I shook my head. “Safe’s the last thing on your mind! Aslaug told me what you really plan to do with Loki’s key. All that talk of taking it back to my grandmother was nonsense.” Snorri narrowed his eyes at that. For once the look didn’t make me falter—soured by the worst of days and made bold by the misery of the voyage I blustered on regardless. “Well! Wasn’t it nonsense?”
“The Red Queen would destroy the key,” Snorri said.
“Good!” Almost a shout. “That’s exactly what she should do!”
Snorri looked down at his hands, upturned on his lap, big, scarred, thick with callus. The wind whipped his hair about, hiding his face. “I will find this door.”
“Christ! That’s the last place that key should be taken!” If there really was a door into death no sane person would want to stand before it. “If this morning has taught me anything it’s to be very careful which doors you open and when.”
Snorri made no reply. He kept silent. Still. Nothing for long moments but the flap of sail, the slop of wave against hull. I knew what thoughts ran through his head. I couldn’t speak them, my mouth would go too dry. I couldn’t deny them, though to do so would cause me only an echo of the hurt such a denial would do him.
“I will get them back.” His eyes held mine and for a heartbeat made me believe he might. His voice, his whole body shook with emotion, though in what part sorrow and what part rage I couldn’t say.
“I will find this door. I will unlock it. And I will bring back my wife, my children, my unborn son.”
THREE
“Jal?” Someone shaking my shoulder. I reached to draw Edda in closer and found my fingers tangled in the unwholesome ginger thicket of Tuttugu’s beard, heavy with grease and salt. The whole sorry story crashed in on me and I let out a groan, deepened by the returning awareness of the swell, lifting and dropping our little boat.
“What?” I hadn’t been having a good dream, but it was better than this.
Tuttugu thrust a half-brick of dark Viking bread at me, as if eating on a boat were really an option. I waved it away. If Norse women were a high point of the far north then their cuisine counted as one of the lowest. With fish they were generally on a good footing, simple, plain fare, though you had to be careful or they’d start trying to feed it to you raw, or half-rotted and stinking worse than corpse flesh. “Delicacies” they’d call it . . . The time to eat something is the stage between raw and rotting. It’s not the alchemy of rockets! With meat—what meat there was to be found clinging to the near vertical surfaces of the north—you could trust them to roast it over an open fire. Anything else always proved a disaster. And with any other kind of eatable the Norsemen were likely to render it as close to inedible as makes no difference using a combination of salt, pickle, and desiccated nastiness. Whale meat they preserved by pissing on it! My theory was that a long history of raiding each other had driven them to make their foodstuffs so foul that no one in their right mind would want to steal it. Thereby ensuring that, whatever else the enemy might carry off, women, children, goats, and gold, at least they’d leave lunch behind.
“We’re coming in to Olaafheim,” Tuttugu said, pulling me out of my doze again.
“Whu?” I levered myself up to look over the prow. The seemingly endless uninviting coastline of wet black cliffs protected by wet black rocks had been replaced with a river mouth. The mountains leapt up swiftly to either side, but here the river had cut a valley whose sides might be grazed, and left a truncated floodplain where a small port nestled against the rising backdrop.
“Best not to spend the night at sea.” Tuttugu paused to gnaw at the bread in his hand. “Not when we’re so close to land.” He glanced out west to where the sun plotted its descent toward the horizon. The quick look he shot me before settling back to eat told me clear enough that he’d rather not be sharing the boat with me when Aslaug came to visit at sunset.