Chapter 898: A Dragon Slayer Named Sigurd [Bonus - ]

Chapter 898: A Dragon Slayer Named Sigurd [Bonus Chapter]

CLACK! CLACK!

The gates at the end of the bridge were thrown wide open, and the guards on them, tall broad-shouldered men and women in gleaming scale armor, snapped to attention the moment they saw Thor coming… then they saw who was walking beside her, and Silas watched their eyes go wide one after another down the whole line as they tried very hard to stay at attention and stare at the same time.

Thor marched straight past them with her chin up and her arm hooked firmly through Silas’s.

The street on the other side was paved with sunstone.

That one, at least, he’d gotten right.

The broad avenue climbing away up the mountain was laid with smooth pale golden slabs that held the light inside them and glowed softly underfoot, warm enough that he could feel it through the soles of his boots, and the effect of an entire city paved with it was like walking through the inside of a sunrise.

On either side of the avenue, halls and houses of golden stone rose three and four stories high, their timber beams carved with knotwork and painted in bright colors, their doors hung with shields and antlers and the skulls of beasts Silas didn’t recognize.

…The entire city was getting ready for a party.

Teams of workers were stringing lanterns between the rooftops in long sagging lines.

Dwarven smiths, short and broad and bearded to their belts, had set up anvils right in the middle of the street and were hammering out decorations of gold and bronze with a cheerful rhythmic din that echoed off every wall.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

Down a side street, Silas saw a barrel of mead so large it had to be rolled by six men at once, and behind it came another, and another, a whole procession of barrels the size of houses rumbling slowly up the hill toward the summit.

In an open square, an entire beast twice the size of an elephant was turning on a spit over a fire pit as wide as a swimming pool, while a dozen cooks swarmed around it with ladles of glistening glaze, and the smell coming off it made Silas’s stomach grumble so loudly that Thor heard it and laughed.

“The mead rivers,” Silas said, as they climbed. “Are those real too…?”

“Of course they’re real!” Thor said, insulted. “I told you about them, didn’t I…?”

“You told me there were rivers of mead flowing past every banquet table in Asgard,” Silas said patiently. “However you said it while you were four pints deep and standing on a table in my mess hall.”

“And I was right!”

She dragged him around a corner onto a wide terrace overlooking the lower city, and pointed down with great pride.

Running through the middle of the feast district below was a canal.

It was a long stone-lined channel about as wide as a garden path, winding between the banquet halls, and the liquid flowing through it was a rich honey-gold that glittered in the light.

Tables and benches lined both sides of it, and as Silas watched, a burly warrior leaned over the edge, dipped a drinking horn straight into the flow and drank it down in one long pull.

Silas looked at the canal, and then at Thor.

“That’s one river…” he said.

“It’s a river of mead!”

“It’s a ditch of mead, Thor…”

“It’s a river,” Thor said firmly, folding her arms across her breastplate and glaring at him. “It flows… It’s got a current and things live in it.”

“What lives in a mead canal?” Silas blinked.

“Dwarves, mostly,” Thor said. “On the last night of the festival…”

Silas looked at her for a long moment, then back at the canal, and found that he had nothing to say to that at all.

’What can I even say?’

They kept climbing.

As they rose higher, the crowds grew thicker, and people began to notice them properly.

Silas felt it before he heard it, a slow ripple of attention spreading out through the street as heads turned toward the towering silver-armored figure of Thor, then slid sideways to the dark-haired stranger on her arm, then stayed there.

Conversations stopped.

A woman carrying a basket of bread walked straight into a pillar… Two old men sitting outside a mead hall stopped halfway through raising their horns and simply stared with their mouths hanging open in their beards.

The whispers followed them up the street like a tide.

“Is that Lady Thor…?”

“Who’s that with her? I’ve never seen him before…”

“She’s holding his arm. She’s actually holding his arm. Since when does the Daughter of Odin hold anyone’s arm?”

“He doesn’t look like a god… Is he a mortal? Did she bring a mortal up here for the festival?”

Silas kept his face perfectly calm and his eyes forward, and Thor walked beside him with her chin up and a grin on her face that was getting wider by the second.

“You’re enjoying this…” Silas murmured.

“Of course I am!” Thor agreed, without bothering to lower her voice in the slightest. “Let them stare, Silas, it’s good exercise for their necks! Half these old gossips bet I’d come back alone, and I can hear them losing their coin from here…!”

She waved cheerfully at a cluster of gaping nobles on a balcony, and two of them dropped their drinking horns. “Ha! See? Good exercise for their hands, too!”

They came out onto a broad plaza halfway up the mountain, and the crowds parted ahead of them to reveal a long column of riders forming up across the far side of the square.

Silas slowed down to look at them, and Thor let him.

There were hundreds of them, maybe more, a vast army of warriors in mail and fur and gleaming helms, mounted on great shaggy horses with eight legs that stamped and snorted and threw their heads in the cold air.

Every one of the riders carried a spear or an axe or a sword across their saddle, and every one of them looked like they’d walked off the pages of a saga.

Their faces were scarred and weathered and fierce, and some of them were laughing and some were singing while many of them carried horns and drums slung over their shoulders.

Moving among them on winged horses that shone like polished silver were women in white-and-gold armor with feathered helms and long spears, calling out orders and riding up and down the ranks.

“The Einherjar,” Thor said quietly beside him, and there was real pride in her voice. “Father’s chosen heroes, the warriors of Asgard… Every one of them died gloriously somewhere and was carried up here by the Valkyries to fight for us…”

She nodded at the shining riders on the winged horses.

“And those are the Valkyries.”

“They’re riding out?”

“The Wild Hunt,” Thor said. “It’s tradition… The whole pantheon gathers under the Great Dome for the festival, every god and goddess in Asgard in one place at once, and that’s the one time the outer dark always stirs… The things beyond the borders can smell us, all bunched up together like that.”

