Snorri turns from the many-pillared hall of the judges and looks out into the Hel-night, alive now with the rushing wind of her approach. Jalan! The dry air shrieks it. Jalan!
There she stands before him, a child no older than his own sweet Einmyria, ghost-pale but lit with some inner glow. Gone. Now the swirl of the wind reveals her on his right, a slim young woman, hollow-eyed, clothed only in the wisps of what rides her, her head cocked to one side, studying Snorri with alien curiosity. The wind speaks again in a voice that stings, grit-laden and cold. Now she’s a baby, lying some yards to his right pale and silent, regarding him with eyes darker than Hel’s night. Tendrils of the lichkin to whom she is bound rise about her like translucent serpents, their light devoid of warmth. The child who has never seen the world, and the lichkin to whom she was given, both woven together, waiting to be unborn into the living lands.
Jalan!
“I’m not him,” Snorri says.
The unborn hisses, its shape twisting into some ugly thing without permanence or definition, the lichkin coming to the fore.
“You can smell it, can’t you?” Snorri says. “The destruction of one of your kind? He came against me in Hel and now he’s nothing.” Snorri raises his axe. “Try me?”
The wind howls and the ghost-like unborn breaks apart, swirling away toward the judges’ hall. Snorri shivers and lowers his axe, hoping he has bought Jal enough time to win clear.
In the distance, where the wind has dropped and the darkness fallen back to the ground from whence it was lifted, the dead-sky shows. It is the colour of sorrow and broken promises. Snorri starts to walk once more, the pain, thirst, and hunger of Hel woven into the meat of him so that each step is its own battle.
He hopes Jal will win through—the boy has grown in the time they have journeyed together. Less than a year, but the softness in him has been worn away to reveal some of the same steel so evident in the Red Queen, though perhaps Jal has yet to realize it. The afterlife feels too quiet without the prince’s constant complaining. Snorri misses him already. A grin creases his face. Even in Hel Jal can make him smile.
Snorri walks on, out into the wilds where Hel’s domain borders other places, the lands of ice and the lands of fire where the jötun dwell and build their strength for Ragnarok. Other places too, stranger places, all bound together by the roots of Yggdrasil. The land heaves and breaks as if frozen in its death agonies, mounded into compression ridges, scarred by deep rifts, stepping up toward daunting heights.
Few wander here, just the occasional soul bent around its purpose, and twice a troll-kin, hunched and moving swiftly through the scatter of rocks. In places monoliths stand, towers of black basalt, each carved with an eye as if to suggest the goddess watches even in the margins of her lands.
With Jal’s departure the Hel that Snorri crosses has grown closer and closer to the tales the skáld would sing in the long night around the dying fire of the mead hall. Snorri knows that Hel herself sits enthroned at the heart of these lands, split like night and day, as if Baraqel and Aslaug had been sliced head to groin and half of each bound into one being. Snorri, despite the depth of his conviction, can’t help but be glad his path has led him to the margins rather than to Hel’s court. He means to break Hel’s law, but he would rather not attempt it with her standing behind him.
In the distance hills rise from the blood-dust, dark with menace. The plain before them lies scattered with dead and twisted trees, ancient wind-stunted things, not one with a leaf on it, nor any hint of green across the whole swathe of the forest. Snorri sets off walking.
“Ccraaaawk!”
Snorri spins toward the sudden cry, axe ready. He sees nothing. Blood-dust rises around his feet, reaching his knees.
“Crawwk!” A raven, black and glossy, perched on a tree some yards back, long toes curled around a dry twig. “Here’s an odd thing. A living man in Hel.” The raven tilts its head first one way, then the other, sizing Snorri up.
“Odder than a raven that can speak?”
“Perhaps all ravens can, but most don’t choose to.”
“What do you want with me, spirit?”
“No spirit, just a raven, wanting what we all want: to watch, to learn, to fly back and whisper our secrets to the All-father. And perhaps a juicy worm.”
“Truly?” Snorri lowers his axe, amazed. “You are Muninn? . . . or Huginn?” He recalls the names of Odin’s two ravens from the priests’ tales. Appropriately he recalled Muninn—memory—first, and Huginn— thought—took a little more thought.