Chapter 18 Gullveig
Gullveig
In the aftermath of the failed attack and the loss of her brother, Freja’s away a lot. I start to worry. I made progress, helping her. It meant something to her. She said she wanted to show me something, but I haven’t really seen her since.
Until she flies in like she’s racing, nearly knocking me over.
He’s finally gone.
“What?”
My father—he’s gone. He was called out to look at—doesn’t matter. We have to go now.
“Go where?”
Freja tosses her head and waits.
I scramble onto her back.
She crawls to the edge of her cavern and looks around, and then she drops off the edge, only using her wings to guide the direction we’re falling until we’re about to slam into the ground.
I close my eyes, prepared for the worst, but instead of a terrible impact, we bank hard right, and then dip again. When I open my eyes, we’re in a cavern I didn’t even know existed, and then we’re dropping again.
“Where are we going?”
Hush.
It takes several moments of terrifying drops and spins around tight corners, weaving through dark caves before we finally stop.
“What is this place?”
Ice shimmers in all the corners, and it drips from the roof.
I shiver, but not just from the bone-chilling cold.
In the center of the enormous cavern, there’s a pillar of what looks like pure gold.
Streaks of gold, twisting veins and lines snake toward the column from all sides, above and below, all of them angling into the solid pillar.
I slide from Freja’s back and walk toward it carefully.
Ice patches covering the ground make the already rocky floor even more treacherous.
Our training helped me become more sure-footed, but it’s still slow as I make my way toward the pillar.
Even if the strange, bluish, glowing ice didn’t provide enough light, I could almost follow the gleamingly jagged lines of gold from the floor toward the column.
In the very middle of the pillar of gold pulses a strange, sparkling stone. It’s large—the size of my fist—and almost circular, if it weren’t angular around the edges.
I reach my hand toward it.
Don’t, Freja says. That’s the heartstone.
I blink. “That story’s true?”
Jore and Veralden Radian? Freja nods. It’s true, at least, the part where they met.
“What does that mean?”
Freja’s sigh is tired. Your people tell a very different story than mine.
Yours is a story of ill-fated love—Veralden wanted to stay with his beloved, but he couldn’t.
As a creature of sky, he had to move on.
But after he left, he sent his children to her.
It was his way of staying with her forever.
“It’s tragic, but also kind of beautiful,” I say.
The vanir tell a different story.
I never heard that. “What is it?”
Veralden Radian traveled to earth, and he met Jore, and he was entranced, just as in your tale.
But Jore was uninterested. She was wise, and she knew someone like him could not stay.
She refused to have anything to do with him, but our great lord Veralden was stronger.
Because he was more powerful, he did what he always did, forcing his attentions upon the weaker Jore.
“That’s awful.”
Freja shrugs. In your tale, the stone was left here out of love and desire, a gift to the children of both of them. It’s a symbol of the bond between star-crossed lovers.
“In yours, it’s a. . .” I shudder. “It’s what? Some kind of curse—stuck here to torture Jore forever?”
Which one is true? I’m not sure we’ll ever know.
The one thing I know for sure is that the stone’s very powerful.
My father built Vanaheim here on purpose.
He could never best your Odin—ice always yields to fire in the end.
But with the heartstone underneath us, Bjorn has always been able to enforce his version of the story—the sky children take from the earth children, just as their father before them.
“The war really never will end,” I say. “No matter who we kill.”
I tried to remove it once, Freja says. She looks. . .tragic, as though of course she tried and failed to betray her own father. I’ve always liked the aesir version of the story better. I’ve always thought the world would be better if it was true.
“But?”
I nearly died, down here in this cave. When my father found me—he knew what I’d attempted. Rather, he thought I was attempting to steal it to best him, not to defeat him and join the aesir, but he hasn’t trusted me since. When we returned, he told me he wished I’d been the one to die, not Freyr.
“That’s horrible.” Tears well in my eyes. “I’m sorry for Freyr’s death. I know it was my brother’s fault.”
She shakes her head. It’s this—all of this. The stupid stone. My father’s agenda—to subjugate all earth children. It’s never going to end.
I don’t know what to say.
She turns toward me. Unless we end it. Together.
I blink.
I couldn’t remove it.
“You said.”
It’s encased in gold—that’s Jore’s domain. I think she placed it here, and that means it can only be removed by an earth child.
She could be manipulating me. Her father might have put her up to this. He might want the heartstone to be portable so he can take the fight to ásgarer. Things like this always have a cost—she’s not asking for a small favor.
I think our only hope is to remove it together. Earth and sky. Will you help me?
I think about what she’s said—if it’s all true, she may be right. Among the vanir, there won’t be likely to be many sky-earth pairings that aren’t fueled by hatred. We may be the first. . .and we could easily be the last. I reach for the bond, and I close my eyes.
I’ve spent so much time shielding from it, so much time hiding, so much time being as separate as I can, that I’m not sure how to use it, not properly. But it feels. . .it feels solid. It feels. . .honest.
I think she’s telling the truth.
“If your father finds us here, after the first time?”
