Joanne Harris - Runemarks

She spoke aloud, in a voice still rusty from underuse. “I can buttress this tower if Chaos breaks through. Seal it off from the rest of the Worlds. We can be beyond Order, beyond Chaos. You and I-my love-alone.”

Balder’s expression, though habitually sunny, was bleak. “I can’t,” he said. “To stand by and watch the Worlds swallowed up, one by one, for my sake-”

“You don’t have a choice,” said Hel grimly. The six seconds on the deathwatch had dwindled to three. “There’s nothing either of us can do…”

So many times she’d dreamed of this moment-Hel, who never dreamed-and now the dream was within her grasp…

“There is,” said Balder. “Pay Loki his debt.”

For a moment she stared at him. “Do you know what you’re saying? No one can stop what’s happening now. Even if I were to take your life…Besides, this is Loki we’re talking about-Loki, whose mischief caused your death-”

“It doesn’t matter,” Balder said. “You broke your word to bring me to life. What kind of a basis is that for a meaningful relationship?”

“But here you can be safe, ” protested Hel. “You can have anything, do anything you ever wanted. My face offends you? There are glamours I could use to make myself beautiful. I could look like anyone-Sif, Freyja even-”

Balder’s eyes went cold as midwinter. “Tricks,” he said.

Now Hel’s living eye twitched in growing annoyance. Tricks? she thought. What does he think the others use? Does he really think Freyja’s hair was ever naturally that shade? Or that Sif’s waist doesn’t benefit from a little tight lacing?

For the first time she began to wonder whether she hadn’t made a big mistake bringing Balder to this place. She should have drugged him first, she thought; a single draught of the river Dream would have ensured his cooperation, at least until the danger was done.

Still, it was too late for that now. Balder was looking out of the window again, searching, his eyes narrowed in concentration. For a second he thought he saw Loki suspended over a pit of snakes and Odin desperately holding on to his hand-

With a flick of her dead fingers, Hel made the window disappear. A fine silk tapestry, cleverly and lasciviously embroidered with scenes of lovers, now hung in its place.

Balder saw it and turned away. “Send me back,” he said in a flat voice.

Hel ignored him and with another gesture made a banqueting hall appear around them, the tables set with fine crystal and pomegranates (a traditional favorite in Hel) and honey cakes and oysters and sweetmeats and wines of every color, from spring green and deepest amber to rose gold and tulip black.

But Balder looked at them in disgust. “Do you really want to please me?” he said. “Then let me go!” And once more he turned away, and Hel, gnashing her teeth, made one last gesture in the air-

“My love,” she said, and stood before him as Nanna, his wife, who had died upon Balder’s funeral pyre rather than live for a day without him, and nothing could have been sweeter and more joyful than her smile, and nothing as soft as her gleaming hair; but Balder closed his eyes in loathing, and tightened his lips and said nothing at all.

Hel gave a cry of rage and disappointment. She looked at the deathwatch, its hands now separated by nothing but the smallest whisker of time.

“Then go!” she screamed, and in an instant her citadel was gone, and Balder was standing once more in the desert with the river gleaming and churning all around him and Dream, in all its gorgeous disarray, laid out at his feet.

Loki, he thought. And plunged headlong into the rapids.

Meanwhile, Odin’s strength was fading. The pull of Loki’s dream had intensified, as if to combat his attempt to escape. Below him Odin could see the rift between the Worlds, now a vortex through which the gulf of Chaos could be glimpsed, like the pupil of a monstrous eye.

Hang on! he said, but his arm was numb, his hand slick with Loki’s sweat, and it was hopeless, he knew; they would both be sucked into the gap between the Worlds, where the blackbird shadow would blot them from existence as if they’d never been at all…

Well, said Loki between gritted teeth. At least you tried, brother-which is more than I was expecting from you, to be totally honest…

Now Loki was clinging to Odin by his fingertips. He could feel them slipping, one by one: index, median, annular…This little piggy went to Chaos, thought Loki with a sudden desperate crack of laughter. This little piggy stayed at home-

Hold on! said Odin one last time. And then the fingers slipped from his grasp and he was left clutching shadows while-

– another hand reached out from behind him and grabbed hold of Loki by the hair.

Got you-said a voice Odin thought he recognized, and he had just enough time to marvel at how very like Balder’s that voice was when there came an almighty crashing sound, as if every door in the Nine Worlds had suddenly been blown shut, and all these things happened at once:

The hands on the deathwatch snapped together.

The rift between the Worlds closed as if it had never been there at all.

The river Dream pulled back, leaving an untold acreage of mudflats of evaporating dreamtime across the deserted plains of Hel.

And the dreamers suspended there awoke with a start, and some awoke to their former selves, and some paused as dancers in the middle of some complicated fugue who find themselves unexpectedly partnered with a total stranger as the music comes to a sudden stop.

Maddy awoke sobbing on the far shore of Dream but could no longer recall exactly why she had wept.

Frigg awoke in the body of a woman who had seemed to her at first both plain and middle-aged but who, with the rune Ethel shining brightly from her arm, made middle age and plainness into virtues far greater than the most transcendent beauty.

Dorian Scattergood awoke to find the sign Thuris emblazoned across his scarred right arm and Ethel watching him with a quizzical expression on her face-a face that was no longer quite hers, but that nevertheless radiated beauty and love.

“Thor,” she said, and held out her hand.

Adam Scattergood awoke feeling perfectly normal-except for the tiny voice that whispered and whined at the back of his head…

Brave T ýr awoke to find himself three feet shorter than he used to be.

Sugar awoke to find himself clutching Fat Lizzy desperately in both arms. For a moment they stared at each other, nonplussed, then the potbellied sow gave a squeal of outrage as around her an Aspect began to form-that of a shapely, well-rounded woman with hair the color of ripe corn and a face now twisted with fury and disbelief.

Sif, the Harvest Queen, awoke in a state of rage that, if expressed in the Middle Worlds, would have leveled trees, blighted crops, and killed every flower from Malbry village to World’s End. As it was, there were no trees or flowers, and she was only able to scream in a voice that would have shattered glass had there been any: “A pig ? You brought me back as a stinking pig?”

Loki awoke in his own skin and laughed until his guts were aching and-

Hel hissed- Men! -and closed her eyes, while around her the dead settled back like dust, to lie silent and undisturbed for another long age.

Silently Maddy let her eyes wander over the mudflats of Hel.

Dreamstuff still littered them, looking like the usual flotsam and jetsam of any river or sea, but the little group that stood assembled on the shore of Dream knew better than to investigate too closely the shining fragments, the not-quite-rocks, the seductive vapors that had been left behind.