Frigg

Baldr had broken the cup without waking.

Frigg found him sitting on the edge of his bed, holding one white shard between his fingers. Wine spread beneath his bare feet. He looked up when she entered, and closed his hand.

“Open it,” she said.

“It hasn’t cut me.”

“Then there is no reason to hold it.”

He let her take the shard. Its point pressed into her thumb.

In the dream, he told her, everyone had been calling his name. He could hear them clearly. He had tried to answer, but there had been something over his mouth, something he could neither lift nor bite through. When he reached for it, his hands would not move.

Frigg set the broken piece on the table.

“Who was calling?”

“You.”

Outside, a servant dragged a bucket across the yard. The ordinary sound went on for a long time.

Frigg knew things she did not speak. Sometimes knowledge came with no image at all, only the weight of an event that had not yet happened. She had lived beside such knowledge for longer than her son could remember. Now she wanted the name of a weapon. A road. A person she could turn away from his door.

“Stay here until morning.”

“Will morning make it different?”

She looked at the shard beside the lamp.

“I will.”

What Iron Promised

At the forge, a blade lay across the anvil with its edge still dark from the quenching trough. Frigg dismissed the smith and put her palm on the iron.

“You will not harm Baldr.”

The blade was cold. Beneath her hand she felt the pull of the mountain it had come from, the hammer that had flattened it, the hunger of the edge.

“Swear it.”

A low vibration entered her bones.

I cut what is put before me.

She pressed harder. The edge opened a fine red line in her palm.

“Not him.”

Whose hand holds me?

“No hand. No wielder. Thrown, dropped, drawn against him in anger or raised by someone who loves him. You will not take his life.”

For a moment the blade resisted her with all its simple purpose. Then the vibration changed. She felt the promise pass beneath the floor, into buried ore, into nails and spearheads, into the smallest iron hook in the world.

Frigg lifted her hand.

There were other doors, other shores, other things that had never before been asked to answer a mother. She went to them. Water spoke in the hollows between stones. Fire bent away from her face. She sought the hidden venom as carefully as the great beasts, and the sickness before it had found a body to enter.

When she returned to Fensalir, Fulla knelt to unfasten her shoes. One strap had rubbed through the skin above her heel.

“Sit,” Fulla said.

“There are trees west of Valhall.”

“They will still be there when you have eaten.”

“So will he.” Frigg reached for the shoes. “That is what I mean to make certain.”

She found Baldr waiting at the outer door.

He looked at her bandaged hand, then at the shoe she had not yet put on.

“You could have asked me to come.”

“I asked you to stay.”

“For how long?”

She had no answer that did not sound like a locked room.

He stepped aside to let her pass. That hurt her more than resistance would have done.

The Small Exception

The last tree gave its promise in the rasp of one branch against another. Frigg stood beneath it until she was sure the sound had ended.

Above her, a green shoot clung to the wood. She touched it with a finger. It yielded so easily that she withdrew her hand, afraid she would break it.

Mistletoe. Young growth, scarcely strong enough to hold its own leaves.

She had made the teeth of wolves answer her. She had laid her demand upon the sea. Here was something she could crush between finger and thumb, and for the first time since the broken cup she felt ashamed of her strength.

“Grow,” she told it.

When she turned, Baldr was standing a little way off.

“You followed me.”

“Yes.”

She almost ordered him home. Instead she looked at the paths behind him, the stones beneath his feet, the branches over his head. All had answered.

He held out his hand for hers.

“Are you finished?”

Frigg took it.

“Yes.”

The first test was a knife. Baldr drew its edge across his palm before she could stop him. The blade slid aside as if his skin were wet glass.

He stared at his unmarked hand. Then he laughed.

Frigg caught his wrist.

“Again,” she said.

He looked at her, surprised.

“Slowly.”

This time she watched the edge, watched the exact place where it should have entered flesh. It could not. Iron had kept its word.