He’ll kill us both, she says. If anyone saw us, if. . .
She’s risking as much as I am. That decides me.
I reach for the stone, and then I hesitate.
It’s encased in earth. An earth child can remove it.
. .but how? My hands won’t do it. They’re weak and soft.
But the swords she had crafted for me—they’re a joinder of two worlds, as we are. They’re metal, smelted from the earth.
But they’re also magic from the sky that allows sky to be harmed.
And I used them to protect her from the earth children who meant her harm. My own people. “You’ve betrayed your own people—and I’ve also betrayed mine.”
But only to try and help both, she says. We have done what I hope Veralden Radian and Jore would have wanted.
Before I start, I say a prayer. “Jore, we don’t know what you’ve endured, whether it was a theft or a loss.
Either way, I’m sure it’s painful, and I know there’s great power, great magic, in this stone—the product of your loss or your wound.
But no matter what happened, your children are struggling, and so are his.
Freja and I are here to try and fix it. We want to change things between our people.
We want to do it with your help and your blessing. ”
I wait, and I’m not sure why. What am I hoping for?
It’s not like the goddess of the earth is going to talk to me.
Just as I’m thinking what an idiot I am, the heartstone begins to glow.
The gold pillar around it lights up, too, turning almost red.
I unsheathe my swords, and I plunge them into the gold on either side.
The sword blades melt in a hiss, the steam burning my face, and I jump back.
You are my child. You’re a child of earth, but you saw the beauty in the sky.
So much for the vanir’s claim that Jore didn’t love Veralden.
Because of your sacrifice, because of your open heart, I give you a gift of the sky.
Pain blooms across my shoulders, like someone’s stabbing me, and then it spreads outward, radiating through my entire body until I’m bowed backward, almost insensate in my agony.
And to Freja, sky child who loves my own earth bird, what should I give?
For some reason, Freja looks at me.
I shrug, and I notice my shoulders are now—I have massive white-feathered wings on my back.
You have to answer her, Freja says. Quickly.
“I want her to gain an understanding,” I say. “Just as, through her, I knew kindness from the children of the sky, I want her to know what it’s like to be a child of the earth. Then she can know, as will I.”
A wise gift requested by a wise child. My chosen child. Granted.
As my pain begins to ebb, I watch Freja’s body stiffen, her head curling inward, her limbs contorting, and then there’s a sound like the shattering of ice, and Freja becomes.
. .like me. A child of earth. Her hair flows down past her back—white, silver, red, blue, golden, and brown.
Iridescent like her scales, it ripples outward.
She’s clad in a gown of the iciest of blues, and when she opens her eyes, they’re the exact same color.
You’re my chosen now, so I shall name you. Gullveig, my golden bird. My sky child is the same but also new, so you shall be known instead as Freya. As your father made you, and as I shaped you. Both of you must serve as promised.
The heartstone falls loose.
I lunge forward to catch it, but Freya’s faster. At the same moment that her hands, working for the first time, catch the heartstone, my swords also plunge downward. Miraculously, instead of being nothing but bare hilts, they each have blades, now burning crimson, like the sun.
New and different than before, just like Freya and me.
Earth-blessed.
Strangely, when I snatch them so the blades don’t strike the ground, the hilts aren’t even hot. The blades themselves cool quickly, fading from bright red to golden, to silver.
“We can’t stay here.” Freya sounds panicked, and I don’t blame her. We just stole her father’s treasure, and now, she’s weak—weaker even than I am.
“Where will we go and how will we get there?”
“We certainly can’t stay here,” she says. “And you betrayed your people. Will they welcome us?”
I doubt it, but with the heartstone and no evil vanir with me, at least not as far as they can see. . . “It probably depends on what we take with us.”
It’s our best chance.
Her ability to talk to me the same way as before surprises me. When I feel for it. . .our bond is still there. I’m not sure what it means.
“We need to go,” I say.
“The only way out is up,” Freya says.
But when I look up. . .I have no idea how we could possibly get through there.
“She gave you wings,” Freya says. “Use them.”
I try. About four pumps later, I slam into the wall, knocking icicles to the ground. The shattering sounds echo loudly.
“We’re going to die,” Freya says.
I groan, but I pick myself up, and after a moment to recover, I try again.
This time, I make it almost twenty paces before lurching sideways and crashing into the wall again.
The room I found so uniquely beautiful has transformed into a total nightmare, full of erratic, low ceilings and sharp icicles.
“I hate this place,” I say. “You’d think these wings might have come with a set of instructions!” I look around futilely. “You gave Freya clothes and the ability to speak. What do I get? Not even a padded jacket.”
Blood’s running down my arm from a gash where a sharp icicle sliced me open. There are two more lacerations on my legs and one on my back that hurts at least as much as my arm, maybe more.
“Gyda,” Freya says. “If you can’t fly us out of here soon, we’re going to die. My father left to deal with a group of humans they stole from the aesir, but that takes almost no time, and—”
But it’s already too late.
Judging by the roar, Daddy’s back, and he sounds really angry.