“Do you have any counsel for me, my lady?” I asked her.

The Norn maiden reached out with her long, long silver talons to caress my cheek, razor-sharp edges rasping against my skin and drawing a shudder from me. She gave me a faint smile, the pale mist that filled the hollows of her eyes swirling. “Trust your heart.”

I waited to see if any more sooth was forthcoming, but she withdrew her hand and returned to rejoin the other two Norns in the endless process of tending Yggdrasil II’s roots, drawing buckets from the well.

“Any idea what that was all about?” I asked Mikill, climbing back into the dune buggy.

The frost giant shook his head, the ice in his beard crackling. “The Norns see many possible futures.”

“Are they ever more specific about them?” I asked.

“No.” Mikill revved the engine. “They reveal as much as they may without breaking the skein of time.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s just . . . um, the fate of the world? I mean, no pressure or anything.”

Mikill gave me a long, grave look and for a moment I thought he was going to say something profound about how no one chooses their destiny no matter how humble or terrifying, or something reassuring about the many possible futures, or maybe a pep talk about how I was only just coming into my own, and I possessed reserves of strength and courage I hadn’t yet begun to tap. After all, we’d spent a fair amount of time together on our excursions to and from Little Niflheim by now.

But no.

“Keep your limbs well within the vehicle during the ascent, Daisy Johanssen,” he said quietly to me before gunning for the rampway that spiraled up the inside of Yggdrasil II’s mammoth trunk.

So, yeah, that was the first disconcerting thing that happened the night Hel summoned me. I didn’t know what to think about it or even how to think about it. On an intellectual level, of course, I’d always known about the danger my existence posed to the Inviolate Wall. It’s why I tried to tread lightly when it came to the Seven Deadlies and why I resisted even considering my father’s temptation scenarios. But as long as I maintained my hard-fought self-control—or at least enough of it not to breach the Inviolate Wall itself—those were only hypotheticals.

This . . . this was different. This was an immortal soothsayer, one of the Norns, telling me that a moment of choice was coming for me and the fate of the world would hang in the balance. Or may hang in the balance, what with the many possible futures and all.

I sighed, a distinctly unsettled feeling in the pit of my belly.

It didn’t help when Mikill pulled into the alley beside my apartment and the dune buggy’s headlights tagged the sleek, matte-black form of a Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle parked there.