“Jeep, four-wheel drive, all-terrain vehicle, whatever. I don’t have one, and it’s not a route I’d risk if I did. How else did you think we were going to get there?” I asked him. I might have been the only citizen in living memory to visit Pemkowet’s underworld, but everyone knew where it was, more or less. Yggdrasil II is the entrance, and it’s tough to miss a pine tree the size of a skyscraper jutting out of the sands that swallowed the old lumber town.
“I don’t know,” Lee admitted. “I imagined something less . . . prosaic.”
“Well, let’s see if we can get an invite,” I said.
He followed me back downstairs and into the park across from the alley, gathering the folds of his duster around him to sit opposite me on the grass. There was a hint of afterglow along the western horizon, but dusk was falling and there was a slight chill in the air warning that autumn was coming.
I set the iron casket between us and opened it, taking out the copper bowl and nestling it in the grass.
“What is that?” Lee asked.
“It’s a bowl,” I informed him, unwrapping the woolen packet and extracting a scaly chip of pine bark. There were seven of them, each about the size of my hand and densely inscribed with lines of runic script. Hel hadn’t given me any criteria for using them to contact her or any assurances that she would replace them if and when I’d used the last. I hesitated, second-guessing my decision.
“I can see it’s a bowl,” Lee said with irritation. He pointed at the pine bark. “What does it say?”
“I have no idea.” I wondered what Hel would do if she determined I’d wasted her time to satisfy the whim of a geeky gaming genius. Then again, my rationale was a valid one. If Hel disapproved of the idea of a database documenting the entire eldritch population, I’d better find out now. I’d already made a few promises regarding the significance of my as-yet-nonexistent ledger. It was probably best to stick with my initial decision.
“You don’t read futhark?” Lee asked in disbelief.
I scowled at him. “No, I don’t read futhark. What’s futhark?”
“Uh, it’s only the runic alphabet.” Clearly, he thought I was an idiot. “See here in the center?” He pointed again. “H-E-L. It’s written horizontally and vertically. Probably some kind of summoning locus.”
“Great,” I said. “What does the rest of it say?”
He pursed his lips. “I can’t tell. I’m afraid I don’t actually speak Old Norse.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “Except for a few words here and there that I’ve picked up along the way. So that sort of invalidates the purpose of learning to read futhark, doesn’t it?”
Lee couldn’t bring himself to agree. “Knowledge is never wasted.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But it can on occasion be somewhat superfluous.” I watched a flicker of surprise cross Lee’s gaunt face and silently thanked Mr. Leary for drilling vocabulary words into me back in the day. “Look, do you want to sit there and tell me how to do my job, or do you want me to actually do it?”
He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I just want to know.”
“Know what?”
“Everything.” Lee tilted his head a little and smiled wryly. It was the first truly candid expression I’d seen on his face and it transformed him, bringing out an unexpected charm; less Skeletor, more mid-1990s heroin-chic male model. Well, except for the ill-advised facial hair, baseball cap, and goth duster. “Go ahead, Daisy. I’ll shut up.”
“Okay.” I held the inscribed chip of bark harvested from Yggdrasil II itself in my left hand, struck a wooden match with my right, and touched the flame to the dry bark.
It caught quickly, kindling to a bright, dancing glow in the dim twilight of the park. I watched the flames lick at the runes neither Lee nor I could read, darkening and consuming them. The occasional spark snapped and a thin stream of aromatic, piney smoke trickled upward into the evening sky. When the flames got close to my fingertips, I dropped the bark chip into the copper bowl. It struck the bottom of the bowl with a faint ringing sound. In the trees above us, a trio of blue jays took flight in a raucous burst of chatter.
I smiled.
“What is it?” Lee asked, watching me.
I pointed after the birds. “They’re Hel’s harbingers.”
“Blue jays?” he scoffed.
“Odin had ravens,” I said as though I’d known it forever. Actually, I’d just learned it a month ago. “Blue jays are in the same family.”
“Odin’s ravens were named Hugin and Munin,” Lee mused, tracking the flight of the blue jays. “Thought and memory. I’ll be damned.” He looked back at me. “What happens now?”
I stirred the ashes in the bowl with the burned-out matchstick, making sure there were no live embers left. “Now we wait and see. And, um, take this stuff back to my apartment and put it away,” I added. “I forgot, I need to put on some warmer clothes. It’s always cold in Little Niflheim.”
