Chapter 903: Odin’s Bastard Daughter

“Ready, Silas?” she asked, without bothering to lower her voice.

“Not remotely,” Silas said. “But I’ve walked into worse rooms than this one with less reason…”

“Ha! That’s the spirit!” Thor reached over and patted his head, right there at the top of the stairs in front of half the pantheon. “Chin up, then… Let’s go and give the old aunts a heart attack!”

They started down the long staircase toward the floor of the Dome, and the noise began to change.

It started at the tiers nearest the stairs and spread outward like ripples from a dropped stone.

Heads turned, then more heads, and the roar of conversation faltered and dropped and became a long, rolling hiss of whispers that swept around the entire Dome.

By the time they were halfway down the stairs, Silas could feel thousands of eyes on him, the same weight he’d felt in Valaskjálf but multiplied a hundred times over…

He kept his eyes forward and his face calm and walked down the stairs beside the most beautiful woman in Asgard, and didn’t stumble once.

Then, from somewhere above them, came a long mournful note.

HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Every head in the Dome snapped upward.

Along the rim of the Dome, silhouetted against the enormous white moon, stood a long line of riders.

Hundreds of them stretched around the entire rim of the bowl, warriors in mail and fur on their great eight-legged horses, their spears raised against the sky, and among them the shining Valkyries sat on their winged steeds with their silver wings spread wide.

At their head, on a horse as white as snow, a tall figure lifted a great curved horn to her lips and blew again.

HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The Einherjar roared back as one, and the sound was like a wave breaking against a cliff, and then the whole host turned their horses and rode straight off the edge of the rim into the open sky.

The horses kept running as if nothing had changed, galloping across empty air as if it were solid ground, a vast river of riders pouring out of Asgard and streaming away across the face of the moon, horns blowing and banners streaming and the Valkyries wheeling above them like silver birds.

They spread out across the night as they went, splitting into columns and racing away toward the far edges of the sky, until the whole horizon was full of tiny glittering specks of light, and then they were gone.

…The Wild Hunt had ridden out.

The Dome erupted into cheering, raising horns and banging tables, and the noise shook the stone under Silas’s feet.

He watched the last of the specks vanish into the dark and felt it again, that small cold tug at the back of his mind.

’Hundreds of warriors,’ he thought. ’Maybe thousands… And every single one of them just left, huh?’

He looked around the Dome as they reached the floor.

There were still warriors scattered among the crowd, he could see a few dozen of them sitting at the tables or standing guard at the entrances in their gleaming scale armor, and he spotted Brynhildr standing stiffly at the foot of the high table with her winged helm under her arm.

Sigurd sat at one of the lower tables, laughing loudly and surrounded by admirers.

Not far from him sat a third figure Silas hadn’t seen before… He was a huge ancient man, broad as a door and scarred all over like a battlefield, with a white beard cut short and a face carved out of old leather.

He had six or seven horns of mead lined up in front of him, and he was ignoring the entire festival with tremendous concentration.

“Starkad,” Thor murmured, following his gaze. “The oldest hero in Asgard… Father blessed him and cursed him at the same time, a long time ago. He’s lived three lifetimes and fought in every war since the world was young. He doesn’t like anybody.”

“Does he like you?”

“Nope,” Thor said cheerfully. “I punched him through a wall when I was nine so he hates me a lot~”

Silas blinked Starkad away next to Brynhildr and Sigurd.

…That made three heroes left in the city that he knew of, along with maybe a few dozen ordinary warriors.

He didn’t like the odds but it wasn’t his city.

They reached the foot of the high table, and the herald from the throne hall stepped forward and struck his raven staff on the stone.

TOK!

“The presentation of candidates,” he called out, and his voice rang across the whole Dome, magically carried to every tier. “By the ancient law of the Festival of Ancestors, let every unmated heir of the All-Father’s line stand before the court and present the one they have chosen!”

The crowd hushed and the presentations began.

They went in order of age, and the herald called each heir by name.

…Most of them weren’t Odin’s own children but grandchildren and great-nieces and cousins of the old bloodline, young gods and goddesses who stepped up onto the dais one by one with their chosen partners.

A tall god of the hunt presented a shy goddess of spring, and the crowd applauded politely.

A proud young goddess with copper hair presented a handsome lord from one of the great houses, and the crowd cheered.

Some of the matches made the old aunts in the front row nod their approval, and some made them purse their lips, and one made a white-haired old goddess in the second tier stand up and walk out in disgust, which the crowd thought was hilarious.

Then the herald called.

“The Lady Loki, second daughter of the All-Father!”

Loki skipped up onto the dais in her pink bomber jacket, beaming, and dragged someone up after her by the wrist.

It was a dwarf.

He was a small terrified dwarf with a magnificent orange beard and a look of pure frozen panic on his face, and he was wearing a sign around his neck that had large painted letters.

[I WAS PAID.]

The whole Dome went silent.

“This is Brokk!” Loki announced brightly. “He’s my candidate! He’s a blacksmith, and he’s very good at it, and I owe him a lot of money, so this seemed like the most efficient way to settle it…!”

“I didn’t agree to this,” Brokk whispered hoarsely to the crowd. “I want that on the record… I didn’t agree to any of this…”

The silence held for one more second.

