Chapter 22 Liz
Liz
I could hear Azar behind me as I hit the lava—I know he was there, but here I am again, alone, in a sea of nothingness.
“This is the loneliest place I have ever been,” I say. “I think it must have been terrible for you.”
“Think of this like a foyer.”
I spin around, and Freya’s here.
“Hello, Freja,” I say. “Nice to see you again.”
Her smile’s slow coming, but it’s real when it arrives. “You’re learning.”
“Too slowly,” I say. “Clearly. But I’ve remembered some things.”
Freya tilts her head. “Sometimes I wonder which of us had it harder—remembering and reliving every last moment for all time, never-ending, never ceasing. Or what you had to endure—forgetting everything and being born anew.” She shrugs.
“You’re saying I’m like Azar,” I say. “I’ve forgotten all that went before, and I’m acting like a complete idiot.”
Freya tilts her head. “Not quite like Azar, no. His memories are there—if he will just do what it takes to reach them. Yours. . .you are Gullveig, and you’re not. There was a softness to her that doesn’t exist within you. It was burned away, perhaps.”
“My mother tells me that I’m an abomination—a demon, maybe. She paid a witch to bring me back from the dead. Maybe that’s where Gullveig went.”
Freya laughs. “And you believed that nonsense? Her ridiculous midwife was wrong—you were never dead. The one thing a witch is good at is stealing things that aren’t hers, and making unjust deals. Your mother went looking for demons, so she found them. It’s that simple.”
“I have so many questions, but I don’t have time—”
“Because you’re here to save your sister.”
“And your son.”
It’s small—almost imperceptible—but I know Freya better now. She flinches.
“He’s dying, an ice-spear in his belly, and I don’t know what to do.”
“It’s not precisely ice as you understand it. It’s liquid hydrogen. One of your soldiers is doing their homework, because it’s absolutely cold, and also highly combustible. Thrusting it into napalm, basically, was ingenious.”
“Can you save him?” I ask.
“You’ve heard my prophecy, I assume?”
“It was yours?” I shake my head. “Your stupid prophecy wrecked both your sons, you know. They had to drag that weight around, and that’s why Hyperion’s here. He was willing to die—because he didn’t want to cause his people’s doom.”
“And ironically, he’s here, doing just that.”
“What does that mean?”
“You already know.” Freya begins to circle me slowly. “It’s why you brought that with you.” She eyes my sword, still clasped tightly in my hand. “I had no idea when I commissioned those, that you’d use them to. . .”
“To what?”
“Liz.” Freya smiles. “Do me the credit of admitting what you already know.”
“You have the heartstone,” I say. “And I need it, to save Hyperion.” I shake my head. “But why can’t you use it to save him? You have it, I know you do.”
“I don’t have the heartstone. You can do better than that.” She lifts her chin, her eyes on me.
“You are the heartstone?”
She smiles. “You’re closer.”
“You can’t use it—because it’s already being used.”
Now she’s nodding. “The heartstone fused with me when—you’ll have to remember that for yourself.
I could never explain it properly, not here, not like this.
Suffice it to say that I can’t use it in the way you would like.
I’m stuck here as surely as the cursed are stuck.
They all should have died as part of my spell, but Odin didn’t do his part.
” She fumes. “So here we all are, alive and miserable, forever.”
I ponder that for a moment before remembering that Coral’s life and Hyperion’s life, they’re both hanging in the balance now too. “I don’t have time to reminisce,” I say. “No matter how much I might want to. What do I have to do to save them?”
“Looking for a baby to skin?” Freya sighs. “Sorry, warrior Liz. No babies here, only me.”
“Where’s Azar? He followed me through.”
“Azar, Axel, why the two names?” She lifts her eyebrows. “When you sacrificed for me, a sky child, you were reborn as Gullveig. I don’t hear you switching back to Gyda.”
“I’m Elizabeth Chadwick,” I say. “But you people persist in calling me Gullveig. It’s not that hard to explain, honestly. Apparently I’m not the only one with dumb questions.”
“But my son’s not two people—he hasn’t lived two lives. He’s one person with two masks.”
“Two masks?” That’s a strange way to put it. “What do you mean—”
“No time for stupid questions,” Freya says. “Remember?”
“They aren’t stupid.” I swing my sword at her. “I can’t remember anything important, remember?”
She dodges and smiles. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“What does that mean?”
“You have a big choice to make today, Liz. You can let Hyperion, and by extension, your sister, die. Or you can take the heartstone for yourself and heal him.”
“By killing you.”
She lifts one hand, turns it over, palm up, with a flourish, and inclines her head. “Even so.”
“You’re not even armed.”
“Don’t be deceived. This entire place, the whole construct, is what I want it to be. Why do you think I’ve been so polite?”
“You think I can’t do it,” I say.
“No, I know you can’t, because thousands of years ago, the first time you tried, I killed you.” Freya’s eyes are sad. “If I hadn’t, you’d be the one stuck here, not me. Not my finest call, was it?”
“Then why don’t you let me kill you?”
“More ignorant, thoughtless questions,” Freya says. “Those make me maddest of all.” In the blink of an eye, I’m not looking at Freya. I’m staring at the ice dragon from my nightmare, and when she roars, the floor that isn’t a floor shakes.
I really, really wish I had both my swords, and not just so that the second one wouldn’t be stuck inside Hyperion.
A snippet of a dream. That’s how much time I spent ‘training’ with Freja before. That’s what I remember. But Gullveig, the Gullveig who needed that training, wasn’t a warrior.
And I’m not Gullveig.
I’m Elizabeth Chadwick, and the one thing in my life I’ve been prepared for is this. My whole life has been a sequence of attacks.
What’s one more, even if I’m outmatched.
