"Blue Season"

Eirik wasn’t afraid of the dark. He was used to the way it sprawled itself over the winter, stretching the nights out so long that they only got three hours of daylight. And he wasn’t really bothered by the dazzling teal light that bounced between the clouds, either. It was Blue Season, after all. It was the time of year when the winds were supposed to howl louder, and the crunch of snow became harder underfoot.

What did scare Eirik was the sudden shot of electric blue, brighter than an oil flame, that blasted out from the Dwarves’ western burial mounds, shattering the calm greenish hues above. As soon as Eirik saw this, he tugged on Thol’s harness, and immediately shivered as the reindeer’s bells tinkled like a crash. The blue beam grew wider. There wasn’t much time. Eirik took his arrowhead knife and sliced the bonds off his cumbersome snowshoes. He said a dire incantation, and then he tugged on Thol’s harness once more and let the reindeer run towards the homestead. All the while, Erik bit his lip and relaxed his feet, so the soft leather undersides of his boots slid faster over the ice and snow.

Thol got them home just as the frigid wet soaked through Eirik’s second pair of socks, stinging his toes with ice water. Eirik’s mother Ragnid swung the wooden door to their slouching stone hut open just enough to let her son inside, but he pushed Thol in, too. Ragnid didn’t see fit to argue. She just locked the door, and raised an axe to rest on her shoulder, and said, “Eirik, I think it’s time to kill your grandfather again.”

***

The first time that Ragnid had killed her father, he had deserved it. Ol had been a vile man, hated by all who knew him. Ruined by his own cowardice, cruel to the Dwarves who worked his mines, and mean to the men who controlled his fortunes. Still, he was worse to his own daughter. Ragnid could not remember a time when her father did not accuse her of some false treachery. None of it was true. She was an honest girl, devoted to their family’s austere ways. Riches were for the vain, and lazy displays of magic were the sign of the weak. A man or woman, boy or girl, was the weight of who they were without help. Ragnid was taught this in simple nursery rhymes and made the mistake of thinking her father actually believed them.

Ragnid’s father believed only in himself, and in all the perceived slights tossed his way. So that was the liturgy he clung to when the lords and ladies voted him out of his blood-given seat in the Althing. They were wrong, not him. It was the lullaby he soothed himself with when Ragnid’s mother evaporated away. (Later it was learned that she had drowned, a serf whaler’s wench, happy to die with her poor lover in frigid seas.) And it was the excuse Ol gave when Ragnid came home to a wrecked house. It was her fault, not his, the star whiskey bottles were empty and the house in shambles. She was not his daughter, but his disappointment.

Finally, at 17, she ran away. It was the yellow-green time right after Blue Season thawed. Spring romanced the cold northern mountains where her southern family had been exiled to, and the Dwarves made easy excuses for her escape. As soon as she was past her father’s magicked sight, she ran. She called upon every speed spell she knew — embarrassed for the help though she was — to hurry to Spring House. It was the prettiest of the manors her father had let slip away. Situated at the foot of a volcano, its timbers had been carved into the shape of a cave, and its grounds gave way to a gorgeous series of hot springs, always steaming and never empty.

The house was supposed to be in the care of a fine lady cousin. Ragnid remembered meeting her at feasts and funerals. She had always been kind, clutching Ragnid’s check in her hand, and saying with a smile how pretty the little girl was now. The hope was that she would give the exhausted girl shelter. What Ragnid found was an empty house, with only a scant crew of serfs and serving dwarves left to watch it. And they all remembered her. Gangrig, the head butler dwarf, actually magicked a soft wool blanket with a snap to cover her with. Before Ragnid could protest, on austerity grounds, Gangrig shushed her. “I can only imagine the strength it took, my lady,” he said, as his pointed ears drooped down.

The fine lady cousin — Helga — was far south for the long summer, a time when the sunshine never wanted to go to bed, so Ragnid was welcome to do what she wished. What she did was bathe. Every day, after rising late, Ragnid would make her way to the hot springs that cascaded down from Spring House’s front door. All told, there were 21 steaming salt pools at Spring House, and Ragnid tried each. There was a small one close to the house that gargled up little bubbles of silt, and a large oval one that sat upon its own solitary shelf, and Ragnid’s favorite, a kidney-shaped one far from the house that had a still silver sheen on its surface.

Ragnid spent the whole long summer like this, and she kept doing it when the fall brought the night back. So it was that Ragnid was soaking alone in her silvery spring one night when the god came to her.

***

“How did you know he was a god?” Eirik would always ask. Ragnid had been forced to tell this story many times, and Eirik always interrupted here.

Ragnid would stiffen her spine and toss her braid back over her shoulder and say, “You just know a god when you see one.”

“But you didn’t really see him?”

“I’ve told you, he cloaked himself in shadow. To look upon a god in his true form is to see your death.”

***

The god did indeed come to Ragnid cloaked in shadow. He moved with the darkness and only came into view at the exact moment when he wanted to.

Ragnid didn’t notice the stark quiet of the night or the rumble slowly overtaking the clouds. She was only interested in watching her own foot slink above the water and move in a perfect curve above the silver surface of her spring. The newborn lights above made her pink flesh look green, and it was enough to marvel her. Ragnid was staring at her own big toe, lime green in the sky’s reflection, when the god announced himself.

“You’re very pretty when you do that, you know.”

Ragnid gasped in terror and pulled every limb to her chest.

The god laughed. He was still so one with shadows that all Ragnid could see were yellow eyes and a curled grin. “M’lady, I’ve seen it all before. In you, and in maidens in years’ past. I’ve even seen goddesses undone.”

“Who are you?” Ragnid said, panicking.

“Shhh…” It sounded less than a hush than a command.

Ragnid suddenly felt as docile as the late spring dew that barely kisses the newborn flower’s leaves. Her knees slipped down into the pool, exposing herself, and she was as calm as a blank page still untouched by ink.

“That’s better,” the god said.

“Who are you?” Ragnid asked in a shy whisper.

