Yggdrasheim Falls

The door in the trunk had sealed itself.

Archie found that out an hour after the broadcast, when Sera woke, and sat up, and looked past his shoulder at the place where the arch had been. There was only bark now, gray and ridged and ancient. The pale wood had closed over the seam like a scar. Where the white light had shone there was nothing but moss.

"The blow shut it," she said. "It will open again when the tree is steadier." She pressed a hand to her ribs and winced. "It is not your fault."

"I wasn't going to say it was."

"You were thinking it."

"A little." He smiled, tiredly. "I'm sorry. I should have asked whether you wanted to risk it."

"You did ask." Sera's eyes glinted. "And I answered. The choice was mine, Shieldbearer. Do not take it from me."

He bowed his head.

They sat together in the roots, in the red twilight, with the camp spread out below them and Venn asleep on a pallet of furs at their feet. He had not woken since the pulses. But his breathing had steadied, and the gray was fading from his lips, and Zoe sat beside him with her bow across her knees, watching the rise and fall of his chest as though it were the only clock in the world.

"Will it be enough?" said Jin.

"What?"

"The message." He had come to sit on the other side of Sera, with his coat drawn about him and his bandaged hand in his lap. "If William's watching. If he caught it. If he's already cut the power—"

"Then we'd know," said Archie.

"Would we?"

"The tree would go dark."

Jin looked at the great gray trunk, rising above them into the copper sky. The leaves came down like ash. The bark shivered, every few minutes, with a long groan. "It's dark enough," he said.

"It's still standing."

"For now."

…

The wolf came the next night.

They heard it first as a sound beneath the sound of the wind: a faint dry rasp of breath, very far away, like a bellows being worked in the next valley. The sentries along the arches stopped talking. A child began to cry, and was hushed. Then the howl rose over the eastern mountains, long and mournful and enormous, and every living creature in the camp turned and looked at the horizon.

"Fenrir," whispered Brynja.

She had come down from the arches at the first note. She stood at the foot of the trunk with her spear grounded and her winged helm pushed back from her forehead, and her face in the half dark was very young. Archie had not noticed it before. She could not have been much past twenty-five. Her braid had come loose, and she did not seem to have noticed that either.

"He has broken his chain," she said. "He is coming. The giants were only the vanguard." She swallowed. "My mother used to say that when the wolf howled thrice, the sky would fall."

"How many times has he howled?"

"Twice."

Nobody spoke.

"How old are you?" Zoe asked, softly.

Brynja blinked. "Why?"

"I just wondered."

"I am a Valkyrie. I am older than the mountains." She said it by rote, with her chin up. Then her shoulders eased. "Twenty-six winters," she admitted, in a low voice. "Or thereabouts. It is hard to count, here. I was chosen at seventeen. I have ridden to forty battles, and carried thirty-one men to Valhalla, and I have never once been afraid." She laughed shakily. "I am afraid now."

"So am I," said Zoe.

"Are you?"

"Terrified."

"You do not look it."

"I've been told that." Zoe's mouth quirked. "It's a trick. You pretend, and then you're doing it, and then you've done it."

Brynja considered this with great gravity.

"That is a very good trick," she said.

…

They fought through three nights.

It was nothing like the first. The giants had come in a great charging surge, like a wave breaking on a shore. The wolf came slowly. It came in the manner of a tide, creeping, patient, inexorable, and everything before it died. First the grass, in a long gray ripple. Then the streams, which ran backward and dried. Then the trees. By the second night the plain below the roots was a bare plate of cracked clay, and the horizon had taken on a strange smoky glare, as though somewhere beyond the edge of the world a vast furnace had been opened.

"Surtr," Brynja said, grimly. "The Fire-Lord. He walks behind the wolf."

"Who?"

"The one who will burn the nine worlds."

"Oh," said Venn. "That's not great."

He was awake. That was the astonishing thing. He had opened his eyes on the dawn of the second day and asked for water, and now he sat propped against a root with a blanket over his knees, thin as a rail but quite lucid, polishing the head of his hammer with a rag. His hands shook. He kept losing his grip. But his grin, when it came, was exactly the old one.

"I'm fine," he said, to the fifth person who asked. "I'm fine. Stop looking at me like I'm a soufflé."

"You fainted in front of a Valkyrie," said Jin.

"That was a tactical faint."

"You were unconscious for a day."

"Strategic unconsciousness." Venn waved the rag. "Look, man. I can hold a hammer. I can swing it. It might take me two swings instead of one, but they'll be very good swings."

