Page 69 of The Fanged One

A second voice came in under hers. Male. Light and teasing as he found the harmony she always missed and never once shamed her about it. His father, young and not yet anyone's villain, sang with his lover while their first child lay between them in the firelight, listening.

They had been happy, at the very beginning, before Asgard and the visions and the chains. Fenris hadn't let himself reach for that memory since before the binding.

The draugr's call reached into him and lifted it out whole and handed it back, and it was the cruelest thing anyone had done to him since Gleipnir.

I will remember for us, his wolf said. Don't listen!

Fenris's feet stopped. He turned, half a step, toward the nearest pool, where the black water waited to give him the rest of it.

The rope pulled at his waist as Linnea looked back over her shoulder. She gave the rope one short, hard tug, jerking him back to himself.

"Follow my voice instead," Linnea told him, and through the muffle of the wool, Fenris focused on the song she started up. He didn't know it, but the others seemed to because soon they were joining in about 'Just dancing' and something about a Lady called Gaga.

He tried to listen to their words and chose to follow Linnea's boot prints in the mud over his mother's voice in the water, and he walked.

The ground rose up again, shifting from mud to wet shingle to cold dry stone. The pools grew more spread out, and the wailing faded out behind a low stone bridge that stood ahead over a dry channel, mossed and ancient.

They walked over it until the last pool was lost in the fog, and a good while further until Tor judged them clear of the smell and the voices. There were more trees on this side of the swamp, but they were dead and twisted.

No one spoke for a moment as they dug the wool out of their ears. Von looked hollowed out, Ciara was crying silently, and Layla had her arms around her. Arne, Tor, and Linnea were gray-faced and grim, looks passing between them as if they had somehow heard the same voice in the swamps.

"Can't believe you chose Lady Gaga's The Fame to get us through," Layla said after a moment and burst into a fit of giggling.

"I can't believe Tor and Arne knew all the words," Ciara replied, wiping her cheeks.

"Are you kidding? Linnea drove us both crazy with that album when it dropped," Arne argued. "At least I'm not like Von, who was doing the dance moves."

"Lady Gaga is a goddess. Her routines are genius, and I'll not have you slander either," Von countered, untying the rope at his waist. "Linnea, you have excellent taste."

"It was the first thing that came to me," she laughed, but there was a wrongness in her tone that made Fenris suspect there was more to it than that.

The heaviness of the swamp lifted with the teasing regardless, and Fenris smiled without really understanding the jokes. He didn't have to in order to enjoy the relief of it.

They drank and ate cold bread and dried meat, and not one of them had any idea how long they had been walking. The flat gray light hadn't moved since they left Hel's doors.

Tor set a watch of two people at a time instead of one, because one pair of eyes in this country wasn't enough, and they had no idea how far the draugrs influence reached. Arne coaxed a small fire out of dead wood and grass. They lay around it, the women closest, the men on the outside. Ciara made a comment about sexism, but she curled around Tor anyway.

Linnea ate and moved her bedroll closer to Fenris so she could put her head down in his lap and was asleep between one breath and the next. He sat with his back against the worn trunk of the dead tree, his hand in her hair, and let her presence hold him to the waking world.

His mother's song was still moving through him. Far off now, at the very edge of hearing, patient as the dark and would now always be there.

Hel had warned him as much. Whatever the trials reached in and took, a person carried the consequences forever. What they had taken from him was a lost moment with a fire and two people who loved each other and the life they had created. All of it had been gone, and a black pool in the country of the dead gave it back so that it could sing it to him forever if he let it.

If Fenris had walked into that field alone, he might have gone to the water, not to drown, only to stand at the edge listening as it pulled warmth out of him one piece at a time, until there was nothing left of him to give.

He looked down at the woman asleep against him, at the ordinary rise and fall of her breath. She was the only reason he had been able to keep walking.

He kept the watch with Tor, leaving his hand in Linnea's hair, his eyes on the fog in the distance where the pools lay, and his mother went on singing for a son who wouldn't come back to her.

34

Linnea had stopped counting her own steps somewhere back in the forest of dead trees because the number only made her more tired.

They had walked since they woke, if 'waking' was the word for sitting up out of a thin gray sleep that left her hollower than before. They stopped to eat and drink. When they needed to move, they moved, because standing still in this country was worse than walking through it.

The tiredness was all wrong. Linnea knew the ache of a long hike, a big night out, and the leaden drag of grief. This fatigue sat over her like grime and sapped at her energy a little more with every hour the gray light refused to change.

What has Hel done here? Is this feeling another kind of trial?