Soren Bearstar wipes a hand down his face. “Amon,” he says, using my name like an apology. He shakes his head.
I shrug a shoulder like it’s all shed water. He’s right anyway. My father is the entire reason for my line of work: why I do it, and why I get away with it.
Wind shakes the pines across the mountain. We both glance up. Finger clouds have stretched in, grasping the stars so there’s only a narrow circle of them. Moonlight filters through, but barely. “Up on the roof’ll be a grand view,” I say.
Soren shakes his head no. “I should go back in. Before the end of the boasting.”
I shrug. “Merry met, then, Bearstar.”
“And you, son of Thor.”
He walks soft for such a hulker, making no noise with his boots. The last hint of that white coat flashes as he disappears into the library. I’m alone on the patio, with the wind carving up my bones.
Backing away from the hall, I stare up at the building. The huge columns bearing up the roof are carved from the trunks of sequoias. Golden elf lights dangle from the eaves, illuminating rows of red round shields that have hung high against the outside wall for centuries. The one at the end is newly painted. A slow grin spreads over my face. They always replace the ones I steal.
Going to the nearest column, I skim my hands along its circumference. My fingers find the chinks cut for handholds. I discovered them five years ago when playing a game of seeker-stayer with Fenris Wolf. Her nose led her to the pole and she knew I’d climbed it, but she couldn’t follow.
I roll my shoulders and flex my hands. It’d be easier if I undid my boots, but where’s the fun in easy?
I dig my cold fingers into the first grips and pull.
The burn of effort scorches across my shoulders and down my back. I breathe even and push a rhythm into the climb, going slow and sure up the side of Bright Home. My toes bend against the hard wood, and I clench with my fingers. Sweat pops out along my spine. This is sheer strength, perfect control of this machine. I can’t stop smiling through it, jaw clenched, as if the hall itself could reflect my white teeth right back at me.
Frozen wind batters me, ripping at my shirt and turning my jeans to ice. I’ve never been much susceptible to cold, thanks to Dad, but I feel it in the wind, invigorating and harsh.
At the top, just under the slope of the roof, I stop. Using my thighs to grip and my stronger left arm, I reach out for the bright red, round shield. The edge is steel-plated and so cold it burns my fingertips. I grab it and jerk it free of the fittings. The effort nearly throws me off the trunk pole, but I manage to hold on.
Here, with the shield heavy in my left hand, I hang. I twist my neck to peer out at the black winter sky. Snow floats down, tossed by the wind in lazy spirals, and hits the sharp treetops. A flake lands on my cheek and melts in an instant of shock. Water’s finest form, the elves call it.
To the east across the valley, on the other side of Shield, waits Etintooth Peak. The road up curls along a cliff and is treacherous in the best weather. With ice coating the gravel, it’ll be a skit of a lot more dangerous.
Getting back down is harder than the climb up, thanks to the shield and the slippery pull of gravity. I manage an embarrassing stop and start, half sliding, half hopping and tearing up my right hand. From two meters, I leap away and hit the patio with a huge jolt. The sweat on my back is freezing, and my breath cuts down my throat. I shake myself like a giant dog, offering the snow a growl that’s more of a laugh.
This shield is easily a meter in diameter, with a steel boss in the center over the grip. I slide my hand into it and hold the shield properly against my side. The red paint glows against this white winter air. A true fancy shield would be inlaid with iron, and coated along the edge with gold leaf to flake off in battle and impress the enemy with one’s throw-away wealth.
I duck under the strap to hold the shield against my back and take off around the long side of the hall toward the parking lot. Fenris is still inside, and she won’t miss her bike for hours.
The heavy shield thumps my ass as I go. My boots are loud and I’m smiling like a marauder when I come around the corner and slam into a fleeing girl.
She jumps away with a cry, arms hugging herself. She hits the wall, and I skid to a stop. Here where the floodlights from the front entryway reflect against the trees and off the low, spinning snow, there’s enough light to see the shine of her wide, pale eyes. Dark hair straggles around her face, loose from double braids, and there’s only black lined around her eyes, none of the usual vast swathes of makeup that girls wear to Bright Home. Freckles stand out across her narrow nose. She’s wearing a tuxedo.
