Lee couldn’t bring himself to agree. “Knowledge is never wasted.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But it can on occasion be somewhat superfluous.” I watched a flicker of surprise cross Lee’s gaunt face and silently thanked Mr. Leary for drilling vocabulary words into me back in the day. “Look, do you want to sit there and tell me how to do my job, or do you want me to actually do it?”

He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I just want to know.”

“Know what?”

“Everything.” Lee tilted his head a little and smiled wryly. It was the first truly candid expression I’d seen on his face and it transformed him, bringing out an unexpected charm; less Skeletor, more mid-1990s heroin-chic male model. Well, except for the ill-advised facial hair, baseball cap, and goth duster. “Go ahead, Daisy. I’ll shut up.”

“Okay.” I held the inscribed chip of bark harvested from Yggdrasil II itself in my left hand, struck a wooden match with my right, and touched the flame to the dry bark.

It caught quickly, kindling to a bright, dancing glow in the dim twilight of the park. I watched the flames lick at the runes neither Lee nor I could read, darkening and consuming them. The occasional spark snapped and a thin stream of aromatic, piney smoke trickled upward into the evening sky. When the flames got close to my fingertips, I dropped the bark chip into the copper bowl. It struck the bottom of the bowl with a faint ringing sound. In the trees above us, a trio of blue jays took flight in a raucous burst of chatter.

I smiled.

“What is it?” Lee asked, watching me.

I pointed after the birds. “They’re Hel’s harbingers.”

“Blue jays?” he scoffed.

“Odin had ravens,” I said as though I’d known it forever. Actually, I’d just learned it a month ago. “Blue jays are in the same family.”

“Odin’s ravens were named Hugin and Munin,” Lee mused, tracking the flight of the blue jays. “Thought and memory. I’ll be damned.” He looked back at me. “What happens now?”

I stirred the ashes in the bowl with the burned-out matchstick, making sure there were no live embers left. “Now we wait and see. And, um, take this stuff back to my apartment and put it away,” I added. “I forgot, I need to put on some warmer clothes. It’s always cold in Little Niflheim.”

We returned to my apartment and sat in awkward silence, Lee slouching on my futon.

“So . . . um . . . have you been in touch with any of your old friends since you’ve been back?” I asked, trying to remember the names of the two guys he’d hung out with in high school. Together, they’d been a sort of nerdy Three Musketeers. “Steve Geddes, or Ben, um . . . ?”

“Lewis,” Lee said shortly. “Ben Lewis. He’s in Afghanistan.”