We began to receive reports that Hel was building forges in her realm and trading for raw materials from the Svartálfar. The dwarfs, bless them, refused to do so. Hel had learned from her time in Midgard that swords and shields would not be enough to carry the day. About nine years ago she started to manufacture weapons in earnest and to train her draugar in their use. She now has a massive army of soldiers with automatic weapons, who cannot be killed unless their heads are destroyed or struck off from their bodies.
Odin has been preparing the Einherjar to meet them, but even with modern body armor, they are at a disadvantage. The dwarfs have chosen to cast their lots with ours and have likewise been making preparation for the final battle. They have new transports and weapons unlike any I have seen.
According to our estimates, Hel could have begun Ragnarok during the past year with a fair chance of success, especially once Surtr and the sons of Muspell got involved. With no Thor to meet Jörmungandr, and no one to stop Fenris, her victory seemed assured—at least on paper.
What has prevented her seems to be a psychological inability to proceed without her father, Loki. She could have the world for her own right now, she could lay waste to Midgard and shape it howsoever she wills, but instead she craves his favor.
Some days ago, she made her move. She brought two thousand armed draugar to the cave against our fifty Einherjar. She stepped over their honorable corpses and entered the cave, wearing the form of a bent old woman.
Sigyn, Loki’s wife, recognized her and demanded that she leave.
“You have no cause to be here!” she cried. “Is not Niflheim enough for you?”
Hel ignored her and spoke in her sepulchral voice to Loki, as the snake dripped its venom into the bowl Sigyn held above his face.
“Father,” she rasped, “we can leave this place today and win Ragnarok. The old prophecies are null. The Norns are dead. Heimdall, who was fated to slay you, is dead. Freyr is dead. Týr and Vidar are dead. Even mighty Thor is dead, and my army is ready.”
The god of mischief did not stir until he heard the name of the thunder god. “What?” Loki said. “You say Thor is dead? How?”
She told him of your party’s invasion of Asgard and how you surprised us with defeat. She named your party: the werewolf, the vampire, the alchemist, the Druid, the wizard, and the thunder god.
“What thunder god?” Loki wanted to know.
“Perun. The Slavic god. He has disappeared.”
“But he is not dead?”
“I do not know, Father,” she said. “He may be dead.”
“I know how to find out,” Loki said, grinning in such a way as he had not for centuries. “Set me free, daughter.”
“Father, I cannot unbind you. Only you can do this. But I can make you do it sooner rather than later.”
“How?”
“Answer me first: Do you still love this cow?” Hel jutted her chin toward Sigyn, who had protected Loki as best she could from the snake’s dire venom all these years. But she was not Hel’s mother. Loki’s monstrous children were all borne by a giantess.
“Her?” Loki sneered. “No, I hate her. She has neither killed the snake nor erected a roof over my head, despite my pleading that she do so. She is thoughtless, worthless.”
“And so I set you free,” Hel said. She sloughed off her human visage and appeared in her true form, sprouting like an unwholesome weed to the roof of the cave. She pulled the wicked knife, Famine, from its scabbard in her exposed rib cage and plunged it into the neck of the faithful Sigyn.
Loki’s wife gurgled her last breath, and the bowl of caustic venom toppled full into Loki’s face. He screamed and writhed violently, and still the snake dripped on, under the goddess Skadi’s command to continue. Loki jerked and pulled at his restraints, and the earth shook underneath Hel’s feet. He cursed her. He swore vengeance upon her. And then, as the venom continued to eat at his eyes and chew at the substance of his flesh, he begged her for mercy.
But Hel had none. Mercy was an empty room in her heart, where nothing at all was sacred and no living creature, not even her father, could cry so piteously as to make her take heed.
Loki bucked and howled as the venom bore deeper. He thrashed and shouted his defiance. The earth trembled more violently, and this grew and grew until his bonds were finally snapped and he was set free. Blood and tears streamed down his purpling cheeks, and he seized the snake that had tormented him so and burned it alive in his hands, his fire returned to him now that he was unbound. No freedom had ever been bought with so much agony, and he vowed it would be avenged sevenfold, beginning with the Slavic thunder god.
