Chapter Text
Now. I must move now. I cannot wait for any longer.
My mother has a long memory, and she has said to us all a thousand times over that this winter is the worst she has ever seen. It started snowing in October, and even I, likewise blessed with an excellent memory, can never recall such an early snowfall. The cold weather is yet another blow after much of our harvest was washed out by a heavy rainstorm in mid-September. The morning when we woke up to the rain pounding on the roof will be burnt into my memory forever. Hnoss, the youngest of my six sisters and just shy of fourteen decades, had woken up before the dawn. She had never quite grown out of waking up early like my other sisters and me.
“Father! Mother!” she calls. “Look at the rain! It’s falling so hard….”
Her voice rang through our tiny farmhouse — a single room separated only by wicker walls that are more like screens than anything else, keeping the work and food area isolated from the place where the nine of us sleep. My parents share the good bed; my sisters and I sleep on the three straw mattresses pushed against the wall, huddled together like a litter of kittens sharing in each other’s warmth.
“Rain?” Father asks.
Hnoss nods, her blonde curls bouncing in excitement. “Lots. Buckets of rain.” She wiggles her fingers to illustrate.
I don’t think she quite understands the implications of what heavy rain means for us — a family who relies on the harvest to survive through the year.
My father sprints to the door, pausing only to pull on his shoes and a shirt whilst the rest of us sit upright.
“Heavy rain?” the second oldest of my sisters, Lofn, mutters furiously, jamming her feet into her own shoes. “It can’t! Not this close to harvest!”
Vár, who my sisters and I have all agreed takes the pessimistic view on life more often than she should, says, “The weather doesn’t care. We should hurry; salvage what we can.”
“What is it?” Hnoss asks. “It can’t be that bad for the harvest. I mean, everything’s underground, isn’t it? Why would the carrots care?”
No one answers her. We all follow Father out of the door, sprinting through the rain to our three fields. The leftmost is a stone’s throw away from the wood that surrounds our land, and it is flooded, the water coming up past my ankles. I run towards it. Hnoss follows me, and comprehension seems to dawn on her face as she sees how urgently we are scrabbling in the mud, and the crops that have been overturned by the rain.
“Sigyn, what is it?” Hnoss demands as I wipe my muddy hands above my cheek before I return to work. I pick up four carrots by my feet. They have been torn from the earth, their roots broken and bent in every which direction. More carrots swim in the mud, and the rain beats against my back, soaking me to the skin.
“Hnoss, get the baskets!” Father calls through the rain. It is so heavy I cannot see him. Hnoss runs off to the house, and I crouch back down in the mud, gathering all the carrots I can into a pile, regardless of their state. Some are beyond saving, withered and broken, and they will soon rot. Some will survive to be reburied, and will hopefully regrow their roots.
Hnoss drops a basket at my side, and I stuff the carrots into it, hurrying back and forth to the house and dumping them on the floor before I return to the rain.
It stops raining an hour later, and the sun comes out, but the eight of us work all through the morning, gathering every last piece of our harvest that we can. It is nearly mid-afternoon when we are finished and trudge back inside. We go to the fire my mother has built, dripping and looking for all the worlds like drowned rats as we strip off our outer layers and lay them on the stone boxing the firepit in. I hang my dress on the high bar that supports the cooking pot, and the flames hiss as drops of water roll off. Even my underclothes are soaked through, as are my sisters’.
But it is my father who stands back, not taking the indulgence of the heat, and he looks for the worst of us. He leans against the far wall, his shoulders curved as if they are under a great weight, and his head is in his hands. “We’ve lost so much,” he whispers. “Norns, we’ve lost so much of it.”
We lost half of our harvest because of the rain, and what we did manage to salvage and replant is hardly enough to feed our family of nine. I asked Father once why there are so many of us, and he laughed.
“Little Sigyn,” he said, “do you know what is the most powerful number in this universe?”
I shook my head. I had been a child of barely four decades, all amber eyes and caramel cowslip curls.
My oldest sister Gefjun, who was seven decades old at the time, answered the question. “Nine.”
Father nodded. “Nine. And so, with the power of the number nine, it is said that great fortune and luck will rule over our family. And that is why you have six siblings.” He tapped the tip of my nose.
