Finding My Place

Growth and reflection

I was carefully blowing little jam pots when I heard the compression of footsteps on the snow. Thyra and Langley picked their heads up off their paws but stayed relaxed, so I didn't have to worry about hostile intruders. I had just broken the newest pot off the pontil when the visitor rounded the pine tree that obscured vision from that approach. I wondered now how it had escaped Uncle Bucky's mania for clear sightlines, but I was glad it had. Uncle Steve came into view, and I smiled.

"Lys, honey," he said, putting his arm around my shoulders and dropping a kiss on my temple. "What's all this?"

"My friends and I thought to do like what Aunt Emma called the Welcome Wagon," I said. "The afterlife can be kind of lonely while you're settling in, and there's no reason for it. So we're going to make little welcome packages, including some snacks, and these little jars will hold some jam." He reached out a hand to the half-filled tray of pots.

"Nope!" My tone was sharp enough that he dropped his hand quickly. "Hot glass looks just like cold glass, Uncle Steve, and you'll get one heck of a burn." He rubbed his neck abashedly.

"Right," he muttered. "This is really nice, Lys. Newcomers will really appreciate it. I'll tell Sif about it, maybe she'd like to do something like that in Folkvangr. I wanted to see how you were doing, though, honey. Sif said that the fallout from that assassination attempt was pretty brutal. You lost a friend, and the valkyries as a unit are in trouble. I'm worried about you."

"It wasn't good," I said, putting the pontil back into its place and turning to him. "It sucked, in fact." The emotions I'd been repressing welled up in my eyes and I sniffled. "I don't know what to do with it all yet. So many things suck." Uncle Steve nodded, then leaned against the table with me, putting his arm around my shoulders, encouraging me to fill in detail what had happened that led to the attack on me, and what Odin had overseen.

"It's a bad situation," he said after I ran down. "No doubt about it, but I know that when you work through it all, you'll have a situation you can live with. And that's important, Lys. Figure out what the solution that you want is, because your afterlife is going to be long, and while your outlook and goals will evolve over all that time, you shouldn't have to deal with stuff like this. Don't worry about disappointing anybody other than you. Even if it means leaving Valhalla." I thought about that, leaning into him.

"It's going to take some time to figure out what I want," I said. "I don't do well if I'm not busy, though." Uncle Steve shook his head.

"And you need to learn to slow down, Lys. That hasn't changed a bit from when I first knew you. Stop and smell the roses. Build a snowman. Do things just for fun, not for practicality or as deflection from your problems." He nudged me. "But before you do, there's a scrimmage coming up. And Odin is assigning half of the valkyries to each side. Sif got you for our side. So Buck's coming too, and we're going to use our horsed unit. This is what we're thinking..."

***

Even though both sides knew about the special unit and had an idea of what we could do, we still smoked Valhalla the next scrimmage, leaving steaming carnage on the ground. We skulked around the back until battle had joined, the archers were done, and everybody was happily bashing and slashing, then we split the small group, five on one side, four on the other, and drove through Odin's forces from opposite sides, using a pincer attack to create as much mayhem as possible. It was fun, and Odin, to his irritation, found the point of my saber at his throat after I'd swiftly split Modi into almost two pieces. He batted it away grumpily, then although he gave no more orders, let his side try for a little longer to regroup, but I watched with my small group from horseback as Uncle Bucky and Uncle Steve's unit cheerfully rode down the Valhalla side toward us and Sif's other generals destroyed the Valhalla lines. I hadn't cared too much about who I was cutting down, choosing only once to take a slightly different line of attack so I wouldn't have to try to take out Violet--she'd been through enough lately-- but I'd plowed through a knot of maybe-valkyries with not care or a second thought. Thyra and Langley fought with the other dogs, and they had a good scrimmage too.