Three slow claps, sounding to the tempo of the key’s revolutions. “Extraordinary.” Skilfar shook her head. “I underestimated our Silent Sister. You actually did it. And tweaked the nose of this upstart ‘king of the dead.’”
“Do you know where the door is?” Snorri almost saw their faces in the flashes between reflection and absorption, Emy’s eye glimpsed in the moment, as if through a closing crack. The fire of Freja’s hair. “I need to know.” He could taste the wrongness. He knew the trap, and that he reached to close it around himself. But he saw them, felt them . . . his children. No man could step away. “I need to know.” His voice rough with the need.
“That is a door that should not be opened.” Skilfar watched him, neither kind nor cruel. “Nothing good will come of it.”
“It’s my choice,” he said, not sure if it was or not.
“The Silent Sister cracked the world to fill you and that foolish prince with magic. Magic enough to thwart even the unborn. Time was when you put a crack in the world it would heal quickly, like a scratch on skin. Now such wounds fester. Any crack is apt to grow. To spread. The world has become thin. Pressed on too many sides. The wise can feel it. The wise fear it.
“Given time enough, and peace, the wound you bear will heal. Time still heals all wounds, for now. And the scars left behind are our legacy of remembrance. But pick at it and it will fester and consume you. This is true both of the crack the Sister ran through your marrow, and of the hurt the Dead King gave.”
Snorri noted she didn’t speak of the assassin’s cut. He didn’t trust her enough to volunteer the information, and instead set his teeth against the growing ache of it and the southward tug that seemed to pull on him by each rib.
“Give me the key and I will set it beyond men. The spirits you have borne, both the dark and the light, are of a piece. Like fire and ice they are no friends of our kind. They exist at the extremes, where madness dwells. Man treads the centre line and when he wanders from it, he falls. You carry an avatar of light now but he lies as sweetly as the darkness.”
“Baraqel told me to destroy the key. To give it to you. To do anything but use it.” Snorri had endured the same speech dawn after dawn.
“The dark then, whatever face it took to persuade you, you must not believe it.”
“Aslaug cautioned me against the key. She said Loki bled lies, breathed them, and his tricks would lay creation in ruins given but an inch. Her father would feed all darkness to the wyrm just as soon as break the light. Anything to upset the balance and drown the world in chaos.”
“This is truly your will, warrior? Yours alone?” Skilfar leaned forward in her chair now, her gaze a shiver that travelled the length of him. “Tell me—I will know the truth of it.” The age of her wavered in her voice, a frightening weight of years that sounded little different from pain. “Tell me.”
Snorri set the key back against his chest. “I am Snorri ver Snagason, warrior of the Undoreth. I have lived a Viking’s life, raw and simple, on the shore of the Uulisk. Battle and clan. Farm and family. I was as brave as it was in me to be. As good as I knew. I have been a pawn to powers greater than myself, launched as a weapon, manipulated, lied to. I cannot say that no hand rests on my shoulder even now—but on the sea, in the wild of the evening storm and the calm of morning, I have looked inside, and if this is not true then I know no true thing. I will take this key that I won through battle and blood and loss. I will open death’s door and I will save my children. And if the Dead King or his minions come against me I will sow their ruin with the axe of my fathers.”
Tuttugu came to stand at Snorri’s shoulder, saying nothing, his message clear.
“You have a friend here, Snorri of the Undoreth.” Skilfar appraised Tuttugu, her fingers moving as if playing a thread through her hands. “Such things are rare. The world is sweetness and pain—the north knows this. And we die knowing there is a final battle to come, greater than any before. Leave your dead to lie, Snorri. Sail for new horizons. Set the key aside. The Dead King is beyond you. Any of the hidden hands could take this thing from you. I could freeze the marrow in your bones and take it here and now.”
“And yet you won’t.” Snorri didn’t know if Skilfar’s magics could overwhelm him, but he knew that having sought his motivations and intent with such dedication the v?lva would not simply take the key.
“No.” She released a sigh, the coldness of it pluming in the air. “The world is better shaped by freedom. Even if it means giving foolish men their head. At the heart of all things, nestled among Yggdrasil’s roots, is the trick of creation that puts to shame all of Loki’s deceptions. What saves us all are the deeds of fools as often as the acts of the wise.
“Go if you must. I tell you plain, though—whatever you find, it will not be what you sought.”
“And the door?” Snorri spoke the words low, his resolve never weaker.