The dark form grew closer and started to take the shape of the most perfect man. A warrior’s height, a king’s brow, and a chiseled body emerged out of a black nothingness not even the neon ether could touch. What should have been his flesh looked like diamond-flecked coal dust. Ragnid looked up into the figure’s yellow eyes, which were now mellowing into an intoxicating emerald green. “I am an admirer,” he said in deep voice that slipped into her ear like a kiss.

“What do you want?” she whispered.

“To show you my love,” he said. “Will you have it?”

The dark form of a hand broke out of the shadowed and reached down to caress Ragnid’s cheek. Ragnid expected the god’s ashen hand to dissolve upon her sweat-dappled skin, but instead, she felt her face explode with a warm dizzy rush of heat at his touch. He was hard, and yet soft, and as he slid out of the sky and into the spring, Ragnid felt that she was being embraced by euphoria itself.

“Yes,” she said.

His version of love choked her with a velvet vise and cracked her decorum into two. Over the course of the night, the god bent her over and made her drown on her own screams. He transformed her into nothing but a howling laugh. He took her, and he took her again, and what scared Ragnid the most was how glad it all made her.

When dawn came, the god evaporated into the sunlight, and Ragnid wobbled up the 115 stone steps back to Spring House. Inside, she stared at herself in the mirror and was horrified to discover that the god had not left a single mark anywhere on her skin. It felt wrong to look unchanged, when Ragnid felt so ruined and rebuilt.

The rest of the day, Ragnid faded in and out of sleep, dreaming of the night before, and saying prayers that the god would return again. She began to cry when she realized she didn’t even know which god she should pray to. He had only revealed himself as pleasure, not as a specific power beyond that. When night fell once more, Ragnid made her way back down to the spring, for there was nothing else to do but bathe and hope he would come again.

And he did come again. The god returned that night, and the next, and so forth for a whole turn of the moon. Ragnid would remember with a bleak chuckle years later that the longer it went on, the less he had to play at wooing her. She would beg for him to take her just so she could feel the thunder in his touch. It was almost like the god knew how to play her for a fool, and not a lady or a love. When the month was over, he was gone. He bid her farewell long before the dawn came that time, and when she asked him if he would return again tomorrow, he sighed and said, “No, our time is over.”

“Please don’t leave me all alone in the world,” she said.

Ragnid remembered seeing a grin flicker across his shadow face. “I’m not,” he said. Because he had left her with Eirik. Weeks later, as she vomited up her honey and oats, and then months later, when Lady Helga returned to Spring House find her with a swollen belly, Ragnid would curse the god for playing such a trick upon her. Helga, of course, kicked Ragnid out, and she waddled her way across the blank winter plains to return to her father in shame. Her god may as well have been a devil.

When Ragnid finally returned home, to the very stone hovel that she and Eirik lived in now, she did not know how to explain what had happened to her father. She thought of inventing a magi lover who led her and left her in the South, or claiming a quick marriage to a now dead sailor. Instead, she told her father the truth, hoping that even he could excuse her for loving a god.

After she finished her tale, Ragnid’s father sat still in his favorite wooden chair. All he could do was stare at his daughter’s belly and slurp on his waterbag full of booze. The silence made Ragnid feel guilty, so she found herself saying that she was sorry, and then she waited for him to forgive her. As dumb as it was, the hope that he would forgive her was still there, like the dream that her mother would return from the grave.

Finally, he said, “How could you do this to me?”

He gave her belly one last look and nodded. Then he reached for the rusty meat cleaver he kept by his bow. It was the kind of blade he only used when he hunted. He’d shoot an elk with a bolt and then break down its body with the cleaver where the poor animal lay. When he turned back to her, Ragnid knew what he meant to do. There was electricity in his eyes and fury locked in his jaw. The dull square blade was raised above his head and his lips were muttering to himself. He was calling up his magic, dark and weak as it always had been, to do something black and bloody to his own daughter.

Before he could say another word, Ragnid pivoted her hips back to grab a dinner knife off the table. She spun back to meet him. The cleaver was still high in the air - hanging over her head - when the point of her blade slipped into her father’s gut. Ragnid found killing a man was easier than carving a roast bird, but harder than slipping a knife through butter.

That was what Ragnid thought the first time she had to kill her own father.

***

Ragnid did not have to ask Eirik to start sharpening his sling shot’s stones. As soon as the boy saw his mother take her whetstone to the household axe, he reached for his rough knit sack of rocks. No ordinary pebbles, they were all heavy stones the size of plump summer dates from the East, and carved down to have sharp hexagonal edges. A boy who had grown up with nary a real toy, Eirik liked to whittle the rocks down by the dying light of the hearth’s fire, but now he checked each stone, feeling carefully how ready each point was to split flesh.

“So what’s the plan?” Eirik asked. “I’ll sneak around the cave’s mouth and take out grandfather with my sling —”

“Let’s not be simple,” Ragnid said. “Ordinary weapons won’t work on a draugr.”

“Fire?”

Ragnid shook her head and Eirik slumped. “We both know what we need to face him.”

“How are we going to get it back, though? You made a Dwarf pact to give it up.”

“And I’ll politely ask for the deal to be rearranged given present circumstances,” Ragnid said. “Or we’ll fight for it.”

Eirik scrunched his mouth up into a tight little pout. He knew his mother was right. Before they could deal with the threat in the western hills, they would have to journey five miles south of the skyline to where the local Dwarf Counsel sat. All just to ask, beg, or even battle for their family axe Grendelstand back.

***

In the long ago days, when mead flowed out of chieftans’ horns and life revolved around the hall, Ragnid and Eirik’s ancestors were monster hunters. Born far south of their northern exile, their forefathers roamed the moors and rode small sturdy ships through fjords and past makeshift dams, to where lords and serfs, magi and merchants needed help ridding themselves of all sorts of foul beings. Perhaps their ancestors were too good at their work. Monsters were rare these days, and mostly stuck to themselves. Magic had been fading from the lands in recent centuries and only stuck itself to the strongest family lines…the magi. Still, spells and enchantments bound themselves to family heirlooms, and Grendelstand had been their family’s last remaining honor.

