Chapter 6
Gullveig
I thought flying the first day was tiring, but the second day, my shoulders and back hurt like I’ve been beaten. If Nótt—Little Bits has a real name, apparently—and her bonded earth child wanted to turn us in, it would be pathetically easy for Bjorn and his vanir to catch us.
“I can’t fly,” I say. “I can’t. It hurts to move at all.”
“Then we’ll walk,” Freya says. “Isn’t that how you reached us in the first place?”
“We had provisions then,” I say. “And we didn’t come all the way here, to your territory. We were picked up near the edge of the aesir lands by a group of vanir who needed brights.”
She sighs. “Well, it’s what we can do, so as long as you’re willing, we’ll do it. Whatever it takes, right?” She turns to look at Nótt hopefully. “Though we can’t really expect you to hobble along with us.”
“You could have turned me in that day,” Nótt says. “You should have turned me in, honestly.”
“What exactly happened?” I ask.
Before they even have a chance to answer, Nótt’s bonded walks toward me with a handful of mud. “Here.”
I can’t help flinching backward. “Oh, uh, thanks for that blob of wet dirt stuff, but I’m not really that hungry, so. No thanks.”
He ignores me, spinning around behind my wings and slathering his handful of smelly mud right between my wings.
To make it worse, he must not realize that I have exactly one tunic, and it’s white.
It’s already battered and tattered almost beyond repair between the rips, gouges, grazes, and tears we picked up on our way out of that tunnel, but a blob of mud that’s now dripping all down my back isn’t going to help, like at all.
“This will help ease your aching muscles.”
Fagen was a healer for his people before your brother took him. Nótt’s looking at Freya, but honestly she probably shouldn’t look quite so proud. I hardly think mud smearing qualifies as healing, and nothing that smells like the back side of a sick mule could possibly help me feel better.
Only, before I can even come up with the strong words with which to fuss at him, the sharp aches and pains in my back begin to recede. “What was in that mud?”
Fagen smiles. “The mud’s just there to hold the herbs together. You can wash in the stream over there once they’ve eased the worst of the discomfort.” He points. “You’ll feel much better.”
She’ll be ready to fly again? Nótt asks.
Fagen shrugs. “She’ll be better. How much better, I’m not sure. But I have another poultice we should put on her scrapes and cuts once they’re clean.”
I start toward the stream, but Fagen grabs my arm. “Not yet. Give it an hour or so. We can eat first.”
“Eat?” I look around. “What on earth would we eat?”
Fagen grabs a rope and tugs it over his shoulder and into view. There’s a string of fish on it.
I’m too busy gaping at him to say much else.
I can start a fire, Nótt says.
“How would a moon vanir—”
Before I can even get my question out, she’s struck a rock, hard, with her claw, and Fagen leaps toward her with a handful of sticks and moss.
There’s a fire blazing in front of us moments later. The two of them work like. . .like they’re a team. Like they’re friends. “How did you save Nótt?” This time, I turn and stare at Freya.
It’s Nótt who answers. Her brother brought in a group of brights. Unlike the ones we steal from the aesir, these earth children were living close to here, hiding and barely surviving under the vanir rule. They were in bad shape. Dirty, tired, and mistreated. They’d been running, but. . .
Freya clears her throat. “This earth form is strange, but I think I already understand better. It’s barely been a night since my transformation, and my body cries out for sustenance. It gives me new perspective on how hard it must be for you to survive as earth children.”
“We were barely surviving,” Fagen says. “And I was about to be bonded by a terrible storm vanir with huge eyes and dark, almost black scales.”
“Nótt has black scales,” I say.
“Take that back.” Fagen splutters. “Her scales are like the richest night and the twinkling of stars.”
“Okay,” I say. “But the night sky looks pretty black to me—”
I saw Fagen helping the smaller brights, shielding them, and I wanted to bond him instead, so that someone who helped others wouldn’t be harmed.
I tried to intervene, but I was far too small to do anything.
I couldn’t protect him. I couldn’t even protect myself, and it made Nostramis, the storm vanir who had chosen him, very angry.
“My brother was livid too,” Freya says. “When I asked what was going on, he thought you looked like you actually liked the earth child, and he told you to bond any other one.”
Nótt sighs. I refused.
“I liked her immediately,” Freya says, “for doing what I hadn’t had the courage to do. You stood up to someone much larger and more powerful, knowing it would probably cost you your life.” She frowns. “And you did it because it was the right thing to do.”
