1. Appearance on the battlefield
2. Back in the trenches
3. Interrogation
4. Field hospital visit
5. Gas in the night
6. Valhalla
7. Challenged by the Einherjar
8. Her sisters don't understand

It was the third month since you arrived at the front line. Trenches as far as the eye could see. If you looked over the trench walls, you could see the barbed wire spreading through no man's land. Of course, you didn't look. Snipers were a real threat. Just last week, one got Jenkins. Luckily, only a hit on the shoulder. Now he was back at the field hospital, while you were stuck with his watch.

The night had been uneventful, like most nights. You had stood watch, thanks to Jenkins. One more hour to daylight.

~Boom~ ~Boom~ ~Boom~

「INCOMING!」

It took just seconds, but now everyone was moving. Men huddled in smaller alcoves for sleep, made their way down to the bunkers. A young man slipped and scrambled back up. He couldn't have been older than eighteen.

「There is someone out there! In the wire!」His hand gripped your uniform. 「She is just standing there!」

~Peng~

「Get down you idiots!」One of the other soldiers yelled at you two. 「First we sit out the barrage then we defend!」

~Whiz~

You dared to peer over the wall. Surely that was just a madman speaking. But there you saw it. A coppery speck of color in the greyish backdrop. The orange hair draped over dark attire stood out like a lit candle in a cellar.

~Ka-boom~ A fountain of earth erupted in the middle of no man's land, just meters from the figure.

The barrage had lifted somewhere around an hour ago, and the attack that followed it had been repelled. The line had held. Somewhere down the trench a man was laughing, too loud. As if they were surprised to still be breathing.

Everything went so fast. She had come down over the parapet on her own or with help nobody remembered. It felt like a long time ago. No one had dared put a hand on her.

Up close she was taller than any of you, broad through the shoulder, wrapped in dark iron armor that looked older than the war. A spear in one hand. Orange hair bound in plaits pinned with what you were fairly sure was carved bone. She had looked at the men along the firestep one by one, and the men had gone quiet, and for a moment, just a moment, she had looked like something that belonged at the head of an army.

That was an hour ago.

Now she was sitting against the revetment with her back to the wood and her knees drawn up.

~drip~ ~drip~

「...ᚼᛅᚢᚱᛁ ᚦᛅ ᛁᚾ,」 she breathed, so low you almost missed it. (...hear them still.) Her eyes were open and fixed on nothing, somewhere past the duckboards, somewhere past the war. 「ᛁᚴ ᚼᛅᚢᚱᛁ ᚦᛅ ᛁᚾ.」 (I hear them still.) Her hand, the one not holding the spear, had found a loose buckle on her armor and was working it, open and shut, open and shut. 「ᚦᛁᚴᛁ. ᚦᛁᚴᛁᚦᚢ ᚾᚢ.」 (Quiet. Be quiet now.)

Whatever she was hearing, it was not the trench. Her lips kept moving around the same few sounds, over and over, and her stare stayed fixed on the middle distance, as though somewhere only she could see it the ground was still coming apart and would not stop.

Behind you, Sergeant Pembridge moved along the trench checking rifles without looking up from them. 「Leave her be,」 he said, to no one in particular. 「She's not the first one to come back from out there wrong. Won't be the last.」

~Boom.~ A shell, far off, on another part of the line rang out.

She flinched as though it had landed in her lap. The spear came up an inch, the knuckles white, and a sound came out of her that was not a word in any language you knew, a short broken thing, and then she had her other hand pressed flat over her own mouth as if to push it back in. Over the top of it her baby-blue eyes had finally found you. The imperious thing that had walked into the trench an hour ago was gone.

She did not look away. She did not lower the hand from her mouth either.

The dugout smelled of wet sandbag, candle smoke, and the tin tang of tea gone cold in its cup. After the noise of the line it was almost obscenely quiet down here, just the scratch of the lieutenant's pencil and, somewhere above, the ordinary grumble of a war taking the evening off.

Lieutenant Hargrove had been at it the better part of an hour. He had a sheet of buff paper in front of him with three lines of writing on it, and the patient expression of a man who used to teach history to boys who lied about their homework.

