The old woman looked at her. ‘Who?’ she said.

‘Balder, Balder the Beautiful. The People’s Paragon. My son.’

‘That’s very sad,’ the old woman said. Her eyes were resolutely dry. ‘But why should I weep for him, eh?’

‘Because, united in grief,’ said Frigg, ‘we can conquer Death itself.’

‘What? So I won’t die?’ said the crone.

‘No,’ said Frigg. ‘But Balder may live.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said the old crone. ‘But this seems quite unfair to me. Why should Balder’s death be any more important than mine? Is it because he was handsome, when I’m just a jumble of tired old bones? Or is it because he was young, and I’m old? I’ll have you know I was young once. And I value my life at least as much as this Balder, whoever he was, valued his.’

‘You don’t understand . . .’ Frigg tried to explain.

The old woman smiled. ‘My dear, no one does. We all get a life, whatever that means. Go home. Grieve for your son. But don’t expect me to weep for him, when he would never have wept for me.’

Frigg’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘Who are you?’ She fingered the rune Bjarkán.

The old woman shrugged. ‘I’m no one,’ she said.

‘You’re lying. I see your colours.’

Under the old woman’s cloak, I grinned.

‘Please. By all the gods,’ she said.

‘The gods can hang, for all I care,’ I said. ‘Go away and leave me alone.’ And at that I closed the door in her face and grinned to myself at a job well done.

And that was that; Balder stayed dead, Hel had her due, and I had something to bargain with – something that, three hundred years later, would earn me an unexpected prize.

Still, all that was yet to come. For now, I had other things on my mind. The End of the Worlds, for example, as well as my own imminent death . . .

Lesson 7 Names, II

LESSON 7

Names, II

Sticks and stones may break my bones . . .

Lokabrenna

AFTER THAT, you might have thought I would have settled down for a while. Adopted a low profile, perhaps. Taken up a hobby. But there was something in the air; a scent of revolt, a whiff of smoke. War was coming. I wanted to fight. So shoot me. It’s my nature.

It wasn’t that I was remotely sorry for what had happened to Balder. Sorry isn’t really a word that figures in my vocabulary. All the same, I didn’t feel as good as you might have expected. I found myself growing restless. I couldn’t sleep. I was irritable. I spent too long in bird form, trying to beat my increasing sense of imprisonment. I suffered terrible nightmares in which I was shackled and blinded, surrounded by venomous snakes that crawled all over my naked body.