Giants of the Frost (39 page)

"Still cold, Vidar?" she asked. "Shall I get Ganglöt to fetch you another blanket?"

"No, I'm fine now," I said, falling on the food. "I can't find the words to thank you for taking me in. You are not what I expected."

"Oh, those stories! That I'm a fearsome scowling goddess who tears men to pieces!" I tried a laugh. This doughy, gentle woman was far removed from that description. "Yes, those stories."

"I'll show you something, Vidar," Hel said. She took a breath, and as the air filled her body a horrible transformation crept over her. Livid shadows deepened around her eyes, her lips pulled back in an animal-like grimace and her hair began to writhe like serpents. Even her body drew up taller and I realized she was easily powerful enough to crush a man. I flinched away from her, but then she released the breath and the frightening countenance melted away.

"You see?" she said. "I am that fearsome monster, but not to everybody."

"Like Garmr."

"Precisely like Garmr. I'll explain. Don't stop eating, poor boy, you must be starving." She patted my knee. "Garmr is me, or at least a part of me. He's my eyes and ears out there. There's nothing either of us likes better than ripping a man to pieces and eating his liver." She laughed. "So many come, more every year. Armed like warriors to force me to do their bidding. I relish seeing them die. But you, you came unarmed, poor boy. Such a famous warrior, you sent me many new souls to keep, but you came to me unarmed. You won't stand there and command me on the point of a blade, will you?" I shook my head, devastated to have finished the stew. Ganglöt stepped in and ladled some more onto the plate. "I'm not a warrior anymore," I said. "Those days are behind me."

"What does your father think of this?"

"I am not the keeper of my father's opinion."

Hel smiled. Her teeth were small and grey, but slightly pointed. "Tell me why you're here, Vidar. I will listen."

Every time I had to tell what was in my heart, I had to suffer the pain all over. It took me a moment to steel myself to the task.

"I loved," I said to Hel. "I loved a Midgard woman so dearly that my heart transformed from stone to flesh. I loved her so dearly that I was prepared to give up everything to be with her. I loved her so dearly that my hands shook while I waited for her to arrive, afraid she would not come at all. I loved her…" My words wavered, bent too hard over my sorrow, and I checked myself. When my voice was even again, I continued. "Odin discovered this love and slew her."

"Oh!" said Hel, her eyebrows quivering. The fire popped and shadows fluttered on the walls.

"My existence is meaningless without her. I can't go back to being what I was, I despise it now. I want her back, Hel. I've traveled for months and endured many hardships. I am starved and frozen and battered and heartsick. All because I cannot endure a life without her in it." Hel gazed at me, her eyes filled with tears. "You came all this way for her?"

"Yes, I did."

She shot to her feet and walked away a few paces. I could see her fists ball up and felt a flutter of wariness.

"Hel?" I ventured. "Have I offended you?"

Hel spun round and her face was the monster's expression I had seen earlier. "Why
her
?" she screamed.

"What's so special about
her
?" Then her features relaxed and became gentle once more, and she sagged into her chest. "Oh, oh. It's not your fault."

I wasn't sure what to do, so I remained silent.

Hel raised her head and met my eyes sadly. "I loved once," she said, "and what is left of the lover in me wants to grant your wish. My beloved promised to come for me, here to Niflheim, after my exile." Her eyes dropped, and she whispered, "He never did."

I waited.

"The woman in me who was betrayed wishes you to be as unhappy as I am." This last declaration galvanized my tongue. "Please, Hel. I am sorry that you were let down—"

"Why her, Vidar? Why is she so special, and why was I so… disposable?" Her eyes began to gutter and I feared she would transform again.

"You are not, Hel," I said quickly. "He was simply not capable of estimating your worth."

"Rubbish. You don't believe that. I'm a fat old cow with the legs of a corpse."

"No, no, you—"

"Enough!" she shouted, flinging out her right hand. "Don't insult me with your false flattery. What was your woman's name?"

"Halldisa," I said, my breath caught in my throat. "Halldisa Ketil's-daughter." Hel paced the room three times in the firelight, her shadow growing and shrinking on the walls.