She sat across from him on an upturned ammunition crate, and she did not look like the woman who had mumbled to herself against the revetment earlier. The mask was back. Spine straight, armor catching the candlelight at its old repairs, the scar on her cheek thrown into a thin line of shadow. In the cramped little dugout she looked faintly absurd and entirely in command of it.

「Let us try it differently,」 Hargrove said, not unkindly. 「I do not need the truth. I have a colonel who needs a sentence. One sentence. 'The woman states that she is,' and then something I can write down without being quietly relieved of my command.」

She regarded him the way one regards a child explaining the rules of a game he has just invented. 「Thou askest me to make myself small enough to fit upon thy paper.」

「Yes,」 he said. 「That is precisely what I am asking.」

「I am Herfjötur. I am the fetter of armies. I have borne more men to the hall of the slain than thy whole grey nation has fathered.」 A pause. 「Write that.」

Hargrove looked at the paper. He looked at her. 「I can't write that.」

「Then thy paper is too small.」

The lieutenant set the pencil down and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. When he surfaced he was looking at you. 「You. You were on the firestep when she came over the top. You have had more sense out of her in an evening than I have managed all night.」 He gestured, exhausted, at the impossible woman occupying his dugout. 「Ask her something. Anything at all. I have run clean out of questions that have answers.」

She turned those baby-blue eyes on you, unhurried, and at the corner of her mouth was something that on a mortal you might have called the beginning of amusement.

「Aye,」 she said. 「Ask.」

They had let the whole section go back at once, which never happened, which meant someone above Hargrove owed someone else a favor. So you went together, down the duckboard tracks and onto a road that actual wheels used, to the casualty clearing station where they had taken Jenkins.

It was a different country back here. Tents the size of barns, marked with red crosses gone brown at the edges. The smell reached you before the doorway did: carbolic, ether, blood, and under it all the clean, wrong smell of a place trying very hard to be clean. Orderlies moved between the cots at a walk that was almost a run. Somewhere a man was being put back together and was letting everyone know about it.

Jenkins was sitting up, shoulder strapped, grinning like an idiot at the sight of you all.

「Took your bloody time,」 he said.

Callahan got to him first, naturally, with a tin of something he should not have had. Pembridge stood at the foot of the cot and nodded once, which from Pembridge was an embrace. The Ashford boy hovered, relieved and trying not to let it show. Beaumont touched the small wooden cross at his collar and said nothing, which was his way of saying a great deal.

And she appeared in the mouth of the tent and did not come in.

You found her there a moment later, the orange hair and the old iron absurd against the canvas and the rows of white cots, taking it all in with the slow, cataloguing attention of someone reading a language they almost know.

「I have walked a thousand fields the morning after,」 she said, quietly, not quite to you. 「I know the shape of this. The torn and the kept. The ones the ravens are owed.」 Her gaze moved down the long row of cots. More cots than a field should be able to hold. 「But they are not given to the ravens now. They are sewn. The rot is cut away and the man is handed back.」

~A surgeon passed, sleeves dark to the elbow, calling out a number. Not a name.~

Her jaw tightened at it. For just a moment her hand found the tent pole, and the word that came out of her was not English. 「ᚦᛁᛏᛅ ᛁᚱ ᛁᚾᚴᛁ ᚢᚱᚢᛋᛏᛅ.」 (This is no battle.) Then it was gone, and she was upright again, watching Jenkins wheeze with laughter at something Callahan had said.

「In the elder days,」 she told you, 「a man carrying that wound belonged to me, or to the ground. Here he belongs to a list. He will be mended, and counted, and spent again.」 She was quiet a while. 「I cannot yet tell if it is mercy, or only arithmetic.」

The alarm came as a sound first, the empty iron clang of a shell case being beaten somewhere up the line, and then as a single word passed down in the dark.

「GAS. GAS. GAS.」

You went for the mask the way you had drilled a hundred times. Open bag. Pull the mask out. Put it on and seal test. You didn't need the test, it was clear as day. A hole right above your eye. The mask had caught shrapnel during the last attack. You knew, this mask was done for, and so were you.

The gas went into you on the first breath. Not pain, not yet. A sweetness, almost, a smell like pineapple and pepper, and then your throat closed around it and your chest understood before the rest of your body could catch up. The second breath was like glass. The third was not a breath at all. You were on your knees in the bottom of the trench, the world gone the color of pond-scum. Your lungs were filling with something your own body was making, and a pink froth was coming at the corner of your mouth. Drowning. On dry land, blind, with the whole weight of France pressing down on top of you.

