The Ship of the Dead by Rick Riordan

I STOODwith four gods at the crest of a hill, next to the ruins of a thatched hut.

Odin leaned on a thick oaken staff, chain mail glinting under his blue travel cloak. A spear was strapped across his back. A sword hung at his side. His one good eye gleamed under the shade of his blue wide-brimmed hat. With his grizzled beard, eye patch, and assorted weapons, he looked like a guy who couldn’t decide whether to go to a Halloween party as a wizard or a pirate.

Next to him stood Heimdall, the guardian of the Bifrost Bridge. Smartphones must not have been invented yet, because he wasn’t doing his usual thing of taking pictures every five seconds. He was dressed in armor of thick white wool, with two swords sheathed in an X across his back. Gjallar, the Horn of Doomsday, dangled from his belt, which didn’t strike me as very safe. Anybody could’ve run up behind him, blown that horn, and started Ragnarok as a practical joke.

The third god, my father, Frey, knelt next to the ashes of a campfire. He wore faded jeans and a flannel shirt, though I didn’t see how those clothes could have been invented yet. Maybe Frey was a medieval beta-tester for REI. His blond hair swept across his shoulders. His bristly beard glowed in the sunlight. If there had been any justice in the world, the thunder god Thor would’ve looked like this—blond and handsome and regal, not like a muscle-bound redheaded fart machine.

The fourth god I had never met, but I recognized him from Njord’s holographic show-and-tell: Kvasir, the living peace treaty between the Aesir and Vanir. He was a handsome guy considering that he originated as a cup of divine spit. His dark curly hair and beard rippled in the breeze. Homespun robes enfolded him, giving him that Jedi-master vibe. He knelt next to my father, his fingers hovering over the charred remnants of the campfire.

Odin leaned toward him. “What do you think, Kvasir?”

That question alone told me how much the gods respected Kvasir. Normally Odin did not ask for the opinions of others. He simply gave answers, usually in the form of riddles or PowerPoint presentations.

Kvasir touched the ashes. “This is Loki’s fire, all right. He was here recently. He is still close by.”

Heimdall scanned the horizon. “I don’t see him anywhere in a five-hundred-mile radius, unless…No, that’s an Irishman with a nice haircut.”

“We must catch Loki,” Odin grumbled. “That flyting was the last straw. He must be imprisoned and punished!”

“A net,” Kvasir announced.

Frey scowled. “What do you mean?”

“See? Loki was burning the evidence.” Kvasir traced a barely discernible pattern of crossed lines in the ashes. “He was trying to anticipate our moves, considering all the ways we might capture him. He wove a net, then quickly burned it.”

Kvasir rose. “Gentlemen, Loki has disguised himself as a fish. We need a net!”

The others looked amazed, like Holmes, how did you do that?

I waited for Kvasir to cry, The game’s afoot! Instead he shouted “To the nearest river!” and strode off, the other gods hurrying after him.

My dream changed. I saw flashes of Kvasir’s life as he traveled the Nine Worlds, advising the locals on everything from farming to childbirth to tax deductions. All mortal beings loved him. In every town, castle, and village, he was greeted like a hero.

Then one day, after filling out some particularly difficult tax forms for a family of giants, he was on the road to Midgard when he was stopped by a pair of dwarves—stunted, warty, hairy little guys with malicious smiles.

Unfortunately, I recognized them—the brothers Fjalar and Gjalar. They’d once sold me a one-way boat ride. According to Blitzen, they were also notorious thieves and murderers.

“Hello!” Fjalar called to Kvasir from the top of a boulder. “You must be the famous Kvasir!”

Next to him, Gjalar waved enthusiastically. “Well met! We’ve heard wonderful things about you!”

Kvasir, being the wisest being ever created, should have known enough to say Sorry, I gave at the office and keep walking.

Unfortunately, Kvasir was also kind. He raised his hand in greeting. “Hello, good dwarves! I am indeed Kvasir. How may I help you?”

Fjalar and Gjalar exchanged glances, like they couldn’t believe their good luck. “Uh, well, you can be our guest for dinner!” Gjalar gestured to a nearby hillside, where the entrance to a cave was covered with curtains of ragged leather.

“We are not interested in murdering you,” Fjalar promised. “Or stealing your stuff. Or draining your blood, which probably has incredible magical properties. We simply want to show you our hospitality!”

“Much appreciated,” Kvasir said. “But I am expected in Midgard tonight. Many humans need my help.”

“Oh, I see,” Fjalar said. “You like…helping people.” He said it the way one might say You like raw beef. “Well, as it happens, we’re having a terrible time with our, uh, quarterly estimated taxes.”