It was only slightly bigger than a farm axe. Its grip had been carved by elder Dwarves out of holy wood, and it was built to last through fire, shock, and cold. The blade itself wasn’t a blade at all, but a huge jagged tooth, yanked from the gum of a monster named Grendel. At least that was the tale. Ragnid had once heard a rumor it was actually carved to look like a tooth and it came from a fallen warrior’s hip. She didn’t like that story.

Over the years, Grendelstand had been passed on from father to son, to daughter to husband, to daughter again, and then son once more. So it was kept in the family’s line, until the night Ragnid murdered her father.

The Althing, the great parliamentary body that ruled over every Northern tribe and city, had to hear about the death of each and every member. Though her father had been voted out for committing war crimes, he was still important enough that his murder would have to be answered. In any other case, self-defense could be plead, except Ragnid had killed her father and patricide was an unforgivable crime in the eyes of the Althing. The laws were iron-clad, set down millenia ago by vicious men afraid of their cunning sons. Laws are never really written for women or their children, but to protect the men who write the laws.

Terrified of the Althing, Ragnid ran, sobbing, covering in her father’s blood, to the local Dwarf Counsel. She plead for their mercy, and they, despising of her father’s cruelty, agreed to help glamour the scene to look like a natural death. They used their enchanted needles to sew thread they nicknamed Sif’s Hair through the cavity in his chest, and like that, they stitched her father’s corpse back together. And they lied to the Althing, an offense just below killing your own father. They even disposed of the body, burying him in their own western burial mounds so that the girl did not have to give her evil father a hero’s pyre. And they did all this in exchange for Ragnid’s one treasure to barter with…Grendelstand.

***

“Tell me why we have to move fast to kill the draugr,” Ragnid said, securing their packs to Thol’s back.

Like rote, the boy said, “The longer a draugr walks among the living, the stronger he becomes. Here.”

Eirik passed his mother an extra big bag of stones for his sling. She tied it on top of their food, water, and kindling, and said, “You know these stones won’t pierce his skin, right?”

“Right, but they might distract him,” the boy said. “Plus, we don’t know what else we’ll encounter. I’ve read all the texts, mom. I’m ready.”

He hadn’t read all the texts, but Eirik had read many. Reading seemed to be the boy’s favorite thing to do. Whenever the seasons changed, and they took Thol to the eastern serf outpost to trade, Eirik would swap books and scrolls with the village librarian. Ragnid was never sure when and how he read these tomes. He spent his days at chores and his nights sharpening his stones while listening to her stories. His favorite nights seemed to be those when she would place a great elk skull on top his head so he could pretend to be a monster, and she the monster hunter. They waltzed around the hearth like this until one of them “won,” but then she hoisted him into the loft for bed. So how he read so many books, she didn’t know, but she knew he did. Ragnid couldn’t explain why, but it bothered her that her son had this secret from her. It reminded her of his father too much.

She pushed all these worries away and said, “Right,” to the boy, and led them on their way. At first, the journey was easy. She and Eirik kept a neat path on their lands marked by felled logs, but once they crossed into the great wild, the snow became treacherously deep. It hid their next steps from them, putting them in danger of twisting their ankles upon rock. They spent a mile suffering with each step, slowly lifting their feet out of the clutches of frosty damp and back in, all while the wind hastened to whip them.

“You can ride Thol if you want to,” Ragnid said. Eirik looked up at his mother’s face, which was pinched by frost, and bored by the very question she had just asked. He knew what the correct answer to that question was.

“No, I’m strong enough to walk.”

Ragnid put on a teasing, sing-song voice. “You sure?”

“Yes, I can do it.”

“And you’re sure you’re ready for tonight? You’ve never even killed before.”

The boy protested. “I have, too. I killed a chicken last month.”

“But you haven’t killed a person,” Ragnid said.

Eirik shrugged. “Killing is killing, I suppose. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

They walked about twenty more paces and Ragnid said, “I’m so proud of you. Eirik Godson, they should call you.”

“I’m Eirik Ragnidson, though.”

She didn’t say anything in reply to that. So mother, son, and Thol the reindeer marched forward in silence, through the powdery expanse that was silver blue in the the shadow of the Northern Lights.  

They were not even one mile away from the Dwarf’s Counsel, though, when they realized that something was deathly wrong. Grey smoke wafted up in eerie columns in the distance, and as they got even closer, the sounds of death could be heard. Screams, cries, and the yodeling battle cry of the Trolls. Ragnid didn’t have to explain what was happening. She could tell from a glance that the frozen boy understood exactly what they were facing.

Dwarves, Eirik knew, were nice. They looked awful, with their leathery grey skin, curly-cue noses, and bristly beards, but they were nice. Dwarves were the great masters of the forge, and it was they who had tamed the elements of the earth long before the magi were born or serfs overpopulated the world. Kindly, wise, but unscrupulous when it came to honor, Dwarves were the ones who had helped his mother all those years ago, and their small villages on the southern ridge were the only buffer between his family’s homestead and the raids of Trolls.

Trolls were not nice. They were vile. Though they shared the same stooped stature of the Dwarves, Trolls prefered to pollute the earth with bloodshed and fire. They had burnt orange skin, and noses like burnt blisters, rancid smiles and horns instead of hair. Instead of blood, bile ran through their veins, and they often had extra sharp talons sticking out where just elbows or knuckles ought to be.

So when Eirik saw that the Dwarf village, which he had visited many times as a boy, was now overrun with Trolls burning down huts and beating down Dwarf women and children, he grabbed onto his mother’s hand for fear. Ragnid didn’t even try to shrug it off; she squeezed it.

“What’s going on tonight?” Eirik said in a whisper.

Ragnid squatted next to him. “The Trolls must have seen the Draugr’s light, too,” she said, “or some other foul omen. Tonight is going to be hard.”

She couldn’t tell if Eirik heard her. His blue eyes were fixated on the mayhem ahead. He was staring so hard that tiny snowflakes had begun to cluster on his eyelashes.

Ragnid cleared her voice. “You ready for this?”

“Yes,” Eirik said, but he still couldn’t look Ragnid in the eye when he said it.