You did not hear her arrive. There was no sound to her.

A woman knelt in the green murk at your side, the gas did not affect her. Red hair the color of a struck match, eyes a hard, clear green that took you in and were not gentled by what they found. Whatever she was, she did not belong to this war. She belonged to something older.

She looked at you the way a craftsman looks at a job botched by someone else.

「Look at you,」 she said. 「Choking on a cloud, in the dark, over a field that will be lost again by Thursday. No blade, no enemy you could name, no song in it anywhere.」 The disdain sat plain on her face, and it was not for you exactly, but for the squalid, graceless waste of the thing. 「A thousand years I have gathered men off the ground. And this is what the age has made of dying. I preferer the old ways. Maybe the hurt was longer, but you were allowed to die.」 Her gaze landed on the shattered gas mask. 「Trying to keep everyone alive by force is a cruelty in it's own right.」

Your hand found her wrist, or at least tried to. It closed on nothing and slid.

She let it fall and watched it go. 「You should be bound for the grey country,」 she said, quieter. 「You know it. A death like this one earns the cold halls of Hel, not the bright one. By every measure I have ever kept, you have not earned what I am about to give you.」

Then something crossed her, and her jaw set.

「But Herfjötur named you.」 The name came out of her carrying weight, carrying history. 「My sister. Who has borne ten thousand to the hall and never afterward spoken me a single one of their names. She spoke yours. She would not say why, and she did not have to, because she does not slip, and she does not waste her regard on the unworthy.」 A curse, low and old, half of it flung at the absent woman who had set this on her. 「So either she is wrong for the first time in all the ages, or there is something in you I have grown too far from the world to see. I will trust her eye before my own tonight. Óðinn help us both for it.」

「There is one way to the halls of Valhalla that asks no battlefield,」 she said, and there was no lightness anywhere in her now. Her hand found the buckles of her armor and worked them open. 「By Óðinn, Herfjötur. You owe me for this, sister.」 Then she came back to you, and the weight came with her. 「It is old, and it is not small, and I do not offer it gladly. I have never once offered it before, in all my years. A life given over in the same moment it is taken. It will be the last thing you ever feel in this world, and I will be the one who carries what is left of you out the far side of it. So look at me. Not past me. Me, for my name is Rosa.」

Her hands ripped your uniform open, her hold was firm, the only warmth in all that drowning green, and she lowered herself onto you with the grave deliberation of a woman performing a rite she believes in even where she does not believe in the man beneath her. You cold feel the heat of her as it enveloped you. A gasp escaped her as her hips met yours. She kept moving, the fog drowned out the world around you.

「ᚦᚢ ᛁᚱᛏ ᚢᛅᛚᛁᚾ,」 she said, low against your ear. (You are chosen.)

The first breath did not burn.

For a while that was all, and it was enough. Air going all the way down into your lungs, clean and unhurt. Your body drew it in and asked for more. The painlessness of it took a moment before you remembered you had eyes, and opened them.

You were not in the trench, you were even nowhere in France. The room around you was small and dark-timbered and warm with a low fire. Someone had laid you out on a bench strewn with furs. It was a quiet place, set a little apart. The kind of room that was not impressive, not important at all. It exists only to be passed through or take a small break, and at its far end stood a pair of tall doors that were closed, except for a small gap. Through the gap between them came light, and noise.

A great hall lay beyond, packed wall to wall and roaring with laughter. Long tables ran the length of it under a roof that threw the firelight back in points of gold. Between the tables and across them were men fighting, breaking off to drink, and falling back in to fight again. They were men out of the deep reaches of the world's memory: a legionary in a cropped helm trading blows with a great fur-cloaked northman. A bronze-helmed spearman from some kingdom that had long since lost its name, a man in a shirt of iron rings laughing at something a bare-chested axeman had said. The newest face among them had been a long age in the ground before you were even born. They had the look of soldiers who had been at this a very very long time and meant to keep at it forever.

