Tessa Gratton - The Strange Maid

In a week and a half I’ll be seventeen. It’s a decade since I climbed the New World Tree, since Odin Alfather, god of the hanged, named me the next Valkyrie of the Tree, and still I have not won my place on the Valkyrie council.

For 250 years, the Council of Valkyrie has advised the president and Congress on matters of the gods. There were nine of them until the Thralls’ War, when Kara Neverborn defied Odin and was punished by being stripped out of the world, her name forgotten by all but the Valkyrie. Ever since then, the remaining eight have behaved—to a fault. They serve mead to the gods every holiday in Bright Home. They raise funds and awareness for charity. They speak out on behalf of the gods and sometimes mediate between our human government and Asgard. They officiate funerals and holy sacrifices. They’re celebrities who wield tremendous influence, can go anywhere and do anything because they touch the gods and walk among them.

And I belong with them.

Memory and longing draw me toward the lakefront park, toward the manicured lawns and bright maple trees, the museums and observatories and avenue of temples at the water’s edge. I played here every other year of my apprenticeship, when it was the Valkyrie of the Lake, Myra Quick’s turn to keep and teach me. I laughed all the time; I had clean sheets and anything I wished to eat. Shoes for running and shoes for walking, shoes for dancing. Silver rings and jeweled pins to hold my braids off my neck. Caramel ice cream.

I had sisters.

After Odin named me, he turned me over to the eight women who make up the Valkyrie council, quelling their irritation that he stole their prerogative of choosing their successors by saying they and they alone would declare me ready to take my place among them. They passed me from Death Hall to Death Hall every three months for eight years.

From the Valkyrie of the Rock in Cheyenne and from the South in Port Orleans I learned history and politics; poetry from the Valkyrie of the Ice in her hall in Vertmont; ritual and comportment from the First Valkyrie, who is stationed in Bright Home, Colorada, to be near to the gods. Languages from the Valkyrie of the Prairie, as well as a love for open air. The Valkyrie of the East, in Shenandoah, taught me to speak evenly and perform, and the West, in Baja California, told me about sex and death and gave me kisses to keep nightmares away. From Myra herself, the Valkyrie of the Lakes, here in Chicagland, I learned how to fight, though she swore to gut me like a deer if I told her sisters how good at it I was.

She gave me this seax in my belt.

The Chicagland Death Hall rises before me. Half castle, half modern art, it’s so different from my Old Eurland–style Death Hall that butts up against the New World Tree in Philadelphia. Here in Chicagland, they built their hall of limestone and tall dark windows that glint pale orange from the sun setting across the city. It’s a rectangular tower of straight lines, but for the green dome of the belfry, with huge white faces of the dead carved into each corner. The main entrance doors are capped by a lintel carved like the rays of the sun.

From the pole at the tip of the dome flies a green pennant, ruffling hard and fast in the lake wind. It means Myra is in residence. She’s somewhere above me, short hair slicked back for that severe look, maybe beating on a punching bag or bathing for dinner with the Jarl of Chicagland.

What would she say if I walked into the sanctuary and climbed over the marble rail separating the public space from the inner? If I knelt at her throne and told her all the secrets our god of the hanged has whispered to me, all the nights of stories and lessons that led to the riddle?

Every year on my birthday, at dusk, Odin Alfather sent Memory to my window to tap-tap-tap with her beak and draw me into the garden of the Tree. When I was still young, he’d come with his blond beard and fatherly smile to grab me up and swing me onto his shoulders, where I could wrap his braids around my hands like reins while he climbed us onto the lowest branches. I told him everything I learned during the year; he whispered how delighted he was with my fierce progress. That whirling mad eye of his noted how tall I’d grown, and he joked about my skinny arms, while I promised next year there would be muscle, next year I’d be nearly as tall as him.

Why did you choose me, Alfather? I asked. What is this itch under my skin when I think of you? When I remember blood and sorrow?

That itch is why I chose you, little raven , he said. The madness teases at you, because you’re bold and daring—who other would climb our sacred Tree for selfish reasons? And he laughed when I screwed my face at selfish .

Sometimes he appeared younger, a thick warrior to put me through my paces all night long, testing my reflexes, giving me a solid wallop to drive the breath from me. Other times he came hunched and old, a tall hat over his ice-white hair and that mad-pearl eye shimmering with mystery. Together we dug into the earth beneath the Tree’s roots to find worms and beetles with iridescent wings, the tiny building blocks of life, he said. Death and life, an infinite circle , he said. See here, the rainbow colors hidden inside death? The poetry of putrescence? Red-hot blood and clinging green decay, as beautiful as sunrise, as the rose born in summertime .

And I saw it; I believed it. I still do. There are hints of Odin the Mad under rocks and in the city rot; the violent pink smog has poetry in it, too, the dirty foam at the lake’s edge, the crumpled trash tossed by a wind into life. In the hot licking flames of a funeral pyre. The rest of the country doesn’t see it—even my sister Valkyrie pretend it’s not there—but it’s the Alfather’s constant presence, like the sun in the sky reminds us of Baldur the Beautiful, that this underbelly of death is Odin.

Kneeling at the edge of the smooth concrete path that curves toward the Death Hall, I skim my cold, stiff fingers over fallen maple leaves. Bright orange and scarlet, they curl against the dirt, sacrificed by the elegant tree to conserve energy and survive the winter. Without dropping these leaves, could it bloom in the spring?

People say I’ve failed every few months when some interweave site or local news channel does a fluff piece: Whatever happened to the Child Valkyrie? These leaves are what give me hope, even a year after I left the Valkyrie with the riddle clutched close to my chest, even as I’ve wandered the country hunting the answer like a revenant. A ghost of Signy Valborn. This reminder everywhere I turn that life and death are the same. One leads to the other, and my god rules over that transformation, the release of death into new life. The essence of sacrifice.

But in the shadow of Myra Quick’s magnificent Death Hall it’s so hard. Inside are warmth and a silky bed, delicious food and sweet-smelling shampoo. Death is concealed with makeup and evergreen incense, surrounded with ritual and simple poetry. Outside, where I am, with an itchy scalp and underwear in my pocket, ash on my tongue, only my own hair for a scarf, it is oh, so hard.

The queen walked out, gold-adorned—

We, shadow-riders, singers of death, weave with blood-soaked thread—

Lines of poetry shuffle through my thoughts, from the oldest Valkyrie poems, where the Death Choosers ride all together, as sisters and friends, shield-maidens and allies. I long to pull out my marker and draw the runes down my arm, or to find a bottle of paint and spray them against the sidewalk—better yet, a great red scrawl of poetry across the Death Hall doors. Poetry always makes me feel stronger, whether songs in Old Anglish or Old Scandan, or new, never-heard, never-read, never-spoken word-shapes I pull from my black imagination.