Ragnarök

The giants came at dusk, which in Yggdrasheim was a thing without a clock.

It began with the ground. A low shuddering tremor ran through the soil, so soft that Archie felt it first in his teeth, and the little blue lights that drifted under the roots flickered and went out. A dog began to bark. Then another. In the camps along the arches, the soldiers stopped sharpening their blades and looked up, and the old women stopped sharing their loaf. Even the skald stopped singing, with his hand frozen on the strings.

Then the horns began.

They came from the east, all at once, a great braying chorus that rolled over the plain like a wave. Fifty horns. A hundred. Deep brazen things, bellowing and groaning, so loud that the roots trembled. And under the horns, drowning them, came a new sound, steady, slow, enormous: thud. Thud. Thud.

"Footsteps," said Jin.

"Those are not footsteps."

"What else would they be?"

On the far edge of the plain, where the burning sky met the burning land, a line of figures had appeared. They were small at first, like black stakes driven into the earth. Then they grew. They rose and rose. They were twenty feet tall, thirty, forty, men of stone and ice with beards of frost and faces like glaciers, and they carried clubs the size of ships' masts and shields made from the doors of halls. Their eyes glowed pale blue. Where they walked, the ground cracked, and the frozen mud steamed.

"Jötnar," whispered Venn.

"Frost giants."

"A lot of frost giants."

"Hundreds," said Brynja, beside him. She had vaulted back into the saddle, and the white horse pawed the earth, snorting. Her face was pale and set. "Hundreds. And behind them, the fire." She drew her spear. "Hold the root line. Do not let them reach the trunk. Archers on the arches. Shieldbearers at the base." She swung her gaze round the four of them. "That means you."

"Us?" said Venn. "We don't—"

"You are einherjar. You'll find that you do."

She wheeled her horse, and was gone.

…

Archie held the base of the tree.

He did not know how it had come to this. He had merely walked where he was pointed and done what he was told, and at some point between the stream and the sky he had found himself at the foot of the Tree of the World with a linden shield on his left arm and a short heavy sword on his right hip, standing in a line of shaking men. He had never been in a fight in his life. He had never held a shield. And yet the thing felt strangely right in his grip, as though the weight of it had been waiting for him.

A shield is a wall you can carry, he thought. That's all it is.

"Brace!" roared a veteran at his left, a heavy-shouldered man with gray in his beard. "Shields up! Overlap! Let them come to you!"

Archie lifted his shield.

The first giant reached the root line at a run.

It was a thing out of a nightmare. A blue-white monster, forty feet high, with an icicle beard hanging to its belt and a club that swung like a ship's boom. It came crashing across the plain with the earth erupting at every step, and the line of men in front of Archie simply went down, like grass in a gale. The club swept over their heads. Bodies flew. A man screamed. A woman's voice cried a name, and then no more.

Archie did not move. He couldn't. He stood with his shield up, and his heart in his throat, and a strange cold stillness settling over him, the stillness of a man very far from home. He looked up. The giant loomed above him, black against the burning sky, its club drawn back over its shoulder.

So this is how.

"Down!" yelled Zoe.

An arrow went over his head.

It struck the giant in the eye. Not a blind lucky shot, but a bolt of pure white light, clean as a thrown spear, that left her bow with a note like a struck bell and burned through the air in a streak of silver. The giant's head snapped back. It howled. The club fell from its hand and struck the earth beside Archie with a concussion that knocked him flat.

He lay on his back, ears ringing. A moment later, three more arrows struck the giant in the throat, the heart, the knee. The creature swayed, like a tree before the axe, and went over backwards into the mud with a roar that shook the world.

"Nice," Venn yelled, from somewhere. "Nice! Zoe, nice shot!"

She was standing on the upper arch of the nearest root, thirty feet above the plain, bow in hand, silhouetted against the fire. Her hair was streaming. Her face was fierce, wild, shining, unrecognizable. She turned her head and saw Archie lying in the mud, and flung up a triumphant fist.

"That's twice!" she shouted down at him.

He began to laugh, helplessly, on his back in the mud.

…

It lasted for hours.

It might have been days. In Yggdrasheim there was no way to tell. The fire never faded and the dark never fell, and the fight went on, grinding and relentless, in a red twilight without end. Archie lost count of the giants. He lost count of his own breaths. He held the shield, and held it, and when it broke he picked up another from a fallen man and held that. He learned to read the swing of a club by the roll of a shoulder. He learned to wait for it, braced, and to turn at the last moment so that the blow slid off the linden wood into the earth. He learned, in the end, to see the whole field at once: the surge of the giants, the weak spots in the line, the places where the ground sloped and where the roots ran. It came to him as a plan comes, in the dark, whole and quiet. There. And there. And there.

He began calling out.

"Left flank, pull back! Draw them onto the root! Brynja!"

"Yes!"

"Bring the horse round behind them! Cut the line at the ford!"

"Understood!"

"Zoe! The one with the red beard! The hammer! Take his hands!"

She did. She took them both.

Jin was a blur of steel on the lower slope, darting between the giants' feet with his rune-blades flashing, hamstringing, slashing, vanishing. Where he cut, frost shattered. A great beast toppled, and he leapt clear with a whoop, and for a moment Archie saw his thin, scholarly face split into a grin of pure savage joy.

And Venn.

Venn had gone berserk.

There was no other word. He had flung himself at the first giant that came within reach, a wall of blue ice, ripping the hammer through the air with a sound like tearing silk. He brought it down on the creature's shin. It shattered. He spun, leapt, swung again. He bounded up the fallen body like a mountaineer. He stood on a giant's shoulder with the hammer raised in both hands, bellowing at the top of his lungs:

"THIS ONE'S FOR RIHANNA!"

