It took a moment for my hands to remember how to sign. Your parents made these for you?
Rules, he repeated. His face gave away little. I started to wonder if, earlier in his life, Hearthstone had smiled more, cried more, shown any emotion more. Maybe he’d learned to be so careful with his expressions as a defense.
“But why the prices?” I asked. “It’s like a menu….”
I stared at the gold coins glittering on the fur rug. “Wait, the coins were your allowance? Or…your payment? Why throw them on the rug?”
Inge stood quietly in the doorway, her face lowered. “It’s the hide of the beast,” she said, also signing the words. “The one that killed his brother.”
My mouth tasted like rust. “Andiron?”
Inge nodded. She glanced behind her, probably worried that the master would appear out of nowhere. “It happened when Andiron was seven and Hearthstone was eight.” As she spoke, she signed almost as fluently as Hearth, like she’d been practicing for years. “They were playing in the woods behind the house. There’s an old well…” She hesitated, looking at Hearthstone for permission to say more.
Hearthstone shuddered.
Andiron loved the well, he signed. He thought it granted wishes. But there was a bad spirit….
He made a strange combination of signs: three fingers at the mouth—a W for water; then pointing down—the symbol for a well; then a V over one eye—the sign for taking a pee. (We used that one a lot on the streets, too.) Together, it looked like he was naming this bad spirit Pees-in-the-Well.
I frowned at Inge. “Did he just say—?”
“Yes,” she confirmed. “That is the spirit’s name. In the old language, it is called a brunnmigi. It came out of the well and attacked Andiron in the form of…that. A large bluish creature, a mixture of bear and wolf.”
Always with the blue wolves. I hated them.
“It killed Andiron,” I summed up.
In the fluorescent light, Hearthstone’s face looked as petrified as Blitzen’s. I was playing with some stones, he signed. My back was turned. I didn’t hear. I couldn’t…
He grasped at empty air.
“It wasn’t your fault, Hearth,” Inge said.
She looked so young with her clear blue eyes, her slightly pudgy rosy cheeks, her blond hair curling around the edges of her bonnet, but she spoke as if she’d seen the attack firsthand.
“Were you there?” I asked.
She blushed even more. “Not exactly. I was just a little girl, but my mother worked as Mr. Alderman’s servant. I—I remember Hearthstone running into the house crying, signing for help. He and Mr. Alderman rushed out again. And then, later…Mr. Alderman came back, carrying Master Andiron’s body.”
Her cow tail flicked, brushing the doorjamb. “Mr. Alderman killed the brunnmigi, but he made Hearthstone…skin the creature, all by himself. Hearthstone wasn’t allowed back inside until the job was done. Once the hide was cured and made into a rug, they put it in here.”
“Gods.” I paced the room. I tried to wipe some of the words off a whiteboard, but they were written in permanent marker. Of course they were.
“And the coins?” I asked. “The menu items?”
My voice came out harsher than I’d intended. Inge flinched.
“Hearthstone’s wergild,” she said. “The blood debt for his brother’s death.”
Cover the rug, Hearthstone signed mechanically, as if quoting something he’d heard a million times. Earn gold coins until not a single hair can be seen. Then I have paid.
I looked at the list of prices—the pluses and minuses of Hearthstone’s guilt ledger. I stared at the sprinkling of coins lost in an expanse of blue fur. I imagined eight-year-old Hearthstone trying to earn enough money to cover even the smallest portion of this huge rug.
I shivered, but I couldn’t shake off my anger. “Hearth, I thought your parents beat you or something. This is worse.”
Inge wrung her hands. “Oh, no, sir, beatings are only for the house staff. But you are right. Mr. Hearthstone’s punishment has been much more difficult.”
Beatings. Inge mentioned them as if they were unfortunate facts of life, like burned cookies or stopped-up sinks.
“I’m going to tear this place down,” I decided. “I’m going to throw your father—”
Hearthstone locked eyes with me. My anger backwashed in my throat. This wasn’t my call. This wasn’t my history. Still…
“Hearth, we can’t play his sick little game,” I said. “He wants you to complete this wergild before he helps us? That’s impossible! Sam’s supposed to marry a giant in four days. Can’t we just take the stone? Travel to another world before Alderman realizes?”
Hearth shook his head. Stone must be a gift. Only works if given freely.
