PART ONE
Exhausted, eyes closed though the surrounding air is nearly as dark as the space beneath them, Farbauti rests, clutching the small child to her chest. Mine, the thought comes to her in a fierce glow, this tiny life… no matter that she had borne two other sons before this, it was no less unbelievable to hold such a newborn creature. She is drifting into exhausted sleep when she feels a soft touch beside her, opens them to find Laufey watching the babe with an inscrutable expression.
“Stunted,” is his only comment. Unconsciously, her fingers tighten around the quiet infant, the blissful peace broken at once with a cold pit that seems to drop out within her, the same fear that had plagued her from the moment she had first wed the Jotun king; that fear that had grown quiet with the healthy birth of their first two sons. She had thought it vanquished forever, but no—it had only been sleeping, and now it had awakened once more, stirred to life by the dull pronouncement.
“No,” she replies quietly, but an edge of hysteria creeps into it that she cannot control. “No, he’s only small; he will grow like the others, he will—” Laufey takes her hand slowly, clasping it between his own cold ones. Stone and ice, a fit marriage. He sits on the edge of the bed, tucking the furs around her. “My wife,” he murmurs, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “Oh my beloved. I am so sorry.”
She sits up, careful not to jostle the quietly resting infant within her arms. She tucks her chin into her chest and squeezes her eyes shut; and for some time there is no sound but the ice, and her own quiet, sobbing breath.
Then she loosens her hold, placing the child gently in her husband’s arms. She stares out onto the deep blue of the shadows and does not look at them as she speaks. “Take him away.”
Laufey shifts beside her. “We do not have to—”
She shakes her head once. “No. No, you are right. I have made my decision.”
He sighs; a soft breath of wind between a crevasse, and then speaks. “So be it.” He stands up, child ensconsed in his arms, and walks softly out of the room, as soundless as he had come.
She lies back on the bed, but sleep eludes her; in her mind she pictures her child waking to cold wind and ice, emptiness its last sight in the world. She pulls the furs close to her, burying her head beneath them as though to catch the residual warmth of her son.
Unbidden, a voice creeps into her mind. You didn’t have to let him die. But it was selfishness that spoke in those coaxing tones. To keep a runt was not forbidden; the choice of death lay entirely within the mother, and ofttimes they did choose to keep their child, when the means were had to support it—but to face naught but a life of weakness, of injuries, malformed limbs, early death—these were the fate of such twisted things.
Her breathing ragged, she clutches at the amulet around her neck, worn smooth with time and the constant passing of fingers. A twisting bolt of lightning, the end is crafted masterfully, but near the top it changes to rough-hewn work, obviously unfinished.
Her fingers slowing, she traces lazy circles across the surface of the unpainted wood, finally grasping it tightly, the dull point digging into her palm.
She remembers Adisa. To a sister younger by almost five hundred years, she had seemed ever-confident, all-knowledgeable; as reliable as the stone. Dark of hair with eyes to match, her favourite places were the trees which whispered her their secrets and gave her their many-colored flesh.
She always had taken after father. Two of a kind, they were; embracing the variance of life on the surface and the ever-fluctuating light of the sun; turning their quicksilver thoughts into forms both delicate and strong; her smile was like light through a gemstone. Yet mother had longed for the cool steady presence of the dark and the rocks about her. To live with father she had taken her leave of the ground, followed him into a place in which she fit as strangely as Farbauti herself; all that she would give up and more gladly, but the tilted eyes upon them and the constant whispers of scandal wore away as water does even the strongest stone, in time.
Madness, they said, a soft, sussurating undercurrent, a disapproving air that young Farbauti did not yet understand, but knew with the tightening of Adisa’s fists and the flinty look in her eye—the only time she had ever truly been able to see her sister’s other heritage was when she was angry; when her fast-moving heart would slow to the beat of ages; it always brought a strange, deep thrill to her to see it.
It all changed when they moved under the ground. In search of peace, was the reason; Farbauti chocked on a twisted laugh. She opened her eyes and, staring into the hard stone of the palace, feeling it within her, she could almost imagine she was there once more, in the tall house that had been their own. The move was strange, but had brought a gleeful excitement of a child with a new arena to play; more than that, the moment she set foot beneath the ground, she felt her place as surely as if it had called to her and spoken. Yet as Farbauti flourished underground, Adisa, that surface tree, burying roots into nothing but stone, withered, hungering for the light.
Their carefree games slowly ceased, Adisa’s eyes growing slowly emptier as she confined herself more and more to her chambers and her whittling, a place filled with trees, flowers, plants both real and carven. She had always had nightmares that terrified Farbauti, waking with strangled cries babbling about creatures crawling beneath her skin, but now they doubled their pace, creeping into the waking hours so slowly that there was no time for alarm.
