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She looks on the verge of falling apart. There’s nothing I can actually do for her. She’s tortured herself into an impossible place: if she can’t handle it, no one can. Indignant anger kindles inside of me, but I take a breath. And then another, trying to calm my shaking hands. It’ll do no good to shout at her—she’ll just get her back up. I know that now. When I open my palm, the key has pressed its shape into my skin. “God. Alright. Okay.”

“Thank you.” In an instant, she sits up a little taller, commanding her skin into something a little more of the being I met: cool and focused. “Now, what was I saying before?”

God, this feels like manipulation. I don’t know what’s real. “What do you mean?”

“When you found me on the floor, what was I saying in Icelandic? You have command of that language, don’t you?”

“I … I mean…” I’m suddenly hesitant to tell her. Because is that the thing that’ll tip the scale and send her over the edge with me? She’s already acting erratically, and I’ve snapped back enough times to know I’m close to her shit list, no matter how much she likes me under her pain.

On this chest we place the iron with these needles we pierce these soles in this house we shatter a new door this beast we banish once and all—

We kill her we kill her we kill her—

Marcella looks at me expectantly. Maybe she’s too tired to charm me, and for once, I have the upper hand. I clear my throat. “I think it was … a burial chant.”

I think back to the diary I found in the Rare Book Room, trying to slot together my fading memory of the pages with what Marcella was saying.

The lord and protector of the realm set a party to root out the beasts—

“A burial chant,” Marcella repeats. Her posture tightens, her lips pursing. “What kind of burial chant?”

“A ward,” I say slowly, “against the undead. But I don’t see how this connects to the journals, or the Classics department and the vættir.”

“Perhaps I should tell you about … the time I died. The time I returned.”

Marcella holds out an olive branch, and I flick my eyes to her. “I don’t want you to feel as though you have to.”

“I think,” she replies softly, “it might be important. If I was saying this while out of my mind, it must mean something. Perhaps … something is happening to me. And—” She falters. “And I think I need your help. Ever since I got to Preston, ever since I drained Arjun, I’ve been sick. Fading. I thought … maybe it was in my head. But now? After last night? I’m not sure. I think I’m changing again, and my body is repeating the horrid score it learned the first time around.”

I place the key carefully back down and lean forward in my chair. “Okay.”

Marcella sits down across from me, her face stricken. “When this is over, I don’t want you to tell a soul.”

TWENTY-FIVEStúlka Í Dyrhólaey

It was a year of smoke and blood, the one my family’s group met the new land. We sailed on vast boats in whiteout storms, slaughtering chickens and sheep if only to feel the warmth of their gore on our hands.

I was the eldest daughter of one of the shipbuilders, a man named Þorstéin. His father before him was a boatbuilder, and his grandfather, and he said he could trace his lineage to the very first of the craftsmen, to the root of the gods.

At that time, women were not boatbuilders–and I would not shadow his name by picking up the mallet and iron spikes. Instead, he brought me across the sea. There, he said, would a husband take me into his own home, would get children upon me, would convert me to the new god.

I remember the ocean the day we landed on their shore, a troubled gray shot through with glacial water. The land broke open for us, like a woman’s legs, like a cracked egg, as our longboats lanced through its muck.

He was waiting for me when I arrived, he and his sister. He wore a breastplate made of battered silver, braids twisting his ruddy hair. She held the hem of a long skirt in one hand, her head bowed, the wind tossing her shrouded locks. But she looked up and caught my eye with hers, a twinkling brown.

She was to be my sister. But I had always been greedy. I wanted more.

On the wedding night the bards sang beautiful songs to my marriage and it fit like a poorly made glove. The men became drunk, raucous, and I left my husband behind. It was my right to refuse the marriage bed, for he was ill-suited to the task.

But his sister, she lay down on a bed of soft furs and begged me to explore her pale body. The revelry hid her cries, and I swallowed the remainder with my own mouth. I took her ecstasy and I became a frenzied animal.

I visited her every night. I snuck between the longhouses during long winter months, using herbs to keep my body pliant for her pleasure. I learned the heat of her body, the spill of her curses, the way to re-plait her ruined hair.

I did not learn well enough the way to be a cowering wife. Instead, I became like a man: I wore trousers and cut my hair to my ears. They whispered at my ugliness, yes, but they still whispered for me. My husband’s sister reveled in my hearty body, bought me fine horses and tucked charms into my leather doublets.

One night when we had enjoyed one another’s company, she sat combing my hair, professing a desire for the onyx locks she would never have. I felt her disquiet and knew the words of the folk grated her, felt her bending to their pressure like a sapling in the wind. I thought, foolish though I was, that I could keep her safe by stealing her away. And I told her:

I would move mountains