We do not know why he focused on Perun rather than on the vampire who killed Thor; perhaps it was because he was a target of convenience. Loki knew that the entrance to the Slavic plane lay hidden somewhere in the Ural Mountains, and it was to these he flew upon first leaving his cave.
He left Hel behind, without thanks, bereft of approval, and with no signal that she should begin Ragnarok. Unable to follow him, she returned to her realm, sullen and uncertain, to await further word from her father.
“And that is why we must strike now and slay Fenris,” Frigg finished, clearly angling for the non sequitur of the year.
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
“We must demoralize Hel and prevent her from launching an attack on Asgard. Odin has decided that the best way to do that is to slay Fenris.”
“Well, that’s nice, but we can do it a bit later.”
“Now is the perfect time.”
“I disagree. Vehemently.”
Frigg’s eyes clouded, and the ravens above squawked. “You swore you would help us. You swore to render what aid you could in place of a blood price.”
“And render it I shall. But not right now. I have an apprentice to bind to the earth, and until she’s bound, I’m not doing anything else.”
Frigg shifted her eyes to Granuaile and pursed her lips in dislike, realizing that my apprentice was an obstacle to her goals. “Bring her along, then,” she said.
“No way.” I shook my head to emphasize the point. “She isn’t ready yet. After she’s bound she could actually be helpful and may choose, of her own free will, to give us her help. But right now she’s a liability and a potential hostage.”
I flattened my hand and used it as an impromptu shade against the sun as I searched out Odin’s ravens. I called out to them to make sure the mind they represented heard me.
“If my apprentice falls victim to an ‘accident,’ Odin, I won’t help you at all, you hear me? Just be patient a while longer.”
“And if Ragnarok begins while we are being patient?” Frigg asked.
“I’ll take on Jörmungandr myself if it does,” I said. “That’s how confident I am that it won’t happen, okay? I think we have a year left.” At least, I hoped we did.
“Based on what information?”
“I’ll keep that to myself. But nothing is changed here, Frigg. I will keep my word as soon as my apprentice is bound.”
Frigg had nothing nice to say, so she didn’t say anything. She nodded curtly and turned her back on us, floating up the rainbow into the northern sky. The ravens followed her.
I hoped that after this encounter Granuaile would be more willing to talk, but my optimistic expression was immediately crushed when she shook her head at me and scowled.
“A liability and a hostage, Atticus?” she said. “Really?”
"Fall to your knees and grovel. Now!"
“Well—”
"Nope. Fall!"
“I put two knives in that bear thing and distracted it while you missed,” she said, “but I’m a liability?”
“Look, Granuaile, against human opponents, I’d say you could take just about anyone,” I said. “But Frigg was talking about messing around with the supernatural, and you’re not in that power class yet. You will be soon.”
“So a vulture that turns into a bear-human hybrid isn’t supernatural?”
"Lie down and offer your throat. No, wait, that’s how dogs submit. I know! Give her your wallet!"
“Yes, it is, Granuaile, and you handled it superbly, no doubt. But right now you can’t heal yourself if you get wounded. You can’t speed up or cast camouflage or take advantage of any of the spells I regularly use to stay alive. I would very much like to make sure you stay alive, so I hope you’ll forgive my poor choice of words. I wanted Frigg to go away, that’s all.”
She gazed at me, her disbelief every bit as plain as her disapproval, but she had no more desire to wrangle over it. She turned her back on me, leaving me unforgiven, and we trudged westward toward Olympus without speaking a word to each other.
A hot hour’s hike up the valley finally brought us good news from Oberon.
"Atticus, I think I found a place!"
You did? Where?
"I can see you from here."
I looked around me and saw nothing but more trees, stubborn undergrowth, and a few stretches of bare rock wall ahead, where the mountain fell precipitously into the wash. I could hear it running with winter snowmelt but couldn’t see it yet.
