Chapter 38
Linnea's mouth tasted of bile and yeast, no matter how many times she spat in the gray dirt. She dragged the back of her hand across her lips and started to walk back the way she had come because the dead country offered nowhere else to go.
Find Loki. Go home. She would be done playing games with gods. They could find someone else to help them in the future.
There is something wrong…in the air, her wolf told her, pacing and circling anxiously in her mind.
"Everything in Niflheim is wrong," she told it, a headache building behind her eyes.
The black pines stood stripped where the scream had gone through them, raw wood showing under the bark like something skinned. She didn't feel better seeing them. She didn't feel anything at all now.
Linnea knew she just had to keep moving, one step at a time. She counted the steps under her breath, the way she had counted in the bad years, when counting was better than thinking, and nobody could beat it out of her.
A hulking shape came out of the trees ahead, low and soundless. The huge black wolf shifted. Fenris's eyes went to her face and read all of it in a single pass. Whatever he found there pulled his brows together.
He took a breath to speak, and the air beside them peeled open. The shade from the hall poured itself upright between them before he got a word out.
Linnea could have wept with relief. She didn't want to talk to Fenris or anyone else. She was afraid of what would come out screaming from her mouth.
"It is time for you to depart, wanderers." The shade's face moved like a reflection breaking on water. "The hall has given what it had to give. Stay longer, and the hall will think you belong to it and never let you leave."
"Thank you for the warning. We will collect our things and be on our way," Fenris said, his eyes still on Linnea.
Behind the shade, the hall doors stood open, and the others were already coming down the slope.
Ciara had her arm hooked hard through Layla's, both of them talking fast, and Ciara trying to hide that she had been crying.
Tor came after with Arne, both looking gray from Skari's bullshit.
Von brought up the rear, smiling but with his eyes sad and uneasy.
Linnea didn't know how everything had gone with them, and she didn't have the emotional capacity to ask. She just wanted to go home.
Tor reached her first. His hand came down warm on the back of her neck, and his eyes moved over her face the way Fenris's had. "Lin…"
"I'll tell you later," she said, flat and final. "We have to keep moving. The dead are getting hungry, and if we don't leave now, the hall won't let us go."
Tor's hand tightened once, then he let go. He knew better than to dig at a wound while it was open.
They grabbed their gear, which had been piled up outside the door, as if the hall was evicting them. It was a relief not to have to go back to the room they had shared together. Linnea pulled on her coat and shouldered her pack, her eyes fixed on nothing.
She put Ciara between herself and Fenris and kept her there as a buffer. The helpful shade drifted ahead to show the way before fading away. After that, there was only the gray cold and the long downward tilt of the land.
Fenris tried to catch Linnea's eye more than once, and she pretended not to notice.
He was too decent to corner her in front of the others and make her talk.
She used that decency against him hour after hour, because the alternative was to look at him and see the careful way he was being kind to her, and she couldn't survive being handled gently right now.
"You want some water?" Ciara asked her.
"No."
"You should drink something."
"I'm okay."
"You want to talk about it?"
"Not even a fucking little bit."
Layla tried later. She bumped her shoulder softly against Linnea's. "Hey, talk to me about literally anything. Tell me your worst haircut. I'll go first. I had a fringe at fourteen that haunts me to this day."
"I'm just tired, Lay Lay." Linnea attempted to smile. "Let me just walk and think, or I'm going to lay down and refuse to move."
Layla let her be after that, and the small hurt that crossed her friend's face was its own little knife, made worse because Linnea couldn't make herself fix it.
She reached down inside herself for her wolf and found it pacing and silent, like she was trying to figure something out as well. They were restless and frustrated.
This place is a bad place, her wolf said and went quiet again. It sounded confused as Linnea felt. There was no color now, no smell of water or smoke.
Don't look at the nothing. Focus on your exit strategy.
The plan was simple now, and Linnea held onto it with everything she had. Find Loki, because she had given Freya her word, and a promise to a goddess was a debt you paid. Get out of Niflheim.
After that, back to her cabin on the edge of the woods, with the winter wind that had nothing in it that could break her heart. She would be a volva. She would do her work. That would be enough, and her parents' shades and their poisonous words would fade with time as they had before.
Linnea didn't know how long they had been walking and didn't try to keep track of markers. Time didn't behave down here, and they only had to keep walking until the next trial presented itself.
Like the river of blades, the next trial announced itself with sound. It was a wet grinding, slow and tireless, like a mill wheel made of teeth.
The trees gave out at the lip of a hollow, and at the bottom of it, the world ended in a wall of rock and one pale root.
It was wider than a longhouse, climbing up out of sight into the dark. It was the great taproot of the whole World Tree, gone down into the deepest place there was.
Coiled around its base, gnawing, was a monster. It looked at the approaching group with glowing green eyes, and the chewing stopped.
The body was serpentine, scaled and endless, looping back into the mist so Linnea couldn't find where it stopped. Folded along its length were wings, huge and feathered, that had gone ragged and gray. Deep fang marks scored the root and wept a thin, pale sap.
"What in the fucking fuck is that?" Layla whispered, her bow already free.
"Níehoggr," Von replied, keeping his voice low. "The Malice-Striker. He has been eating at the root of the Tree since before Midgard was made, and he will be eating at it long after it's gone. They say he flies up over Nástrond sometimes, with corpses caught in his feathers."
Linnea stared at the slithering monstrosity, the stench of dead things rising from where part of a great wing peeked through the root and stone.
Great. As if today couldn't get any worse.