SIXTY-ONE
Heather Is My New Least Favourite Flower
I didn’t think anything could be worse than our fishing expedition with Harald. I was wrong.
As soon as we left the harbour, the sky darkened. The water turned as black as squid ink. Through the haze of snow, the shoreline of Boston morphed into something primeval – the way it might have looked when Skirnir’s descendant first sailed his longship up the Charles.
Downtown was reduced to a few grey hills. The runways at Logan Airport turned to sheets of ice floating on open water. Islands sank and rose around us like a time-lapse video of the last two millennia.
It occurred to me that I might be looking at the future rather than the past – the way Boston would appear after Ragnarok. I decided to keep that thought to myself.
In the quiet of the bay, Gjalar’s outboard motor made an obscene amount of noise – rattling, growling and coughing smoke as our boat cut through the water. Any monsters within a five-mile radius would know where to find us.
At the prow, Fjalar kept watch, occasionally shouting warnings to his brother, ‘Rocks to port! Iceberg to starboard! Kraken at two o’clock!’
None of that helped calm my nerves. Surt had promised we would meet tonight. He planned on burning my friends and me alive and destroying the Nine Worlds. But in the back of my mind lurked an even deeper fear. I was about to meet the Wolf at last. That realization dredged up every nightmare I’d ever had about glowing blue eyes, white fangs, feral snarls in the darkness.
Sitting next to me, Sam kept her axe across her lap, where the dwarves could see it. Blitzen fussed with his yellow ascot, as if he could intimidate our hosts with his wardrobe. Hearthstone practised making his new staff appear and disappear. If he did it right, the staff shot into his hand out of nowhere, like a bouquet of flowers spring-loaded in a magician’s sleeve. If he did it wrong, he goosed Blitzen or whopped me upside the back of the head.
After a few hours and a dozen staff-induced concussions, the boat shuddered like we’d hit a cross-current. From the bow, Fjalar announced, ‘It won’t be long now. We’ve entered Amsvartnir – Pitch-Black Bay.’
‘Gee –’ I looked at the inky waves – ‘why do they call it that?’
The clouds broke. The full moon, pale and silver, peered down at us from a starless void. In front of us, fog and moonlight wove together, forming a coastline. I’d never hated the full moon so much.
‘Lyngvi,’ Fjalar announced. ‘The Isle of Heather, prison of the Wolf.’
The island looked like the caldera of an ancient volcano – a flattened cone maybe fifty feet above sea level. I’d always thought of heather as purple, but the rocky slopes were carpeted with ghostly white flowers.
‘If that’s heather,’ I said, ‘there sure is a lot of it.’
Fjalar cackled. ‘It’s a magical plant, my friend – used to ward off evil and keep ghosts at bay. What better prison for Fenris Wolf than an island entirely ringed with the stuff?’
Sam rose. ‘If Fenris is as big as I’ve heard, shouldn’t we be able to see him by now?’
‘Oh, no,’ Fjalar said. ‘You have to go ashore for that. Fenris lies bound in the centre of the island like a runestone in a bowl.’
I glanced at Hearthstone. I doubted he could read Fjalar’s lips behind that bushy beard, but I didn’t like the reference to a runestone in a bowl. I remembered the other meaning of perthro: a dice-rolling cup. I didn’t want to run blindly into that caldera and hope for Yahtzee.
When we were about ten feet from the beach, the keel of the boat ground against a sandbar. The sound reminded me unpleasantly of the night my mother died – our apartment door creaking just before it burst open.
‘Out you go!’ Fjalar said cheerfully. ‘Enjoy your walking tour. Just head over the ridge there. I think you’ll find the Wolf well worth the trip!’
Maybe it was my imagination, but my nostrils filled with the smell of smoke and wet animal fur. My new einherji heart was testing the limits of how fast it could beat.
If it hadn’t been for my friends, I’m not sure I would’ve had the courage to disembark. Hearthstone leaped over the side first. Sam and Blitzen followed. Not wanting to be stuck on the boat with lobster dwarf and his jerky-eating brother, I swung my legs overboard. The waist-deep water was so cold I imagined I would be singing soprano for the rest of the week.
I slogged onto the beach, and a wolf’s howl split my eardrums.
Now, sure … I’d been expecting a wolf. Ever since childhood, wolves had terrified me, so I’d tried my best to gather my courage. But Fenris’s howl was unlike anything I’d ever heard – a note of pure rage so deep it seemed to shake me apart, breaking my molecules into random amino acids and icy Ginnungagap run-off.
Safe in their boat, the two dwarves cackled with glee.
‘I should have mentioned,’ Fjalar called to us, ‘the ride back is a little more expensive. All your valuables, please. Gather them together in one of your bags. Toss them to me. Otherwise, we’ll leave you here.’
Blitzen cursed. ‘They’ll leave us here anyway. That’s what they do.’
At the moment, heading inland to confront Fenris Wolf was very low on my wish list. At the top of my wish list was: Cry and Plead for the Treacherous Dwarves to Take Me Back to Boston.
My voice quavered, but I tried to act more courageous than I felt.
‘Get lost,’ I told the dwarves. ‘We don’t need you any more.’
Fjalar and Gjalar exchanged looks. Already their boat was drifting further away.
‘Didn’t you hear the Wolf?’ Fjalar spoke more slowly, as if he’d overestimated my intelligence. ‘You’re stuck on that island. With Fenris. That’s a bad thing.’
‘Yeah, we know,’ I said.
‘The Wolf will eat you!’ Fjalar cried. ‘Bound or not, he will eat you. At dawn the island will disappear and take you with it!’
‘Thanks for the lift,’ I said. ‘Pleasant trip back.’
Fjalar flung up his hands. ‘Idiots! Suit yourself. We’ll collect your valuables from your skeletal remains next year! Come on, Gjalar, back to the docks. We might have time to pick up another load of tourists.’
Gjalar revved the motor. The longship turned and disappeared into the darkness.
I faced my friends. I got the feeling they wouldn’t mind another rousing speech like, We’re a family of empty cups and we will dominate!
‘Well,’ I said, ‘after running from an army of dwarves, facing a monster squirrel, killing three giant sisters and butchering a pair of talking goats … how bad can Fenris Wolf be?’
‘Very bad,’ Sam and Blitz said in unison.
Hearthstone made two OK signs, crossed them at the wrists and flicked them apart – the sign for awful.
‘Right.’ I pulled my sword from pendant form. The blade’s glow made the heather look even paler and more ghostly. ‘Jack, you ready?’
‘Dude,’ said the sword, ‘I was forged ready. Still, I get the feeling we’re walking into a trap here.’
‘Show of hands,’ I asked my friends, ‘is anybody surprised by that?’
Nobody raised their hand.
‘Okay, cool,’ said Jack. ‘As long as you realize you’ll probably all die in agony and start Ragnarok, I’m down. Let’s do this!’