Then Odin threw his head back and laughed so hard he nearly fell out of his chair, and the entire Dome dissolved into howls of laughter along with him.

The old aunts in the front row turned purple, Frigga covered her eyes with one hand, and Loki took a deep, triumphant bow and skipped off the dais, dragging poor Brokk behind her.

“The Lady Fenrira, youngest daughter of the All-Father!”

Fenri stood up from where she’d been sitting at the foot of the high table with Tyr holding her chain, and the laughter faded very quickly.

She was still wearing her sports top and track shorts, and she stayed at the foot of the dais and lifted her chin, and her scarlet-amber eyes swept across the crowd like a hunting wolf’s.

“I don’t have a candidate,” she said bluntly, her rough voice carrying to every tier. “I don’t want one but if I ever do, it’ll be the first one who beats me in a fair fight.”

Her eyes stopped on Silas and stayed there.

The Dome went very quiet, and Thor’s hand on Silas’s arm turned into a vise.

“Fenri,” Thor said through her teeth, with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Sit down…”

Fenri grinned with all of her sharp teeth and sat down with her tail swishing happily behind her.

The herald cleared his throat with great care.

“The Lady Thor,” he announced. “Daughter of Odin, first heir of Asgard!”

Thor let go of Silas’s arm, lifted her chin and climbed the steps onto the dais in her storm-grey gown, and the whole Dome fell so silent that Silas could hear the lanterns hissing overhead.

She turned to face the crowd, all those thousands of eyes, and planted her feet the way she planted them before a fight, and grinned down at all of them as though she couldn’t imagine anything more fun.

“This is Silas!” Thor declared, and her voice boomed out across the Dome like thunder rolling over a valley. “Lord of Blessed Land, in the Umbral Basin, born on Earth! He’s a mortal, and he cooks better than any chef in Asgard, and he’s not scared of me, and he’s not scared of Father, and he’s not scared of anyone!”

She held out her hand to him. “He’s my candidate, and I don’t care what any of you think about it!”

Silas climbed the steps and took her hand.

The Dome exploded.

It was half outrage and half delight, and it was the loudest noise Silas had heard since Odin’s laugh in the throne hall.

The old aunts in the front rows were on their feet, shrieking and waving their fans, a mortal, a mortal from Earth, the first heir of Asgard and a mortal!

Gods in the upper tiers were pounding the tables and roaring with laughter… Someone threw a cake.

From high up in the rafters of the Dome, where she’d somehow climbed in the last thirty seconds, Loki was standing on a beam and screaming.

“That’s my Big Sister’s man!”

She shouted through cupped hands at the top of her lungs, and Brokk was clinging to the beam beside her with his eyes shut.

And at the high table, Odin was laughing and clapping his huge hands together, and Frigga was smiling a small quiet smile.

Thor stood beside him through all of it with her chin up and her hand gripping his, grinning out at the howling crowd like a general who’d just won a battle, and then, as the noise finally began to fade, she reached over and patted his head in front of the entire court.

The old aunts in the front row made a noise like a flock of startled geese.

The herald waited for the noise to die down, which took a very long time, then he consulted his list, and something shifted in his face, a slight stiffening, as though he’d reached a name he’d been dreading.

“The Lady Hela,” he announced, much more quietly. “Third daughter of the All-Father…”

The noise in the Dome changed again.

The sound shifted and soured, the laughter draining out of it and something colder creeping in underneath, and Silas heard the whispers start up all around him.

“The bastard’s here?”

“I didn’t think she’d have the nerve to show her face…”

“The giant’s whelp, sitting at the All-Father’s table, can you believe it?”

At the far side of the Dome, a woman was walking slowly down the long staircase alone.

She was tall and slender and dressed in a gown of black and white silk, split straight down the middle, one half pure snow and the other half deepest night.

Her hair was split the same way, falling long and straight past her shoulders, brilliant white on the left and pitch black on the right, and her face was striking and elegant, with high cheekbones and dark, dramatic eyeshadow that swept out toward her temples like wings.

As Silas watched, her skin seemed to shift with every step she took.

It was a warm rosy color one moment, almost glowing, and then, as the whispers reached her, it paled and paled until it was the cold grey-white of marble in a tomb.

Her eyes were the strangest thing of all.

They were black and white at once, like two stars, one dark and one bright, swirling slowly around each other in the depths of her gaze.

She walked down the stairs with her chin up and her back perfectly straight as though the whispers were the sound of rain on a roof she didn’t need to worry about, and nobody walked beside her.

She reached the floor of the Dome, climbed onto the dais without a word and turned to face the court, and for a long moment, she simply looked at them, sweeping her star-eyes slowly across the tiers until the nearest whisperers began to shift in their seats and look away.

“I have no candidate…” Hela said.

Her voice was cool and perfectly steady as it carried through the silence like a blade being drawn.

“I didn’t come to Asgard to be judged by people who can’t hold my gaze,” she went on, just as calmly. “I came because my father’s festival calls every heir of his blood, and I keep my duties… That’s all.”

The faintest edge of a smile touched her dark-painted lips.

“When I choose someone, it’ll be someone worth the trouble of standing up here… I’m told that’s a rare thing in these halls.”

There was a long ugly pause.