“Hey,” I say.
She shies away from me, and something about how she hugs her stomach and the tinge of white around her lips raises fast fury in me. “Did someone hurt you?” I demand.
It’s too much and she flinches. I draw back and hold my palms out, but even as I do, she gulps a breath and shakes her head. “Amon?” She swipes her hands under her eyes.
I falter. I stare more closely and only then realize her tux isn’t a tux but a uniform. One of the caterers. Maybe she’s a longtime servant, but rag and skit, surely I didn’t have a thing with her and forget. I wouldn’t. I think. “Do I…know you?”
“Ah….” She touches her cheeks like they’re new and raw. “No. But you’re…famous.”
“That I am. You shine?”
She draws up to her full height, which is not to be trifled with, and she’s got hips that strain the line of her pants and breasts just big enough to pucker the buttons under her bow tie. The tux sure wasn’t made for a girl. I snap my eyes back up to her face. She says, smooth and hard, “I just needed to get out.”
Cursed but I know that urge, and trouble is always better in greater numbers. Besides, she’s sexy, all disheveled as she is.
“I’m getting out even farther,” I say. “Up the opposite mountain for a real Hallowblot fire.” I hold out my hand. It’s only a dark outline in the night. She looks at my face, and in her eyes are the shadows of a pine forest, gray and green and darkest brown, and now I see hints of fire red in her hair. She slides her hand against my palm slowly. The touch zaps straight to my rocks as her hot fingers skim against my wrist.
Our fingers weave together and I pull her along. There’s a low rumble in my stomach when she slips after me, polished shoes tap-tap-tapping behind the pound of my boots.
We run off the stone porch that hugs this side of the hall, down along the line of pricy cars gathering a crust of snow. This is the tucked-away rear lot, where all the regulars have assigned spots. My breath is a hot cloud before my face as I search for Fenris’s bike. There it is, between a two-seater coup and a long-nosed red Volundr.
The girl gasps when I stop before the motorcycle. Chrome glows in the snowlight, and the front wheel stretches forward and turns like a perfectly placed leg. As if the bike were curtseying for us, inviting us onto her back.
“Can you take this?” I offer the girl the shield. She grips it and swings it onto her back with a grunt of effort. She cocks her head proudly.
I mount up, settle my hands at the grips, and roll my shoulders. “Coming?”
There’s a pillion for her to perch on behind me, and it takes her a moment to settle. She slides up against me and without hesitation wraps her hands around my waist. Her thighs line up with mine, her entire body pressed into my back. I let my breath snake out slowly as I skim through all the steps for turning on Fenris’s old beast—clutch and choke and ignition—before I kick up the stand and into gear.
When I hit the engine, the bike growls. The girl’s fingers dig into my hard stomach. I clench my teeth and feel the rumble in the back of my throat. She puts her cheek against my back and hugs. I’m so lit up from her and the shaking bike, I have to pull the throttle or explode.
We scream out of the lot, tossing gravel in our wake.
TWO.
The headbeam cuts through the snowfall, illuminat
ing a thin, twisting road. I take it easy, gentle with curves and letting the bike lean into the mountain. The girl holds on as if I’m her center of gravity. I can’t get used to the tight feel of her breasts against my back, her thighs hugging my hips. I’m so hot, the snow should hiss when it touches my cheek. Hopefully it’s helping keep her warm.
All around are the towering pillars of lodgepole pines. They loom down the mountainside and fall away into darkness down the cliff. I squint into the delicate snowfall, glad I’ve come this way four times a year since I was twelve.
We pass wide around the town, Shield, said to be the most pious town in the entire United States of Asgard. It has more churches per capita than anywhere else, and every god and spirit, saint and jotunn, hero, demon, priest, and angel is represented either on Temple Row or off one of the alleys or in one of the thousand carved sidewalk shrines. There are mobile monuments and storefront reliquaries and not a single quick-stop shop where you can’t find incense and prayer cards. I heard a joke once that this town requires initiation into a priesthood before testing for a driver’s license.