We returned to my apartment and sat in awkward silence, Lee slouching on my futon.
“So . . . um . . . have you been in touch with any of your old friends since you’ve been back?” I asked, trying to remember the names of the two guys he’d hung out with in high school. Together, they’d been a sort of nerdy Three Musketeers. “Steve Geddes, or Ben, um . . . ?”
“Lewis,” Lee said shortly. “Ben Lewis. He’s in Afghanistan.”
“He is?” I blinked. “In the army?”
“Well, he’s not there on his honeymoon.”
“You don’t have to get sarcastic,” I said. “I’m just surprised I didn’t know.”
Lee shrugged. “I don’t know why you would.”
“It’s a small town,” I reminded him. “So I guess that means you’re still in touch with him?”
“Yeah.” His voice softened. “The character Dan Stanton in my first-person shooter was named after a buddy of his. Kind of a tribute. Ben’s the one who suggested it, even told me to use it as an alias. Said his buddy would have thought it was hilarious.”
“This is a buddy who . . . didn’t make it?” I asked. Lee nodded. I thought about that for a minute. Ben Lewis had been a short, stocky little guy in high school. Everyone called him the Hobbit. It was hard to imagine him in a war zone. “I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t know.”
“How about Steve?” I couldn’t remember anything about Steve other than his name, which was sort of ironic; he’d been the kind of kid who made so little impression, he didn’t even have a nickname.
“He’s fine. He’s in New York.”
“Doing what?” I asked.
“Set design.” Lee regarded the toes of his Converse sneakers. “It was his major at NYU.”
“Huh. Good for him.” It felt strange to realize that two people I’d grown up with, however little I’d actually known them, had left Pemkowet to make such diverse lives for themselves elsewhere. Three, if you counted Lee. I wondered what had prompted him to return.
Before I could ask, Mikill and his dune buggy pulled into the alley beside my apartment, waiting patiently while Lee and I came down to meet him.
“Daisy Johanssen,” Mikill greeted me in a booming voice, raising his left hand. A spear-headed rune glimmered on his palm, indicating that he was one of Hel’s guards. “Your request for an audience has been granted.” Rivulets of meltwater dripped from the icicles in his hair and beard. Mikill was a frost giant, eight feet tall with pale blue frost-rimed skin and eyes the color of dirty slush.
Well, unless you happened to be mortal and of mundane birth. Then he just looked like a huge, hairy guy who was sweating profusely.
“Who the hell is that?” Lee asked, the words emerging in a squeak.
“Hi, Mikill.” I raised my left hand in reply, displaying my own rune. “He’s our escort,” I said to Lee. “He’s a frost giant.”
Lee glared at me. Whatever goodwill had been emerging between us evaporated. “Oh, very funny. Ha ha, you got me.”
“Look, I realize he doesn’t appear . . . Mikill, can you drop your glamour for a minute?” I asked.
The frost giant shook his ponderous head, sending droplets of water flying. “It is of Hel’s doing, Daisy Johanssen, that her servants might move freely aboveground at need. If it is your wish that the mortal accompany you, he will see clearly in Niflheim.”
I shrugged. “You’re just going to have to trust me on this one, Lee.”
Lee backed away. “No. Oh, hell, no! What were you going to do?” he asked grimly. “Drop me off in the middle of the dunes at night and let me walk home? Hell, don’t tell me! Is there someone else in on it? Maybe you’ve got some other big hairy guy out there pretending to be the Tall Man’s ghost?”
“Lee—”
“I’m not falling for it, Daisy! I put up with enough shit like that in high school—”
“Lee!” I raised my voice and dropped my hand to dauda-dagr’s hilt. Amazingly, he actually shut up. “Look, I know you’ve got high school damage, okay? Everyone does. You’ve made it very clear that you’re not the dorky nerd in high-waisted floods your mom bought for you anymore. You went away and made a ton of money and came back. . . . Why the hell did you come back, anyway?”
“My mom’s not well,” he said in a quieter tone. “Someone had to look after her.”
“Okay, well, I’m sorry to hear it. But I’m not the same person I was, either,” I said. “I’m not asking you to help me pass computer science. I get that you think this project is beneath you, but it’s important to me, and I’m not pulling some stupid prank just because you’ve been kind of a dick about it.”
