Nothing seemed to dampen his spirit.

  “Kenna had muskrat for breakfast—she found it down by the river, frozen in the ice,” Tosk announced, as if this were news that should interest her. “What else? Oh, I heard them speaking about you last night. Again. Baldur thinks you can’t boil water, you know.” The little beast spoke cheerfully, as if this report should be good tidings to her. Without taking a breath, he launched into another speech.

  Her heart felt heavy. It was true she lacked finesse around a dinner fire. She had not been prepared for her Trial the way most maidens were. Her preparations had been of a darker sort.

  When she still ignored him, the red squirrel ran up the back of her leg, snagging hold of her coat and worming his way up the inside of it until he perched inside her hood beside her ear. The long tufts on his ears tickled her cheek.

  He smelled musty like parchments and damp like wet dog. “Are you listening?”

  She was not. Astrid moved to finger the bone again. She paused to stamp her feet and glance across the courtyard, through the naked branches of the ash tree at the center, the squirrel’s tinny voice in her ear. The smooth bit of bone felt soothing between her fingers, a piece of herself in this strange place. She could see the bear, holed up in his tower, squinting at them through the fog of heavy snowflakes. Unease churned in her belly like a tangle of snakes. She reached up to cover her scars, as if they could somehow reveal the secrets she kept.

  Did he suspect why she had come?

  Tosk squeezed her ear lobe with his tiny paws. “Dragon girl! I said, have you figured out where he’s hiding the treasure yet?” Still holding onto her ear, he shuddered, apparently with uncontrollable delight.

  “Oh, do hush,” Astrid complained and flicked him on the stomach. “Enough of your gossip.” She’d heard all the stories in Sandfell about the past wealth of Jar Rann buried in the snow somewhere, but she believed naught of it.

  If Baldur had a fortune at his disposal, he could afford to buy himself a wife. They would have no need for the Trials.

  She deliberately set her feet to the narrow path once again. She should return to the longhouse. Her body temperature was high from exertion, but her cheeks prickled and felt stiff and chapped from exposure. Still, she lingered. It was a small show of rebellion, probably obvious to none but herself. Her father would have recognized her stubbornness as disobedience, but he was not here.

  “May your boots chafe,” Astrid muttered the half-hearted curse and instantly repented of it. Sigurd was probably too drunk to know if his boots chafed him. Besides, she knew all too well the power of curses.

  It was after all the reason she had come here. Rather, it was one of the reasons.

  She heard the screeching of unoiled hinges and a loud bellow. The squirrel yelped and clung to her tangle of braids. She tried to dislodge him by wiggling her shoulder, but he rebounded and flipped his tail in her face. From the longhouse doorway, the bear roared at her. Astrid waited. Tosk cocked his good ear toward the kitchen. Baldur bellowed again, his breath fogging on the wind in irritated bursts, and he angrily thrust his front paws off the ground only to come thudding back down. Emphatically.

  She was being summoned.

  Tosk scrabbled across the courtyard, bounding in and out of snowdrifts and right up Baldur’s front leg and shoulder. Most likely, he was concocting some vile tale of her. He had a gift for that sort of thing. Astrid pursed her lips but turned to obey. She left the path she had carved with her own footsteps and trudged toward the longhouse, through knee high snow drifts. It slowed her down, which bothered her not a bit.

  It bothered the bear a great deal. He lumbered outside, his ungainly body draped with a patchwork cloak of deer hides large enough to clothe four grown men. He looked ridiculous, as usual, but this was a thought Astrid intended to take to her grave rather than share.

  After all, it was hardly the sort of thing potential lovers said to one another.

  She passed by him without comment and did not flinch when the door slammed behind her. She heard a heavy plop as snow slid from the roof to the frozen ground. Tosk chittered and raced about the expansive room, making little sense but a great deal of general mischief. Baldur growled and swept a paw, but the squirrel dodged it and continued his revelry.

