Chapter 22 Skadi
SKADI
It had to be the end of the world. There was no other plausible explanation.
I had a hoard.
I raged at the sky, sending lightning racing from the white-cold dome above to the icy plain where I stood now, my clawed feet sinking into the surface of the glacier, my home.
How was this possible? I was an elemental god, not a dragon. That was merely a form I’d worn to give shape to my being. To create a mouth to use for speaking to the mortal things, so their minds would perceive me as more than wind and ice.
Scales and claws and teeth and wings were signs of weakness, the trappings of mortality that my descendants wore. Well, my descendants and those of my enemy.
This was his doing. He must have sent her, as some sort of test, or emissary, or… spy. That was it. She was his tempting, conniving spy. I’d felt her presence, the north wind tasting her even when she was far from the sea. It had carried a hint of her aroma to me, enticing me to leave my home.
She’d come close enough to lure me in, and then she’d afflicted me. She’d made me want things.
I rolled the sharp tooth of the little enemy in between two icy claws. A splinter almost too small to be perceived, with a gleaming green bead at one end. A sharp needle on the other, that she’d plunged into my eye, waking sensations in me I had never been physical enough to feel.
Hunger. Pain. Shock. And… desire. A cold wave of lust for the tiny, warm creature who’d pinned me to this form, forcing me to smell her, feel her softness, long for her.
A perfect spy for my greatest enemy.
I panted, drawing blessedly cold air into my lungs.
When I’d tasted her tears, a long-frozen dream inside me had woken.
Moved inside me, and continued to move, altering my inner landscape in some permanent, unknowable way.
Like the small drops of saltwater I’d stolen from her were somehow more powerful than the glaciers of my home.
Then she’d dared to strike me in the eye. She’d pinned me to consciousness, to the temporal plane.
I’d raged for a moment, then fled back to the place that was most familiar: the northern pole of the world, where the only movement was the slow, inexorable creep of ice, and the bracing blast of wind.
Where even the seas held still when I commanded it.
I’d slept here for so long, since… since my enemy had been pinned under the earth, far to the east. He’d been contained as securely as he could be with water, earth, air, and ice. I’d made sure of that before I slept.
But now the world stank of his tainted power, flames everywhere, his beady, shifting eyes spying. He was awake, or waking. I could not allow that.
I stretched my cursed wings out to the sides and flapped them, crystals of ice flying away from them as I became more and more real in this plane. I felt the urges of my body, this limited shape. I needed to move, to drink, to eat.
Worse, I wanted her. The rest of the pieces of her that belonged to me.
An idea formed like a perfect flake of snow.
For now, I had a small, pathetic hoard with only one thing in it: a shining tooth.
I could find her, then use the next thousand years to rend her into equally small pieces, slowly.
Creating a hoard of shards of the little, tainted spy until I could sleep again.
Until this form became ice, and I lay in peace in my lair.
My stomach growled, and I roared at the sky once more. How revolting, to be flesh. How debased, to desire a creature of flesh. She’d weakened me in a few short seconds. She had to be his tool; there was no other explanation.
But now she would be mine. I flapped my wings again and went hunting.
She was farther south and east than she had been before, and I could smell my enemy in the air that blew from the island where I’d trapped him long ago. I could smell her, too—the sweetness of green things and the kiss of rain, with only the slightest hint of his corruption.
He’d planted her well. I placed the tooth she’d stabbed into my eye under an iced scale on my belly and flapped harder, forcing the dragon skin I wore as high as I could go, so as not to alert her to my presence.
Then, when I was above her, I dove. Straight and true, like a comet falling from the sky, I plummeted, only extending my wings at the last moment, when she was within my grasp.
She wore an ash-gray cloak, and it kept her skin from being broken by my claws.
Unfortunately, I had not yet learned the limits of my new flesh, and something cracked at the same moment I plucked her from the boat.
The joint at the shoulder of my right wing was broken somehow, and the muscles in my left torn inside as well.
I flew anyway, ignoring her squawking as I carried her north.
I would not be able to make it back to my resting place, but I had seen islands below on my flight and knew one lay close enough, a mere hundred miles northwest. I coasted to it now, the wind at my tail, my wings screaming in agony as more muscles tore in the effort to hold us up.