"Vidar, I want to reward you for your own true heart, but I must punish you for
his
false heart. I know this isn't fair, but I feel too. I hurt too." She paused and sucked her lips together, holding back tears.

"Halldisa will come back," she continued, "but not now. She will enter Midgard sometime in the far future. I'd like to see if you will remain faithful to her memory once time wears you down."

"I will remain true forever," I said, my heart heavy. "Please, let me have her now. Let me take her back with me."

Hel shook her head. "No. I will let you have warm clothes, new shoes and food for your journey, but you won't have your beloved, not yet."

"How will I know when she is reborn?"

"If your love was true, then your souls have touched and saved the imprint of one another. They will always be drawn to each other—across miles, across centuries. When it's time, you'll know." She held up a warning finger. "She won't remember you. You have to woo her all over again before you remind her. That will also test
her
love. If she doesn't respond to you, then perhaps you overestimated the depth of her feeling."

"I can't bear the years without her!" I cried, despair flooding into my throat. "Please, Hel."

"Be glad for what I've granted you. It's much more than most people take from this place," she said. Her voice grew gentle and kind once more. "Rest here a night or two, regain your strength, set your mind. She will come again; your heart must ache until then."

This is nearly all I have to tell you, Victoria. I returned from Niflheim and took my mother's advice to exile myself from my family, and I have been true to you for a thousand years. Our story, my story, ends here. You've asked me for it many times: what will you do with it, Victoria? What will you do with me now you know the truth? Everything depends on your answer.

[Midgard]

The silence that followed Vidar's voice rushed upon my ears and grew heavy between us. I opened my eyes. The forest had grown dark and gloomy shadows had gathered. Vidar waited. He had waited a thousand years.

It seemed I had lost the ability to speak. Formless thoughts clustered and shifted in my mind. Logic had completely disintegrated. During Vidar's rehearsal of his tale, I'd recognized every word as a faithful account of my own memories—but memories that weren't my own. Looking at him, his sad eyes black in the firelight, I knew that he was a supernatural creature utterly alien to me, but I had never felt closer to anyone in my life. My body had responded to his story with rush after rush of adrenaline, like riding on a fairground ride for so long that standing on solid ground seems all wrong and flat. Here I was, Queen of the Skeptics, dethroned by my own history. Irony or destiny?

Vidar still waited.

I sat up and he moved to sit beside me, our arms touching. "I don't know who I am," I said. "Or, at least, I don't know whom you love."

"I love you."

"Halla? Or Victoria?"

"You're the same person."

"I'm not. I'm Victoria." As I said this, the echo of my previous existence resonated on top of me and I had to catch my breath.

"It's only a name. It's your soul, your spirit—"

"I don't even believe in souls. Or at least, I didn't."

"You believe in me, don't you?"

"With all my heart."

"I need to speak to you seriously," he said, his eyebrows drawing down. An image of him overlaid it and I knew it was one of Halla's memories: he had spoken seriously to me long ago. "If my father finds out, he will kill you. You have to leave the island, go as far away as you can, far enough that he will not bother to follow you."

"And you'll come with me?"

He shook his head. "I cannot."

The earth seemed to shudder. "What do you mean?"

"Because he would bother to follow me. To the very edges of civilization. Victoria, I have come here to save you, not to be with you. We can't be together."

"No," I said, as my already overtired brain tried to process this new flood of feeling. "We're meant to be together. We've waited forever." I could feel the years that had passed, century on top of century like layers of thick cold soil, heavy on my chest. I forced a breath.

"My father—"

"Save it, Vidar," I said, resting my finger on his lips. "Tell me tomorrow. Be with me tonight." His eyelids fluttered closed and I could feel the shuddering breath he drew.

"Vidar?"

