The Ship of the Dead (Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard #3)

“I hope you’re right, Sam,” I said. “Because some of it’s been pretty rough.”

Sam sighed as if letting go of all the hunger, thirst, and curse words she’d kept inside while fasting. “I know. I think the hardest thing we can ever do is see someone for who they really are. Our parents. Our friends. Ourselves.”

I wondered if she was thinking about Loki, or maybe herself. She could have been talking about any of us on the ship. None of us were free of our pasts. During the voyage, we’d looked into some pretty harsh mirrors.

My moment at the mirror was yet to come. When I faced Loki, I was sure he’d delight in magnifying my every fault, stripping bare my every fear and weakness. If he could, he would reduce me to a sniveling grease spot.

We had until tomorrow to reach Naglfar, Frigg had said…or the next day at the latest. I found myself wavering, almost wishing we would miss the deadline so I wouldn’t have to face Loki one-on-one. But no. My friends were counting on me. For the sake of everybody I knew, everybody I didn’t know…I had to delay Ragnarok as long as possible. I had to give Sam and Amir a chance at a normal life, and Annabeth and Percy, and Percy’s baby sister, Estelle. They all deserved better than planetary destruction.

I said good night to Sam, then spread my own sleeping bag out on the deck.

I slept fitfully, dreaming of dragons and thralls, of falling down mountains and battling clay giants. Loki’s laughter echoed in my ears. Over and over, the deck turned into a gruesome patchwork of dead men’s keratin, enfolding me in a disgusting toenail cocoon.

“Good morning,” said Blitzen, jolting me awake.

The morning was bitter cold and steel gray. I sat up, breaking a sheet of ice that had formed on my sleeping bag. Off our starboard side, snowcapped mountains loomed even taller than the fjords of Norway. All around us, the sea was a broken-up puzzle of ice blocks. The deck was completely glazed in frost, turning our bright yellow warship the color of weak lemonade.

Blitzen was the only other person on deck. He was bundled up, but he wasn’t wearing any sun protection, despite the fact that it was clearly daytime. That could only mean one thing.

“We’re not in Midgard anymore,” I guessed.

Blitzen smiled wearily, no humor in his eyes. “We’ve been in Jotunheim for hours now, kid. The others are below, trying to stay warm. You…well, being the son of the summer god, you’re more resistant to cold, but even you are going to start having trouble soon. Judging from how fast the temperature is dropping, we’re getting close to the borders of Niflheim.”

I shivered instinctively. Niflheim, the primordial realm of ice: one of the few worlds I hadn’t yet visited, and one I wasn’t anxious to explore.

“How will we know when we’re there?” I asked.

The ship lurched with a juddering noise that loosened my joints. I staggered to my feet. The Big Banana was dead in the water. The surface of the sea had turned to solid ice in every direction.

“I’d say we’re here.” Blitz sighed. “Let’s hope Hearthstone can summon some magical fire. Otherwise we’re all going to freeze to death within the hour.”





I HAVE DIED many painful deaths. I’ve been impaled, decapitated, burned, drowned, crushed, and thrown off the terrace of floor 103.

I prefer all of those to hypothermia.

After only a few minutes, my lungs felt like I was breathing glass dust. We got all hands on deck—another nautical term I finally understood—to deal with the ice problem, but we had little success. I sent Jack out to break up the floe in front of us, while Halfborn and T.J. used poleaxes to chip away at the port and starboard sides. Sam flew ahead with a rope and tried to tug us along. Alex turned into a walrus and pushed from behind. I was too cold to make any jokes about how nice she looked with tusks, whiskers, and flippers.

Hearthstone summoned a new rune:



He explained this was kenaz: the torch, the fire of life. Instead of disappearing in a flash, like most runes did, kenaz continued to burn above the foredeck—a floating bend of fire five feet high, melting the frost on the deck and rigging. Kenaz kept us warm enough to avoid instant death, but Blitz fretted that sustaining the rune for an extended period would also burn up Hearth’s energy. A few months ago, expending so much energy would have killed him. Now he was stronger. Still, I worried, too.

I found a pair of binoculars in the supplies and scanned the mountains for any promise of shelter or harbor. I saw nothing but sheer rock.

I didn’t realize my fingers were turning blue until Blitz pointed it out. I summoned a little Frey-warmth into my hands, but the effort made me dizzy. Using the power of summer here was like trying to remember everything that had happened on my first day of elementary school. I knew summer still existed, somewhere, but it was so distant, so vague, I could barely conjure a memory of it.

“B-blitz, y-you don’t look affected,” I noted.

He scratched the ice from his beard. “Dwarves do well in the cold. You and I will be the last ones to freeze to death. But that’s not much comfort.”

Mallory, Blitz, and I tried using oars to push away the ice as Halfborn and T.J. broke it up. We alternated duties, going belowdecks two or three at a time to warm up, though below wasn’t much warmer. We would have made faster time just getting out and walking, but Walrus Alex reported that the ice had some nasty thin spots. Also, we had nowhere to shelter. At least the ship offered supplies and some cover from the wind.

My arms started to go numb. I got so used to shivering I couldn’t tell whether it had started to snow or my vision was blurred. The fiery rune was the only thing keeping us alive, but its light and heat slowly faded. Hearthstone sat cross-legged beneath the kenaz, his eyes closed in intense concentration. Beads of sweat dripped from his brow and froze as soon as they splattered on the deck.

After a while, even Jack started to act glum. He no longer seemed interested in serenading us or joking about doing icebreaker activities.

“And this is the nicest part of Niflheim,” he grumbled. “You should see the cold regions!”

I’m not sure how much time passed. It seemed impossible that there had been any life before this one: breaking ice, pushing ice, shivering, dying.

Then, at the prow, Mallory croaked, “Hey! Look!”

In front of us, the swirling snow thinned. Only a few hundred yards ahead, jutting from the main line of cliffs, was a jagged peninsula like the blade of a corroded ax. A thin line of black-gravel beach hugged the base. And toward the top of the cliff…were those fires flickering?

We turned the ship in that direction, but we didn’t make it far. The ice thickened, cementing our hull in place. Above Hearth’s head, the kenaz rune guttered weakly. We all gathered on the deck, solemn and silent. Every blanket and extra piece of clothing in the hold had been wrapped around us.