Stormbringer: Book 2 of the Wyrd

Twelve

Safe to say, by the time I'm chased out of Þrúðr's chambers, I'm not the happiest fucking camper in the mountain.

Fucking æsir. Fucking holier-than-thou, hypocritical sacks of—

Was Þrúðr right? About Nic? Because, fuck. Nic. Nic is great. She is LB, literally, but Travis is the face of the company and . . . and maybe it shouldn't be like that? I mean, this is the twenty-first fuckin' century right? Nic can do the bread and circuses stuff just as well as I can. She deserves to do it and—

And, fuck. This really isn't the time to be thinking about succession plans. Not those ones, anyway.

While Þrúðr is cloistered in her room, bawling her eyes out over a bullshit "choice" she shouldn't ever have had to make, her brothers are in with Brokkr, negotiating her price. Hers and mine, truth be told, because the oath-breaking sonsofbitches (sorry not sorry, Sif) do intend to leave me here as dowry.

Uni, Þrúðr's husband-to-be, at least seems to not be an awful piece of shit, which is something he's got that his father doesn't. Even still, Þrúðr doesn't deserve to be sold to anyone, let alone a dvergar, and yours truly deserves it even less.

Fortunately, yours truly has a plan. Of course he does, right?

Because Uni is a nice guy, but he's not the only one sitting at the table. Brokkr is the elder brother, but he's not the master smith. That honor goes to Eitri. Brokkr is the sales team, and he's good and he's smooth, but he's nothing without his brother. And this is where the family politics gets fun, because Uni, the poor bastard, has a cousin.

And Uni's set to get the girl and inherit the empire, but his cousin? His cousin is ambitious, not to mention has his father's talent at the forge.

I'm sure everyone can see where this is going.

Where I'm going is to visit my new BFF, Tóki.

Tóki has been excluded from the negotiations going on in the great hall, for which I'm sure he bristles with resentment. I was watching him at dinner, while Magni and Móði were busy courting Brokkr and Uni was trying to comfort Þrúðr. Tóki is bigger than his cousin, and has the hard and stony skin of a dvergr smith. This is sort of the dvergr equivalent of a tan, and obtained in the same way. Except where humans get melanomas, the dvergar turn to stone. Literal, solid stone. Still breathing and conscious, but unable to move, thanks to their hardened skin. I think it can be reversed, but in the same way fifth-degree burns can be "reversed." Most dvergar who get into that state don't make it and end up as particularly unattractive garden ornaments.

And then there are the dvergar smiths, who wrap themselves in light, gauzy cloth and spend one day every month or so baking themselves just hard enough to handle molten-hot iron with bare hands, but, they hope, not hard enough that they can no longer eat, breathe, move, and/or speak.

They hope.

Tóki is a terrifying thing. Or would be, if he weren't four feet tall. He's broad, though, with a skin that glistens like sharp-edged obsidian. His "suntan" takes the bioluminescence away, too, and to a dvergr, that's almost like being mute.

Smiths are important to the dvergar. They make wonders and bring trade with the outside world. But damned if they aren't as feared as they are necessary.

Tóki lives in chambers adjacent to the family forge. Posh things, for the dvergar, but everything down beneath the mountain is heavy and hard-edged. Geometric and sharp, traced in gold and brass and granite. Glass, too, a rare substance in Ásgarðr; here it's all over the damn place. Including in one of the walls in Toki's chambers. The front of a huge aquarium of black and inky water, lit by flashes from the sort of horrific cave fish I don't want to spend too much time observing.