The Ship of the Dead

  railing, I lost the ability to breathe.

  On either side of the ship, so close I could almost touch them, sheer cliffs rose out of the water—thousand-foot-high walls of rock marbled with waterfalls. White rivulets of snowmelt coursed down the ridges, bursting into mist that fractured the sunlight into rainbows. The sky had been reduced to a jagged ravine of deep blue directly above. Around the hull, the water was so green it might have been algae puree.

  In the shadow of those cliffs, I felt so small I could only think of one place we might be. “Jotunheim?”

  T.J. laughed. “No, it’s just Norway. Pretty, huh?”

  Pretty didn’t do it justice. I felt like we’d sailed into a world meant for much larger beings, a place where gods and monsters roamed freely. Of course, I knew gods and monsters roamed freely all over Midgard. Heimdall was fond of a certain bagel place near Fenway. Giants often strolled through the marshes in Longview. But Norway seemed like a proper stomping ground for them.

  I got a little ache in my heart, thinking how much my mom would’ve loved this place. I wished I could share it with her. I could picture her hiking along those cliff-tops, relishing the sun and the crisp, clean air.

  At the prow stood Alex and Mallory, both silent in amazement. Hearth and Blitz must have still been asleep below. Halfborn sat at the rudder, a sour look on his face.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked him.

  The berserker eyed the cliffs as if they might collapse on us if he made a bad comment. “Nah. It’s beautiful. Hasn’t really changed since I was a boy.”

  “Fläm was your hometown?” I guessed.

  He let out a bitter laugh. “Well, wasn’t much of a town. And it wasn’t called Fläm back then. Just a nameless fishing village at the end of the fjord. You’ll see the spot in a minute.”

  His knuckles whitened on the rudder. “As a boy, I couldn’t get out of here fast enough. Joined Ivar the Boneless when I was twelve and went a-Viking. I told my mom…” He grew silent. “I told her I wouldn’t come back until the skalds were singing about my heroic deeds. I never saw her again.”

  The boat glided onward, the soft applause of the waterfalls echoing through the fjord. I remembered what Halfborn had told me about not liking to go backward, not revisiting his past. I wondered if he felt guilty about leaving his mom, or disappointed that the skalds hadn’t made him a great hero. Or maybe they had sung about his deeds. From what I’d seen, fame rarely lasted longer than a few years, much less centuries. Some einherjar in Valhalla got bitter when they realized nobody born after the Middle Ages had a clue as to who they were.

  “You’re famous to us,” I offered.

  Halfborn grunted.

  “I could ask Jack to write a song about you.”

  “Gods forbid!” His brow remained furrowed, but his mustache quirked like he was trying not to smile. “Enough of that. We’ll be docking soon. Keen, Fierro, stop gawking at the scenery and help! Trim the sail! Ready the mooring lines!”

  “We’re not your pirate wenches, Gunderson,” Mallory grumbled, but she and Alex did as he asked.

  We rounded a curve, and again I caught my breath. At the end of the fjord, a narrow valley split the mountains—layer upon layer of green hills and forests zigzagging into the distance like an infinite reflection. At the rocky shore, shadowed by cliffs, a few dozen red, ochre, and blue houses clustered together as if for protection. Parked at the dock was a giant white cruise ship bigger than the entire town—a twenty-story floating hotel.

  “Well, that wasn’t here before,” Halfborn grumbled.

  “Tourists,” Mallory said. “What do you think, T.J.? Are they exciting enough for you to fight?”

  T.J. tilted his head as if considering the idea.

  I decided it might be a good time to refocus the conversation.

  “So, back in York,” I said, “Hrungnir told us to take the train in Fläm, then we’d find what we were looking for. Anybody see a train?”

  T.J. frowned. “How could anybody lay tracks across terrain like that?”

  It did seem improbable. Then I glanced off our port side. A car zipped along the base of a cliff. It made a hairpin turn and disappeared into a tunnel, straight through the side of the mountain. If Norwegians were crazy enough to build and drive on highways like that, maybe they were crazy enough to lay train tracks the same way.

  “Let’s go ashore and find out,” Alex suggested. “I recommend we dock as far as possible from that cruise ship.”

  “You don’t like tourists?” Sam asked.

  “That’s not it,” said Alex. “I’m afraid they’ll notice this bright yellow Viking boat and think we’re a local attraction. You want to give rides around the fjord all day?”

  Sam shuddered. “Good point.”

  We slipped into the dock farthest from the cruise ship. Our only neighbors were a couple of fishing boats and a Jet Ski with the dubious name Odin II painted on the side. I considered one Odin quite enough. I wasn’t anxious for a sequel.