In the summer the streets to fill up with pilgrims, sweet-smelling smog, and the bray from the martyr stalls. Rune flags flap off every roof, thanks to seasonal residents whose highest purpose is proving they’re favored over their neighbors by some god or other. I’ve got a place in town but avoid it pathologically in the busy months.
But tonight the town is only a glow of bonfire and the distant low murmur of festival music. It’s too late for trickster treating, and with the snow, everyone is probably inside for parties or ensconced on a sofa to watch the broadcast from Bright Home. Deadens the road completely.
This strange girl and I have it all to ourselves.
When we head up again on the eastern side of the valley, her arms tighten further around me. The snow slows, and pockets of moonlight flash through the forest. There’s hardly even a sheet of ice on the road when the pavement breaks and we’re back to crunching over frozen mud and gravel. I slow, taking care as we climb higher and higher. The girl’s arms relax, but she keeps hold of me. I wonder who she is and realize I never asked her name. It didn’t matter with her hand in mine, and matters even less while she’s pressed against me. I laugh to realize how rutted I am, and I blame Liz Thorlin and Soren Bearstar for getting my goat up.
When the gravel ends at a rounded overlook, I brake the bike and kick down the stand. She lifts her head. The engine purrs to silence, and we wait in this thick bubble of quiet as the clouds part and the moon shines down onto the pointing trees and the valley and there are a half-ten tiny stars exactly above us.
I hold my hand back to help her off the bike—she’s stiff and frozen—then I stand next to her. “I can take that back,” I say, nodding at the round shield.
She shakes her head. “Cutting the wind,” she says through chattering teeth.
“We’ll be at shelter soon.” I’ll warm her up then.
Together we go off the road, up the mountain. She grips my hand and follows where I lead her. She’s either brave or stupid to not ask anything, and I choose to think brave. She wanted away, wants trouble, like me, and climbs hard without pausing, without complaining. Her breath is rushed and puffs out in a cloud around her head. Those shined fancy shoes weren’t made for scrambling over needle detritus or craggy rocks, but she ignores the scuffs. She ignores the weight of the shield pushing her down.
The pines shorten and grow farther apart the higher we reach. The night sky opens up and sharp boulders push through rough mountain grasses like half-buried skulls. I grip the rock in my strong hands, knowing where the best holds are, the best places to set my boots. The girl steps where I step, pulls herself along with surprising strength. Once or twice, she slips and I catch her, dragging her to her feet again in the black night. With the shield on her back, she’s a handful.
We burst through the treeline onto the peak.
This nowhere strip where the forest and the alpine tundra dance for dominance is the best part of the mountain. Trees half-stripped of branches on the windward side mark the way higher. In the summer, bluebells and snow glories spread blue and purple like the sky spilled itself down the peak, but here at the edge of winter and a hundred meters on, the tundra’s gone all gray and yellow. I stop beside a solitary tree that curls in on itself against the constant harsh weather. Nighttime washes the color away, but I remember rainbow shades of lichen on the wind-scoured rocks.
The girl puts her shoulder against my arm, staring out ahead. I wonder what she sees through the shadows. She’s the one who steps out first.
I take her hand and pull her toward the lee of the peak. There waits the Rock Church.
It’s nearly three hundred years old, just a single room built of cast-off boulders and no mortar. The steeple grasps at the sky. The door hangs by iron hinges and screams like a dying dragon when I wrench it open. The girl grimaces.
Inside smells musty, but it’s clean and plain. The stone walls block the wind and snow. I leave the girl at the doorway to head straight through to the rear wall, where there’s an oil lamp tucked at the floor. From my jeans pocket, I pull a lighter. It flares up, casting smooth light against the cragged walls and the life-size wooden statue of Thor Thunderer in the center of the room. He’s buttery and smooth from decades of hands patting him for luck and blessings, and I take a moment to look into his eyes. The face is carved so basically, by someone who’d never seen the god in person. I know his jaw is more square and his nose is crooked from battle. He squints his eyes when he thinks, and even through the heavy red beard you can see lines of laughter around his mouth.
