Freya Valdis's Arc

Chapter 3 of 11

By morning the wind had died. Freya stood outside the giant's windbreak and stared north. Somewhere out there the god who exiled her waited. She had his name. She had a direction. But the north was wide and white and endless. Walk it blind and the child would freeze before they found him. Freya needed more than a name. She needed the road itself. Elsa woke and shook the pixie from her bag. "It found the giant," the girl said. "Maybe it can find the god." She held the wooden figure toward the pale sky. "Show us where he sleeps." The pixie beat its wings. It did not fly. It only pointed one small arm at the horizon, then dropped, spent. "It knows the way," Elsa said. "It doesn't know how far." Freya knelt and pressed her hand to the snow. She thought of every servant of the gods, bound and shivering in the cold. If the pixie answered a god's call, so would others. She raised the cold lantern and let its blue light spill across the drifts. "Then I'll call something that can carry us," she said. The frost spread. Freya poured her cold into the ground and sang the old summons she still remembered from the cosmos. Far off, the snow began to move. A long white shape rose from a drift, sleek and furred, with pale horns and wings like frozen glass. A dragon. It had slept under the field for ages, waiting for a voice it knew. The dragon coiled before her. Its eyes matched the blue of her lantern. "You called with a god's tongue," it said. "But you are no god now. You fell." "I fell," Freya said. "And I mean to climb back and answer the one who threw me." She spoke the god's name aloud. The dragon flinched. Freya saw she had guessed right. The creature feared him. It knew him. "You know where he dwells." "In the far north, past the frozen sea," the dragon said. "His hall stands on the ice. Gold and bronze, bright enough to burn your eyes. No walker reaches it and lives." "Then carry us," Freya said. "Warm the child on your back. Fly us over the sea. Do that, and I free every servant of his I find." The dragon lowered its long body to the snow. Elsa climbed up first, then the giant, then Freya. The pixie settled in the girl's hands. Wings of frozen glass spread wide. "His house shines like a lit hearth on the ice," the dragon said. "You will see it long before you land." They rose. The frozen field shrank below. Freya no longer wandered blind. She had a mount, a road, and the shape of the god's golden hall fixed in her mind. But the dragon had said it plain. No walker reached that hall and lived. Now she flew straight toward it.