Soon the others wanted to see. A stone struck Baldr’s shoulder and dropped at his feet. A spear turned without piercing him. With every failed blow, the gods grew bolder, and Baldr stood among them laughing with his arms spread.

Frigg watched from the edge of the gathering. Once he turned toward her, bright with the pleasure of being unafraid.

She raised her wounded hand to him.

Then she went home.

A Woman at the Door

The visitor came while Frigg was washing the dried blood from her palm.

Fulla had gone to fetch fresh linen. The woman stood inside the doorway with her cloak held closed, waiting to be acknowledged. Frigg motioned her toward the bench.

“You have come from the gathering?”

“They are throwing things at your son.”

“Yes.”

“Does it not frighten you?”

Frigg squeezed the cloth. Pink water fell into the basin.

“It did.”

The woman sat. “I could not bear to watch.”

That was why Frigg had left, though she had not said it even to Fulla. She set the cloth down.

“Nothing there can harm him.”

“Nothing?”

“I have their promises.”

The woman looked at her hand.

“That must have been hard work.”

Frigg felt the ache in her heel, the raw place beneath the bandage, the weariness she had not permitted herself until now. The words opened something. She had been obeyed, argued with, thanked. No one had said that.

“There was much to ask,” she said.

“All the world?”

“All that could hurt him.”

“Even the little growing things?”

Frigg smiled faintly.

“There is a shoot of mistletoe west of Valhall. I left that one alone. It was too young to put under an oath.”

The woman rose.

“So even you can be merciful.”

Frigg looked up. Something in the words had hardened, but the visitor was already thanking her and drawing the cloak close again. At the threshold she moved quickly, with none of the tiredness she had brought into the room.

Fulla returned with the linen.

“Who was that?”

Frigg kept looking at the open door.

The Road Still Open

The laughter stopped before Frigg reached the gathering.

She heard the change from beyond the wall: a shout cut short, the scrape of feet, then a silence so complete that she could hear her own dress dragging over the stones.

She ran.

The gods were standing in a broken circle. Hödr held one hand out in front of him. His fingers were open, as if someone had just taken something from them.

Baldr lay in the middle.

Frigg knelt beside him. A slender shaft had entered his body. She recognized the pale wood before she touched it.

She put one hand beneath his head and called his name.

His mouth remained slightly open. She wiped a little earth from the corner of it with her thumb. Behind her someone began to weep, and another voice answered, and still she could not make a sound beyond his name.

The stones under him had sworn. The ground had sworn. Nothing she had bound had broken faith.

She bent over him until her forehead touched his.

A hand settled on her shoulder. Odin knelt beside her, but he did not try to lift her away.

She wanted to ask him where his wisdom had been. She wanted to call back the woman at the door, the words beside the basin, the moment when she had touched the young green shoot. Each wish reached backward and found nothing it could move.

Beyond the circle, a horse stamped.

Frigg lifted her head.

“Where does he go?”

Odin looked at her.

“Hel,” she said, before he could answer.

She laid Baldr’s head down carefully. Her hand remained beneath it for a moment, unwilling to surrender even its weight. Then she drew it free and stood.

“Who will ride there?”

No one answered. They were still looking at the body.

“Who will go to her and ask what she will take for him?”

She heard how the words sounded: a ransom offered before the keeper had named a price. She had nothing certain to offer the rider either. No oath from the road ahead. No promise that the gates would open.

Hermódr stepped out of the circle.

“I will go.”

At the horse, Frigg took the rein while he mounted. Sleipnir tossed his head, eager to move, and the leather pulled against the cut in her palm.

“What shall I tell him?” Hermódr asked.

She had told Baldr to stay. She had told him the work was finished.

“Tell him I am asking for him.”

Hermódr waited. There might have been more: a command, a secret, some protection she had withheld until the last possible moment.

Frigg opened her hand.

The rein slipped through it, and the horse carried him away.