***

There were only thirteen Trolls in the raiding party, but that was enough to take the town. They had crept up on the Dwarfhall just as dinner had been finished and the honey-ale was dancing through everyone’s blood. First, they threw torches upon the hall’s thatched roof, and then they pushed through every door screaming murder with a fury. An old Dwarf had been the first to fall. He took a smouldering iron blow straight across his face. Then his wife was stabbed straight through. After those first two deaths, it was hard to know which Dwarf fell next. Soon whole families were dead in piles, fathers falling back upon their slain sweethearts and bleeding children, and the wooden walls of the hall were alive in flame.

The Dwarfhall was now gone, but there were still fighters in the town who remained. On the opposite side of the village, past the open amphitheater where the Dwarf Council would meet around a great bonfire, was the Forge. From human eyes, it resembled nothing more than a large stone manger, but inside were great hearths, hobs, and forges set up atop steaming vents. Locked up in the back of the Forge, behind iron hewn out of volcanic debris, were the Dwarf’s favorite weapons. Here were daggers and swords made out of meteorites that had fallen from the heavens, helmets made out of fire brass (a favorite trick of this Dwarf tribe), and Grendelstand.

Two of the Trolls made for the Forge next, and there they found five stout Dwarves, all devoted to the protection of their crafts. Dwarves might have been the best creatures at making weapons, but they were not good at using them. Too kind, too in love with the beauty of their art, they rarely had the stomach to see flesh and blood staining their craftsmanship. No matter how hard these young apprentices and one lone master tried, they could not stand up to the menace of the Trolls in full battle fever. As the last apprentice fell, grasping the key that undid the elegant lock that kept the weapons safe behind bars, the Trolls began to yodle victory. The ghastly song echoed across the Dwarf village, even as maiden Dwarves still cried out for help. Every hut in sight was flaming louder than a hearth, and the Trolls rushed the empty amphitheater in the heart of town to toast their victory. The treasured weapons of the Dwarves were their spoils, and Grendelstand was among them.

A lone elder Dwarf was standing serenely in the center of where the Dwarf Counsel usually met — atop a pile of ashen kindling — and the Trolls stumbled over themselves in shock at his presence. He was one of the few Dwarves with milk-colored eyes, pale and bright as the solstice full moon. That meant he was a seer.

Even though they had pulled the limbs off little Dwarflings as though arms and legs were no different than a flower’s petals, the seer spooked the Trolls. It was considered worse than bad luck to murder a seer. Slaying a sage like this old Dwarf could bring an instant curse upon each Troll present that would travel far and wide, and bring ruin to all of their vile mothers huddled deep in the Earth’s darkest crevasses. And so, they stood still, circled around the Dwarf Counsel’s seats, waiting for some kind of sign for what they should do next.

The Troll Chieftain limped a few steps forward. (He only had one true foot and one leg that naturally ended as a sharpened bone.) The old Dwarf raised one hand, and the Troll Chieftain stopped.

“You certainly have a high opinion of yourself,” the Chieftain said.

“And you think you’ve won,” the Seer replied.

The Chieftain began to laugh in large wheezing gasps. His Trolls joined him, making an eerie noise like shrill wind cutting through chimes. “Your people are dead, old father Dwarf. The Counsel is ruined. Your weapons are in our hands.”

At that, a smaller Troll rushed to his Chieftain’s side and put Grendelstand into his claw.

“What is this pretty one?” he asked. “It’s not made of your metal.”

“That is ours by oath, and you are not fit to wield it,” the Seer said. “As you’ll soon find out.”

“Think you can threaten me? I am the one who has stolen everything that you are from you in just one night.”

“My people might have lost tonight, but you have not won.”

The Seer’s words hung surrounded by silence for a moment, and then the Trolls began their clattering laughs again. One such cackle went silent as a small stone whizzed through the air and landed upside the Troll’s pate. He fell with a wobble and shook his head, but he couldn’t get the dizziness out of his system. Only a couple of Trolls noticed this at first, and they were the first ones to be hit in a similar way. The blows were not fatal, but stunned them into uselessness.

On the other side of the amphitheater, where the great Chieftain stood smiling, a whistle came, followed by the dazzling light of a magical spell. Then the Chieftain dropped to the ground with a thud upon his knees and then a slam upon his face. Panic spread as the Trolls saw nothing more than a humble kitchen axe stuck in the Chieftain’s back, square between his shoulder blades. The Trolls began to back away from their fallen commander and they huddled up and looked to all sides. But instead of seeing an encroaching pack of warriors, all they saw was a single woman, clad in shearling, and strutting towards them.

“I am Ragnid Olsdatter,” she said, “and I will have my family’s axe back now.”

The largest Troll of the bunch, a gargantuan beast with nothing for a nose but a hole in the center of his ugly face, pointed at the axe still stuck in the Chieftain’s back. “All yours, lady magi,” he said. “And get you gone from here or we will suck on your flesh until only the bones are left.”

“I mean this axe,” Ragnid said. “Grendelstand.” She crouched down beside her kill and smashed Grendelstand out of the Chieftain’s death grip. The axe’s milk white bone blade hummed as it found its home in her hands, and that was when the Trolls began to look not just stunned, but scared.

Eirik was running along the outer perimeter of the town’s great circle and he was managing to strike a Troll with each slingshot. None of them were kills, and some of them only pinged the beasts’ oozing orange skin, but the boy was announcing himself.

Ragnid picked this moment to rush the hole-nosed Troll, but no sooner did she sprint into action did he reach for two of the Dwarves’ treasured swords still stacked upon the ground. One came with a curved blade that tapered into an opposing hook and the other was a round poker, its entire rod serrated in a maniacal pattern designed to slash, tear, and slice at flesh. Running, Ragnid howled an old Shieldmaiden’s chant and threw the axe behind her and then snapped it down. It clanged off the precious sky stone of the curved blade. While she tried to swing her elbows around to take the Troll’s arm off with an under-swipe, he batted her arms with the serrated rod. The razor sharp points pricked through her thick sheepskin coat and scratched at her skin. The metal must have had fire poison on it. It was not deadly, but it distracted a warrior with burning pain. Ragnid fell back, into a crowd of Trolls.

