Lamentably, my friend’s mother does not take the offer. She steps toward Sefi. “I carried you, birthed you, nursed you, and this is my reward? Treason? Blasphemy? You are no Valkyrie.” She looks at her people. “These are lies. Free our gods from the usurpers. Kill blasphemers. Kill them all!”
But before the first warchief can even draw their blade, Sefi steps forward, lifts the razor I gave her, and decapitates her mother. Alia’s head falls to the floor, eyes still open. The woman’s huge body remains standing. Slowly it tips backward and thuds to the ground. Sefi stands over the fallen queen and spits on the corpse. Turning back to her people, she speaks for the first time in twenty-five years.
“She knew.”
Her voice is deep and dangerous. Hardly rising above the level of a whisper. Yet it owns the room
as surely as if she roared. Then tall Sefi turns away from the Golds, walks back through the gaggle of warchiefs to the griffin throne where her mother ’s fabled warchest has sat unopened for ten years.
There, she bends and takes the lock in her hands and roars gutturally, like a beast, as she pulls at the rusted iron till her fingers bleed and the iron crumbles apart. She throws the old lock to the ground and rips open the chest, pulling free the old black scarabSkin her mother used to conquer the White Coast. Pulling free the red scale cloak of the dragon her mother slew in her youth. And hoisting high her great, black, double-headed axe of war called Throgmir. The rippling gleam of duroSteel catches in the light. She stalks back to the Golds, dragging the axe on the ground behind her.
She motions to Holiday, who removes the gags from the mouths of the Golds.
“Are you a god?” Sefi asks, her tone so different from her brother ’s. Direct and cold as a winter storm.
“You will burn, mortal,” the man says. “If you do not release us, Aesir will come from the sky and rain fire upon your land. This you know. We will wipe your seed from the worlds. We will melt the
ice. We are the mighty. We are the Peerless Scarred. And this millennium belongs to…”
Sefi slays him there with one giant swing, cleaving him nearly in twain. Blood sprays my face. I do not flinch. I knew what would happen if I brought them here. I also know there’s no way I could keep them as prisoners. The Golds built this myth, but now it must die. Mustang moves closer to me, her sign that she accepts this. But her eyes are fixed on the Golds. She will remember this slaughter for the rest of her life. It is her duty and mine to make it mean something.
Part of me mourns the death of these Golds. Even as they die, they make these other taller mortals still seem so much lesser. They stand straight, proud. They do not quake in their last moment in this smoky room so far from their estates where they rode horses as children and learned the poetry of
Keats and the wonder of Beethoven and Volmer. A middle-aged Gold woman looks back at Mustang.
“You let them do this to us? I fought for your father. I met you when you were a girl. And I fell in his Rain,” she glares at me and begins to recite with a loud clear voice the Aeschylus poem the Peerless Scarred use at times as a battle cry:
Up and lead the dance of Fate!
Lift the song that mortals hate…
Tell what rights are ours on earth,
Over all of human birth
Swift of foot to avenge are we!
He whose hands are clean and pure.
Naught our wrath to dread hath he.
One by one they fall to Sefi’s axe. Until only the woman is left, her head held high, her words ringing clear. She looks me in the eye, as sure of her right as I am of mine. “Sacrifice. Obedience.
Prosperity.” Sefi’s axe sweeps through the air and the last god of Asgard flops to the stone floor.
Over her body towers the blood-spattered Princess of the Valkyrie, terrible and ancient with her justice. She bends and removes the tongue of the female Gold with a crooked knife. Mustang shifts beside me in discomfort.
Sefi smiles, noticing Mustang’s unease, and walks away from us to her dead mother. She takes the
woman’s crown and ascends the steps to the throne, bloody axe in one hand, glass crown in the other, and sits inside the rib cage of the griffin where she crowns herself.
“Children of the Spires, the Reaper has called us to join him in his war against false gods. Do the Valkyrie answer?”
In reply, her Valkyrie raise their blue-feathered axes high above their heads to drone out the Obsidian chant of death. Even the warchiefs of fallen Alia join. It seems the ocean itself crashes through the stone hallways of the Spires, and I feel the drums of war beating inside, chilling my blood.
“Then ride, Hjelda, Tharul, Veni, and Hroga. Ride Faldir and Wrona and Bolga to the tribes of the
Blood Coast, to the Bleaking Moor, the Shattered Spine and the Witch Pass. Ride to kin and enemy alike and tell them Sefi speaks. Tell them Ragnar ’s prophets told true. Asgard has fallen. The gods are dead. The old oaths have been broken. And tell all who will hear: the Valkyrie ride to war.”
As the world swirls around us and the ecstasy of war fills the air, Mustang and I look at one another with darkened eyes and wonder just what we have unleashed.