The ball was flush with enchanted fey foods - boar's heads with jellied eyes, lamb pot pies, honey baked salmon, fingerling potatoes roasted to perfection, venison from the Isa's mountain reindeer herds, radish cakes, apples, pears, persimmons, citrons, and blackberries and raspberries grown in Maren's enchanted gardens, all carried about by short and stout duergar of dwarven stock. I helped myself to the feast, but Rosy helped herself more.Above all, there was frenzied dancing in a great cavernous ballroom lit by a cosmic shatterglass diamond that grew from the lofty, twisted ceiling - the walls were draped in tapestries depicting Queen Jarngrimr's great lindworm hunts, boar slayings, solving of riddles of enchanted castles to gather bounty, and her fighting King Hakkon. The huldre and Isa pounded out a quadrille that was maddening in its speed."Isn't this marvelous?" Fylja asked, taking a deep whiff of marzipan cake that Maren and Rosy had prepared. "And lo

And so, I set off claymore abreast, aback Grimnr, to fell the white hart of artistry.Jarnja took to the skies, and we set about our destiny.The God's Woods were thick fir, birch, and hemlock and yew, copses of trees weaving about like lover's embraces as I rode the gallows horse's thick fetlocks in search of the elusive white hart. I had a pack of bow and arrows borrowed from Felice, and as Grimnr cantered along, his hooves like a thundering melody, a great rain began to fall.There was a High Seat like Jarnja's father Wotan the Raven's own outlook in Asgard standing tall, carved of the tallest tree I had ever seen, in the center of the forest. It was from there that Jarnja watched me, looking like a gargoyle high above her throne.I came to a fjord where the Watermen had docked and found hart foottracks in the mud."Laguz of the lamb's ear, Laguz like flowing Njordr – bespell the tracks of your passenger, and show me th

"You are a monster, us Tuniskans know never to trust Wotan or his ilk," I heard Yolanda's amber voice cut through the air like a knife as Gullinkambi alighted on Jarnja's High Seat in the Dark Woods of the Northern Holds."I take after my mother Sithgunt the Seeress. My father takes as he will. Tempered by Jotun blood, I would not make snap judgments about the bergresar daughters of the Seeress," Jarngrimr said softly, pacing on her wolf's feet as her black cloak breezed on the frozen wind. She was skinning the white hart left over from Eleleth's apparition, and Heith was by her side, divining portents from the cursed hart's offal."Turiel could have died, and if I were still watching on from the branches of Yggdrasil, my body trapped in her amethyst godstone, unable to aid my girlfriend, she would have been mincemeat," Yolanda chided sternly, taking a whetstone and grinding her Tuniska scimitar to a sharp, shining point. The curved blade shimmered in the midni

In the High Seat of Yggdrasil, in Wotan’s keep, he gazed keenly at his enemy Eleleth, the White Seraph. Gritting his teeth, the Gray Gizzard Wolf – Wotan the Raven – spat at the ground past his gold teeth, and swiveled the telescope in disgust at the astronomy window of stained glass.Frieda, his wife, Queen of Valkyries, stepped through with a mead bowl and ruby sword, her tears amber. Lust stirred under the stirrups of Wotan’s faded blue trousers, and he grinned at his wild wife.“Free, a drink for your parched ember, from your golden lap,” Wotan winked.Freida grinned, her strawberry blonde hair, peach skin, and freckles aglow as her eyes glowed like copper. “Not my lap – my sword.”Freida, Warrior Mother of the pantheons of the Northern Holds and land of midnight sun, took her blade – shaped like a longsword – it’s opal flesh shining like moonlight out of i

By midnight, we had entered the Lokabrenna Strait, where the Pole Star resided, and Jarnja had not tired yet. Loki’s bondage isle, the Serpent Spit, rose in jagged obsidian cliffs up into the aether.Jarnja cautioned me back. Yuri and Dominic docked the boast. I held a breath I didn’t even know I was capable of taking:“Fylja, manage the steering against the swells as we are docked. Turry and Yola, take wing, and we shall clear this strait of monsters and sea beasts as Heith keeps the tides at bay. Dominic and Yuriel, manage the ship and hold the magick binding Naglfari together. Ask Aegir and Ran’s blessing. Here.” She handed them a flagon. “Offer them this mead.”I looked at Gullinkambi, then at Yolanda, then at Jarnja again.All three grinned knowingly at me – the rooster included.“Gullinkambi, let’s go!” I said, and he swelled into his giant cockere