Not among the vanir, it wasn’t. I felt like I didn’t fit with the vanir from the moment I hatched. None of the things I was being taught made sense, and I struggled over and over.
Freya nods. “And you were right. Bonding earth children against their will was the wrong thing. In that moment, you did the absolutely worst thing you could do among the vanir, and it felt like the most right thing I had ever seen in my life until that moment.”
That’s why you stopped your brother, distracting him, and ordered Nostramis to follow you.
“I figured you’d go ahead and bond that bright while I led them away, and so you did.
When I heard a few years later that another pair of brights were resisting being bonded.
. .” Freya faces me, one eyebrow quirked.
“That’s why I came so fast. I wanted to find a bright to feel something with, like it seemed that Nótt had. ”
“Too bad you were stuck with me.” I roll my shoulders. “I do feel much better.”
“And the fish is cooked.” Fagen passes the steaming, rough-hewn filets out on large, wide leaves.
I’m aware it hasn’t been seasoned, and I know it’s probably not very delicious, but after not eating for so long, we all fall upon it gratefully. Except for Nótt. She just watches.
At first.
As I take my last bite, she asks, Is it everything it seems? She creeps closer, her eyes on our nearly clean leaves. Fagen seems to love eating, when he’s able to make something in a certain way. Her head tilts. I’ve always wanted to experience the act as an earth child does.
She’s jealous of Freya. I should have understood that earlier. It makes me less nervous that she’ll betray us, but I have no idea how the aesir will react to a winged earth child who betrayed them, two unknown earth children from the vanir lands, and a tiny moon vanir.
I’m worried they’ll kill us on sight.
After I’ve washed in the stream as well as I’m able, my cloak still damp enough that I’m shivering in the early spring air, we take off. We may have the help of a moon vanir, but we should still get through the vanir lands as quickly as possible.
It’s a long three days, Nótt stuck flying as miserably slow as I fly, and a few times, when Nótt let her guard down, we were nearly seen.
Thankfully, with the help of Fagen’s mud herbs and Nótt’s cloaking, we’re able to creep along undetected.
The fish we manage to catch aren’t nearly as delicious when we aren’t as hungry, but the trip’s blessedly boring.
Until we reached Asgard.
Now we’re not hiding from vanir that clearly didn’t know that we’d found a moon vanir to help us.
Or vanir who are looking for Freja, in her sky child form.
No, now we’re hiding from the aesir, and they’ve been on high alert to moon-vanir-led attacks for centuries.
They have protocols in place to detect us, not dissimilar to the wards set up by Fagen.
We set a few off, and each time, Freya’s able to convince them that she’s the one who did it. But it’s getting harder and harder, because the closer we get to the more densely inhabited areas, the more suspicious the sentries become.
“I still think we should veer off and head for Himinbjorg,” I say. “I know no one else agrees, but it’s the only place I have family, and—”
“Family that might have already decided you’re an irredeemable traitor,” Fagen says. “We’ve been over this. It’s not safe to risk—”
I grab his arm. “I don’t know what your family was like, and mine’s fiercely loyal to the aesir cause or they’d never have trained Gorm and me like they did, but they also loved me. They’ll listen to what I have to say, and that will be enough.”
Nótt and Freya exchange a look, and I wait.
“Fine,” Freya says. “You and I will approach your mother and her bonded aesir, but Nótt and Fagen will wait in the countryside. I won’t risk their lives on your faith.”
“Agreed,” I say. “We’ll come to get you once you see that my parents will listen.”
It takes a long time for us to find the right area for my childhood home.
I’ve never looked for the markers while coming this direction from the Gulf of Bothnia, but then I see the inlet Mother always launched from, and I breathe a sigh of relief.
“This is it. I can show you where to hide. You won’t need to cloak except right around dusk and dawn. ”
Once we have Nótt and Fagen hidden away, we wait for nightfall, and then Freya and I set out toward Soderhamn.
It’s so slow by foot, now that I’m used to flying, but I can’t risk drawing more attention to my wings, not if I want to survive our entrance into the populated parts of aesir holdings.
If we want to help them, if we want to do as Jore asked, it’s vital that we do manage to talk to someone who matters.
Although the journey in is almost torturously slow, it pays off.
Mom’s right where she always is as the sun rises.