She shrugged.

“So while we feast, the Einherjar and the Valkyries ride the borders and hunt anything that comes sniffing. They’ve done it every festival since before I was born.”

Silas watched the column a moment longer, at the hundreds and hundreds of warriors preparing to leave the city, and something about it tugged at the back of his mind.

’Most of Asgard’s heroes leave the city,’ he thought slowly, ’exactly when every god in Asgard is gathered in one room getting drunk…’

It wasn’t his city or his tradition, and the people who’d been running it for thousands of years probably knew far better than a mortal who’d arrived an hour ago over somebody’s shoulder.

The thought stayed with him anyway… What were the chances that there was going to be an attack probably?

’Well this is Asgard, who would be dumb enough to attack it…?’

“Lady Thor.”

The voice came from above them, clear and cold as a bell ringing over ice, and Silas looked up as a winged horse came down out of the sky.

WHOOSH!

It landed on the sunstone in front of them with a ringing clatter of silver hooves.

CLATTER!

The woman on its back swung down from the saddle in one smooth movement and stood before them, and the crowd around them drew back a few paces without seeming to notice they’d done it.

She was tall, almost as tall as Silas, and armored from throat to heel in white-and-gold plate etched with feathers, with a winged helm tucked under one arm and a long silver spear held loosely in her other hand.

Her hair was pale gold and braided tightly down her back, her face was striking and severe, all sharp cheekbones and hard lines, and her eyes were a cold clear grey that swept over Silas from head to toe in a single unhurried glance and made it very clear she’d found nothing worth looking at twice…

“Brynhildr!” Thor beamed. “You’re not riding out with the Hunt?”

“I was ordered to remain in the city for the festival, my lady,” Brynhildr said, and her voice was perfectly polite and perfectly cold. “The All-Father wants some of his captains close at hand while the halls are full…”

Her grey eyes slid sideways to Silas again.

“And it seems I’ve been sent to escort you to the summit. Word reached the high hall that the Daughter of Odin had returned with… company.”

“This is Silas!” Thor said proudly, and squeezed his arm. “My candidate!”

Brynhildr looked at Silas for a long moment, with exactly the expression of someone examining a horse they’d been told was a champion and privately believed was lame.

“A mortal…” she said.

“A Lord, Captain,” Silas said mildly. “Mortal, too, but I promise I’m housetrained, Thor checked you see.”

“A mortal Lord,” Brynhildr corrected, as though that were somehow worse, and turned back to Thor with the faintest crease of disapproval between her brows. “My lady, with respect… there are a dozen sons of the great houses who would have stood beside you gladly… There are heroes among the Einherjar who have slain giants and dragons. Is this truly the man you mean to present before the entire court?”

Thor opened her mouth, her face already darkening like a thunderhead, and Silas spoke first, without raising his voice at all.

“She’s allowed to choose who she wants, Captain…”

Brynhildr’s cold grey eyes moved back to him.

“She is,” she agreed. “And the court is allowed to judge her choice.”

She tilted her head a fraction. “I hope you’re stronger than you look, mortal Lord… The festival is not kind to the weak.”

“Then I’ll try very hard not to disappoint you,” Silas said, with a flat calm that made it impossible to tell whether he was being polite or mocking her. “I’d hate to ruin a first impression this warm.”

If Silas got the chance, he was going to slam this woman’s head into the pavement.

Brynhildr’s eyes narrowed, just slightly.

“Brynhildr, my shining swan, is this the one…?”

A man came striding through the crowd toward them, and the people in his path scattered out of the way.

He was tall and broad and absurdly handsome, with a mane of golden hair tumbling over his shoulders, a jaw that looked like it had been chiseled by a sculptor with something to prove and a smile so bright it practically glittered.

He wore a red cloak over polished mail, and at his hip hung a sword with a hilt of red gold set with a great green jewel.

He came to a stop beside Brynhildr, threw an arm around her armored shoulders, which she shrugged off immediately without looking at him, and looked Silas up and down with open cheerful amusement.

“So this is Lady Thor’s mysterious mortal!” he declared, loud enough for the whole plaza to hear. “Well met, friend! I am Sigurd, son of Sigmund, slayer of the great wyrm Fafnir!”

He paused, clearly waiting for a reaction.

Silas looked at him for a moment.

“Silas,” he said. “Lord of Blessed Land. I’ve got a dragon too, as it happens, but I didn’t have to kill her. I just fed her…”

Sigurd’s smile flickered very slightly.

“Slayer of Fafnir,” he repeated, a little louder, as though Silas might not have heard. “The great dragon? The wyrm of the Gnitaheath, who guarded the cursed gold of the dwarves? I slew him alone, from a pit beneath his belly, and bathed in his blood, and tasted his heart, and understood the speech of birds…”

“Bathing in dragon blood,” Silas said thoughtfully. “That sounds like a deeply unpleasant afternoon…”

“It was glorious!”

“The dragon part sounds glorious,” Silas agreed. “I just meant the bath. I’d have gone with soap…”

There was a short terrible silence and somewhere in the crowd, someone snorted into their mead.

Sigurd stared at him, his golden smile slowly stiffening on his face, and then he laughed a little too loudly and clapped Silas on the shoulder hard enough to stagger an ordinary man.

Silas’s shoulder didn’t move at all under his hand, and Sigurd’s eyes flickered down to it for half a second, and then back up again.

“Well!” Sigurd said brightly, taking his hand back. “You’re very calm, friend… I like that… We should drink together at the feast. And spar, perhaps, at the games.”

His smile widened again, all teeth.

“I’d very much like to see what kind of man Lady Thor thinks is worth bringing home.”