The giant went down like a cathedral.

"He's going to get himself killed," Jin panted, appearing at Archie's side. His coat was frosted with blood. "He's not looking behind him. He never looks behind him."

"I know."

"Do something!"

"What?"

"I don't know! Something! You're the one who yells instructions!"

Archie drew breath. He cupped his hands to his mouth. And bellowed, in a voice he did not know he had, a bellow that carried over the field like the call of a ship's master:

"VENN! BEHIND YOU!"

Venn spun.

A second giant had crept up on him from the rear, a hulking thing with a spiked club, drawing back to strike. Venn threw himself flat. The club passed over him with a rush of wind. He rolled, came up, and swung, and the hammer caught the monster full in the knee. It went down screaming.

He looked across the field at Archie.

He grinned. He pointed with two fingers, from his eye to Archie's, in the old gesture. I see you. And he plunged back into the fight.

…

Archie fell at the end of the fourth watch.

He didn't see it coming. He had turned to call a warning to Brynja, and the last of the giants, a wounded thing, mad with pain, swung blindly in the smoke. The club took him across the back. He felt something give. He went down on his face, with the shield pinned under him and his breath gone, and a vast sick blackness opened up beneath.

Not yet, he thought. Not now. Not when I've just—

The blackness took him.

He woke in warm light.

It was green and gold. It pulsed softly. Over his head hung a canopy of leaves, thousands of them, vivid emerald, swaying in a breeze that smelled of rain and flowers. A hand lay on his chest. It was brown and calm and strong. A voice was humming.

"Don't try to speak," said Sera.

She was kneeling beside him in the hollow of the roots, with one hand pressed flat against his sternum and the other raised, palm up. Light ran between them. It poured from her fingers into his ribs, warm and thick as honey, and where it passed, the broken things in him mended, one by one, with a slow delicious ache. His back unlocked. His lungs cleared. For a moment, an absurdly long moment, he could breathe deeper than he had in a year.

"What is that?" he whispered.

"The tree." She smiled faintly. "It gives what it has. It has little left."

"I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"For using it."

"It is for using." Sera's voice was tender. "I would rather it be used for you than hoarded for nothing." She lifted her hand. "There. You will do."

He sat up, slowly. The field beyond the roots lay silent and smoking. The giants lay in heaps like felled pines. The burning sky had dimmed to a long angry copper. Along the arches, small figures were walking among the fallen with torches, calling names.

"We won?" he said.

"The first night." Sera's gaze went to the east, where the great wolf howled. "It will come again. And again. The tree is weaker each time. It cannot hold." She said it as one would say it will rain. "But you held it, Shieldbearer. For a night. Now rest."

"Why do you do it?" Archie asked. He had not known he was going to. "You said you wanted to die here. If you're so sure it's hopeless—"

"I did not say it was hopeless." Sera smiled. "I said I wanted to die."

"That's the same thing."

"Is it?" She rose, in a single movement, and stood looking up into the gray branches. "The tree is dying. Everything dies. I know that. I have known it since a stranger, in a cold white room, in a place I barely remember, told me I had a year." She laughed softly. "A year. And here I am, fifteen years later, still breathing, in the arms of the oldest living thing in the world. I have had more life than I was promised. I would like to end it well."

Archie said nothing.

"That is what you cannot understand," said Sera. "The dying is not the sorrow. The sorrow is the dying badly." She looked down at him. "I have found a good way to die. I do not want to give it up."

…

He found Zoe sitting on a root, in the late copper light, with her bow across her knees.

She had washed her face. She had braided her hair. She had taken a long gash in the arm, which someone had bound with a strip of blue cloth, and she held the arm carefully in her lap. She did not look up when he approached. She only shifted, an inch, on the root, to make room.

He sat down.

They did not speak for a while. The field smoked quietly below. A raven wheeled over the tree. Far off, the skald had begun to sing again, a slow ballad, very low.

"You were reckless," said Zoe at last.

"So were you."

"I'm allowed to be. I'm not the one with the shield."

"I'm not sure that's how it works."

"It's absolutely how it works." She turned her head. Her eyes, in the dim light, were brown and tired and extraordinarily bright. "You went down. I saw it. I was thirty feet up, and I saw you go down, and I thought—" She stopped. Her mouth twisted. "I'm not going to say what I thought."

"Say it."

"No."

"Zoe."

"You were face down in the mud, Archie." Her voice shook. "You weren't moving. And I knew you were just resting. I knew. And I still couldn't get my breath." She took a long, painful inhale. "I almost fell off the root."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Be careful."

"I'll be careful."

"That's the third time you've said that."

"I mean it more each time."

She laughed, a wet shaky little laugh. She put her good hand over her eyes. "I don't take risks because I'm brave," she said into her palm. "I take them because I want to live. That's all it is. I want it so much I can't stand it." She lowered the hand. "That's what you don't understand about me. People think I'm fearless. I'm not. I'm greedy."

"I like greedy."

"Do you?"

"Very much." He looked down at his hands. "I used to think that wanting things was a kind of weakness. That if I wanted nothing, nobody could take it." He drew a breath. "I'm learning to want again. It's... it's like walking on a leg that went to sleep."

"It hurts."

"It really does."

"But you can walk."

"I can," said Archie. "I'm walking."

She leaned against his shoulder, quite suddenly, and rested her head there. He went very still. Above them, in the branches, a single leaf let go and came spiraling down, gold in the copper light, and landed in her hair.

He did not brush it away.