Valhalla.>
This time I didn’t curb my tongue.
The Einherjar can go toast their foreskins
.
Odin laughed at me.
Do. What happened to the witches and Garm?
Great. One more thing to worry about
.
That reminds me. How is Freyja doing?
The Norse goddess of beauty and war had been severely injured in our raid on Hel.
Does she even know we were successful?
I frowned.
Is she in a coma or something?
I knew that she had lost a lot of blood and had some shattered bones when we evacuated her, but perhaps she’d suffered more head trauma than was immediately evident.
Odin huffed impatiently.
Thanks
, I said dryly.
We’ve been working on that. Gotta go
.
Why?
Like I said, gotta go
.
Who?
The rainbow bridge from Asgard shimmered into existence on the pasture next to the Long Wood, and we saw distant forms in the sky growing larger. I broke my link with Hugin and turned to Granuaile.
“On your guard. Dark elves coming,” I said. “And apparently some standard elves and a bonus dude to help us somehow.”
Oberon perked up.
In this case they do
.
Granuaile hefted Scáthmhaide. “Going invisible,” she said, before speaking the binding and winking out. I cast camouflage on Oberon but left myself visible.
The Ljósálfar, when they stepped off Bifrost onto Midgard, both disappointed and delighted me. They weren’t wearing leaf-shaped green and gold armor with curlicues or long robes with overlarge embroidered sleeves. They didn’t glow with backlighting or come with their own soundtrack by Enya. Their hair wasn’t long, straight, and silky, and their eyes weren’t limpid pools of oh-my-god straight out of manga. But they were tall and slender and very shiny, and they sounded like wind chimes when they moved.
The sound came from their light-blue enamel armor—that is, glass fused to a metal base. It draped their forms in layered scales so that they reminded me of pangolins, if pangolins could blind you like metal mud flaps on a semitruck. In the center of each enamel scale, a single rune had been etched with acid, and so far as I could tell, it was always the same rune. On a practical level, I couldn’t imagine the benefit to enamel; basic blunt force would shatter it, and the metal backing each scale looked to be either aluminum or a thin wafer of steel. But the runes must offer some protection. Their helmets had no metal backing: Each was a solid piece of shaped glass in light blue, etched with the same rune over and over, lending the impression that someone had found some defective fishbowls at an outlet store and shipped them to Álfheim. A grid of thin holes had been drilled through the glass around the nose, mouth, and ears,which had the effect of blurring out those features, but otherwise I could see that their heads were closely cropped and the tops of their ears did have the famous pointy cartilage. They had swords swinging on their left hips, but I wondered if they weren’t ceremonial. Their primary weapons rested in holsters strapped to their thighs—large flechette pistols.
Two dozen such elves were led by a thick, diminutive fellow in heavy steel plate. His armor was also etched with runes, but these were many and varied and flickered with their own light. Four small axes were strapped to his back, handles peeking over his shoulder. His voice was muffled somewhat by his helmet, but I still recognized the
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