“They’re annoying siblings,” I giggled, grasping at his hand.
Lofn clipped me on the back of the head for that.
Times had been much easier fourteen decades ago. We had been wealthy enough then. My mother had been a practiced sorceress before she had had the accident that had broken her magic. After that, we had lost half of the source of our family’s income — I was eleven decades old when Mother’s spell broke free from her control and destroyed something within her. That blow is felt this winter. I think she blames herself for our position, for sometimes when I lay awake at night, I hear her quiet sobs from the other room.
I suppose the weather tonight is suitable for the beginning of a story such as this. It is always on one of the coldest nights of winter that something strange happens, and it is no different for my story.
Tonight is one of the most bitter in my memories. We managed to gather enough wood from the forest that we could find a few decent branches, strip off the wet bark and then put them into the firepit. But fire is a hungry thing, and our supply of wood is dwindling. Syn feeds another branch into the fire from where she is seated by the pile. The rest of us are curled together under our meagre threadbare blankets as my mother melts snow for a thin stew. Sjöfn, who is twelve years younger than me, is making stock in the second pot over the fire using the bones of our last chicken. We had had little choice regarding the hen, and she had just become too old to lay eggs. None of our chickens had for a long time, but Hnoss had managed to persuade us to eat this particular hen last. She hasn’t had a bite of her though, and the part of me that isn’t currently ruled by my aching stomach feels sorry for her.
My family is all dangerously underweight. I can trace the valleys created by my ribs when I lie on my back, and Hnoss’ I can see when she stands. Her shoulders as well are bony and prominent, and her face, in the right light, is skull-like. None of us are any better, and I myself haven’t bled for nearly two months. But that’s the funny thing about hunger — after a while, the ache in your stomach is almost a companion, and when you finally get to eat, it feels almost odd.
“In King Odin’s hall,” Syn says into the silence as she pokes at the fire, “they have a boar, Sæhrímnir his name. It is said that he is slaughtered every night, and that there is always enough meat to fill even the largest of stomachs. And then, Sæhrímnir is brought back to life for the next feast the following night, and then the one after that, and the one after.”
“Don’t be silly,” Vár says, miserable. “They don’t have something as wonderful as that. It’s just a story, isn’t it, Father?”
As expected, he shakes his head and hugs Syn close, rubbing her arm. “No. Sæhrímnir is just a story, but a good one. Imagine what we could do with an immortal boar.”
Eat, I think, and then sell what ever we couldn’t.
The thought sends a shiver of delight coursing through me, and, judging from the expressions on everyone else’s faces, it is a thought mirrored elsewhere.
The two bangs on the door makes all of us jump. Thoughts of Sæhrímnir vanish as I frown. It must have been the wind; no one in their right mind would come knocking at this time of night, much less in this weather when the two-foot deep snow blankets the land for miles and miles around. Our nearest neighbour too is a forty minute walk away in this weather.
“Sigyn,” my mother says, still stirring the contents of the pot, “could you get that, love?”
She is not convinced that it is the wind.
The childish part of me wants to protest, because surely my share of the blankets will be taken by my sisters should I leave the bundle, but Mother’s gaze is one of steel. I have little choice but to extract myself somewhat gingerly from the pile. The cold air is like a punch in my chest, and I suck in a breath. It gets a little easier to breathe after that, and I shuffle towards the door, rubbing my hands together before I dare brave the knob. I wrap my hand in my sleeve, grasp the handle with only the very tips of my fingers, and turn it.
The night is dark, and for a second I am convinced that the wind was indeed the culprit for the noise. I am annoyed that it has made me give up my hard won spot in the huddle of blankets, but then there is a shift to my left.
I gasp, stumbling back from the threshold as I see the man, no, the creature, standing in the night.
I have heard of the frost giants, and this monster, even if it is shorter than I was expecting, is by no doubt such a thing. I am unprepared for it. It is all I can do to scramble back as the monster eyes me flatly. Its gaze is the red of blood spilt on the snow, its skin the blue of frostbitten flesh, and the dark, parallel lines running in sets of three over its ludicrously bare chest, arms, and face speak of some ancient meaning that is lost to me. It is wrapped in a fur-lined cloak that blows behind it in the wind; finely made leather trousers, reinforced with scale mail on the thighs, are its only other piece of clothing — even its feet are bare.
