The hellhound bounded after his treat. In the front seat, Lee turned to give me an incredulous look.

“What?” I said to him. “You want to visit Little Niflheim, you bring a loaf of bread for Garm.”

“Um . . . why bread?” he asked in a faint voice.

“Because that’s the way it is,” I replied firmly. I’d asked the exact same questions on my first visit and gotten the exact same highly unsatisfying response. Somehow it felt better being on the other side of the equation.

Mikill gunned the buggy’s engine again. “Be sure to keep your limbs inside the vehicle during the descent.”

Lee looked around the basin. “Descent? Descend where?”

I pointed at Yggdrasil II. “There.”

The fact that a gap large enough to admit a small vehicle looked like a mere crack in the mammoth trunk gives you an idea of the scale of the tree. Lee let out a terrified sound as we hurtled toward it, then slumped in deflated relief as we passed through the opening and began spiraling down the path carved into the walls of the hollow interior. The temperature dropped as we descended, an icy mist rising from the depths below us. Mikill stopped dripping, his hair and beard freezing.

Down, down, down we went, emerging beneath the immense canopy of roots that the three Norns tended with tireless care, drawing water from the wellspring and pouring it over Yggdrasil II’s roots. One of them smiled at me, her eyes as colorless as mist in her grandmotherly face. I smiled back at her. She’d given me a piece of soothsaying earlier this summer that had saved a lot of lives.

“Are those . . . ?” Lee asked in a hushed whisper.

“The Norns,” I said.

Turning his head, he looked at Mikill hunched over the steering wheel. “And he’s . . . blue.”

“I told you,” I said. “He’s a frost giant.”

Little Niflheim really is little. There’s nothing left of the buried city of Singapore but a single road and a handful of buildings, including the abandoned sawmill where Hel holds court. Or at least that’s what it looks like, insofar as it’s possible to see in the darkness and mist. I suspected that here, as elsewhere in the eldritch community, the laws of physics didn’t necessarily apply.

Duegars, the ancient Norse dwarves whose magic had excavated Little Niflheim and kept the whole thing from collapsing, came out to observe our passage, silent and watchful, looking as knotty and hardened as though they’d been carved from Yggdrasil II’s roots.

“What do they want?” Lee whispered to me.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard one speak. Maybe if you learn Old Norse, you can ask them.”

In the driver’s seat, Mikill made a muffled sound that might actually have been a chuckle before halting in front of the sawmill. “Come, Daisy Johanssen,” he said to me. “You are expected.”