Before I approach the statue, I look hard into every corner of the church. The shadows appear flat and missing secrets, but I never know if Eirfinna will be here. Choosing one shadow, I steady my gaze, waiting for the telltale glimmer of her crystals. But there’s nothing.
Sharp regret needles at me; I look forward to seeing the elf princess every few months. But I did bring a stranger here, and that would be rough to explain.
With a small sigh, I put my palm against the honeywood statue, making a black hand-shaped hole on the Thunderer’s chest. I trace the hammer sign over my forehead and whisper a prayer to Thor Sky-Driver.
“Mead,” the girl says.
I turn. She’s holding a plain glass bottle up so it catches the dim glimmer of the oil lamp. It’s a golden color, swirling prettily. I smile. Eirfinna’s definitely been and gone already, tired of waiting for me.
I stride over to the girl and take the mead. Her fingers are ice, and she’s shivering. “You could use something to drink. Can you make a fire?” I say, skewing my eyes to the west, where the small hearth sits cold. The girl nods enthusiastically and crouches there as I pick up the round shield from where she’s leaned it against the wall and go outside again.
Beside the entryway is an elf cup carved into a waist-high stone. I put down the mead and the shield and kneel at the stone. A dugout hole beside it holds a small leather bag I can just barely see in the moonlight. Gathering the bag in my fist, I feel the weight of it. Nothing this small should weigh so much. But that’s the truth of elf gold. It’s weighed down with trouble. I grin and tuck it into my pocket.
I brush dust and a few dead pine needles out of the shallow bowl carved into the elf cup and pour in as much mead as will fit. I drink a sip from the bottle, then spit more onto the ground and prop the shield here as an offering to Eirfinna. Her true payment I left two mornings ago, when I had time to lug a huge bag of electronics here and didn’t have to worry about snow. She likes the shields, though, because she likes me stealing skit from Bright Home as much as I do. If she were here, we’d name it and paint ridiculous faces on it with sticky mead, pretend either of us was capable of getting drunk on human liquor.
Despite the girl waiting inside, I miss Fin. There’s a lot we should talk about, what with the Stone Plague shifting my routes and ability to get good prices for troll dust. And, her kisse
s hurt like ice.
Pulling a tiny switchblade from my jeans pocket, I slice the back of my wrist, hissing at the pain. A few drops gather against my skin, dark on dark, and I turn my wrist over so they fall against the ground.
The traditional Hallowblot sacrifice was metal, alcohol, and blood. Most forgo the blood now, or perhaps sacrifice a martyr mouse to the goblins, but one thing I’ve learned from my mom is sympathy for the little things. I’d rather offer my own blood than cut the head off a mouse or a dove. Hope Dad never notices.
Sacrifice made, I go back into the church with the mead and elf gold, and force the door shut behind me. It groans long and loud.
The girl has the start of a fire made with tiny kindling from the wooden box beside the hearth. I make my way to the back of the room again and the rope that hangs from the steeple. Gripping it, I give it one long yank. The rope lurches, and when the old bell clangs like thunder, I laugh with it. The noise vibrates my teeth and my chest, echoing out from the church, down the mountainside, to Shield far below. Let any who hear it believe what they like: in the power of the wind, that some hermit tends the place, that the gods of Bright Home have sent one of their indentured to ring it. Or that goblins themselves are here on the mountain.
The girl is on her feet, watching me. I go to her. She stands as high as my eyes, but her curls give the impression of more height, and her shoulders are strong, her waist slender. Her hands look bluish from the cold but like they’re used to work. No fancy nails or delicacy there.
She leans in and puts her hand on my chest. “Aren’t you freezing?”
I’ve only a long-sleeved T-shirt and my jeans on, while she shivers in her tuxedo. I shake my head and put my hand over hers. It makes a spot of ice that spreads across my chest. She fists her hand in my shirt and pulls me close. All my built-up craving expands and I shift nearer, herding her toward the wall. Her shoulders knock gently into it, and my mouth curls slowly up into a smile. She slides her hand down my arm to the neck of the mead bottle and drags it up to her mouth to take a long drink. Her eyelids shut, and for a moment it’s like all of her is letting go.