“Get away,” I say sharply, backing away as the monster advances on the doorstep and sets foot inside my home, filling the doorway. Frost spikes from under its feet, coating the floorboards and cracking the wood. My mother screams, and my father jumps to his feet, grabbing our rusting cast-iron skillet from the hanging bar and wielding it like a club. The frost giant seems unconcerned with my parents, and instead it eyes me and my sisters. Gefjun ushers me back to the huddle and I retreat, eager to be within their safety. The frost giant is huge in the doorway, looking down on us all.
“Get out, monster,” my father barks, jabbing at the frost giant with the skillet.
The frost giant ignores the skillet, and instead addresses my father as if it were a guest holding nothing more than pleasant conversation:
“I want your third born daughter.”
My heart turns to ice. My sisters turn to me with huge eyes, hugging me closer.
“No,” little Hnoss whispers. “No.”
The frost giant’s lip curls. Every one of its teeth are pointed, and I think how of easily it must tear flesh with them. I wonder if that is what it plans to do with me. I will not let it do anything to me. I will never let it.
“No,” Mother says viciously. She stands tall as she continues, “You will be gone from here at this instant.” Although her magic may be nothing like it once was, broken beyond repair, the comforting blue glow lights the tips of her fingers.
The frost giant tilts its head to the side, looking at the magic without so much as a hint of an expression in its face. I wonder if it is afraid of the magic; the jotnar are a primitive, backwards, barbaric people, so I would not be surprised if it is.
“Please,” the frost giant says after a few seconds of silence, its gravelly voice low and much gentler than I had been expecting, “that will not be necessary, my lady.”
I can only stare. Frost giants were the villains of the stories I grew up with, and they never were polite like this one has been. It has rocked some deep part of me. But the words have sparked something within me — now the more I look at it, the less frightening it becomes. I have heard stories that the frost giants have cruel twisting horns crowning their heads, that their claws are as long as a man’s thumb joint, and that they are twelve feet tall and use trees for weapons as well as living, enchanted ice. But this frost giant is hardly like that. Its eyes may be frightening, its skin a deep cobalt blue, but I see no evidence of there ever being horns on its brow, and whilst it does have claws, they are not as long as I have heard. As for its height, it is tall for a normal man, standing above my father who I used to think was the tallest man in the world, but it stands nowhere near twelve feet.
It looks over to me, and its red eyes, devoid of either irises or whites, narrow. “If she comes with me,” the frost giant says, “I swear that you will be looked after. All of you. Not only for this winter, but for all your lives.”
The words hang in a heavy silence.
“And why should I trust a creature like you?” Father says, lifting the skillet. “There is nothing to trust of a creature that has no honour.”
The frost giant’s eyes darken, and it growls like a cornered wolf. Suddenly, it is the monster again, the creature of the cold that will kill my family without hesitation. My sudden sympathy towards it vanishes.
“You dare you accuse me of such a thing?” it asks, still dangerously quiet.
“Why would I not?” Father asks angrily. “You come uninvited into my home in the dead of night, and demand one of my daughters without so much as a hint of explanation?”
“I have as much stake in honour as any of you here,” the frost giant says. “I swear on my life and my line that if she comes with me, of her own free will, you will be looked after until the day you die. You will have enough food to fill your bellies three times over three times a day, everyday. You will have clothes enough to spill out of your closets, enough coal and wood to build a bonfire to reach the stars, and enough gold lining your pockets to buy a mansion filled with servants.”
My breath catches in my throat. I know there are too many mouths to feed to get us through this winter. Everyone here knows that without taking the chance that this miracle of a deal is real, at least one or two of us will be dead come spring.
The frost giant looks at me unblinkingly. “I swear that you will come to no harm at my hands,” it says.
I swallow, and my decision is made. The half-starved state of my family convinces me.
“I will come,” I say.
My mother wails, and my father’s face whitens. I stand up and remove the twelve hands suddenly wrapped in my rag of a skirt. My eyes are fixed upon the frost giant. He — this frost giant is male, and as such I will think of him as male — he looks at me. I think I catch a hint of surprise in his eyes before it vanishes. Was he not expecting his offer to be seriously considered? Perhaps.