There! Just as my feet dangled close enough to skin the rough waves of the sea here, I spotted the stark black rock face of the cliff island, thousands of seabirds wheeling above it and nesting on its shore.
Only a few more miles. I flapped again, roaring as I fought to maintain control of my weak flesh, and at last reached the shore.
The sharp rocks rose to meet me as I fell onto them, my scales sending splinters of ice into the air, but protecting me from the rock.
I let my claws open and tossed the little enemy to one side.
The sound of her screaming, though, demanded my attention. Then the smell of her iron and salt blood bit into me deeply, like a sword of fire.
I turned my neck to see what had befallen her, and shock coursed through me.
She lay on the rocks beside me, broken and twisted, a swath of gray fabric wound around her pale, naked limbs.
Blood flowed from her dark hair in a stream to her shoulders, coating the chain and small nautilus shell that lay around her neck and dripping down one arm that bore a tattooed vine and flowers.
“You… You…” Her lips formed a small circle before she fell silent, her eyes rolling back and her limbs going slack.
Was she dead? I did not want her dead. At least, not yet. I needed to take her apart myself, watch her crumble, hoard her. Dead flesh did nothing but rot away.
I had been meaning to keep her, torment her, until she begged my forgiveness. Until she took me to my enemy, and I showed her how he would be defeated for the final time. Then I would take her to my lair, where I could wrap myself around her and freeze her to me before I slept again.
Or something like that. But if she were dead…
Something deep inside—not my stomach that still growled with physical hunger, but something else. My heart? It could not be my spirit, could it?—shied away from the thought of her being taken from me by my own error.
Pain shot through me as I dragged my head up and turned to see her more clearly. “Wake, little enemy. You are not allowed to die.”
She did not wake.
“Disrespectful spy,” I hissed. I did not know how to fix this. Her blood was flowing too quickly. Perhaps… Ah, yes. I could freeze her. Freeze her, and find some servant who knew how to mend her pathetically weak body.
I took a deep breath, sending the air to the icy core of my being, but before I could exhale, something barked.
I blinked, and it barked again. At me.
A seal? I lowered my head to inspect the creature that leaped onto the rocky shore.
Suddenly, it stood on legs like a human male, a seal pelt in one hand, and screamed, “Do not! Oh, great one, do not kill the Omega, the favored daughter of the Goddess!”
Kill? The… Omega? I remembered that word.
I let the air out, aiming my head toward the sky, then replied, “I am not killing her. I merely freeze her, in order to find…” Wait. This was the small creature I’d found swimming beneath the ice, the one who had been with the spy. He knew what she was, perhaps who she was.
I inhaled. He smelled nothing like my enemy. He could be my servant, perhaps.
“Do you know how to fix this spy?”
“Spy?” His wet hair swung around his frail body, small gold beads dangling from the dark strands.
“Do not lie to me, little seal man. I know she is a spy.”
He nodded, glancing at the dying female. “Yes. Her name is Rada, and she is a spy. You said you didn’t want to kill her. If you don’t let me help her, she’ll die in minutes. She’s bleeding to death.”
“You can make her whole?” I asked, wondering if he, too, was a spy. “Do it.”
I leaned my head back, and he scrambled toward the spy, panic in every move.
I watched as he used the seal pelt to staunch some of the wounds.
I wasn’t sure how, but the pelt seemed to work to stop the bleeding.
He fumbled with her gray fabric as well, wrapping it around parts of her, pulling small items out of the cloth and setting them on the rocks.
How curious.
The little spy had mumbled something about stealing from a dragon’s hoard when I had her the first time. But she had no jewels with her. She did have an inordinate number of small packages, some of which the seal man was pulling out and lining up on the rocks until he found something. “Got it!”
I sniffed at the things he’d removed casually.
They smelled of her in the way the green-jeweled needle-tooth had.
I wanted them. As the seal man pressed something between the spy’s lips, I picked up the small packages and tucked them behind my foreleg toward my back, applying a thin layer of ice over them so they were fixed to my scales.
They were not quite as good a hoard as pieces of the spy herself, but they served to soothe a little of the painful ache that she’d created when she forced me into this shape.