  Baldur grabbed her sleeve between his teeth and tugged her toward the hearth, where a black pot smoked over an untended fire. He fumbled at the lid with his claws and chuffed at her, indicating the scorched remains of what should have been their evening stew.

  This must be the only bear in the Niflheim who refused to eat raw meat.

  “I apologize,” she said, feeling her failure down to the core of her bones. She had forgotten all about the stew…again.

  He snarled something that indicated her apology was not accepted while Tosk rolled with laughter on the floor. “Oh, my giddy aunt! He just said you—”

  “You do not need to repeat whatever it was he said,” Astrid interrupted, her voice sharp. Trying to suppress a rising sense of despair, she ripped one mitten off at a time and set them down on the plank table. Baldur waited as she peeled the scarf from around her neck and removed first her overcoat and then several layers beneath that. She tugged off her boots and set them neatly beside the smoking remains of dinner. Astrid then turned to reach for her outer garments, to put them away.

  This was too much for Baldur. He bellowed and swatted the pot against the stone hearth wall. This time, when the contents of the pot spilled across her feet, she did flinch. But Baldur did not move to throttle her—as her father would have surely done—but turned and lumbered from the room, knocking over everything he could find between there and his tower high above her.

  Tosk whimpered and slunk to his cubby high in the corner, properly chastised.

  Astrid sighed. She did not like feeling chastised, especially when serving dinner was at the absolute bottom of her priorities. She was going to disappoint everyone. That’s all there was to it: she could not please them all. It was not easy living a lie, not even here in Jar Rann where nothing was what it seemed.

  Some girls were not destined to fall in love, no matter how desperately they may wish to.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE LONG DAYS had turned into long weeks. Kenna sulked in the highest branches of the ash tree. The sky arched above her, gray and bland, the sun masked behind low-lying clouds. The bleakness of the day did nothing to improve her mood.

  Baldur was not ready to send the girl home even though no progress had been made in the three weeks she had been there. Kenna did not understand what he was waiting for.

  A breeze hit her, and she ruffled her feathers, agitated. This was not at all how she had hoped things would turn out. She had hoped this girl would be different—and she was different, but in the wrong sort of way.

  Granted, Astrid actually wanted to be here. It was plain as day, although Kenna could not imagine the girl’s true intentions.

  The dragon slayer’s daughter was not like the usual selections: most of the chosen maids were prepared for their Trial. They could sing, clean and sew. Some could even recite the ancient lays. Even though they were terrified and unwilling participants, they could all behave.

  They could all cook.

  Kenna paced along the tree branch, hissing to herself and wondering why this girl had come to them when she was so obviously ill-prepared.

  She would never break the curse.

  Something deep inside the raven stirred, and it was not pleasant. It was dark and painful and plagued her excessively.

  It was guilt.

  An outburst interrupted her black musing. She tried ignoring him, but the squirrel raced up the tree, only growing more insistent. As Tosk scrabbled toward her on all fours, the slender branch bucked beneath their combined weight. Kenna hissed at him and clung tighter. He stopped beside her, yanking at the tufts on his ears as he shouted at her.

  “What is it? I can’t understand you!” she squawked and swatted him with a wing. Tosk did a frustrated little dance and tugged his ears down around his chin. He clutched them there, his small body quivering. Kenna felt a thrill of alarm. The squirrel was clearly agitated beyond words.

  Unlike the rest of them, Tosk was never at a loss for words.

  “They’ve gone mad!” he finally shouted, his paws pounding together, still full of ear tufts. “I think they’re going to kill each other!”

  Kenna croaked in disbelief and thrust away from the tree, leaving Tosk to howl and cling to the lurching branch. She expected no better from that worthless dragon girl, but it took a great deal to push Baldur to violence. She landed on a high window sill to the longhouse and wedged through the shutters propped ajar by the snow. She could hear the girl shouting as she fluttered onto the rafters.