「Easy. You are allowed to sit up.」

Rosa was crouched on her heels beside the bench. Her red hair and green eyes had lost the hardness form the trenches. She watched you take stock of your own hands, your feet, the whole unbroken length of yourself. 「There. They always forget the breathing is the strangest part.」

Beyond the doors a roar went up, hundreds of throats at once, saluting some blow or fall. You looked toward it, and Rosa followed your eyes.

「Everyone who came before you,」 she said. 「They fight all day to keep their edge, they die for it, and they are whole again by supper. They drink until they drop, and in the morning they rise and do it over. They have kept it up a long while.」 Her mouth tilted, it was not quite a smile. 「Longer than they should have had to, of late. You are the first new face through those doors in more years than I care to number.」

It was then that you saw the other woman.

Herfjötur stood back against the far wall, in the part of the room the fire did not reach. You had seen her in a great many lights and never in this one. Her eyes were on you and would not come off, one hand had found the timber of the wall and pressed flat against it, as if without it her legs might not have served.

Her lips moved before any sound came. 「ᚦᚢ ᛁᚱᛏ ᚼᛁᚱ,」 she breathed, the old tongue slipping loose of her the way it did when the ground tore open. (You are here.)

She came a few steps toward you and stopped short, as though she had walked into glass. Her gaze travelled slowly down over you. She read you lie she read a field after the fighting had stopped, and you saw the instant the reading failed her.

「I know those fields. I have seen them myself,」 she said, very low, and not quite to you. 「There is no road from them that ends here.」

She turned her head and looked at Rosa.

Rosa's eyes dropped aside for half a breath, before they came back and met her sister's. Then she lifted one shoulder, barely, and turned her open hand toward you. Herfjötur watched her for a long moment, then her chin dropped ever so slightly. She closed her eyes and took in a shuttering breath.

「I see... A warrior's death indeed...」

When her eyes opened again, her fingers had stopped shaking.「You should not be here,」 she said, low and uneven. 「By every law I have ever kept, you should not be here at all.」 A slow breath came out of her as she relaxed her shoulders. 「And I cannot make myself sorry that you are.」

You had arrived wearing a soldier's uniform, which had bought you a few days of grace. A uniform is a uniform in any century and these were fighting men who knew the cloth of another fighting man when it came through the door. They took you for one of their own in the beginning. You were the first new face the hall had seen in longer than any of them could name. The longer they looked the less the coat and the man inside it seemed to agree with their initial assessment.

Tonight one of them decided to settle the matter.

He came down the length of the table toward you. A northman, a head and a half taller than you and built like a mountain. He wore fur at his shoulders and a beard you could have lost a fist in. He planted both hands on the table in front of you and leaned down until you could smell the mead and the iron on him.

「You wear a warrior's coat,」 he said, pinching your sleeve between two fingers. 「So. A soldier. And a soldier has dead men behind him, and a tale to go with them.」 He took your wrist and turned your hand over for the whole table to see, and dragged a thumb across your palm. 「But look here. Soft. No axe, no spear, no shield ever bore a callus into this. A fighting man's coat on a scribe's little hands.」 He let go of your hand with a dismissive sneer. 「So tell us, little one, since we have all been wondering and the asking has come to me. What did you kill? What was the fight that earned your seat among us?」

And there was no good answer, and you both knew it. You had killed nothing. You had knelt in the bottom of a trench and drowned on the air, blind, while guns you never saw did their work a mile away. No enemy before you, no blade, no fight at all. Only the green dark smoke filling your lungs.

The northman's grin began to sour as the silence held. Down the bench sat an old man who had watched in silence. He was grey to the roots, his face scarred and ancient. He sat there turning a horn slowly in his hands. He had said nothing all evening. Now he began, very quietly, to laugh.

「Leave the boy alone, Bjarki,」 he said. 「He gives you no fight because there was none. A man comes to this hall by one of two roads, and only two. The first is the blade, and there is no blade anywhere in this one.」 His eyes found yours, bright and merciless and delighted. 「Which leaves the other. The old road, that asks no field and no foe at all. Or rather the most dangerous foe out there, if you ask me.」 He spread his hands to the table, inviting every man to arrive with their own conclusion. 「He did not fall fighting, lads. He fell in a woman's arms, or rather in her lap. The men that fell in the wet, hot embrace are few.」

The silence that followed his explanation came apart all at once, a wall of sound, forty men maybe more, roaring. Someone hammering the boards until the cups jumped. It was not contempt. No man there would ever call you a fighter, but every one of them had wished to go out exactly like you. Buried in something soft and hot instead of cold and sharp, and none of them had managed it. They had conquered countries and kings. You had conquered the one field a man actually hopes to die on.

