Page 45 of The Fanged One

"Priest," the wanderer said. "If ever you should meet a wolf with one eye like winter and a girl who can sing the dead to sleep, send them down the path I could not finish. The treasure is theirs to claim, if any."

This is what the wanderer told me. I write it down. May God forgive me, and the wise find this account in time. May the foolish never know it exists.

Brother Eyvindr.

The first night of Advent.

22

Linnea's writing hand had started cramping somewhere around the river of swords, but she shook it out and did her best to keep up until Fenris had finished. She flexed her fingers under the table and looked down at the pages she had filled with the wanderer's path through the realm of the dead.

Tor stood in the kitchen archway with a beer he had forgotten to drink. Ciara leaned a hip against him. On the far couch, Layla had gone boneless against Arne, her pen slack between two fingers, and for once she wasn't chewing it.

Fenris closed the little book over one thumb to keep his place, his eyes distant. The lamplight caught the silver scar at his throat. Linnea made herself look back at her notebook.

Von, on the other hand, was lit up like a tree at Yule. He came up off the chaise and crossed to Layla's couch with one palm already out.

"Give me your copy, sweetheart. Quickly, before it slides out of my head."

Layla handed over the spiral pad. "What are you thinking? Don't leave us in suspense because I have no idea what I just wrote."

Von clicked the pen, dropped into a crouch at the low table, and flipped back through the pages until he found what he wanted.

"The wanderer is Havi," he said, jotting down a note above Layla's writing.

Linnea's pen stilled. "Are you sure?"

"I've spent my whole life reading this god's footprints. This is exactly the kind of fuckery he gets up to." Von was already underlining something else. "The Norns bound his tongue. Fine. They stopped him from saying it plainly to anyone who mattered. They didn't stop him from wandering up to a half-mad priest on the cold ass end of nowhere, telling him a story sideways, and making him hide it where only the right people would ever dig it out. A priest who got himself excommunicated within a year for being a heretic, so no one ever took him seriously. Havi always lays breadcrumbs, and he's had thousands of years to do it."

"That sounds like my uncle," Fenris said with a gruff laugh. "He told me once that the best lie is a true thing told to the wrong listener. I laughed and told him that my father was rubbing off on him."

Linnea laughed and quickly tried to smother it. Fenris grinned back at her. Heat pooled in her stomach, warming her up in places she had been cold all day. It was terribly unfair that he could do that just with a grin.

"Okay, this is starting to make sense," Von said, writing more notes.

"Glad it is to someone," Arne commented. "You need to talk us through it because I'm still confused."

"Hel offers our wanderer a treasure, but she riddles it. The way you riddle something that's dangerous or ephemeral." Von shifted on his heels and sat back on the floor. "The Finnish Kalevala does the same thing with the Sampo. It never states what it actually is, except that it was forged with random things like swan's feathers, milk, barley, and black wool, but it provides endless wealth to whoever possesses it."

Everyone looked a bit lost, but they seemed to reach a silent agreement to let Von keep talking without asking follow-up questions. He knew what he was on about, and that was what mattered.

"The mare that bore the swift one." Von wrote a single word beside it in small, sharp capitals and kept moving down the page. "The salmon's tail that escaped the net. The falcon's wing that crossed Jötunheim. The mother that births monsters and the father that loves them. The brother bound by oath to the brother who wears the cloak of crows."

The pen stopped tapping. Linnea leaned over to read what he had set in the margin beside each line. The same word, five times, in Von's obsessive scrawl.

Loki. Loki. Loki. Loki. Loki.

"The mare," Layla said slowly, moving off Arne's chest to lean forward to read Von's notes over his shoulder. "Loki turned himself into a mare and birthed Sleipnir, Odin's eight-legged horse. The swift one."

"The salmon is when he tried to bolt, and they caught him in his own net," Von added. "The falcon cloak he borrowed from Freya. Loki is both mother and father of monsters." His eyes flicked to Fenris and winked. "We have one of them sitting in the room being very un-monsterlike."

"I have my moments," Fenris said and winked back, making Von giggle.

Linnea's eye twitched. "Focus now, flirt later."

Von's brows shot up at her tone before his smile turned sugary sweet. "There is always time⁠—"

"The brother who wears the cloak of crows is Havi, Loki's blood-brother, right, Von?" Arne interrupted, trying to pull the conversation back on track.