“If, and only if,” I continue, determined, “you swear upon your honour that my family will receive everything you have promised them.”
His eyes are grave as he nods. “Upon my honour,” he says, a solemn vow.
“I forbid it,” my mother says. She spits at the frost giant, “How dare you come here and put this thought into my daughter’s head?” Her hands clamp around my upper arm.
I shake her off. “Mother, this is our only hope.” I look her in the eye. “Please,” I whisper. Please, I beg. I cannot bear for any of my family to grow any thinner than they already are, cannot bear for any of them be buried. If I am still alive by that time, the nagging doubt in the back of my mind that I could have saved them would ruin and haunt me forever.
“It’s a frost giant,” my father argues. “You won’t go with it, not even to drag it to the door.”
“And what would happen if you were to die because you refuse to act?” I say hotly. “I can’t have that. I couldn’t bear to watch any of you die on the floor with every rib stark again your skin.” My breaths are coming fast as the emotions well up inside me. Tears sting my eyes, and I swipe them away, angry with myself for them. “Mother, please. He has sworn to provide for you if I do this, has sworn not to bring me to harm.”
“I don’t care,” she says. “You are my daughter, and I will not sell you for anything.”
“Even for the lives of everyone else?”
She stops dead, and we look as one to my six sisters.
Gefjun stands now. “If that’s how things are going to be,” she says, “then, jotun, I will tak—”
“No.” The frost giant’s snarl sends everyone back a step. The circle of frost-covered floor around his feet expands and his gaze strays to me. “I will only take Sigyn. It has to be Sigyn.”
Warmth swells in my chest for Gefjun, and I run to her, throwing my arms around her shoulders and burying my face in her dress. I am shaking with sobs, and she holds me gently, rubbing circles over my back. The truth is that I am terrified of the intensity of the frost giant’s voice when he refused Gefjun’s compromise. Only me. Why? What do I have that he wants? If he wants beauty, then I am not the first one he should have come to. Out of everyone in this land, I am hardly the most beautiful, and even within my family, Lofn is the prettiest of my siblings. But he only wants me. I don’t understand why, and neither, does it seem, anyone else.
But what scares me the most is the fact that the frost giant knew my name. No one has said it since his entry. It chills me to my bones.
“Look at him,” I say to my mother, looking over my shoulder at the frost giant. My cheeks are wet. “He is well-fed, he has wealth enough that he can afford fur —”
“It does not mean anything,” my father says. “It could have stolen the fur, eaten people —”
“Stop it,” I say. “Stop. I’ll … Father, you’ll only make it worse for me.”
“Sigyn, you won’t —”
“But why not?” I demand, angry now as I let go of Gefjun. “I am an adult, I am fertile. It would have only been a matter of time before I was required to take a husband, maybe even a matter of months. What is so different about this?”
“You will not be given to a monster,” Mother says, but I continue on.
“You will be searching for a dowry in exchange for my hand. This jotun may be a monster, or he may not be. If I were to stay and take a husband in the future, what guarantee would you have that he would not beat me? There is none; he could be as much a monster as this frost giant, or even more so. This deal is by far the greatest dowry I will ever fetch. Take it. Please. He has sworn to deliver it.”
Finally, my mother closes her mouth.
“Sigyn, don’t do this.” My father’s voice is soft, and I almost buckle then. But I fix my eyes on the frost giant and lift my chin. If I am to follow this path, then I will be brave for my family, and for myself most of all. Perhaps if I manage to create a convincing façade, the jotun will not treat me as my parents fear.
“I will come,” I say again. I cross the room. I step onto the frost. The air around him is freezing, and my hands jump to my arms.
“Sigyn please!” Hnoss wails. Lofn catches her as she lunges for me. Thick tears stream down my little sister’s face, and sobs wrack her chest. The tears come back to my eyes as I look to Lofn. Her eyes too are wet, and my gaze travels to my other sisters. To Vár and Syn; to Gefjun and Sjöfn. Each of them looks shocked, and each of them broken in their own way.
“Farewell, Hnoss,” I say quietly. “Be sure not to hog the blankets.”
“Stop it, Sigyn!” Hnoss pleads. “Don’t go with him! We need you here; please….”
“Come,” the frost giant says softly in my ear. “Do not hurt them anymore.”
