“I don’t know if he can, my lady,” I said. “It’s an unwanted burden, and I don’t know if he can accept it in good faith. But even if he can . . .” The icy mists of Little Niflheim were creeping into my bones. I balled my hands into fists and pushed them into the pockets of my motorcycle jacket, hunching my shoulders into its collar against the cold. “He’s claimed your demesne as his home. And as your agent, I’ve declared him under my protection.”

“I see.” Hel’s ember eye blazed open. Behind her, the attendant frost giants murmured and then fell silent.

Hel gazed at . . . I don’t know what. Although I stood in her line of vision, I was pretty sure she was looking through me, her lucent, long-lashed blue eye and the smoldering red one in its charred socket gazing at whatever goddesses contemplate in the unfathomable distances of time.

I stood and shivered, alternating between blowing on my ice-cold fingers and shoving them back into my pockets.

Hel’s gaze came back from the distance. “Then it is a matter of honor, Daisy Johanssen,” she said somberly to me. “And we must fight.”

“How?” I asked her.

She beckoned to Mikill. He strode forward, bowing and leaning toward the saw-blade throne to hear her bidding, then striding out of the old sawmill.

We waited.

It’s hard to calculate the passage of time in the underworld, at least for this half-human mortal. Hel and her attendants simply went motionless, suspended in a kind of divinely patient stasis. I had the feeling that whether minutes or days or years passed, it was all the same to them.

Me, not so much. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, trying to stay warm without looking utterly uncomfortable.

When Mikill returned, he was followed by a retinue of duegars, the taciturn dwarves whose magic had carved out the realm of Little Niflheim beneath the shifting sands. All of them knelt before Hel’s throne, and the foremost among them raised something bright and shiny in his gnarled hands. Returning once more from the distance, Hel accepted it with both hands, the fair and shapely right hand, the hand of life, and the blackened claw of her left, the hand of death.

She held it aloft. It was an old-fashioned lantern wrought of silver metal, the kind with shutters that block out the light, the kind you could imagine smugglers using to signal ships at sea. But either it wasn’t lit or the infamous dwarfish workmanship was so exacting that not a single ray of light escaped it.

Hel opened the shutter with her right hand.