Bjarki hauled you up off the bench by one arm and brought a hand down on your shoulder hard enough to fold your knees. 「No warrior,」 he declared to the hall, half a jeer and half a salute, 「but by Óðinn, a conqueror.」 Then he swept the horn wide, mead slopping, and bellowed up at the rafters. 「A thousand years the choosers keep us waiting, and THIS is the catch they bring home at last. A soft little thing that died on its back, suckling a tit.」 He shook his head with laughter. 「Tell me, the eye that once picked giants and kings has not, after all this time, gone soft...」

He could not finish. A voice came across the hall, low and unhurried and colder than any blade in the room, and the whole table felt it land before they had the words for it.

「Careful, Bjarki.」

Herfjötur. She had been there the whole while, back in the shadow of a pillar where the firelight did not reach. The hall went still. Nobody had noticed her. She did not raise her voice. She came forward into the light. The men parted ahead of her like a tide.

「You have feasted at our judgment for a thousand years,」 she said. 「Every man at this table is here because one of us looked at him in the worst moment of his life and found him worth the carrying. You do not get to weigh that choosing now because its newest addition does not please you.」 Her gaze moved down the hall, and grown men who had died facing cavalry found other places to put their eyes. 「We have not gone soft. You have seen battle; he has seen worse, and yet did not complain. You stormed a wall for glory; he held a hole in the mud against the wrath of gods, and still would have been unworthy to be marked by our spears. Pray you never learn the difference between our mercy and our patience.」

It was an idle afternoon on the high terrace. Below, on the long field, the Einherjar were training. It was the same as every other day: the dead going through their forms, pairing off and circling and trading blows that were half in earnest, half routine. The steady clatter and ring of the drill drifted up the cliff face. No one was dying down there today. They were only keeping their edge.

Her sisters stood along the warm stone, not hurried about anything. One was rebraiding another's hair. Two were arguing without heat over a wager from the morning. The drift of practice-iron came and went. Not one of them so much as turned her head toward it.

Herfjötur stood a little apart at the rail, and she had stopped speaking for some time now.

You saw it before any of them did, because you had seen it before, in other faces, in the mud of France. The sound kept up its slow rolling rhythm, rise and fall, rise and fall, and with each turn of it something in her drifted a fraction further off. Her knuckles had whitened on the rail. Her breathing had gone shallow. Her eyes were open and fixed on the harmless drill below.

Down on the field a knot of them fell into a shield drill, beating a slow rolling cadence into the afternoon.

~Boom. Boom. Boom.~

She flinched as though each one landed on her, and her hand came off the rail to press flat over one ear.

「ᚦᛁᛏᛅ ᛁᚱ ᛁᚾᚴᛁ ᚢᚱᚢᛋᛏᛅ,」 she breathed, very low, to no one. (This is no battle.)

The hair-braiding stopped. One of her sisters looked over, a tall one, gold-haired, easy and unworried a moment before. She looked at Herfjötur, her eyes narrowing.

「Sister?」 she said. 「What is this?」

The others were turning now too, the ease sliding off their faces. They looked at her, and did not understand what they were seeing. Bafflement. A slow, creeping dread. These were women who had walked through slaughter time and time again, who dealt terror to mortals and had never once tasted it themselves. And here was one of their own, the army-fetter, the breaker of formations, undone by the sound of men at practice.

「Herfjötur.」 The gold-haired one came and took her by the arm and gave her a small shake. 「There is nothing here. It is only the drill. You have stood in a thousand true battles, sister. This is not even one of them.」

The shake, the raised voice, the hand closing on her arm. Herfjötur's eyes squeezed shut and her lips moved faster, the old tongue spilling out of her in a thin unbroken thread, 「ᚦᛁᚴᛁᚦᚢ ᚾᚢ, ᚦᛁᚴᛁᚦᚢ ᚾᚢ,」 (be quiet now, be quiet now,) and she had begun, very slightly, to shake.