Eirik had just made it to the Chieftain’s corpse. In the hurlyburly of his mother’s movements, he managed to free the kitchen axe from the troll’s back. He spun back on his heels straight into the sights of two angry Trolls. Crazed with fear and armed with adrenaline, Eirik swung the rustic axe about in such wild circles that the Trolls couldn’t make sense of his movements fast enough to feint his attacks. He managed to chop one of the Troll’s sword arms off with a hard, grunting effort, and sliced through the belly of the other. But neither were quite dead, so Eirik leapt back from their falling bodies, still snatching at the air for a grip on the boy.

It was then that Eirik noticed that his mother was in trouble. The silver and gold sparks of her spellwork were crackling in the air — right in the middle of of a squall of Trolls. When Eirik finally caught sight of his mother’s face, he wished he hadn’t. That was the moment the hole-nosed Troll smacked her, blowing blood out of her mouth and nose.

At first, Eirik didn’t think that the Troll had struck his mother. It looked like she was merely spitting out a spray of pomegranate seeds into the air. But when the garnet drops hit the snow and pooled out in little crimson seas, Eirik knew that she had been struck. The boy cried out, which only made Ragnid, and every Troll surrounding her, turn to face him. The Trolls took this moment, when Ragnid was fixed on the fright in her son’s face, to snap her arm and send Grendelstand flying.

The axe fell with a soft thud outside the mass of Trolls scrambling to tackle Ragnid. The brutes were so bloodthirsty that they didn’t even notice that the magical axe landed right at the feet of Eirik. But Ragnid saw it.  

As she spun her fingers around one another, desperately trying to summon a magical shield for herself, Ragnid cried out to her stunned son.  “Take the axe, Eirik, and get it done.”

The boy blinked. When he opened his eyes, his mother was lost in a pile of Trolls. Little waves of pale light rippled up, knocking Trolls back. So Eirik could tell she was still fighting. He blinked again and this time he saw Grendelstand and understood his mother’s order. A painful chill seized his belly; he knew its name was fear. So he let himself blink one more time, and then he let himself hear his mother’s screams, and then he let himself smell the dead Dwarves’ crackling skin, and then he dropped the kitchen axe upon the ground. That’s when he took up Grendelstand, and turned the tide of the fight.

Grendelstand was lighter than Eirik expected and it slipped into an easy cradle in his small hands. And it seemed to want to fight. As Eirik picked up the axe, a trio of Trolls turned to tackle him. But they failed. Eirik swung Grendelstand three times, and with each stroke, he found a killing blow. Troll guts spewed out and sizzled when they hit the snow. The noxious smell of bile tickled at Eirik’s nose, tempting him to sneeze. And Eirik watched the moment each Troll died. He could see the spark of malice that lurked behind each of their eyes go blank, like a shade had been drawn.

He was troubled by this, but Eirik also didn’t have time to ponder the storm churning inside his head. Instead, he just listened to the rhythm of his heart beats. It was as steady and stark as an army’s march. He stepped in time with it and turned to slay two more Trolls.

Eirik’s little killing spree did not go unnoticed. In fact, it pulled attention away from his mother and gave her the spare moment she needed to tear a Troll’s arm off with her good left arm, and then use its strength to bind her right bone back together with an ancient spell. It was fast, sloppy work that her father would have laughed at, but it was good enough to put her back in the fight. Which was convenient, since now the Trolls were clustering around her little son.

A shrill, melodic whistle ripped through the air. Eirik knew it was his mother’s tune, and he was glad to hear it. He was stumbling into puddles of bile and was tripping over corpses. He was tired, and panic was beginning to slow his arms. He looked up and over the Trolls ahead of him, and he saw his mother’s face smiling. She crouched under the arm of the hole-nosed Troll and held out her hand. Eirik pushed Grendelstand into her palm, and she carefully closed her fist around the tooth-like edge and yanked both the axe, and her son, through the huddle of Trolls.

Quickly, the boy handed Grendelstand off to Ragnid and scurried behind her. Before the Trolls realized what was happening, she swung Grendelstand underhanded and ripped the hole-nosed Troll’s torso in two from his ass. After he fell, she whipped through the rest of his lieutenants. Eirik stepped further and further away from his mother as she massacred them. Heads rolled into the scooped out ground of the amphitheater like balls tumbling down a hill.

Eirik didn’t know what scared him more: the fact that his mother was smiling, or that his little hands suddenly felt bare without Grendelstand in their grasp.

***

“It’s only a dead Troll,” Ragnid said as blithely as though it was only spilt milk. She lifted Eirik from the armpits and shunted the boy to the side. He gasped loudly, like a croaking frog, as his butt hit the snow. The cold shocked him back into his own skin. Ragnid worried he might cry, but instead, he just gulped for air. By the time she had begun to pull the last Troll carcass across the ice, its mustard bile oozing a track in the pure white snow, Eirik’s gasps had eased into slow and steady deep breaths.

“That’s my boy,” Ragnid thought as she turned from Eirik to build a pyre. Everything would be burned. She would not risk another visit from draugrs ten years from now.

Eirik didn’t see the great bonfire of Dwarf skulls and Troll corpses his mother was building. He was too busy looking at his own hands. Small and calloused, they were used to cold and work, but now they looked wrong to him. They were coated in that oozy Troll bile. Maybe it was only a dead Troll, but its blood was on his hands.

The elder soft grey Dwarf scooted towards Eirik. His ancient brow wrinkled over his narrow black eyes, but there was kindness in his face.

“Your first kill?”

Eirik nodded.

“Ah, shit. I’m sorry, boy.”

“Are you trying to make me feel better?”

Doubt drowning out the certainty in his voice, the Dwarf said, “Maybe?”

This made Eirik laugh.

“What’s that?” Ragnid called out. She had heard her son’s laughter over the crackle of the fire.

“Nothing!” he answered back.

That satisfied Ragnid and she got back to tossing bodies into the flames, but the Dwarf shook his head. “Joy is not nothing, Ragnidson.”