"You can't," said Zoe.

"Watch me."

"You'll hurt yourself."

"Zoe." He looked up at her, and something in the dark eyes, tired and bright and unbearably gentle, made her stop. "I'm not going to sit here while you all go out there. I can't. It'd be worse than dying." He laughed under his breath. "I need to be useful. You know? I need it more than I need to breathe."

She looked away. She did not answer. After a moment, she bent and tucked the blanket more securely round his knees.

"Two swings," she said, in a muffled voice. "No more."

"Deal."

…

They held the line.

It was Archie's line now. He had not asked for it. It had simply drifted into his hands, as the sword had drifted into them at Thornkeep, the shield on the plain. He stood at the base of the tree and watched the shape of the field, and in his head the pieces fell into place. This hollow could be flooded. That ridge was a killing ground. The roots made a natural wall, here and here and here, and if the skalds' fires were moved a hundred yards east the enemy's approach would be funneled along the ravine.

He gave orders. He was astonished at how readily they were obeyed. Brynja rode the lines with his sketches rolled in her saddle. The old veteran with the gray beard, whose name was Hrolf, came to him at midnight and asked, with a courtesy that almost made him blush, whether the Shieldbearer would care to inspect the left flank. A dwarf mason named Dagny presented him with a model of the ravine in clay, apparently unprompted, and stood beside it chewing her beard until he told her it was exact.

I'm good at this, he thought, with a kind of wondering dismay. I've always been good at this. I just never did it for anyone.

On the third night, the wolf reached the roots.

…

It was bigger than the tree.

That was the first impression, and the last. A shape of smoke and shadow, pale as old bone, with eyes like twin moons burning green, it rose out of the cracked plain on the edge of the firelight and stood, and stood, and kept on standing, its head level with the lowest branches. The jaws opened. Within them was nothing but dark. A long, shuddering, subsonic growl rolled through the world, and the very stones of the roots seemed to ring.

"Hold," Archie said. His voice did not shake. "Hold the line."

The wolf lunged.

It struck the tree. Not the line, not the men: the tree. A great wedge of jaw closed on the nearest root, and bit, and tore. A sound came from the wood that Archie would remember until he died: a thin, high, human cry. The root split. Sap poured out of it in a stream, silver-gold, and the earth beneath shuddered like a stricken thing.

On the trunk above him, Sera screamed.

She had been standing with her palms against the bark. She dropped as if struck. He ran to her. He knelt in the spilled sap, and caught her, and she looked up at him with blind, wide, agonized eyes and said in a whisper, "It hurts. It hurts. I feel it. Every tooth."

"I know."

"I cannot hold it. I cannot hold, I cannot..."

"You don't have to hold it alone."

She stared at him.

"There's an army," said Archie. "There's a thousand people here, Sera. Brynja's sisters. Hrolf's men. The dwarves. The farmers. They are all here for the same reason you are." He gripped her shoulders. "And beyond them, there's a man in a lab who just turned a brass key to keep the door open for us. And a boy in a white coat who went upstairs in his socks. They're fighting for this. Right now. For you."

"I do not understand."

"You're not alone."

"I have always been alone."

"You haven't." He was weeping, he realized. He didn't mind. "You haven't been for days. You've had us."

She looked at him. She looked at Zoe, a few paces away, bow bent, loosing arrow after arrow at the wolf's burning eye. She looked at Jin, darting under its belly with his runic knives. She looked at Venn, who had risen to his feet, swaying, and was dragging his hammer toward the jaws with a face of terrible determination. She looked at Brynja, wheeling her mare in front of the line, spear raised, shouting a name that was her sister's. She looked at the faces of the farmers, the dwarves, the children, lit gold in the burning dark.

"I am not afraid of fighting," Sera said. "I never was." Her voice was small, and cracked, and wondering. "I am afraid of being no use. Of finding there is no purpose left."

"Then find a new one."

"Where?"

"With us."

The wolf screamed. Fire rolled down from the east.

And Sera smiled.

It was not the quiet smile she had worn under the tree. It was an astonished one, helpless and wide, the smile of a child who has been told that she may stay up for the fireworks. It split her whole face. It lit her from within.

"With you," she said.

She stood.

She did it in a single movement, graceful and strong, with the sap still running down her arm. She reached up and took her braid in both hands and tore the cord from it, and her black hair fell loose to her waist. She put her palm flat against the wounded bark. And, from the deep wood, from the sleeping heart of the oldest living thing in the world, a light began to rise.