Chapter 39
"Are we meant to fight it or what?" Tor asked, looking at the thick coil of scales.
"No. This is another trial. There's no killing that," Arne replied and pointed. "That is the only way I can see to get past it."
Linnea squinted and spotted a narrow opening between the root and the cliff, and the serpent's coils lay across it. Set before the gap, on a squat stone altar, was a wide, shallow bowl. It was carved from the same black stone as everything in Hel's country.
A voice came up out of the hollow, the green eyes gleaming. "Each must pay until the bowl is full, and then you may pass."
They all stared at the bowl, confused.
"Any ideas what we are meant to fill it with, shaman?" Fenris asked.
Von looked at the bowl, and his frown deepened. "In the old stories, it has to be something that matters. Not coins or trinkets. The kind of thing you only have one of. A memory. A name. A piece of what makes you you. You speak it into the bowl, and he feeds on it."
"You are wise," the voice hissed in the darkness. "I look forward to tasting your offering."
"You're not the first one to say so," Von replied, with only the smallest crack in his bravado.
"Guess there's only one way to find out," Tor said.
He rolled his shoulders, the way he did before a fight, and stepped up to the altar.
He stood over the bowl a long while before leaning down and saying into it, "I offer my first memory.
I see my mother in a sunlit doorway, laughing.
This was before she shattered into the woman who could abandon her family.
It's one of the few memories I have from that time, and it is the most beautiful. "
Something in Linnea's chest tore. She had no sweet memory of her mother. Now all she could see was Inga's face across the table, telling her that Linnea was the reason she left.
He bent his head and said the rest of it too low to hear, the memory going out of him in a golden wisp into the stone. Tor's face was blank as he lifted his head again. He walked into the gap, and the coils drew back for him, just enough, and let him by.
"Me next. I can't leave him alone," Ciara said, blue eyes staring at where Tor had disappeared.
She put both hands on the rim of the bowl.
She said one word into it, soft, in Gaelic, a small sound Linnea didn't know and would never get the chance to learn, because the second it left Ciara's mouth, it was gone from the world.
"That was the name my mam called me," Ciara said, to no one, her voice gone strange. "I… I can't hear it anymore...." She laughed a small, broken sound. Tor reached back through the gap and pulled her to him on the other side.
Layla came up, rubbing her palms on her thighs.
"Okay. So. When I was fifteen, I wrote a story about a certain blond elf with a bow from a certain trilogy.
I posted it under a fake name, and it got, um.
Popular. Like, really popular. People still quote it at conventions and have no idea it was me.
" She was going pink, and once she started, she couldn't stop.
"It is the proudest I have ever been of anything I've created, and I have never once been able to take the credit.
I'm about to forget I ever wrote it. Arne, when I can't remember why I cry at the Grey Havens, you just have to hold me and not ask. "
"I will always hold you when you reach the Grey Havens, baby," Arne said gravely.
Layla blew the bowl a kiss, said her piece into it, and laughed wetly when it left her. "Oh. Oh, that's so strange. I don't even know why… Why am I crying? Ciara?" She went through the gap into her cousin's waiting arms, frowning faintly, chasing a thing that was already gone.
Arne didn't have to dig the way the others had. He held his palm over the bowl, and a thread of golden light unspooled off it and onto the black stone.
"A piece of my magic," he said to the serpent. "It will take me thirty years to grow it back." The thread sank into the bowl and went out. He went to Layla and held her close.
Von went to the altar without a single word. He stood over the black bowl with his golden hair loose around a face wiped clean of all its masks.
"The boy I got to see in the hall today gave me a present once.
" Von didn't lift his eyes from the bowl.
"We were both sixteen at the time, and he wrote me the…
the most beautiful poem. He jumped off a bridge the next day and into a train because his fucking awful father found out he was gay and had beaten him senseless.
I always kept the poem, and I have never said it aloud to a living soul. "
Von bent his head, and he whispered into the bowl, too low and too private for any of them to hear. Whatever the words were, they left him. Linnea couldn't have said whether what crossed his face was grief or relief or both at the same time.