“I know.”

“Not yet, you don’t.”

Eirik finally pushed himself up off the snow and patted down his pants. While he did this, he looked at the Dwarf with new eyes. “Are you really a Seer? Is that why the Trolls were afraid to kill you?”

“I don’t see the future. I just see the truth in the present. And that’s all you really need to guess what will happen next.”

“So what do you see about me?” the boy asked, his eyes sparkling with hope.

The Dwarf chuckled grimly. “Eirik Ragnidson, you’re in the midst of your first great adventure, and all you want to know is who you might be when you grow up.”

“I know it’s stupid, but…”

“You’re about to face your grandfather.”

“The draugr.”

“Your grandfather? Yes.” The Dwarf took up a stray branch, not yet claimed by Ragnid for the pyre, and dragged its broken point through the snow. He then pointed at the line. “This is your life, so far, little magi. It runs from here…to here.” The Dwarf gestured towards the starting and end points of the short line.

“Many wise and brave people never get past here, “ the Dwarf said pointing at the end of the line. “It’s not a matter of life or death, or even time spent on this particular version of earth. It’s a matter of growth.”

Eirik narrowed his eyes at this, and then found himself pulled to the sight of his mother, huffing angrily to herself as she struggled to lift one great Troll cadaver upon the pyre.

“The trick is to go back,” the Dwarf said, pulling his kindling stick well past Eirik’s “starting” point just to swing it back over the entire line in a smooth semi-circle, “just so we can go well past where we are stuck now.”

The boy shook his head. “I don’t understand, Father Dwarf. Is it a spell I have to learn to cast or do I—”

“Eirik!” Ragnid called. “Stop bothering that poor old Dwarf and come here! I want to show you something.”

The boy growled as bade the Dwarf farewell and went to his mother. He couldn’t imagine a pyre to be as interesting as whatever it was the seer was trying to tell him, but as he made his way to the blaze — pinching his nose so as not to smell the rancid sulfur scent of the crackling Troll flesh — he saw what it was his mother needed him to see.

Grendelstand’s bony white blade glowed in the light of the fire.

“It’s drawn to death,” she said. “The blood, the gore, the void, the finality of it all.”

Eirik understood. Even as he had struggled to heave it over his head, it slammed itself down — in just the right kill spot — with hungry abandon.

“What else does it do?” he asked.

With a smile, Ragnid picked the axe up carefully and then shoved it into the flame. When she pulled Grendelstand out of the pyre, it wasn’t on fire, but its blade glowed a garish blood red, and the weapon emanated heat like a needful torch on a dark winter night. “My father taught me that one,” Ragnid said, staring at the blade’s grisly beauty.

“When do you want to kill him?” Eirik asked.

“As soon as possible,” Ragnid answered, still rapt up in the axe’s tricks. “Tonight will be long. Tomorrow night longer. The more darkness the draugr drinks up, the quicker he’ll move, the harder he’ll hit. I’m thinking we should bring the fight to him.”

Eirik looked back and saw the elder Dwarf still tracing the same loop and line into the frost.

“I agree,” he finally said to Ragnid.

***

Ragnid decided they should split up. Thol would carry the old Dwarf seer all the way back to the homestead for safe-keeping, while Eirik would walk straight towards the western burial mounds. He would have his slingshot, arrowhead knife, and the iron house axe in his arsenal. Ragnid figured he didn’t need more than that since he would serve merely as bait to coax the draugr out of his burial cave while she would attack the monster from behind.

“You’ll be fine,” she told Eirik. “You know those hills and you’re small enough to slip into a warren if you need to hide and take cover. It takes about an hour to walk the back glacial paths from here to the burial mounds, and far less than that to hike straight there as the eagle soars. I’ll take off now, and in 20 minutes, you’ll set off.”

“Okay,” Eirik said in a smaller boy’s voice.

Ragnid put a mittened hand on her son’s shoulder and shook him warmly. “Hey, my sweet, we’ve got this.”

He didn’t nod, but his head quivered slightly.

She knelt down carefully so as not to get her knees soaked in the snow and hugged him. “When it’s all over, I’ll melt down sugar over the fire and we’ll drizzle it into caramel nests on the snow.”

“Can we have hot chocolate, too?” he asked.

Ragnid smiled. “We’ll break into all the sweets and devour them all. We’ll even put an extra bolt of wood on the fire and really make it roar.”

“But then I’ll have to chop more wood for later in the season!” Eirik complained with a laugh.

Ragnid stood up and pulled Eirik’s hat down snug over his ears. It was cold as a grave tonight.

“Well, I’m off,” she said. Eirik rushed into her waist for another hug, but she only patted him on the shoulders in return. The boy seemed to catch the hint, and immediately let go of his mother’s hips. He straightened his postured and picked up the farm axe, palming it in between his gloved hands so that he wouldn’t be tempted to reach out for his mother again.

Ragnid left the boy, and Thol left him, too. Eirik counted from one into the low eight hundreds, only trailing off as his mother’s form faded into the smudged horizon. He looked up at the sky and tried to find stars hidden behind the veil of the lights, but nothing helped keep him company. All he had for conversation were the dark fearful thoughts rattling around his own head, and those weren’t helping him now. Since he had lost count of the seconds, he wasn’t sure if twenty minutes had passed yet, or perhaps thirty, or only fifteen. He paced back and forth for a short while and finally decided he must set off. He didn’t know it, but he was a good three minutes early.

***

Ragnid was trying to ignore how her right arm was aching far more than it should have been. The healing spell she had cast during battle must not have been executed perfectly, which meant that the bone might still be broken. She bit her lip to distract herself with a sharper, more immediate pain, and switched Grendelstand to her left hand. Her plan was to re-arm her fighting hand when she finally drew closer to the draugr.

She had only just reached the glacial paths, a narrow and icy set of trails that snaked their way through the northeast foothills and old burial mounds. The soft crunch of snow Ragnid had been walking on now transformed into a slippery, rock hard, icy incline. The trail was more precarious than she had remembered, but then, Ragnid had never dared to walk it before in the frigid heart of Blue Season.