  As Mallory and Alex tied the mooring lines, I scanned the town of Fläm. It was small, yes, but more convoluted than it had appeared from a distance. Streets wound up and down hills, through pockets of houses and shops, stretching out about half a mile along the shore of the fjord. I would have thought a train station would be easy to spot, but I didn’t see one from the dock.

  “We could split up,” Mallory suggested. “Cover more ground that way.”

  I frowned. “That never works in horror movies.”

  “Then you come with me, Magnus,” Mallory said. “I’ll keep you safe.” She frowned at Halfborn Gunderson. “But I refuse to be stuck with this lout again. Samirah, you’re useful in a pinch. How about it?”

  The invitation seemed to surprise Sam, although Mallory had been treating her with a lot more deference since the incident with the water horses. “Uh, sure.”

  Halfborn scowled. “Fine by me! I’ll take Alex and T.J.”

  Mallory arched her eyebrows. “You’re going ashore? I thought you wouldn’t set foot—”

  “Well, you thought wrong!” He blinked twice, as if he’d surprised himself. “This isn’t my home anymore, just a random tourist stop! What does it matter?”

  He sounded less than certain. I wondered if it would be helpful to offer to switch up the teams. Mallory had a gift for distracting Halfborn. I would’ve been willing to trade her for…I don’t know, Alex, maybe. But I didn’t think the offer would be appreciated by anybody else.

  “What about Hearthstone and Blitz?” I said. “Shouldn’t I wake them up?”

  “Good luck with that,” Alex said. “They are out.”

  “Could you fold up the ship with them inside?” T.J. asked.

  “Doesn’t sound safe,” I said. “They could wake up and find themselves stuck in a handkerchief.”

  “Ah, leave ’em here,” Halfborn said. “They’ll be fine. This place was never dangerous, unless it bored you to death.”

  “I’ll leave them a note,” Sam volunteered. “How about we scout around for half an hour? We’ll meet back here. Then, assuming somebody’s found the train, we can all go there together.”

  We agreed that plan had a low possibility of violent death. A few minutes later, Halfborn, T.J., and Alex headed off in one direction, while Mallory, Sam, and I headed the other way—wandering the streets of Fläm to find a train and some interesting enemies to kill.

  AN OLD LADY was not what I had in mind.

  We walked about three blocks through crowds of tourists, past shops selling chocolate and moose sausage and little wooden troll souvenirs. (You would think anybody descended from Vikings would know better than to create more trolls.) As we passed a small grocery store, Mallory grabbed my arm with enough force to leave a bruise.

  “It’s her.” She spat the word like a mouthful of poison.

  “Who?” Sam asked. “Where?”

  Mallory pointed to a store called Knit Pickers, where tourists were oohing and aahing over a sidewalk
display of locally produced wool yarn. (Norway offered something for everyone.)

  “The lady in white,” Mallory said.

  I spotted the one she meant. In the midst of the crowd stood an old woman with rounded shoulders and a hunched back. Her head craned forward like it was trying to get away from her body. Her white knit sweater was so fuzzy it might have been cotton candy, and cocked on her head was a matching floppy hat that made it hard to see her face. Dangling from one arm was a bag stuffed with yarn and knitting needles.

  I didn’t understand what had attracted Mallory’s attention. I could easily have picked out ten other folks from the cruise ship who looked stranger. Then the old lady glanced in our direction. Her cloudy white eyes seemed to pierce right through me as if she’d ninja-chucked her knitting needles into my chest.

  The crowd of tourists shifted, engulfing her, and the feeling passed.

  I gulped. “Who was—?”

  “Come on!” Mallory said. “We can’t lose her!”

  She dashed toward the knitting store. Samirah and I exchanged a worried look, then followed.

  A senior citizen dressed in cotton candy shouldn’t have been able to hobble very fast, but the lady was already two blocks away when we got to Knit Pickers. We ran after her, dodging tour groups, bicyclists, and guys carrying kayaks. Mallory didn’t wait for us. By the time Sam and I caught up, she was clinging to a chain-link fence outside a small train depot, cursing as she scanned for her lost prey.

  “You found the train,” I noted.

  Parked at the platform were half a dozen brightly painted old-fashioned railcars. Tourists were piling on board. The tracks wound away from the station and up the hills into the ravine beyond.

  “Where is she?” Mallory muttered.

  “Who is she?” asked Sam.

  “There!” Mallory pointed to the last car, where the cotton candy grandma was just getting on board.

  “We need tickets,” Mallory barked. “Quickly.”