“I knew it,” Farbauti murmured to an empty room, the empty space of her newborn already growing cold. “I knew it, I knew it was killing her—”
And yet she had said nothing. Petulant, she had been. Greedy, as children are, she only wished for Adisa to be herself again, so they could once more explore and wander through this new deep, beautiful home.
It was only when they found her one day lying upon the floor of her twining, vined chambers, knife stained with the same blood which flowed from her wrists, that they realized what Farbauti had known all along.
Adisa did not die, but Farbauti still lost a sister.
Pulling the furs off frantically, Farbauti tried to clear the terrible image from her mind, grasping the amulet ever tighter as she stumbled from the bed into the doorway, arching high above her head. I was going to name him Loptr, the thought came, clear, in her mind, with the sudden knowledge that if she had waited to see him smile, it would be like light through a gemstone.
The paths through the palace were dark, but her eyes saw better in such darkness than under the burning light of the sun; still, somehow the ice and stone tripped her as it never had before, hindering her stumbling steps which should have carried her along. Clutching to the edge of a pillar within the walls of the palace, in the quiet hours of sleep, she felt as though everyone had vanished, leaving for some reason no one had told her of, when she had been alone.
This was the path to the building through whose gates she passed every so often when mother and father had died, to visit a sister who had abandoned her. This the lintel of the door; and behind it, she would see that face, that smile; faded and yet still beautiful.
And there she is, gazing out onto her precious trees and sun in that surface house as though she wants to drink it until it overflows from her mouth and spills onto the floor, painting it in light.
“Farbauti,” she says, head turning, and there, the smile passed from behind the clouded cast of thought, but the hungry, desperate look that Farbauti had seen still echoes in her mind, sinking into her heart with something like guilt and anger. “I missed you.”
“Adisa,” she says, coming in. Part of her wants to confess it all: every worry about money, about their lives, about her anger and the unfairness of it all, wants to rage that this should have been something they faced together, Adisa leading as she always had, brilliant as a sunbeam. But she is older now, and stone, once formed, does not easily change from its shape. So instead she merely sits by her sister and they pass the long time in an ecstacy of waiting. She can feel the cool of the blade beneath her sleeve, and yet cannot bring it out. It was a terrible choice, an impossible hope to think… “I brought you a present,” she says, in a rush, before she can think on the consequences. Consequences have been swimming before her eyes for years, and they have done nothing but press themselves into her bones with an ache that cannot be mended. And there on the table it rests, reflecting in the sunlight—Adisa stares at it, half-wanting, but her hand not yet closed upon it. “I’m not supposed to have these,” she says, in a joking tone yet with real warning underneath; she glances at the younger asking silent permission that should have been her own to give.
“I trust you,” Farbauti says, knowing it is the wrong thing, knowing Adisa knows it too; the levity of the moment fades into an awkward silence and her eyes grow sad, but she takes the knife in hand and her plain wooden goblet in another, passing one across the other as though feeling for the life within.
Carefully, she makes the first stroke.
And for a moment, Farbauti is a child again, eager and exited, leaning forward, speaking breathlessly, “what is it going to be?”
Adisa smiles enigmatically, eyes fixed upon her work. “You’ll see, little sister. Be patient.”
The funeral is held aboveground; not only because it is custom but because Farbauti knows Adisa could not bear to rest anywhere else. The sky has opened, pouring rain turning the soft ground to mud, pounding in time to the incriminations in her own head: my fault. In her hands she holds the unfinished figurine. A present meant for her, a lightning bolt forever frozen in motion, and the sky echoes the amulet within her palm, lighting up the twilight with her namesake.
The palace is indeed emptied; frantic voices echo within its walls; the last line has been breached, the last battle lost and taken to their very gates. Tall forms stride with giant paces; she feels small and lost within them, making her way against the tide toward the temple. At first unnoticed, but she is the Queen, and soon her retainers have gathered round.
“Quickly,” they say, “come with us. The only means of escape are now the underground pathways.”
“My son,” she hisses, shaking herself from their grip and running to the source of that terrible din, the battle that rages at the gates.
“They are safe, they are waiting for you in the passage. Come, my queen, quickly!”
“No, Loptr is there—he is dying!” She makes a wild dash between the concerned group and with her smaller stature manages to slip beneath, but with a long stride and a viselike grip they take hold of her once more. She is raging, screaming, but the sounds of the battle have grown and drown out her own cries as she is pulled into the earth.