I’m always outmatched.
It’s never stopped me before.
Freya opens her mouth and blasts me with shimmering ice, and I raise my hand without much idea what to do. . .and the red magic from Azar simply flows through. Even without being entwined, I’m able to pull from him, and it’s enough.
Freya blasts me for what feels like an hour, but finally, she gives up.
“Are you just trying to kill time until he dies?” I shout and lunge at her. “You can’t win. Not this time.”
My sword hits nothing but air.
She’s already disappeared.
Vapor—that’s what she is every single time I strike, over and over.
But I’m learning the rules of engagement.
When she materializes a few swings later, I’m ready.
I almost hit her before she disappears. I’m not sure how long we go round and round.
She blasts me, and I block. I strike, and she disappears.
She almost catches my leg with her snapping teeth once, and I slice her hindquarter another time, but neither wound is significant.
I can’t help trying to track time—is Coral already dead? It makes me desperate, but then I start to think.
What does Freya want?
Why hasn’t she simply killed me?
She could burn me into ash by releasing me back into the lava. She could call her fearsome beasts over to eat me. She could materialize with her jaws already around my torso and snap me in two.
Why, then, are we fighting?
She doesn’t want me dead, but she can’t let me win.
Why not? What other option is there? What am I missing?
The next time she appears, I drop my sword. It clatters on the nonexistent ground, and her eyes widen. She shifts back to her human form with the same ice-shattering noise I heard that first time. “What are you doing?”
“You don’t want me dead.”
“No.” Her nostrils flare. “I don’t.”
“But you don’t want to die.”
She sighs. “I have to die.”
“Yet you won’t let me kill you.” I shake my head. “You’re very frustrating. Why can’t you just tell me the third option?”
“It must be freely given,” she says.
“You want me to take your place,” I say. “Not take the heart to save my sister and Hyperion—you want me to accept this place from you. They’re chanting for me. . .because I can become their new master.”
Freya sighs with total exhaustion. “Thousands of years, Gullveig. Thousands of years.” A single tear forms in her right eye and rolls down her perfect, inhuman cheek. “Please, please take it.”
“Or, I could kill you and take it.”
Her grin this time isn’t compassionate. It’s not understanding. She’s enraged. “That’s the wrong answer.”
“You want me to take it, because the vanir wanted to enslave the humans. They were bad, bad creatures.”
“You know that much already,” she says. “But if you knew how bad they’ve become in all this time, trapped here and suffering for thousands of years? You’d never even consider an alternative that would release them.”
“You’re right,” I say. “If I knew the truth, if I knew how things were, I’d do exactly as I was told, right?”
She nods. “Exactly.”
“What would I have to do, exactly, to take over for you?”
Freya’s shoulders soften. Her mouth parts, and she exhales. “Bless you, Gullveig. You never were selfish.” She steps closer. “First, you take my right arm with your left.” She holds her hand out. “Then we clasp one another’s wrists, and you rest your head on my shoulder.”
I do as she asks, stepping toward her slowly.
She feels like a bright, fresh spring meadow.
She smells like fields of lavender just unfurled into brilliant blooms.
She sounds like sunshine and ocean waves and laughing children.
She’s devoted her entire life to ending the suffering that she and Gullveig swore to stop. She and Gullveig made that vow to Jore, to honor the love she had for Veralden Radian. They both wanted to set the world’s wrongs right, and she’s suffered terribly for it.
“Now,” Freya says. “Repeat after me.”
“Okay,” I say.
But instead of repeating the words she begins to chant, I clasp her hand as tightly as I can, and I channel Azar’s energy into a shield to hold her in place, and I kick the hilt of my sword upward with my toe.
I grab it with my right hand, and I plunge it into her heart.
And I never once let go. I never waver.
Her voice is pained. “Gullveig.”
Even here, in this strange place, standing on a floor that’s not a floor, holding a blade that she gave me, blood bubbles up out of her mouth and splatters everywhere.
Apparently dying sucks everywhere, and it’s always messy.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “But I’m not Gullveig, and I never made a vow, not to Jore, not to you, and certainly not to Veralden Radien. In fact, he can burn, for all I care.”
I pull the blade out, and as it’s almost loose, it grinds on something.
I smile as I reach my hand inside and yank the heartstone from her chest. “I bet this freaking hurt for the last few thousand years. You must have been choking on it all the time.” I shake my head. “And I know I should feel really terrible right now, but here’s the thing.”
I back away from her, the heartstone pulsing in my hands. “In the world out there? No one’s perfect. So I know there are devils in here, but there are devils everywhere. Keeping them penned up? It didn’t fix anything.”
Freya collapses to her knees. “You’ve just brought my prophecy to fruition.” She coughs again, covering my one decent tunic with even more red splatter. “You’ll save Hyperion, but the blessed will be doomed in return.”
“Good thing I’m bonded to their savior, then,” I say. “And if you’d be a doll, could you give your son his memories back before you die?” I toss my head. “Because it has really sucked for him not to know who I am.”
“Only he can retrieve those,” Freya whispers.
“But, old friend, I have one last thing to share.” She grabs my wrist and pulls me closer.
“The one thing you truly desire, it’s always been in your grasp.
” Her smile—I can’t tell whether it’s kind or smug.
Before I can ask her what the heck she means, her eyes close and she gasps.
“You couldn’t have told me how to use this to heal Hyperion first? Really?” I stand.
I should probably be sad, but I barely know Freya, and let’s be real. She lived a long freaking time. It’s tragic she had to die, but she had it coming.
Before I’ve even figured out where the door is, the white-but-not-substantial walls around me start to literally crumble. Azar! I push the call as hard as I can. Where are you? We need to get out of here, now!