  “We should get the others,” Sam said. “We told them we’d rendezvous—”

  “NO TIME!”

  Mallory nearly mugged Sam for her Norwegian kroner. (Currency provided, of course, by the ever-resourceful Alex.) With much cursing and hand-waving, Mallory managed to purchase three tickets from the station attendant, then we bolted through the turnstile and made it aboard the last car just as the doors were closing.

  The cabin was hot, stuffy, and packed with tourists. As the train rattled up the hillside, I felt queasier than I had since…well, the day before, roasting that dragon heart in Alfheim. It didn’t help that I would occasionally catch snippets of bird chatter from outside—conversations I could still understand, mostly about where one could find the juiciest worms and bugs.

  “Okay, Mallory, explain,” Sam demanded. “Why are we following this old lady?”

  Mallory slowly made her way up the aisle, checking the faces of the passengers. “She’s the woman who got me killed. She’s Loki.”

  Sam almost fell into an old man’s lap. “What?”

  Mallory gave her the quick version of what she’d told me a few days ago: how she’d set a car bomb, then regretted it, then gotten a visit from an old woman who convinced her to go back and disarm the bomb using a couple of super-useful daggers that turned out to be super-useless. And then ka-boom.

  “But Loki?” Sam asked. “Are you sure?”

  I understood the anxiety in Sam’s voice. She’d been training to fight her dad, but she hadn’t expected it to happen here, today. Fighting Loki was not a class in which you wanted a pop quiz.

  “Who else could it be?” Mallory scowled. “She’s not here. Let’s try the next car.”

  “And if we catch him?” I asked. “Or her?”

  Mallory unsheathed one of her knives. “I told you. That lady got me killed. I intend to return her daggers, points-first.”

  In the next car, tourists pressed against the windows, taking pictures of ravines, waterfalls, and quaint villages. Squares of farmland quilted the valley floor. Mountains cast shadows as sharp as sundial needles. Every time the train rounded a bend, the view seemed more scenic than before.

  Samirah and I kept stopping, dumbfounded by the scenery outside, but Mallory had no interest in pretty stuff. The old lady wasn’t in the second car, so we moved on.

  In the next car, halfway up the aisle, Mallory froze. The last two rows on the right were arranged in a sort of conversation nook, with three backward-facing seats and three that faced forward. The rest of the cabin was jammed with people, but that little nook was empty except for the old lady. She sat facing our direction, humming as she knit, paying no attention to the scenery or to us.

  A low growl started in Mallory’s throat.

  “Hold on.” Sam grabbed her wrist. “There are a lot of mortals on this train. Can we at least confirm that this lady is Loki before we start killing and destroying?”

  If I had tried to make that argument, I imagined Mallory would’ve hilt-bashed me in the groin. Since it was Sam asking, Mallory sheathed her dagger.

  “Fine,” she snapped. “We’ll try to talk to her first. Then I’ll kill her. Happy?”

  “Delirious,” Sam said.

  That didn’t describe my mood. Jumpy and confuzzled came closer. But I followed the girls as they approached the old lady in white.

  Without looking up from her knitting, she said, “Hello, my dears! Please, sit.”

  Her voice surprised me. It sounded young and beautiful, like a radio announcer on a wartime propaganda station trying to convince enemy soldiers she was on their side. Norway Nancy, maybe. Or Fläm Flo.

  Her face was hard to see—and not just because of the floppy hat. Her features glowed with a white light as fuzzy as her sweater. She seemed to be every age at once: a little girl, a teenager, a young lady, an old grandmother, all the faces existing in the present like the layers of a transparent onion. Maybe she hadn’t been able to decide which glamour to wear today, so she’d just worn them all.

  I glanced at my friends. We took a silent vote.

  Sit? I asked.

  Kill? Mallory asked.

  Sit, Sam ordered.

  We edged into the three seats across from the old lady. I kept one eye on her knitting needles, waiting for her to bust out some dual-wielding moves, but she just kept working on her fuzzy white yarn, making what looked like a cotton candy scarf.

  “Well?” Mallory snapped. “What do you want?”

  The old lady clucked disapprovingly. “My dear, is that any way to treat me?”

  “I should treat you worse, Loki,” Mallory growled. “You got me killed!”

  “Mallory,” Sam said. “This isn’t Loki.”

  The relief was obvious in her voice. I wasn’t sure how Sam knew, but I hoped she was right. There wasn’t room in this train car to wield a blazing spear of light or a singing broadsword.

  Mallory’s face mottled red. “What do you mean not Loki?”

