Chapter 33
They hadn't traveled far from the cacophony of the river when the mist rose up from the ground around them.
The smell reached Fenris before the others slowed. Stagnant water and rot and the sweet-foul reek of a thing that had died in the shallows and been left to soften. Under it, the old cold of standing graves.
I hate it here, his wolf said. Even the dirt is dead.
The flat, colorless country gave way to one pocked with small black pools, still as poured tar, running out into the fog farther than the eye could follow.
Linnea stopped at his shoulder and looked out at the nearest pool, her hand finding the back of his coat.
"I just saw something moving in the water," she said, her voice coming out as a whisper.
Under the black, sticky surface of the pool, a pale shape rolled over slowly, the way a dead fish floats belly up.
Another surfaced beside it before the whole field began to move at once.
The dead came up out of the pools without breaking the surface, faces first, pressed up against the underside of the water like swimmers under ice. Old men and young women and children, gray and waterlogged, their mouths working.
Behind him, Layla made a small, whimpering sound. Ciara swore. Tor's arm came across his mate without taking his eyes away from the closest pool.
The voices started as a whisper on the wind and got louder with every step they took. They were not the drowned gurgle the faces should have made. Each one was a person somebody had known and loved, and was so eager to greet them.
"Help me," a woman's voice called from the pool nearest Ciara, and Ciara turned the color of the fog.
"Please, I'm so cold," another said, and Tor took one step toward the bank before Arne caught the back of his coat.
Hands pressed up under the surface, palms flat, reaching for the warm living things on the bank.
"Nobody touch the water." Layla's voice shook, and she held a hand out to them.
"Listen to me. This is totally like the Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien stole it from the Norse myths, and this is the real deal.
The rules are you don't look at or go near the water.
They can't come out. They can only call.
We keep walking until we are on the other side.
If we don't listen, they can't touch us. "
"Anyone got any earplugs?" Von asked, staring at the face of a young man in the water that he seemed to recognize.
They tore strips of wool and cloth from their clothes and packed their ears tight with it. Arne pulled out a climbing rope, and they threaded it waist to waist, Tor at the front, Fenris at the back with Linnea knotted three lengths from him. The dead wailed louder the more they were ignored.
"Eyes down. Walk where the one in front of you walked," Tor said and started picking his way through the higher ground where they wouldn't sink straight down.
They went out across the field one careful step at a time, cold mud sucking at their boots, the pools to either side crowded with reaching hands. The wool dulled the wailing to a drone.
It did nothing for the voice that came up inside Fenris's skull. It was a woman's voice, singing softly.
He knew it the way he knew his own name, from before the years and the dark. Low and a little off the note, the way his mother had always sung. She had big, scarred hands and a booming laugh. She was singing over a fire in a hall he had not stood in for longer than men had been counting time.
Angrbothr.
He had been so small in the memory that all he remembered was her voice and the smell of food cooking on the fire.
A second voice came in under hers. Male. Light and teasing as he found the harmony she always missed and never once shamed her about it. His father, young and not yet anyone's villain, sang with his lover while their first child lay between them in the firelight, listening.
They had been happy, at the very beginning, before Asgard and the visions and the chains. Fenris hadn't let himself reach for that memory since before the binding.
The draugr's call reached into him and lifted it out whole and handed it back, and it was the cruelest thing anyone had done to him since Gleipnir.
I will remember for us, his wolf said. Don't listen!
Fenris's feet stopped. He turned, half a step, toward the nearest pool, where the black water waited to give him the rest of it.
The rope pulled at his waist as Linnea looked back over her shoulder. She gave the rope one short, hard tug, jerking him back to himself.
"Follow my voice instead," Linnea told him, and through the muffle of the wool, Fenris focused on the song she started up. He didn't know it, but the others seemed to because soon they were joining in about 'Just dancing' and something about a Lady called Gaga.
He tried to listen to their words and chose to follow Linnea's boot prints in the mud over his mother's voice in the water, and he walked.
The ground rose up again, shifting from mud to wet shingle to cold dry stone. The pools grew more spread out, and the wailing faded out behind a low stone bridge that stood ahead over a dry channel, mossed and ancient.
They walked over it until the last pool was lost in the fog, and a good while further until Tor judged them clear of the smell and the voices. There were more trees on this side of the swamp, but they were dead and twisted.
No one spoke for a moment as they dug the wool out of their ears. Von looked hollowed out, Ciara was crying silently, and Layla had her arms around her. Arne, Tor, and Linnea were gray-faced and grim, looks passing between them as if they had somehow heard the same voice in the swamps.
"Can't believe you chose Lady Gaga's The Fame to get us through," Layla said after a moment and burst into a fit of giggling.
"I can't believe Tor and Arne knew all the words," Ciara replied, wiping her cheeks.
"Are you kidding? Linnea drove us both crazy with that album when it dropped," Arne argued. "At least I'm not like Von, who was doing the dance moves."
"Lady Gaga is a goddess. Her routines are genius, and I'll not have you slander either," Von countered, untying the rope at his waist. "Linnea, you have excellent taste."
"It was the first thing that came to me," she laughed, but there was a wrongness in her tone that made Fenris suspect there was more to it than that.
The heaviness of the swamp lifted with the teasing regardless, and Fenris smiled without really understanding the jokes. He didn't have to in order to enjoy the relief of it.
They drank and ate cold bread and dried meat, and not one of them had any idea how long they had been walking. The flat gray light hadn't moved since they left Hel's doors.
Tor set a watch of two people at a time instead of one, because one pair of eyes in this country wasn't enough, and they had no idea how far the draugrs influence reached.
Arne coaxed a small fire out of dead wood and grass.
They lay around it, the women closest, the men on the outside.
Ciara made a comment about sexism, but she curled around Tor anyway.
Linnea ate and moved her bedroll closer to Fenris so she could put her head down in his lap and was asleep between one breath and the next. He sat with his back against the worn trunk of the dead tree, his hand in her hair, and let her presence hold him to the waking world.
His mother's song was still moving through him. Far off now, at the very edge of hearing, patient as the dark and would now always be there.
Hel had warned him as much. Whatever the trials reached in and took, a person carried the consequences forever.
What they had taken from him was a lost moment with a fire and two people who loved each other and the life they had created.
All of it had been gone, and a black pool in the country of the dead gave it back so that it could sing it to him forever if he let it.
If Fenris had walked into that field alone, he might have gone to the water, not to drown, only to stand at the edge listening as it pulled warmth out of him one piece at a time, until there was nothing left of him to give.
He looked down at the woman asleep against him, at the ordinary rise and fall of her breath. She was the only reason he had been able to keep walking.
He kept the watch with Tor, leaving his hand in Linnea's hair, his eyes on the fog in the distance where the pools lay, and his mother went on singing for a son who wouldn't come back to her.