  “I am sick to death of the sulking—and the cooking and the—the chores! I hate chores! I’m not here to be your slave—”

  Baldur roared something back at her so loudly the very rafters seemed to quake in fear. Kenna leaned forward to see what was happening below her. Astrid stood on one side of the fire pit, brandishing a broom like a weapon, while Baldur stood back on his hind paws, towering over her. He swiped a paw at the air and roared again.

  “That’s another thing!” Astrid shouted and stabbed toward him with the bristly end of her broom, as if he were a wee mouse and not teeth and claws and four times her size. “I am wearied to the bone with the roaring! Where is Tosk? For once, can we not have a respectable conversation? I did not come here to coddle a child—your tantrums are beneath you. Beneath me!”

  Baldur smacked away her broom with a stunned bellow, his claws shredding the bristles and scattering them into the smoldering fire. Astrid darted back and jabbed him with the other end of the stick, hard enough he chuffed in response and dropped to his forepaws.

  “No wonder you cannot find a wife! We cannot understand anything when you growl like a cub that’s lost its mam! Will you not tell me what you want? Just speak with me! Please!”

  It felt as if time skidded to a wrenching halt. Kenna’s heart beat so violently she feared it would break free of her chest and drop to the ground far below. Baldur groaned and swiped a paw at his mouth, as if he had eaten something terrible and wanted to hack it back out. He dropped his nose to the ground, grunting and growling in turn. His mouth worked soundlessly, and then he spoke.

  “I can speak with you,” Baldur said, the words as rusty as an abandoned door hinge. “Thank you for asking.”

  That voice! Kenna thought and closed her eyes. She could already remember the last time she had heard him speak. It had been such a long time ago. They had both said things that night, terrible things, the sort of things that curses were made of.

  It was the night she lost control and ruined everything.

  How had the girl known to ask him? Had it merely been a blunder? Careless words said in a fit of her temper? Had Tosk broken his promise and given her a hint? She would not put it past him. Even the gravest of oaths could not temper that squirrel’s tattling tongue.

  Baldur growled and took a step toward the girl. “You had to ask me to speak with you,” he said, his maw forming each word with awkward precision. He rose to tower over the dragon slayer’s daughter. “It’s one of the rules of the Trials—to test your sincerity, perhaps your cleverness. No one has ever asked.”

  Astrid stared at him, mouth open. She gulped abruptly and jabbed the stick at him. “I cannot believe that you can speak, after all these years of bellowing at your visitors as if they were simpletons!” As she spoke, her words grew louder and louder, her color deepening with anger.

  “I had no choice!” he bellowed back. “I wish I could change things, but I cannot. I am as bound by these ridiculous Trials as the girls.” This last phrase came out in almost a whisper.

  When Astrid lowered her broom handle and cocked her head to one side as she studied him, Kenna felt a pang twist her insides. Silence filled the longhouse once again. She could not breathe, her black eyes wide and unblinking. This was what she had wanted all along; this was what she feared more than anything in the world.

  “The Trials are not your doing?” Astrid asked, as if this question were somehow more important than any other.

  Baldur snorted and sat down hard, turning his face from her. “I would never have chosen this,” he sighed. “The Trials were my mother’s doing. If you believe nothing else, dragon girl, believe this.”

  Kenna scuttled back toward the window. The dark place inside her was growing more painful. This was quickly becoming an exchange she no longer wished to be a part of.

  The squirrel was there, appearing from nowhere as he was wont to do. “I told you,” he said, doing another of his irritating little dances. “She’s the one.”

  Kenna’s chest grew even tighter, the dark space pressing against every part of her until there was almost nothing of her left. Tosk was the last creature she wanted to see right now. She tried to peck him, but he dodged and disappeared into one of his secret hideaways.

  Kenna blinked, and nuts began rolling out of the hole. Tosk tumbled after, wailing, and tried to pounce on his escaping stores, only to have them vanish beneath his touch.

  It was, after all, only a trick.

  It seemed she was not good for much else. Kenna squeezed through the narrow gap on the window, back into the cold. Upset, Tosk barreled after her. “It could never have been you,” he shouted, touching the place from which her anger truly stemmed.