  “Mallory Audrey Keen,” the old woman chided. “Did you really think, for all these years, I was Loki? For shame. Few beings in the Nine Worlds hate Loki as much as I do.”

  I considered that good news, but when I met Sam’s eyes I could tell she had the same question I did: Audrey?

  Mallory shifted, her hands on the hilts of her daggers like she was a downhill skier approaching a difficult jump. “You were there in Belfast,” she insisted. “In 1972. You gave me these useless knives, said I should run back and disarm the bomb on that school bus.”

  Sam caught her breath. “School bus? You targeted a school bus?”

  Mallory did her best to avoid our eyes. Her face was the color of cherry juice.

  “Don’t be too hard on her,” said the old lady. “She was told the bus would be full of soldiers, not children. It was July twenty-first. The Irish Republican Army was planting bombs all across Belfast against the British—retaliation for retaliation, as it usually goes. Mallory’s friends wanted in on the action.”

 
“Two of my friends had been shot by the police the month before,” Mallory murmured. “They were fifteen and sixteen. I wanted revenge.” She glanced up. “But Loki was one of the lads in our gang that day. He must have been. I’ve heard his voice since then, taunting me in dreams. I know how his power can tug—”

  “Oh, yes.” The old lady continued to knit. “And do you hear his voice right now?”

  Mallory blinked. “I…I suppose not.”

  The old lady smiled. “You’re correct, my dear. Loki was there that Friday in July, disguised as one of you, egging you on to see how much mischief he could create. You were the angriest of the bunch, Mallory—the doer, not the talker. He knew just how to manipulate you.”

  Mallory stared at the floorboards. She swayed with the rattling of the train. Behind us, tourists gasped with delight every time a new vista came into view.

  “Uh, ma’am?” I didn’t usually insert myself into conversations with creepy godly ladies, but I felt bad for Mallory. No matter what she’d done in her past, she seemed to be shrinking under the woman’s words. I remembered that feeling well from my most recent dream about Loki.

  “If you’re not Loki,” I said, “which is great, by the way, then who are you? Mallory said you were there, too, the day she died. After she set the bomb, you appeared and told her—”

  The intensity of the woman’s gaze pinned me to my seat. Within her white irises, gold pupils glowed like tiny suns.

  “I told Mallory what she already suspected,” the woman said. “That the bus would be full of children, and that she had been used. I encouraged her to follow her conscience.”

  “You got me killed!” Mallory said.

  “I urged you to become a hero,” the woman said calmly. “And you did. Around twenty other bombs went off in Belfast on July 21, 1972. It became known as Bloody Friday. How much worse would it have been if you hadn’t acted?”

  Mallory scowled. “But the knives—”

  “—were my gifts to you,” said the woman, “so that you would die with blades in your hands and go to Valhalla. I suspected they would be useful to you someday, but—”

  “Someday?” Mallory demanded. “You might have mentioned that part before I got myself blown up trying to cut bomb wires with them!”

  The woman’s frown seemed to ripple outward through her layers of ages—the little girl, the young woman, the crone. “My powers of prophecy are short-range, Mallory. I can only see what will happen within twenty-four hours, give or take. That’s why I’m here. You will need those knives. Today.”

  Sam sat forward. “You mean…to help us retrieve Kvasir’s Mead?”

  The woman nodded. “You have good instincts, Samirah al-Abbas. The knives—”

  “Why should we listen to you?” Mallory blurted out. “Whatever you tell us to do, it’ll probably get us killed!”

  The woman laid her knitting needles across her lap. “My dear, I am the goddess of foresight and the immediate future. I would never tell you what to do. I am only here to give you the information you need to make a good choice. As to why you should listen to me, I hope you would do so because I love you.”

  “LOVE ME?” Mallory looked at us in disbelief, like Are you hearing this? “Old woman, I don’t even know who you are!”

  “Of course you do, dear.”

  The woman’s form shimmered. Before us sat a middle-aged woman of regal beauty, her long hair the same color as Mallory’s, plaited down both shoulders. Her hat became a war helm of white metal, glowing and flickering like trapped neon gas. Her white dress seemed made of the same stuff, only woven into gentle folds. In her knitting bag, her fuzzy yarn had become swirling puffs of mist. The goddess, I realized, had been knitting with clouds.

  “I am Frigg,” she said, “queen of the Aesir. And I am your mother, Mallory Keen.”

  YOU KNOW how it goes. You’re minding your own business, taking a train up a ravine in the middle of Norway, when an old lady with a bag of knitting supplies introduces herself as your godly mother.

  If I had a krone for every time that happened…

  When Frigg broke the news, the train screeched to a stop as if the locomotive