Kvasir frowned in sympathy. “I see. Those can be difficult to calculate.”

“Yes!” Gjalar clasped his hands. “Could you help us, O Wise One?”

This was like the part in every horror movie when the audience yells DON’T DO IT! But Kvasir’s compassion overcame his wisdom.

“Very well,” he said. “Show me your paperwork!”

He followed the dwarves into their cave.

I wanted to run after him, to warn him what was going to happen, but my feet remained rooted to the ground. Inside the cave, Kvasir began to scream. A few moments later, I heard a sound like a chain saw, then liquid gurgling into a large cauldron. If I’d been able to throw up in my sleep, I would have.

The scene shifted one last time.

I found myself in the front yard of a three-story mansion, one in a line of Colonials facing a public green. It might have been Salem or Lexington—one of those sleepy pre-Revolutionary towns outside Boston. White-painted columns flanked the house’s entrance. Honeysuckle bushes filled the air with sugary perfume. An American flag fluttered on the porch. The scene was so bucolic it could have been Alfheim if the sunlight had been a little harsher.

The front door swung open, and a skinny figure tumbled down the brick steps as if she’d been thrown.

Alex Fierro looked about fourteen, maybe two or three years younger than when I’d met her. A trickle of blood ran from her left temple. She crawled down the front walk on her hands and knees, her palms shredded from breaking her fall and leaving dabs of blood across the cement like a sponge painting.

She didn’t look scared so much as bitter and angry, with tears of frustration in her eyes.

In the doorway of the house, a middle-aged man appeared—short dark hair streaked with gray, pressed black slacks, shiny black shoes, a white dress shirt so crisp and bright it hurt my eyes. I could imagine Blitzen saying You really need a splash of color, sir!

The man had Alex’s petite build. His face was handsome in the same harsh angular way—like a diamond you could admire but not touch without getting cut.

He shouldn’t have been scary. He wasn’t big or strong or tough-looking. He dressed like a banker. But there was something terrifying about the set of his jaw, the intensity of his stare, the way his lips twitched and tightened across his teeth as if he hadn’t quite mastered human expressions. I wanted to put myself between him and Alex, but I couldn’t move.

In one hand, the man hefted a ceramic object the size of a football—a brown-and-white ovoid. I saw that it was a bust with two different faces side by side.

“NORMAL!” The man threw the ceramic sculpture at Alex. It shattered on the walkway. “That’s all I want from you! To be a normal kid! Is that so damn hard?”

Alex struggled to her feet. She turned to face her father. A mauve skirt hung to her knees over black leggings. Her green sleeveless top had given her arms no protection from the pavement. Her elbows looked like they’d been struck by a meat tenderizer. Her hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, a green ponytail sprouting from her black roots like a flame from Aegir’s hearth fire.

“I am normal, Father.” She hissed the word as if it was the most twisted insult she could think of.

“No more help.” His tone was hard and cold. “No more money.”

“I don’t want your money.”

“Well, that’s good! Because it’s going to my real children.” He spat on the steps. “You had so much potential. You understood the craft almost as well as your grandfather. And look at you.”

“The art,” Alex corrected.

“What?”

“It’s art. Not craft.”

Her father waved in disgust at the broken ceramic pieces. “That is not art. It’s trash.”

The sentiment was clear, even if he didn’t say it: You have chosen to be trash, too.

Alex glared at her father. The air between them turned dry and bitter. Both seemed to be waiting for the other to make a definitive gesture—to apologize and give in, or to cut the thread between them forever.

Alex got no such resolution.

Her father shook his head in dismay, as if he couldn’t believe his life had come to this. Then he turned and went inside, slamming the door behind him.

I woke with a start. “WHAT?”

“Relax, Sleepy.” Alex Fierro stood over me—today’s Alex, wearing a raincoat of such bright yellow I wondered if our ship had begun to assimilate her. The banging sound I’d heard in my dream had been her dropping a full canteen next to my head. She lobbed an apple at my chest.

“Breakfast,” she said. “And also lunch.”

I rubbed my eyes. I could still hear the voice of her father and smell the honeysuckle in their front yard. “How long was I out?”

“About sixteen hours,” she said. “You didn’t miss much, so we let you sleep. But now it’s time.”

“For what?”

I sat up in my sleeping bag. My friends moved around the deck, tying off lines and securing the oars. Cold drizzle hung in the air. Our longship was moored at a stone embankment, on a river lined with brick town houses not too different than those back home in Boston.

“Welcome to Jorvik.” Halfborn glowered. “Or as you modern folk call it, York, England.”