  “Be gone with you!” Kenna shrieked. Her wings beat furiously, lifting her away from that accursed, ear-tufted gossip and toward the south tower. But she changed her mind when she caught sight of the two dark splotches hulking against the snow on the tower roof. She veered east, fluttering down to the storeroom roof. She craned her neck backwards.

  The ravens were there, watching.

  Kenna’s blood ran cold. She fluffed her feathers and huddled deep into herself, hissing as she gazed up at the two shadows on the tower roof, at the Raven King’s spies.

  Tosk scrambled down beside her. “They’re watching you, bird.” For once he did not sound as if he were laughing at her. Kenna shivered.

  Hugin gazed down on her with one dark, glittering eye, and Munin perched beside him, gently bobbing back and forth. Munin’s beak parted as if he wished to speak, but he made no noise. He merely looked at her.

  How many times had she seen them over the past fortnight? When she began to figure the number of days, she realized that they had been present more often than not.

  This alarming frequency could only be an omen.

  It meant something was about to happen, something worth watching, and whatever it was, good or bad, Kenna knew it would be the ruin of her. Frigg’s prophecy had finally caught up with them. Perhaps there was still time to save Baldur, but it would mean the end of her.

  Frigg had foreseen that, too.

  As the dark space engulfed her, Kenna took to the skies, to the one place Tosk could not follow. Her keening cries were lost on the bitter wind. No one heard, no one but the Watchers, and they did not care about her. They were here for Baldur, because the end was drawing near. The signs all pointed to the times: the dying rose bush, the dragon slayer’s daughter, the shifting in the curse. It all pointed to Frigg’s foreseen nightmare. Time had finally caught up with them.

  The dragon was coming.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE NEXT MORNING, Baldur found Astrid in the center of the longhouse, head pillowed on a crudely bound book she had been reading. The fire had given way to gray-dusted embers. He wanted to be angry with her for staying up all night because it meant she would want to sleep the day away, but he tempered his impatience. Instead, he picked up a log with his teeth and nosed it into the embers, stirring it about until the log sparked and began to glow at the edges.

  He turned to the dragon slayer’s daughter and nudged her hand. She woke at once, her other hand moving to rub the one he had touched with his cold nose. She laughed faintly and closed the book. “Is it late?” she asked.

  Baldur growled a negative before he remembered. After all this time suffering in isolation, it no longer felt natural to speak. “No,” he said aloud. “You’ve slept the night and half the day.”

  Astrid sat up and rubbed her arms. “It’s cold.”

  “It is.” He nudged the pelt she sat on with his paw, and she moved to burrow beneath it. He dropped down beside her, so that she was cocooned between him and the fire. Their exchange felt awkward and strained, even though they had ceased arguing not long after he began speaking. It seemed Astrid did truly respond well to calm conversation. It was not as if she had forgiven him for all the confusion and tempers, but she seemed to have accepted them.

  She sighed, a contented sound, and seemed to go back to sleep. “Are you in good humor today?” she asked.

  He thought for a moment, wondering if her question was serious or jest. “I am always in good humor,” he quipped. “For a bear.”

  She snorted and propped herself up by the elbows. “I wish to ask you a question.” It did not seem like a request, so he did not bother giving his consent. Astrid seemed the sort who did as she pleased. She was not shy, this one. He waited, somewhat uncomfortably, wondering what sort of awkward question would necessitate an announcement.

  “Frigg’s prophecy,” she said. “How do you foresee it ending?”

  Baldur closed his eyes and turned his face away. This was not a topic he wished to discuss. It preoccupied his every waking thought and haunted each sleeping one.

  “Baldur?” Her voice sounded small, and he felt sorry for the pressure he must have put on her, bringing her here under such high expectations. They had no choice, however. The rules of the Trials were laid out for the both of them. It must not sit well with her that many had gone before her and failed—many who were so much better prepared.

 

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