Ragnid pushed forward, pulling herself up steep sheets of ice and gingerly sliding through rocky passes. She was even making pretty good time, closing in on the burial mound just as Eirik was approaching it from the south. But then, as she fixed her right foot on a patch of frost and swung the weight of her body up, the snow underfoot collapsed and she fell straight into a crevasse. She would have fallen all the way down, too, were it not for Grendelstand’s hook-like blade which stuck itself into a rock to hold her up. She moaned in pain as she reached up for more leverage with her right arm. Her legs dangled for a few seconds and she kicked aimlessly in place. Finally her left foot found a solid home and her hips curved to pull her right foot upon the same ledge.

But she was stuck, and panicked, and her arm felt like it might break again.

***

Eirik was so close to the draugr’s burial cave that he could crane his neck back and see the bright blast of blue light pushing past the limits of the sky. He had been quick and quiet about getting to the caves, and now was unsure how to coax his grandfather out. Nervous, he tiptoed back and forth between snow-covered rock outcroppings that sat in front of the burial mound. He had his share of cover, but no plan for what should come next.

That was when he heard his mother’s not-so-distant wail of panic. Fear clutched at his heart and he cowered behind a large boulder not five feet away from the mouth of his grandfather’s burial mound. His heart pounded and his breathing became quick and hoarse. He fumbled at his belt, trying to grab a slingshot stone, the hilt of the axe, and the holster of his dagger all at once. Just then a dark and deep growl came from the cave, and his grandfather’s draugr shuffled out into the open.

***

Ragnid’s left ankle began to swell with pain. It was a stinging pinch and the more weight she put on it, the more she was certain that she would lose purchase and fall into the crevasse. Panic tightened its hold on her and her breath morphed into quick, terrified cries. There was no spell she had the power to think of, much less conjure. Her body was bending in on itself. She knew the earth would soon swallow her, and that her father would take her son.

She wondered what would come next for her. Would she actually be spirited to Valhalla in a Valkyrie’s arms? Was there really a crowded hall made of high gold rafters and full of the fragrance of crackling pig skin and hot smoke? Would she spend eternity drinking with the great warriors of eons past? Would the taste of sweet mead slinking down her throat be enough to numb the memories of all she had suffered?

Ragnid decided that she didn’t believe Valhalla was real, and if it was, she did not think a vast feast hall full of drunken murderers sounded very much like paradise. Her father had taken her to smaller, earth-bound versions of that place. Ragnid remembered what it was like being passed from lap to lap, and how each year the hard pokes pinching into her ass grew harder. The smell of mead was nice, but the reek of vomit always overtook it before midnight’s chimes.

No, Ragnid did not want to go to Valhalla, even if she had a chance of going. Ragnid Olsdatter was a hell-bound god-fucker and father-killer. She was not a good girl, and she had never even attempted to live a noble life. She ran away whenever she could, and hid more than she ought. They didn’t have to live in her father’s little farm of exile. They could have taken a boat to kinder shores, to live a happy, quiet life where no one knew them. But Ragnid had always wanted to give Eirik an origin story.

Eirik was supposed to grow up to be Ragnid’s champion. That was what she thought the god’s plan was. He left Eirik with her so that the boy could grow up to be a hero, powerful enough to ruin the people who had brought her family low — starting with her father. She always knew that the Dwarves buried him the wrong way. She could have insisted that they bury him laying down, but she let them inter him in the precise way that tempted a draugr to wake from a corpse’s sleep. Part of her wanted to face him again, and she wanted Eirik to do it, too. She figured it could be the boy’s destiny, and that the god wanted it, too. Why else would he leave the child with her and never come back?

Her ankle slipped, and though her hands clawed for purchase, the ice shrugged them away. Now Ragnid was dangling by her bad arm. Only Grendelstand kept her from falling to her death. But the pain in her broken arm was exquisite in its cruelty. She could not keep her grip on the axe’s handle. This was it. She had been wrong and now she, and Eirik, were dead. Ragnid realized now when the god was fucked her in all those forbidden ways, he was really just fucking with her.

***

The draugr was the color of a fresh bruise — all bluish purple and iridescent in the moonlight. Eirik saw that he was almost naked, too. There was nothing but the long cotton strips that the dwarves had wound around his corpse. Once lamb white, the fabric was now brown with age and falling to threads. Eirik had always been told his grandfather was tall, but this draugr was a hulking thing, hunched over on his own crumbling spine and still well over six feet tall. That made him the tallest thing Eirik had ever seen, save for the elk that sprinted like ghosts through the southern forest. This draugr moved like a nightmare, though, lurching forward on bent ankles and looking around like a curious bird. That’s how Eirik saw the most horrifying part of the draugr: his face. The veins in his eyes seemed to have ruptured, dying the full eyeballs a sickly brown burgundy dotted with nothing but black, and his lips had crumbled away so all Eirik saw was a ghastly grin of bone and rotten teeth.

Eirik put the axe on the ground and readied his slingshot in his left hand. He took a deep breath and waited for the draugr to creep closer, but his grandfather disappointed him. Instead of moving towards the rocks, the draugr turned around and slunk in the direction of the glacial path — where Ragnid’s cry had just rang out from.

“No. Nooo,” Eirik said softly. He tore his right glove off with his teeth and reached in his pouch for his three sharpest stones. After he balanced them between his fingers he positioned them in his sling, yanked back, and let them soar straight into the violet horror of the draugr’s skull.

The stones pinged off the monster’s flesh like it was brick, and the draugr turned slowly in the direction of Eirik, whose head was still popped up over the boulder. What happened next frightened Eirik more than anything else that had happened that night.

***

First, Ragnid heard a wolf’s quiet, happy growl. Then she heard the girl’s voice.

“There she is!” She spoke in a sing-song tinkle that reminded Ragnid of a summer wind tickling chimes.