“And there are guards,” Inge added. “Security spirits that…you don’t want to meet.”
I’d expected all of the above, but that didn’t stop me from cursing until Inge’s ears blushed.
“What about rune magic?” I asked. “Can you summon enough gold to cover the fur?”
Wergild cannot be cheated, Hearth signed. Gold must be earned or won by some great effort.
“That’ll take years!”
“Perhaps not,” Inge murmured, as if talking to the blue rug. “There is a way.”
Hearth turned to her. How?
Inge clasped her hands in agitation. I wasn’t sure if she was aware that she was making the sign for marriage. “I—I don’t mean to speak out of turn. But there is the Careful One.”
Hearth threw his hands up in the universal gesture for Are you kidding me? He signed: Careful One is a legend.
“No,” Inge said. “I know where he is.”
Hearth stared at her in dismay. Even if. No. Too dangerous. Everyone who tries to rob him ends up dead.
“Not everyone,” Inge said. “It would be dangerous, but you could do it, Hearth. I know you could.”
“Hold up,” I said. “Who’s the Careful One? What are you talking about?”
“There—there is a dwarf,” Inge said. “The only dwarf in Alfheim except for…” She nodded toward our petrified friend. “The Careful One has a hoard of gold large enough to cover this rug. I could tell you how to find him—if you don’t mind a fairly high chance that you’ll die.”
Hearthstone? More Like Hearthrob. Am I Right?
YOU SHOULDN’T make a comment about imminent death and then say “Good night! We’ll talk about it tomorrow!”
But Inge insisted we shouldn’t go after the dwarf until the morning. She pointed out that we needed rest. She brought us extra clothes, food and drink, and a couple of pillows. Then she scurried off, maybe to clean up spills or dust artifact niches or pay Mr. Alderman five gold for the privilege of being his servant.
Hearth didn’t want to talk about the killer dwarf Careful One or his gold. He didn’t want to be consoled about his dead mother or his living father. After a quick gloomy meal, he signed, Need sleep, and promptly collapsed on his mattress.
Just out of spite, I decided to sleep on the rug. Sure, it was creepy, but how often do you get to recline on one hundred percent genuine Pees-in-the-Well fur?
Hearthstone had told me that the sun never set in Alfheim. It just sort of dipped to the horizon and came back up again, like in summer in the arctic. I’d wondered if I’d have trouble sleeping when there was no night. But I needn’t have worried—here in Hearthstone’s windowless room, one flick of the light switch left me in total darkness.
I’d had a long day, what with fighting democratic zombies and then getting dropped out of an airplane into the wealthy suburbs of Elitist-heim. The evil creature’s fur was surprisingly warm and comfortable. Before I knew it, I had drifted off into not-so-peaceful slumber.
Seriously, I don’t know if there’s a Norse god of dreams, but if there is, I’m going to find his house and hack apart his Sleep Number mattress with a battle-ax.
I got treated to a flurry of disturbing image
s, none of which made much sense. I saw my Uncle Randolph’s ship listing in the storm, heard his daughters screaming from inside the wheelhouse. Sam and Amir—who had no business being there—clung to opposite sides of the deck, trying to reach each other’s hands until a wave crashed over them and swept them out to sea.
The dream shifted. I saw Alex Fierro in her suite in Valhalla, throwing ceramic pots across the atrium. Loki stood in her bedroom, casually adjusting his paisley bow tie in the mirror as pots passed through him and smashed against the wall.
“It’s such a simple request, Alex,” he said. “The alternative will be unpleasant. Do you think because you’re dead you have nothing left to lose? You are very wrong.”
“Get out!” Alex screamed.
Loki turned, but he was no longer a he. The god had changed into a young woman with long red hair and dazzling eyes, an emerald green evening gown accentuating her figure. “Temper, temper, love,” she purred. “Remember where you come from.”
The words reverberated, shaking the scene apart.
I found myself in a cavern of bubbling sulfuric pools and thick stalagmites. The god Loki, wearing only a loincloth, lay lashed to three rock columns—his arms spread wide, his legs bound together, his ankles and wrists tied with glistening dark cords of calcified guts. Coiled around a stalactite above his head was a massive green serpent, jaws open, fangs dripping venom into the god’s eyes. But instead of screaming, Loki was laughing as his face burned. “Soon enough, Magnus!” he called. “Don’t forget your wedding invitation!”