Vidar opened his eyes and held my gaze and my body swirled with warm shivers. He turned and pulled me close against him, and I could hear his heart pounding and feel the heat of desire rising from his skin. He drew me into his lap and pushed my hair off my face and we froze there a moment, watching each other, and it seemed that the sun rose and set for an age; each cloud and shower of rain, each glimmer and beam of the daylight, counting all the days between us, between this love and the last. I felt something eternal and something sacred, and I recognized everything I had felt before as a mere shadow of real love. The ocean I had plunged into with Vidar was deep and thrilling, and the bottom was so far beneath me that I was terrified. To lose him again? To go back to my ordinary, flat world of shallow concerns? I would sooner die.

I touched his face. He made a rumbling sound deep in his throat: half a growl, half a groan. His hands still in my hair, he pulled me forward and kissed me violently. His beard was rough, his lips were hot and laden with frantic passion. He pressed my body against his as though he wanted to crush me to pieces, dissolve into me. When I drew a sharp breath of pain, he released me and proceeded more gently. Tiny kisses on my chin and ears, down my neck. I was unfastening our clothes as quickly as I could, shedding mine awkwardly, having no idea how to get him out of his. He helped me and we ended up on the forest floor among the animal skins he slept on. Warm blood, hard kisses, and smooth hot flesh over his ribs under my fingers. He covered my body with his and slowed: his breathing, his heart, his mouth. I looked up at the dark branches above us, the scudding clouds. Vidar warmed my skin with his touch and trembles started deep inside me.

"Remember to breathe," he said.

Centuries of desire weighed down his fingertips, the yearning of ages about to be dispersed. His body moved into my body. Intense feelings threatened to break each of us out of our skins, to achieve the impossible and melt us together.

One of us cried out. The dark forest did not respond. Far away the clouds parted on distant stars and Vidar's hot skin soaked up the light and transferred it to me. It seemed to last forever and yet be captured in a moment. I sobbed and clung to him and he held me and drew up a blanket to cover us. I came all the way back to my own body and Vidar was kissing my shoulder tenderly.

"I love you," I said, but it seemed impossibly inadequate to say,
I love you
. Drunkards and novelists had been using those words for too long. What I felt was so much more than that random collection of blank syllables. The meaning spilled over the edges and disappeared, unvoiced, into the forest.

"And I love you," Vidar said. "Forever."

"Stay with me."

"I can't."

"I'm not afraid to die," I said, and in that instant it was true, though it would not always be so.

"I'm afraid of you dying."

"More afraid of that than of us being apart?"

He bent his head and pressed his lips into the hollow of my throat "It's impossible." He sighed, his breath warm on my skin. "It's all impossible, Victoria." He raised his head.

"If I must lose you, then I would rather you were alive, here, with some hope of happiness for—"

"There's no hope of happiness without you," I said, sitting up and turning on him. "Now I know, I can't go back to what I used to be." I realized that I had shouted, that my voice had sounded shrill and desperate. I shook my head and laughed. "Look what you've done to me. You've turned me into a crazy person."

"Victoria—"

"No, no," I said. "Not now. I can't bear to hear it. Stay just until tomorrow night. Just one day, Vidar. Please." I secretly hoped that if I could make him stay until then, we could conjure a way to be together. I had transformed from the girl who believed in nothing to the girl who believed in miracles. Vidar had his lips pressed together in consideration. His eyes undid me, so deep and sad and full of passion.

"Vidar, please?" I whispered. "Just one day."

"Victoria, it cannot be," he said quickly, as though he wanted to have it out before he changed his mind.

"I must go tonight, and you must leave tomorrow."

The real world swerved in on me. My job, my future. "I can't leave until Wednesday when the boat comes," I said.

"And what day is it now?"

"Thursday… nearly Friday."

He sat up next to me and looked bewildered, afraid. "Then I will stay with you until Wednesday, and keep you safe from him."

"But you don't know for sure that he'll come?"

Vidar shook his head. "No. I hope he will never find out. However, now we have been together, he could sense you, and he has scrying water he could use to find you…"

The first cold tendril of fear touched my heart then, mortal fear. I remembered the dreams I'd had of the dogs chasing me, the man-monster with the cruel axe. Now those fragmented dreams had a deeper texture, fleshed out by Halla's memories.

"I will keep you safe until then," he said firmly. His right fist was clenched.

"I trust you," I said, touching his hand.