He straightened, scrubbed a hand once across his mouth, and walked through the gap without looking back at any of them. On the far side, he sat down on a rock, wrapped his arms around his knees, and wept. She blinked back the tears in her own eyes, wishing she could go and hug him.
There was no doing that until she had made her own sacrifice.
Linnea stared at the bowl in front of her, and she had still not decided what she was going to give.
Would it accept a bad memory or only good ones?
Would a song or a piece of her magic do?
What did she have that was worth a serpent's toll, when she had spent the whole day being told, in two different dead voices, exactly how little she was worth.
She could give him up. The stupid, impossible weight of loving him. She could set it in the bowl and let Níehoggr eat it. She could walk out of Niflheim, go home to her cabin, not with a hole torn through her, but as if she had never fallen for Fenris at all.
It would be a mercy. It would save her months of bleeding. She wouldn't have to lie in her own bed and remember his warm body around hers and the way he had made her feel more important to him than she was.
Her wolf leaped against her chest. No! This is wrong. Don't take him from us…
Enough! It will only hurt for a moment, Linnea snarled back, making her wolf shy back. Her hand was steady on the rim. She opened her mouth.
"Stop." Fenris put himself between Linnea and the bowl before she got the first word out. He looked up into the dark where the great bowed head was and began talking fast.
The language was older than the Norse they knew. It was low rolling vowels and sounds that scraped, and it had the cadence of a bargain being struck, offer and counter, and offer.
From up in the dark, the serpent answered, with a hiss, a grind of fangs. "We have an agreement, Great Wolf."
The wolf took over Fenris's body in a wash of blue-tinged smoke, growing until he stood as high as an SUV and just as wide.
He put his great head down over the altar.
His jaws worked, there was a wet crack, and he spat out a pale fang and a mouthful of blood.
Around it, pouring out of his open mouth, came a thread of golden memory like Tor's good memory of Inga.
The gold coiled down into the black stone, round and round, until the bowl was not empty anymore but full to the brim and running over.
Fenris shifted back and wiped the blood off his chin with the back of his wrist. "Satisfied?"
"No more is owed." The voice came down out of the dark, sated now, almost gentle. "The bowl is full, and the woman's place is paid." The coils drew all the way back off the path. "Leave now before I decide to eat you all."
For a second, Linnea was too shocked to move. Tor waved at her, and she made her legs carry her into the gap, past the place where Fenris's blood and memories still steamed on the stone, and out onto the far side where the others waited.
They were on top of a cliff, a narrow path disappearing through the rocky outcropping and down into the mist with no bottom in sight.
Fenris was right behind her, and when Linnea turned back to face him, she kept her voice low in the hope the rest wouldn't hear.
"What the fuck did you give him for my place?" she hissed at him.
He held her gaze. "Don't let it worry you. It doesn't matter anymore."
He said it softly, the way you pacify a confused child…or spare someone a burden you didn't think they could manage on their own.
Linnea pulled back from him. "You didn't think I could take care of it myself? Because I wouldn't have had something good enough to pay my way through?"
Fenris folded his arms. "You have paid enough on this journey."
Linnea's magic bubbled hot in her veins, the temper she had inherited searing away her good sense. "You don't get to decide that for me. I might not be as special and powerful as you, but I was still chosen to do these trials by Freya, and you don't get to take that from me too."
"I wasn't trying to…"
"I don't fucking care! Let's just find Loki so we can get the fuck out of here."
Somewhere deep inside her, her wolf whispered, This is not what it seems…
I don't care. I can't anymore.
Linnea forced herself to turn away from him and started forward on the stone path ahead. Tor fell into step behind her, catching her by the arm. "You all go ahead. I need a moment alone with my sister."
"Let me go," she snarled, yanking at her arm. Tor hung on, and she had no choice but to watch the others walk away.
Tor moved in front of her, blocking her view of them. He put his hands on her shoulders and held her steady. "Spit it out, Linnea."
"There's nothing…"
"Stop fucking lying," Tor snarled, his alpha power flaring up around him.