” I ask.
His nostrils widen around a harsh exhale. “I’m a wolf, Zas.”
Right… Even though the lake has washed away most of my blood, Nordin can smell it.
My abdomen pulses, slicking my inner thighs. “I can walk on my own.”
He crouches, but not to set me down, only to yank up his furs, which he dumps onto me. When I begin to scooch my legs out from the crook of his arm, his fingers clamp around my knee.
“Please put me down,” I beg him—urgently now—before his sleeves can grow soiled.
“I don’t trust you not to rush back into the lake.”
My lips twist in irritation.
“Where are your shoes? Your cloak?”
“At home.”
“You trudged through the woods barefoot and without a coat?”
Since his question is rhetorical, I mutter, “Best set me down, or I’ll stain your leathers.”
“My leathers are perpetually stained, Zaskjalill.” Though his tone isn’t gentle, the sound of my nickname—Little River—warms places in me his pelt can’t reach.
As he tramps through the forest, we lapse into silence. One that is, at first, only interrupted by the raspy kip of hawk owls, the crunch of needle litter, and the whiny bleat of goats. But then, a howl rises from the patrol wall that spans the crown of our mountains.
Although the call doesn’t vibrate with alarm, it causes my pulse to spike with bitterness.
My voice will never surge like theirs, my ears never ring with their lupine speech, and my mind never brighten with their silent conversations.
But most heartrending of all, I will never get a true mate, for those bonds exist only between wolves.
My lids seal as heat flows into them. “Does everyone know what I am?”
“Not everyone, no. Only the Council, our parents, and I know.”
“Not your sister? Not the Gothi?”
“Saga was never told. As for our High Priest, it doesn’t concern him.”
“What are my odds of being kicked out of the pack?”
His hold on my body firms as though my words alone could conjure this occurrence. “You are, and always will be, part of my father’s pack. That will never change. Not under his leadership, and not under mine.”
His sweet reassurance trickles through me like sap, but sap isn’t metal. It will never solidify to seal the gaps in my soul, but merely stick the flayed pieces of me together so that I can function.
When we finally break through the tree line, the sun is already bending back across the sky, gilding the grid of snow-covered streets, pooling darkness into the hollows left behind by paws and boots.
“I’m not ready to go home yet.” The bear fur tickles my stinging nose.
“Good.” He books a sharp turn. “Because that’s not where we’re headed.”
I guess our destination a few seconds before he hunches his shoulders to penetrate the communal steam hut. The crisp scent of pine wafts through the antechamber, thickening as we approach the sealed door.
He peels the pelt off my body and discards it on the bench that’s bare of anyone else’s belongings. He must toe off his boots, because a moment later, they thunk against the granite flooring and list onto their side. The black, fur-lined leather is creased and scuffed from use.
Nordin may be an Alpha’s son, but he lives modestly like the rest of us. Unlike some of the neighboring packs, where status ensures new clothes each season.
“Are you coming in with me?” I ask, looking away from his worn boots.
“Might as well. I can still feel the water’s chill in my fucking bones.” He peers down at my face. “Seriously, Zaskja… What possessed you to go out without proper attire and jump into the lake?”
I stare at the tawny planks that make up the wall. “You know exactly what possessed me.”
“Were you hoping that Fenrir would give you a ride to Helheim?”
“I wasn’t seeking to leave this world. I was only looking for a quiet place to put order in my thoughts and feelings.”
“And you couldn’t have done that at home?”
“I wanted to numb the pain in my chest.”
He purses his lips and draws the door wide.
I consider asking him to set me down, but I doubt he’s forgotten that I’m in his arms. To be honest, I’m selfishly enjoying the warm cocoon of him, the heat of his flesh, the solid thump of his heart, the brisk scent of his skin.
I’m squirreling them away for all the days when his pack duties take him away from our valley.
Here I’d imagined the chasm narrowing between us as I joined pack runs, but I will never run with the others. Not only could I never keep up, but the Wilds beyond are also too treacherous, and the creatures that prowl too vicious for fragile humans.
Except…
Except I’m not a human.
As he props me on the higher bench, where the air is hottest, I ask him, “What sort of magic do valkyries wield?”
His eyes flash the indigo of his wolf’s in the windowless obscurity.
“They have magic, correct?”
They… Shouldn’t I be using a first-person pronoun? Admittedly, if my ears hadn’t been spiky, I wouldn’t have believed I could be anything other than human.
“Only the Twelve and the Empress-touched.” Wood creaks as he drops onto the bench beneath mine, leans his back against the wall, and stretches out his long legs.
“Empress-touched?”
“It’s another term for those the Twelve deem worthy. They gift the chosen ones magic through touch. Thus, the name.” A smile must curve his lips, for his following words are lighter. “Not very original, is it?”
“By the Twelve, you mean the Empresses?”
“Yes. Since two of them are male now, it seems more fitting to refer to them by number.”
Although my eyesight’s hardly as keen as a shifter’s, thanks to the firepit, I don’t miss how soiled my nightgown has become.
I pinch the homespun fabric and pleat it to conceal some of the mess. “How does one know whether they’re Empress-touched? Or I guess, Twelve-touched?”
The wash of silence in the muggy chamber makes me wonder whether Nordin missed my question, but he’s a wolf. I could mouth a word from a mile away, and he’d hear it as though I’d shouted it against his eardrum.
“You’re not.” His voice brooks no argument.
Yet I argue, for how can one accept they are nothing? “How can you be so certain?”
He palms his jaw, filling the space with the scratch of his stubble. “When you were a child, my father tested you for magic.”
“Maybe it only manifests at puberty like shifter power? Maybe—”
“The faster you come to terms with this, the easier it’ll be.” His callousness makes my vertebrae click into alignment.
“How dare you, Nordin? How fucking dare you be so cold?” I press my palms into the wood, plant my feet on his bench, then stand.
“Sit.”
I don’t.
Lightning-fast, he hooks my waist and hauls me down onto him.
“Let go!” I pummel his chest with my fists.
“You can hit me as hard and as long as you want, but I won’t let go, Zaskja Stormsson.”
“If you care about me and our friendship, you will.”
“It’s because I care that I won’t. You’re not immortal.”
“I wasn’t immortal yesterday, yet I had free agency then.” I yank on his forearm, claw at it, desperate to escape.
“Yesterday, you didn’t seek to drown yourself in an icy lake.”
“I was only trying to drown my sorrows, not my body! I’m not Lenora!”
A shudder races through Nordin at the mention of his late brother’s mate.
I hate the sorrow the memory of their floating corpses will cause him. But I need Nordin to stop thinking me desirous to leave Midgard for Asgard. I may be hurting, but not to the point of stepping from the realm of the living to the land of the dead like Lenora after Bjorn’s brutal demise.
The pressure of Nordin’s arm slackens. I wait for him to relinquish me, but he doesn’t, merely scoots me up the length of him until I resemble a pup curled atop his torso.
In a hoarse voice, I grumble, “It’s only my dreams I’ve given up on. Not on life. Not on living.”
“Good, because I couldn’t bear losing you.” His soft rasp brushes across my perspiring brow, draining me of all residual fight.
While we lie there, as his fingers trace the seam of my bent legs, I wonder if I must forsake all my dreams. After all, I might not have magic but my ears bear points, unlike humans.
If Fenrir doesn’t give Nordin a preordained mate, could my lineage secure me a place at his side?