Page 29 of Last Thrall of Asgard

He kept trying to kiss me again, to goad me into continuing to ravage him, but I held him still, using my hand on his throat to pin him without squeezing.

The bed seemed to sway, like we were on the same skiff where his corpse had burned.

“Please.” Balder’s voice echoed, distant and yet too close, as if… as if…

I’d been poisoned.

I pitched to the side, realizing that the swaying, the haze and dizziness, meant something was wrong with me.

“This pit in me,” Balder sobbed, climbing atop me, but all I could see were shapes and shadows. “It has not been banished with my resurrection. Do you understand? How can I return to my brethren as lesser than what I was?How? How…?” He materialized clearer above me, enough for me to watch his eyes dart to the side and up along the wall replaying his death.

“Lesser?” I tried to focus, to not give in to the taint of his kiss that had no reason being there. “What… makes you lesser?”

“Because, for a moment that day, I welcomed my death.”

The fog of the poison left me, and my vision and sense of surroundings returned. There was no real taint to Balder’s kiss, only his belief that one should be there.

I reached for him, drawing his attention back to me.

“Why? You had everything. You were the favorite. The one your own family, the one all the gods loved and still love most. You were—”

“Perfect? Do you have any idea what it is like for everyone you know, and everyone you don’t know, to think you’re perfect? Nothing, nothing other than a draught of the weed that killed me could ever harm me, all my life. When so little can even touch you, you begin to feel numb, even before your body dies.”

“Balder…”

“It was only in death that I realized how numb I had become. If I am to live, I need to shine brightly again. But to do so, I need tofeel.” He took my hand from his cheek and moved it back to his throat, trying again to make me squeeze. “Please. Bring me to the brink, so I might feel something.”

“But why? Why like this?”

He stared at me, eyes swimming, and then looked behind him at the opposite wall. “It is what I dreamed.”

I had to look too, around him at the scene of his nightmares. I couldn’t see the dreams themselves, just Balder in disturbed sleep, but he clutched at his neck in the throes of his dreaming. Suffocating. Gasping for breath.

“It was the same then as when I died for real.”

“You were lung-pierced?”

“No.” He chuckled.

“But wasn’t the mistletoe that killed you hurled at you attached to a spear?”

Again, he laughed, pitiless of his plight. “Wouldn’t that have been a worthier tale? One that might have earned Valhalla? No, the plant fell into my cup, poisoned me, and my throat closed.”

I feared the sudden closing of my own throat then, but the poisoning I had experienced was only an echo. Balder was the one reliving it. He’d felt like a disappointment when he died. He felt that way now. And death,Hel, had seemed welcome to escape that.

He tried to reinvigorate my hold on him, but I used the leverage of my hand on his throat to roll us the other way and put myself on top again. How often had I convinced myself that liking or wanting something I actually didn’t somehow gave me power? How often had I been brought so low that I allowed worse?

“Oli, please—”

“Do you have scarves? Strips of fabric? Anything like that?”

Balder tilted his head at me. “This is Hel. You can have whatever you will into existence.”

I took my hand from Balder’s throat and held it out, envisioning what I wanted. In an instant, two sturdy lengths of cloth appeared, blue like my tunic.

I urged Balder to sit up so I could relieve him of his tunic first. There were slats making up the headboard, allowing me to wind the strips of fabric around them and around Balder’s wrists. He looked pleased when he realized what he thought I intended.

But pain was not the path to escaping numbness. I was learning that too.

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