35. Forest
Forest
Ipush away from the sill and the lingering scent of the two argr who refused to wait for me, anger burning across my ribcage.
Faster. You’ll never make it in time.
I have to trust we’re heading in the same direction. The right one. Trust we’ll reach the jotun before it crushes Helene.
Thunder rolls, the land stretching endlessly beneath me, contorting the longer I stare at it.
Woods spread, the blizzard pushing its poison out and separating this world from the rest.
Odd magic dampens the breeze. It permeates everything, warping the thread of connection between us. I urge the raven’s body faster but the trail I followed minutes prior is already lost.
Helene’s scent disappears.
There’s no telling what you’ll find when you arrive. What will you do if you are too late? The insidious voice is louder now than my own. And still too muddled by panic to be distinguishable.
Pain spikes through my skull with more force than Thor’s hammer.
Leave her. Save yourself. It will be the smartest choice you’ve ever made.
I push harder, wings beating and muscles straining. Below me, the freeze cracks old trunks in two. The ground shakes with each new fall.
Where is the jotun?
His scent is everywhere. Impossible to separate and discern. Another burst of power sends me closer to the road, and the crackling of ice is too heavy for the land to support.
There.
Something silver winks in the whiteout.
The car is lost to the snow. Only the rough edge of the trunk pokes out from a pyramid of crystalline hail, the trees depositing their flakes with a vengeance.
An unnatural wind eddies me in the opposite direction, the twists of fate keeping me from the automobile.
I squint and double down, with wings flapping monochrome black against the white. There. A change of direction brings a glimpse of metal.
Not only do I sense the car, but the women trapped inside. The scent of blood and human panic. A sharp yell tears through my senses.
The frost giant approaches.
Nasty, noxious things. They take delight in causing pain in others. Not only physically but emotionally, mentally. It’s the same kind of psychological warfare that makes Wren’s kinfolk so profound at the games they play.
Frost giants aren’t concerned with immediate gain. And right now, he’s toying with the girls. A slow stalk, an approach they see coming and know they can’t escape.
There is nowhere to run.
Do something! I scream the words into the void like she’ll hear them.
Magic lifts inside of me and gives me a push forward. Even the propulsion isn’t enough to make headway, though. Muscles tense and go sluggish, but the wind is stronger.
It howls, rages. Pushes me back as many feet as I steal.
Then the creature is there. It bends to the window, looming, the ice giant larger than ten wolves standing on each other's shoulders.
The glimpse of his true form is gone, only a small part of him, a sliver, slipped through into this world.
My mind disconnects the two images the moment my head starts to hurt.
The giant able to crush entire villages is not the same creature we see on this side of the veil.
I drop to get under the gust, but it throws me off course. Rather than fight it, I let it take me closer to the trees.
I have to get to her.
Helene has managed to fend off two trolls. Giants are different. Smarter. Brutal.
Losing her isn’t an option, not when I’ve finally found her again. The taste of her lingers on my tongue, along with the memories I’ve fitted into the fabric of my mind. This time, we can’t lose.
Panic batters at me harder than the wind. It wracks through the raven’s body as I swing into the canopy. Pine needles provide no reprieve from the elements.
The giant has reached the car. It drags frozen fingernails across the metal roof like a lover’s caress. Inside, the girls have stopped screaming.
The terrible sensation of eyes on my feathers follows me deeper into the foliage. I hop to the nearest branch and inch toward its edge, ducked against a blast of air.
There is something else here.
In the quiet, it calls.
Thor’s hammer, and now frost giants? The AllFather isn’t playing around this time, and if this is the last time, if Nicholas and Wren are right in their suspicions...
No!
I drop, plummeting to the next limb, gathering energy to push off.
But as my claws touch down on worn bark, another gust of wind snatches me. It sends the body of the raven spiraling up. It drops away as suddenly as it arrives. I angle my wings, catching myself before I hit a bank of snow as solid as iron.
Flap those wings, the voice in my head laughs. It’s adorable the way you fight. But bird or man, it makes no difference.
The storm’s gusts carry in them a song of sorrow. Women’s voices, trapped in endless suffering.
It’s not a herald. It’s a warning.
Both women scramble toward the backseat of the car like formless shapes behind a barrier. The frost giant looms closer yet, crouching over the vehicle.
I can’t lose her again!
Not when I found her again. When we are finally together again and the memories are coming back. My heart bends, threatens to snap.
I crouch on the lower branch of a barren oak and push. Wings flapping through empty air. The wind abates for a moment.
Then picks up, slamming me back into the tree.
My head slams hard against icy bark. Skitr. Dark spots bob when I blink my eyes open and panic throbs beneath my breastbone
Give up. You will never make it.
That’s how I know the voice isn’t my own. I would never—
Helene is everything. She is the sun rising in the north, and the warmth of her soul is the constant of my life.
I knew it the first time I looked at her. Valkyries and ravens are in Odin’s entourage.
When her eyes marked my flight overhead on the battlefield before Odin’s orders reeled me home to his throne in Asgard. The cruelty of the tether, the call away, and the devastation written on her face—
I hadn’t abandoned her. She thought I did. With her sword hungry and her armor heavy, she continued to fight the Battle of Clontarf. Her sisters chanted the fate of the fallen around her.
Yet the flaxen-haired warrior with a heart bigger than her blade...
She stayed.
She always stays.
I snap my beak at the wind and take off again. Tensing, I wing closer to the frost giant, throwing magic to magic.