I don’t see you, I told Oberon.
"That’s the kind of place you want, right?"
It is indeed.
"Keep heading toward the water. I’ll direct you when you get closer."
After I gave Granuaile some encouragement that we were near a possible campsite, we shoved our way through the brush to the water’s edge. It was a narrow, rocky stream, easily jumped in some places but running fast.
Can you still see us? I asked Oberon.
"Sure can. You’re looking for a good place to cross that torrential sluice of doom. That was an excellent example of both hyperbole and assonance, by the way, for which I deserve a turkey leg and a long brush by a tall person with soft hands."
Where do we go from here?
"Upstream. I’m on a ledge on the other side. There’s a pine tree here and some thorn, but behind it there’s a cave in the side of the mountain."
I looked in that direction and saw the place he was talking about—I saw the tree on the ledge, anyway. Awesome. Any animal tracks or other sign in there?
"Yeah, but they’re years old."
Is the cave deep enough for us to lie down, tall enough to stand?
"It’s definitely deep enough. You might have to watch your head, but I think you can walk for most of it."
The difficulty we faced getting up to the ledge only made it more attractive to me once we finally arrived; there was very little chance we’d be disturbed by any humans in a place like this—few people are trailblazers anymore, when it’s so much safer and easier to follow the trails already blazed.
We hopped the stream about thirty yards past the tree, then struggled our way up to the ledge. Oberon waited at the mouth of the cave, wagging his tail. The entrance was completely choked with brush, but it was spacious inside.
How did you ever think to look for this? I asked Oberon.
"I didn’t think of it, to be honest. Finding it was a happy accident. You see, there was a squirrel on that pine tree, giving me some lip as I was passing down by the stream. He said some bawdy things about my mom—"
Oberon, come on.
"Well, all right, I don’t know what he said, but he definitely had an attitude, just like all squirrels, and he deserved to be chased up to the top and kept there for a while. I wouldn’t have come up here otherwise."
Well, this is perfect. We owe that squirrel for leading you here.
"Wait a second! How come the squirrel gets all the credit?"
I was thinking he’d get all the credit and you’d get all the sausage.
"Oh! That sounds completely fair, Atticus; I really can’t argue with that."
“We’re going to camp here, then?” Granuaile asked, peering into the cave and breaking the silence.
“Maybe,” I said. “Let me scope this out first.” Using the magic stored in my bear charm, I triggered my faerie specs and looked for any indication that there was a magical booby trap here or an alarm that would go off if I drew power from the earth. This cave could be the favorite spot of a cyclops or a nymph or something spookier than an old monster like Agrios. It took a while to check thoroughly; any magic performed by the Greeks wouldn’t look like the Celtic bindings of my own work. I found nothing. The ceiling of the cave wasn’t blackened by the smoke of ancient fires, which corroborated my growing belief that we were the first humans to set eyes on this cave in centuries—perhaps the first humans ever.
“It looks good,” I said, shrugging off the straps of my pack. “This might work out perfectly.”
“Okay,” Granuaile said, extricating herself from her pack and setting it down with a relieved sigh.
“Oberon, I’ll need you to scout all possible approaches to the cave. We can see pretty well down below, but we need to know what’s behind us. Would you mind?”
"Not at all. Am I allowed to hunt?"
“Don’t hunt yet. Scout all you want, but let’s just establish what’s normal for the area so we can spot any intruders later.”
"Okay. But I’m bagging something before we leave or I’m a pug with the muscle tone of French bread."
“Agreed.”
Oberon turned and disappeared with a swish of his tail through the brush. Granuaile began to unpack in brooding silence.
Backpacking is different when you can cast night vision. Items like flashlights and lamps and oil are unnecessary. We had plenty of food—mostly soup mixes and jerky and dried fruit. It was a nutritionally deficient diet, but it was only for a few months, with resupply available at a tolerable distance in Litochoro. Water and wood for fuel were plentiful. The large pine tree would help diffuse the smoke from our cook fires.