Winterfire

Chapter Thirty-eight

Lif

There was nothing to gather; Njord had already filled my pack for us, and we had only the clothes on our backs. We sharpened our weapons and waited. Heavy fog had enveloped Njord’s ship all day. I had not seen the horizon in any direction since Njord rescued us; I wondered how he knew we were nearing Midgard.

“I summoned the fog. It’s not troublesome weather; it’s a cloaking contrivance. We’re invisible in the fog, and I don’t need to see; I know where I’m going.”

“Where are you going?” asked Lucan.

“I will leave you just south of the city of Edinburgh. Don’t bother going into town; it’s deserted but for some outlaws. I don’t know where you should go from there. That’s your puzzle to solve.”

The fog parted and I saw an unfamiliar beach. I had hoped we might go back to Beal so I could be certain no one had survived. This was not our beach.

Njord brought his ship right up onto the beach. Lucan and I climbed over the gunwales and dropped onto the sand. “Remember,” said Njord, as we shoved his small craft back into the sea. “You have the advantage of unpredictability on your side. No one in the Nine Worlds will expect two pitiful humans to possess the courage, resourcefulness, and perseverance you have repeatedly shown. Your enemies will underestimate you. May we meet again in joyful times.”

As the wind caught his sail, Njord’s ship slipped back into the fog. We watched it until there was not even a ripple in the water to see, and then headed up the beach toward the forest.

Neither one of us knew where we were going. “I can’t believe we are meant to just wander around until we find Hodmimir’s Holt, and then wait out the end of the Ragnarok,” said Lucan. “I don’t even know what a “holt” is; do you?”

“I think it’s a forest,” I said. Honir had mentioned Hodmimir’s Holt once, but he’d only told me it was an enchanted, woodland glen. I wonder if he’d known who I was. He wasn’t  good at keeping secrets, so I guessed he probably wouldn’t have been able to resist telling me all about the prophesy and my role in it if he’d known I was the human meant to survive Ragnarok.

I still had the bag of runes I’d grabbed off my dresser before Frigga whisked me off to Hel. I took it out of my pocket and tossed the bag up and down in my hand as we walked. “I have the runes,” I said. “Although I am missing the Laguz. Njord never returned it to me after he saved us last time. Maybe he kept it on purpose so I wouldn’t be able to interrupt him on his mission.”  

“More likely, he just forgot about it,” said Lucan. “Can you cast the runes to make predictions? Maybe that would give us some idea where to go.”

“I’ve never done it,” I said. “But I’ve seen it done lots of times. The Norns spent most of their time in a corner of the kitchen at Folkvanger casting the runes. I know how to place the runes, but not how to interpret them. I guess it wouldn’t hurt to try, though.”

“I’ll keep a watch for trouble,” said Lucan.

I sat down on a large, flat rock. I thrust my hand into the bag and stirred the runes. “I’ll do a three-rune cast,” I said. “The right side will tell us the situation we’re in now, the center will suggest what we should do, and the left will predict the outcome.” I stirred the runes until I felt the one that wanted to come out. “The right side rune is Hagalz. It means the destructive rage of nature.”

“The Frost Giants. Cold. Darkness. Floods. Fire. That’s one way of looking at what we face right now,” said Lucan. “What’s the next one?”

I repeated the action of the first cast. I kept one hand in the bag a long time; none of the runes felt ready to come out. At last I touched one that seemed to cling to my fingers. “The second rune is Othala. It refers to one’s ancestral home, the place of one’s birth. It signals safety and order.”

“Does that mean we should go back to Beal? Is that where we’ll find safety?” asked Lucan.

“What else could it mean? Njord left us here in Midgard because he had a feeling this was where we would find Hodmimir’s Holt, and now this center rune, the one that indicates the desired course of action, seems to be telling us we’ll find safety if we go back to the land of our births. Let me draw the third.”

This time, my fingers touch the rune that wanted to come out at once. I drew the Berkano. “I have the Berkano,” I said. “It means regenerative power and light of spring. It is a promise of new beginnings. That sounds like what we want. Of course, if I turn it upside down, it means the opposite of that.”

“Does the upside-down rune always mean the opposite of the right-side up? Because if that’s the case, we might be completely wrong in all three interpretations,” said Lucan.

“Yes,” I answered. “That’s where my ignorance really deters us. It is one thing to draw the runes; another to interpret them.”

“So the only thing we really know is that returning to Beal either will or will not result in our salvation.”

I shrugged. “Pretty much,” I answered. Lucan handed Breyta back to me as I scooped up the runes and put them into my sack. “Let’s just say we have read the runes correctly. We should go to Beal.”

 “Even if we haven’t read them right, it’s not as though we’re abandoning another theory to try this one. Maybe going to Beal won’t help us, but I don’t have any other ideas.”

“How do we get to Beal?” I said. “I never saw a map in my life until Honir showed me a map of the Nine Worlds, but that doesn’t help us now. Midgard was shown, but none of the cities in Midgard.”

“Let’s think about when we were captured,” said Lucan. “Your ship sailed east, mine, north. Ingmar, the steersman on the Fýri, pointed out the city of Edinburgh to me three days after we left Beal. If we head south and stick to the coast, we should eventually come to Beal. We may be able to see the tower at Lindisfarne from far off.”

“It must be nearly noon,” I said. “The weather is fine, we have plenty of food and water for several days and there is nothing to slow us down. We should be able to get pretty far before nightfall. For once, maybe good luck is on our side. Let’s go.”