Yule
In deep winter Bilskirnir was buried to the eaves on its north side, and the snow had made a second roof over the first. On the south side the drifts stopped short of the walls, where the warmth came through. Roskva knew the house mostly by its warm places now. The kitchens were the warmest, and after them the goat stall at the east end.
She knew her brother by the water.
Every morning before light he came past the kitchen door with two buckets for the cook. Every morning the cook shouted at him to look sharp. Thjalfi did not look sharp. He walked to the well and walked back, and the water in the buckets hardly moved. Then he took a crust from the end of the board and went away east to the stall, and she did not see him again until dark.
Counting was a thing Roskva could do with her hands busy, so she had counted the mornings. On Yule eve the count was sixty-one. In sixty-one mornings he had not run once.
"Every hearth," said Sif, standing in the kitchen doorway with her keys in her fist. "Every one in the house, tonight, and kept in till morning. Who has the steadiest hands?"
The cook pointed at Roskva with a ladle. So she was given an iron pan of coals with a long handle and a basket of kindling. Then she was sent off into the house to light Yule.
East first, because she knew the way. The passages were cold enough to show her breath. She came to a room she had only ever passed in the dark, with a long hearth swept clean, and knelt and fed it and blew until the kindling caught. Orange light came up the walls. There were benches along them she had never known were there, and a loom with nobody's weaving on it.
In the cloak room she lit a small hearth under the hanging cloaks, and they stirred in the warm air like big slow animals waking. In the empty room that gave back footsteps late, she lit a fire, and after that it stopped answering her. Other girls were out with pans too. She met them at corners, their faces red over their coals, and they nodded and went on.
Roskva counted fires. She had lost the rooms past two hundred, and she meant to keep this count to the end. She lost it in a high passage somewhere past ninety, where four doorways stood open together and every room behind them was already lit, and she could not tell whose fires they were.
When her pan was empty she went out by a side door to fetch more coals the short way, over the snow. On the step she stopped.
The whole house was smoking. From every roof, high and low, ridge behind ridge back into the dark, smoke went straight up into the still air, grey against the stars. Each column was lit red underneath by its smoke hole.
The snow on the roofs had gone soft and was sliding off in slabs. She could hear it go: a hiss, and a thump somewhere far off, and then another nearer. A house of five hundred and forty rooms was warm all through for once, and it was shedding its winter.
She stood there until her feet went numb. Then she went in, because there was still the meal.
Thor ate his Yule supper in the long hall, with his household on the benches and his wife beside him. Loki sat on his other side. He had come at dusk out of nowhere, as clean and pleased as if he had walked over from the next farm, and Thor had said "Sit," and he had sat.
Roskva carried bread. Thjalfi carried wood. She saw him come in with an armful of split birch and kneel at the hearth with his back to the tables. That was where he would stay, she thought, with his back to everybody, until the wood was done.
Loki waited until the meat was half gone. Then he leaned forward over his cup.
"I promised myself this," he said pleasantly. "At Utgard the king set a trough of meat between me and his man, and we ate from both ends. I'll have it told properly. I ate level with a fire. All the way to the middle of the trough."
"You lost," said Thor, chewing.
"To a fire. Who has ever beaten a fire at eating?" Loki smiled round at the benches, and some of the household laughed. "But the best of it was the night before. We slept in a hall in the forest that groaned till morning, and Thor sat in the doorway of a little side room with his hammer across his knees, guarding us from it. At first light the hall turned out to be a glove. The side room was its thumb." He held up his own thumb and looked at it fondly. "Thor, keeper of the thumb."
The laughter was louder this time. Thor's brows came down.
"My father was Farbauti," Loki went on, "and he was a giant, and even he would never have slept in a glove. I shall tell that one at every feast I'm asked to, for years. For as many years as there are feasts."
Roskva had stopped with a loaf in each hand. She looked at the hearth.