I want to scream at him that he is the one doing all of this, and I almost do, my mouth opening and the words heavy upon my tongue, but I bite them back. This deal will buy my family comfort and food and safety, and I do not want to jeopardise that. After all, he’s still a frost giant, and I do not fully trust it to keep its word. How can I? I can only pray that it keeps the two oaths it has given.
We step out into the night, and I close the door behind me quietly. I shiver.
“Here, Sigyn.”
I jump as the frost giant undoes the fine clasp of the wolf fur cloak, takes it from his shoulders, and drapes it around mine. I suppose it would be warmer if it hadn’t been pressed against his icy skin for so long; but even so, it is still warmer than all of my other clothes.
“Thank you,” I whisper, holding the front closed and burying my ears into the collar.
“This way.”
He does not take my arm as I would have thought he’d have done. He walks off, expecting me to follow him. And I do, stepping in the footprints he leaves in the snow. I cannot afford to think about what I’m doing, or where he’s taking me; the courage I have found to follow him would only vanish if I do. He moves across the drifts with little effort, whereas even following the tracks he had made, it is somewhat of a struggle for me to keep up. We walk in silence for a few minutes, and even through the heavy cloak, now warm and curled around me, my fingertips are numb. My toes are worse off — I cannot feel them in my thin shoes, and thoughts flash across my mind of frostburn. It is all I can do to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to watch that bare blue back as it walks across the snow. I take the time to study him now he doesn't have his cloak.
He is made of lean muscle, and the dark lines cover his back too, disappearing into the line of his trousers. Near the back of his head, two falcon feathers have been tied into his long hair. Other than those, he has no other adornments, no jewellery.
We walk of my family’s land and onto the road beyond. We walk for a long time; I cannot feel my feet after a bare few minutes, and cannot say for how long we walk. When the frost giant reaches his destination, I feel my knees go weak. He has come upon a dark mound, and as he touches it, rubbing something, the mound stirs. I realise with a jolt that it is a beast of some kind, huge and covered in thick hide and spikes. Its eyes too are vermilion, and it lifts its head, yawning, a pink tongue curling out to lick its nose. Tusks protect its jaw, and the tail, curled tightly against the body, is a heavy looking club. Upon its back is a saddle.
The frost giant makes a clucking sound I could never replicate under his breath, and part of me wants to laugh derisively. He is treating the beast like he would a horse, and then I realise nastily to him is probably is a horse. He turns to me — I have frozen several paces away.
“Are you afraid?” he asks me.
I am terrified, have been terrified since I first saw him in the dark, but I still say, “No.”
I know that he knows that I’m lying, but he doesn’t say anything about it. “This is Blíðýr,” he says, stroking one of the great tusks.
I come forwards cautiously. “Hello,” I whisper. Blíðýr sighs heavily, and my hair rustles around my face.
“Come.” The frost giant holds out a hand, and I hesitantly take it. It feels like he has put it into ice water. He helps me into the saddle, and I hold onto the pommel as he pulls himself up behind me. Tied to the pommel is a set of reins.
The frost giant makes the strange clucking sound again, and Blíðýr sways beneath us as it gets up, shaking its head as it turns to face the north. The frost giant’s arm is tight about my waist as he picks up the reins. Even beneath his gloriously warm wolf fur cloak, his cold flesh freezes my blood. I am shivering as he drives Blíðýr forward with a sharp cry and kicks it in the flanks. The animal jumps forward, flying across the snow with easy bounds. It is far faster than a horse, and the wind stings my eyes. I throw my arm up in front of my face. I would have flown off if not for the jotun. He has moulded himself to my back, lying almost on top of me and pressing me down as he rides Blíðýr with an expert hand. It is all I can do to hold to the saddle tightly, praying that I do not fall despite the safety he offers me. The rocking motion of Blíðýr’s strides is making my empty stomach turn.
“What’s your name?” I whisper. I need to distract myself.
The frost giant’s grip around my middle tightens. Perhaps it is a gesture of comfort; I can’t tell.
“Loki,” he says in his quiet voice, so quiet I almost miss it. The name is as harsh as the wind battering me, as harsh as the cold that eats at my bones, as harsh as the stories I have heard told of his people. It is a name that suits his nature, I think.
“Loki,” I repeat. “Loki.”