“But you can’t go home when you’ve won,” said Odd.
“Exactly. You wait here, in this hot, horrible place, for reinforcements who don’t want to come, while the locals hate you . . .”
“So go home,” said Odd. “Tell them that I beat you.” He wasn’t smiling now.
The Frost Giant looked at Odd, and Odd looked at the Frost Giant.
The Frost Giant said, “You’re too small to fight. You would have to have outwitted me.”
Odd nodded. “My mother used to tell me stories about boys who tricked giants. In one of them, they had a stone-throwing contest, but the boy had a bird, not a stone, and it went up into the air and just kept going.”
“I’d never fall for that one,” said the giant. “Anyway, birds, they just head for the nearest tree.”
“I am trying,” said Odd, “to allow you to go home with your honor intact and a whole skin. You aren’t making it any easier for me.”
The giant said, “A whole skin?”
“You banished Thor to Midgard,” said Odd, “yet he’s back now. It’s only a matter of time until he gets here.”
The giant blinked. “But I have his hammer,” he said. “I turned it into this boulder I sit on.”
“Go home.”
“But if I take Freya back to Jotunheim, she’ll just shout at me and make everything worse. And if I take Thor’s hammer, he’ll just come after it, and one day he’ll get it, and then he’ll kill me.”
Odd nodded in agreement. It was true. He knew it was.
When, in the years that followed, the Gods told this tale, late at night, in their great hall, they always hesitated at this point, because in a moment Odd will reach into his jerkin and pull out something carved of wood, and none of them, try how they might, was certain what it was.
Some of the Gods claimed that it was a wooden key, and some said it was a heart. There was a school of thought that maintained that what Odd had presented the giant with was a realistic carving of Thor’s hammer, and that the giant had been unable to tell the real from the false, and had fled, in terror.
Before he took it out, Odd said, “My father met my mother when our village was raiding somewhere in Scotland. That’s far to the south of us. He discovered her trying to hide her father’s sheep in a cave, and she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. So he brought her, and the sheep, home. He would not even touch her until he had taught her enough of the way we speak to be able to tell her he wanted her for his wife. But he said that on the voyage home, she was so beautiful she lit up the world. And she did.
“This was before you were born,” said the Frost Giant.
“True,” said Odd, “but I saw it.”
“How?”
Odd knew, without being told, that it would be very, very wrong to mention the pool in the forest to the Frost Giant, let alone the shapes that he had seen moving in the pool the night before. He lied, but it was the truth also. He said, “I saw it in my father’s eyes. He loved her, and a few years ago he started to make something for her, but he left it unfinished, and then he didn’t come back to finish it. So last night, I finished it for him. At first I didn’t know how it was meant to look, and then I saw her . . . I mean, it’s as I imagine her, my mother, when they had just met. Stolen from her people and her land, but brave and determined, and not ever going to give in to fear or grief or loneliness.”
The giant said nothing.
Odd said, “You came here for beauty, didn’t you? And you can’t go back empty-handed.”
He reached into his jerkin and he took out the thing that he had carved. His father’s carving, which he had finished. It was his mother, as she had looked before he was born.
The Frost Giant squinted at it, and then, just for a moment, smiled. He put the carved head into his pouch, and he said, “It is . . . remarkable. And lovely. Yes. I will take it back with me to Jotunheim, and it will brighten my hall.” The Frost Giant hesitated, then he said, a little wistfully, “Do you think I should say good-bye to Lady Freya?”
Odd said, “If you do, she’ll probably shout at you some more.”
“Or beg me to take her with me,” said the Frost Giant. Odd could have sworn that the Frost Giant shivered at that.
The Frost Giant took a step away from Odd, and as he moved away, he grew. He went from being the size of a high hill to being the size of a mountain. Then he reached an arm up into the grey of the winter sky. His hand vanished in the cloud . . .
“I think I need good weather to leave in,” said the giant. “Something to hide my tracks and to make me hard to follow.”
Odd could not see quite what the Frost Giant did, but when he lowered his hand, snow began to fall in huge white flakes that spun and tumbled and obscured the world. The giant began to lumber away into the blizzard.
“Hey!” called Odd. “I don’t know your name!”
But the figure did not hear him, or if it did, it did not answer, and in moments it was lost to sight.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Four Transformations and a Meal
The eagle found him, as he sat on the wall in an area that he had kept as free of snow as he could. The great bird landed beside the boy.
“Good?” it said. It was twilight, and the snow was falling more gently now.
“I’m cold,” said Odd. “I nearly got blown off there a couple of times. I was getting worried I’d have to spend the rest of my life up on this wall. But yes, I’m good.”
The eagle simply looked at him.
“The Frost Giant’s gone,” said Odd. “I made him go away.”
“How?” asked the eagle.
“Magic,” said Odd, and he smiled, and thought, If magic means letting things do what they wanted to do, or be what they wanted to be . . .
“Down,” said the eagle.
Odd eyed the snowy rocks that made the wall. “I can’t climb down that,” he said. “I’ll die.”
The eagle launched itself from the edge of the wall, circled downward. It soon returned, flapping heavily, carrying a worn-looking soft leather shoe, which it dropped on the wall beside Odd. Off again it went, into the snowy dusk, and came back with a shoe that was a twin to the first.
“They’re too big for me,” said Odd.
“Loki’s,” said the eagle.
“Oh,” said Odd, remembering the shoes from Loki’s story, the ones that walked in the sky. He pulled them on. Then, warily, heart pounding, Odd limped to the edge of the wall, and when he got to the edge, he stopped.
He tried to jump, and nothing happened. He didn’t move a muscle.
Oh come on, he told his feet, his good one and the one that was broken and twisted, the one that hurt all the time. You’ve got magical flying shoes on. Just walk out into the air and you’ll be fine.
But his feet and his legs ignored him, and he stood where he was. He turned to the eagle, who was wheeling above Odd’s head impatiently. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I’ve tried and I can’t.”