Her brother was kneeling with a log held in both hands, halfway to the fire, and his face had gone white to the lips. She knew why. He had been in that thumb. They all had. But in Thjalfi's head, everything that went wrong at Utgard had gone wrong because of him.
Thor swallowed. "I sat in the door," he said. "You were at the far end."
That stopped Loki for nearly a breath. Then he laughed as if it were the best joke of all, and the hall laughed with him.
Thjalfi put the log on the fire. He set the rest of the armful down very neatly, and stood, and went out by the east door. He walked.
That night, before she slept, Roskva said Loki's words over under her breath. Farbauti. A giant. Every feast, for years. She would keep them, though she did not like them.
Thor went before it was light. Roskva was in the yard emptying ash when he came out with his cloak pinned at the throat, the hammer on his belt and the iron gloves pushed through it beside. Sif came after him with a bag of food.
"Giants in the east, making trouble," he said to her. "I'll go and see to it."
"Take the goats," said Sif.
Thor looked toward the east end of the house. Thjalfi was standing in the stall door with a lantern, as though he had been there all night.
"Leave them," said Thor. "I'll walk."
He took the bag and went out of the yard and across the snow toward a line of low blue hills. For a big man he walked fast. He did not look back. The sun came up while Roskva watched, and he was small against it, and then the hills had him.
From the stall door Thjalfi watched too. He did not move until Thor was gone. Then he went in.
Roskva put the ash bucket down in the snow and followed him.
The stall smelled of goat, and of new bread from the oven behind the wall. Tanngnjost was at the rack. The lame goat stood in its corner with the stiff leg cocked. The raw place above its hock had healed over with new grey hair, shorter than the rest.
Thjalfi had a fistful of the best hay from the loft. He held it out across the straw at arm's length and waited. The goat looked at the hay, and then at him, and stayed where it was. After a while he laid the hay on the flags and stepped back to the doorway. The goat came and ate it.
"You do that every day," said Roskva.
He jumped. He had not heard her come. "Go back. Cook'll want you."
"Cook can want me." Her voice came out louder than she meant, and she let it. "You've been sulking for two months."
He stared at her.
"Sixty-two mornings," said Roskva. "I counted. Cook shouts run, and you walk. Last night Loki said thumb, and you went white and walked out. You haven't run since Utgard. Not once."
"I'm working."
"You're sulking. Working's just what your hands do while you sulk."
He turned his back on her and took the salve crock down from its peg. The goat let him come close now. Roskva watched it let him. It stood still while he rubbed the last of the grey fat into the new hair, and only its ear went back.
"You think you lost it," she said to his back. "All of Utgard. Thor's contests too. You think the giants laughed at him because of you."
His hands stopped.
"He was up against the sea, Thjalfi. And the Serpent, and old age. The king said so, and I've got every word of it. You were up against a thought." She heard her voice shake, and kept going. "They'd have beaten anybody, all of them. And you're still the quickest thing in this whole house, and you carry water like an old man."
The goat had turned its head and was looking at her. So was her brother. His face was red now instead of white.
"You don't know what it's like," he said.
"I know what you're like. I've known for eleven years."
He opened his mouth. Before he could find anything to put in it, keys clinked in the passage, and Sif came round the doorpost with a servant behind her. The man had something in each arm that Roskva took at first for cooking pots. They were bowls. Each was as wide as the whole cauldron at home, made of dark polished wood and bound round the rim with bronze.
"There you both are," said Sif. "These are Thor's drinking bowls. There's a feast in Asgard at midwinter, and he promised them for it, and now he's gone east and left them on the shelf." She looked at Thjalfi, and at the crock in his hand, and then at Roskva. "I need two who don't get lost. You'll carry them to Asgard. Tomorrow, first light."
The servant set the bowls down in the straw. The lame goat put its nose over the rim of one and snorted into it.
Thjalfi did not move. Roskva stepped past him, took the nearer bowl by its rim, and lifted. It came up against her chest and hid her from her knees to her chin. Over the top of it she looked at her brother, and waited for him to pick up the other.