Ragnid looked up and saw a girl — maybe fourteen years old to the eye — sitting astride an enormous black wolf with eyes that were the same color as the blue-green sheets of light above. But it wasn’t the wolf’s eyes that stole Ragnid’s gaze. Half the girl’s face was enchantingly beautiful. She had porcelain skin and long hair as black and shiny as a wet raven’s feathers. Her heavily-lashed eye was also the color of Blue Season, and her lip curled ever so slightly up at the corner, like an eternal smirk. But that was just half the girl’s face.

Her other face, as Ragnid saw it, was just a dented yellow skull, covered with a few patches of oozing flesh and two mounds of writhing maggots where her lips and eye should be. Her whole body was split like this: a beautiful cornflower blue satin gown covering half of a nymph-like frame, and then bloodied, tattered rags slung across broken ribs and a shoulder of grey skin that was being pecked at by a crow. The girl was half pure life and half dreadful death, and she seemed glad about it.

“I know who you are,” Ragnid said to the girl. “You’ve come for me?”

She cocked her ghoulish half-head to the side, and said, “Well you do interest me.”

There it was, Ragnid thought. Death had come, and she was as easy as a child.

“But you interest Daddy more,” the girl said.

The wolf then let out a growl that almost sounded like a chortle.

Ragnid looked down at her broken body, straining in pain to hold onto itself, and said, “Of course, that’s who he was.”

“You sound disappointed, but you shouldn’t be,” the girl said. “Our father is the only god smart enough to always survive.”

“Like me,” Ragnid said.

“Really?” The girl slid off the back of her wolf brother. Maggots danced in her jaw as she laughed. “You think you can survive without help?”

“No, but you’re here to help me, aren’t you?” Ragnid asked. “Your father’s sent you.”

A golden rope appeared in the girl’s hand and she tossed down it’s end to Ragnid, who clutched at it gratefully. The great wolf then took the rest of the coiled line in his mouth and pulled back, easily lifting Ragnid out of the crevasse. Grendelstand eased out of the ice wall as Ragnid rose up, so it was in her hands as she rolled onto to cold ground.

Without saying anything else, the girl leapt back on her brother’s back, and turned to go.

“Wait!” Ragnid said. “Why hasn’t he sent help before? It’s been ten years, and I’ve needed him.”

“No, you haven’t,” the girl said. “But you should know that even if you did, Daddy likes his games. They’re all he has, you know. You at least get to keep your son.”

“Eirik.”

“I suppose you better hurry,” the girl said, “or else I’ll get to see my brother before you do tonight.”

***

The draugr was laughing. It was a happy, retching noise that made Eirik want to vomit.

Eirik’s hands jerked towards the farm axe and his arms trembled as he lifted it off the ground. While the draugr hobbled towards him, Eirik rushed forward into his dead grandfather, slamming the axe’s shimmering sharp blade against the draugr’s chest. And then Eirik fell as the force of the iron edge bouncing off the monster’s skin blew him back. He cried out, not from pain, but from fear, from embarrassment, and from panic.

Again, the draugr laughed.

Eirik didn’t have time to pull himself up. Somehow, the draugr, once so slow and lumbering, had managed to snatch the boy up in one swoop. Up close, Eirik noticed that his grandfather’s nails had kept growing in his crypt, but not like a normal corpse’s. Now they were long, sharp talons that the draugr used to tear open the neck of Eirik’s shearling jacket. Eirik screamed as the cold air hit his bare throat. He tried to kick his way out, but it was no use. The draugr had now wrapped one of his claw-like hands around Eirik’s neck. The sting of the draugr’s flesh on Eirik’s throat was meaner than frostbite, but it was nothing compared to the pressure of his fist tightening around the boy’s windpipe like a screw. Eirik felt woozy with pain. He warned himself not to cry. If he cried while he died, he might not make it to Valhalla.

That’s when Eirik heard someone else’s high-pitched cry. Suddenly the boy fell to the ground, gagging on the fresh air hitting his lungs. Eirik looked up and through the blur of his tears, still caught in place in his eyes, he saw a purple mass falling on top of him in slow motion. Then, a mittened hand clasped itself about his shoulder and pulled him out from under the draugr. Eirik wiped his eyes and saw that it was his mother.

“It’s all right, Eirik!” she said, gesturing at Grendelstand stuck square between the draugr’s shoulder blades.

But Eirik knew it wasn’t all right. It wasn’t yet over. The shot of electric blue still zoomed up into the clouds, and Ragnid wasn’t done.

The last thing Eirik saw before he closed his eyes and hid his face in his own hands was his mother sobbing as she hacked her own father into sinewy little pieces. The man who had become a monster was now nothing more than bits of frozen flesh, broken bone, and blue dust upon the ground. Some of Ragnid’s tears had fallen with them, and they were hot enough to melt ice.

***

Ragnid crept along the frozen plains, trudging through a soft new powdering of snow. She limped for two miles, dragging her lame left ankle like a leaden weight through the soft, cold frost. She was slowed down by two heavy weights. Grendelstand pulled on her wounded right arm. The monster’s tooth kept plowing its own small gully through the snow behind them. And Eirik was on her left hip. Though it strained her back, Ragnid carried him like a toddler through the swirling snow. She knew he was too weak for the fully journey home. The boy was crying softly and gasping into her shoulder. His spittle was freezing into a sharp icicle on her collarbone.

But he was actually not too weak. Ragnid could see that now, and a small smile stretched out her lips. It would happen soon. She could feel it. He was almost of an age to chase down the wolves that threatened the flocks. He had slaughtered trolls and lived to cry out the tale. And they had Grendelstand now. Her family axe was back where it belonged. She would have to push the boy for another year or three, it was true. He would need to learn to lean on his own wits and to study magic as theory…so that it may better explode when time lit the fuse. Soon she and her son would travel south and retake Spring House. It was theirs by right, and she would make it so by might.

Ragnid said nothing about her plans, so Eirik had to content himself with his own version of a lullaby. He looked up to the skies, as he always had at this time of year, and saw great cobwebs of neon cerulean vibrating against the dark black sky. The deep azure colors shone so brightly that Eirik could see everything as clearly as on a bright summer morning. It was Blue Season, and it was his favorite time of year. For the first time ever, though, Eirik prayed that the season would be over soon.