Whoever you are, you are nothing, I scream to the emptiness where the first voice exists.
I dive at the giant. He tips his head in acknowledgement when I make contact. Claws scrape crosswise over the frozen plane of his spine.
It senses my struggle.
With the weather actively working against me, the winds too strong, I’ll never reach them in time.
Come on, bird brain. Fight it. Give it everything you’ve got.
I tense, flapping my wings and managing to stay aloft and steady as it pushes me backward again.
Wren’s voice. In my head.
The bond between us flares once as the first creep of his shadows cuts across my vision.
I’m trying. It’s not enough.
It’s never enough.
Another burst of magic sends me flying, heading the frost giant.
It lifts an arm to swat me away, and the contact hurls me into the trees.
And Helene will pay the price for it, taken out before she fully understands the connection. Our love is one-sided. She doesn’t think we see it, the way she gave her body to us but nothing else. We know her.
It scares her.
I dive at the car as the skies open. Here the innocent white flakes are rounder, harder pellets of hail. Pellets shred through whatever they touch and batter my bones.
They bounce off the vehicle, off the giant.
Thunder claps, and sleet spirals, propelled by the wailing wind. It dives beneath my feathers and draws blood.
A massive stone of it lands between my wings and sends me spinning to the forest floor. Freezing my spine. Falling faster and faster, circling in a tight spiral.
I slam hard into a mound of ice. Eyes squeezed shut, I can’t breathe. I can’t move. A pulse of magic attempts to change me back into human and even that stalls.
Yes, poor bird. The man is trapped in the myth, and there’s no way you can battle your way out of this. One little jotun—
Wings flap.
I turn on my side as ice shakes the limbs above. A piece of desiccated deadwood breaks off and spears the earth with the sharpened point of a javelin, missing my finger feathers by half an inch.
Fly, little bird—
I take off, sweeping a foot off the ground and avoiding the next spear of pine. The next. They fall in random order and land upright, deadly. Tracking me.
There is no use fighting the storm in the sky. Or on the surface.
I leap to my feet as another limb jettisons to earth. The force of its hit sends me off center.
One after another, they strike and pin a trail of potential death.
I hop another foot and flap to take off. Audra screams in the car, the jotun stooping protectively over it. Hinging at the waist, bending to keep him eye level at the window.
The sound is an electric jolt to my organs.
Leave her alone!
The words vibrate the raven's throat. Ice pellets pounds, coating the spears of pine. Dodging them is a minefield.
Heart racing, ready to burst, I claw to the side of one and strike out at the jotun. He swipes at me with his rear leg, talons extending, lupine. Sharp.
I dodge and peck at his ankle as a massive sphere of hail cracks the edge of my head. Agony races through me, spinning me onto my spine.
My claws gouge the underside of the ball of ice as it presses closer. Heavy and unnatural.
I open and shut my beak, attention shifting back to Helene.
I’m not dead yet. Not disemboweled. A scratch, nothing more.
It will ruin me if it happens again.
Muscles clenching, honed through countless hours of flight, I shake the hail off me and right myself. A jolt of magic shoots to my wings, and I push up from the smooth snow.
The jotun twitches, tracking my retreat, and I freeze.
Helene slams something against the inside of the car hard enough to rattle the windows. But not hard enough to shatter them.
I take her in through dark eyes, but the unmistakable look on her face splits me.
Terror, yes. But also perseverance.
She’s still fighting.
The jotun lifts a shoulder and pushes his weight into the car to keep her trapped.
How will any of us survive another round of this curse?
We’re destined to lose, to only lose. There are never any wins under our belt. Only our love. That's never diminished.
Our resolve hasn't waned. Centuries of it accumulate, unbearable loneliness tossing us around, stronger than this storm. Or the god’s whims.
I won’t let her slip through my fingers again. Not when I’m here, and she’s in sight.
Phantoms or not. This time there will be no long goodbye or faded dreams of tomorrow.
I kick off the ground, shaking free of snow clinging to my pinions. With a growl I fly toward the trees, hopping up their limbs in the direction of the sky.
One hit. I’ll shift midway through and land on the jotun, severing his spine in one go. Use his focus on the automobile to my advantage.
The frost giant slams its fist into the car window. Cracks spread from the impact in a spider web of destruction. The girls scream again.
The sounds lodge terror under my breastbone and fill my veins with lead.
I’m halfway up the tree and tense to fly into the gloom. Somber clouds threaten to swallow the world. From this high, the forest is a mass of black and gray.
I angle toward the car, diving down.
The woods stretch beneath us like a mirror of the track of turbulent heavens. Mounds of snow blanket any distinguishing features, the true sky nothing but hammered nothingness, flat and dangerous.
Any attempt to mark the places I’ve passed before failed.
Somewhere underneath me, obscured, Helene and Audra huddle together for warmth and fight the inevitable.
I stare down through the dark silhouette of bare limbs and pine, picking up speed. A battle cry tears free. Burns my throat.
Ice slams into me with the force of Thor’s hammer itself, hitting harder and harder.
Hail cracks the bruised side of my head, and my vision darkens.
Not now.
Nighty night, little raven. Now the locks will never break. No sacrifice, no reward.
What. Locks?
Spinning, falling fast. Losing altitude and consciousness and the song on the wind is different now. The aching, haunting notes of the women in torment are punctuated by another sinister sound. Odin’s laughter.