The Ship of the Dead by Rick Riordan

DESPITE SKADI’S PROMISE, I didn’t sleep peacefully.

The coldness of the chamber and the constant booming didn’t help. Nor did the knowledge that in the morning Skadi was apparently going to fit us with skis and throw us out a window.

Also, I kept thinking about Alex Fierro. You know, maybe just a little. Alex was a force of nature, like the snow thunder. She struck when she felt like it, depending on temperature differentials and storm patterns I couldn’t possibly predict. She shook my foundations in a way that was powerful but also weirdly soft and constrained, veiled in blizzard. I couldn’t assign any motives to her. She just did what she wanted. At least, that’s how it felt to me.

I stared at the ceiling for a long time. Finally, I got out of bed, used the washbasin, and changed into new wool clothes—white and gray, the colors of snow and ice. My runestone pendant hung cold and heavy on my neck, like Jack was catching some winks. I gathered my few supplies, then wandered into the corridors of Thunder Home, hoping I didn’t get killed by a startled servant or a random arrow.

In the great hall, I found Sam at prayer. Jack hummed against my collarbone, informing me in a sleepy, irritated tone that it was four in the morning, Niflheim Standard Time.

Sam had laid her prayer rug facing the huge open windows. I guessed the blur of white outside made a good blank screen to stare at while you meditated on God or whatever. I waited until she finished. I’d come to recognize her routine by now. A moment of silence at the end—a sort of peaceful settling that even the thunder couldn’t disturb—then she turned and smiled.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Hey. You’re up early.”

I realized that was a stupid thing to say to a Muslim. If you’re observant, you never sleep late, because you have to be up for prayers before first light. Being around Sam, I’d started to pay more attention to the timing of dawn and dusk, even when we were in other worlds.

“I didn’t sleep much,” she said. “I figured I would get in a good meal or two.” She patted her stomach.

“How do you know prayer times in Jotunheim?” I asked. “Or where Mecca is?”

“Heh. I take my best guess. That’s allowed. It’s the intention that counts.”

I wondered if the same would be true of my coming challenge. Maybe Loki would say, Well, Magnus, you really sucked at flyting, but you did your best and it’s the intention that counts, so you win!

“Hey.” Sam’s voice jarred me out of my thoughts. “You’ll do fine.”

“You’re awfully calm,” I noted. “Considering…you know, today’s the day.”

Sam adjusted her hijab, which was still white to match her outfit. “Last night was the twenty-seventh night of Ramadan. Traditionally, that’s the Night of Power.”

I waited. “Is that when you get supercharged?”

She laughed. “Sort of. It commemorates Muhammad receiving his first revelation from the angel Gabriel. Nobody knows exactly which night it is, but it’s the holiest of the year—”

“Wait, it’s your holiest night, and you don’t know when it is?”

Sam shrugged. “Most people go with the twenty-seventh, but yeah. It’s one of the nights of the last ten days of Ramadan. Not knowing keeps you on your toes. Anyway, last night it just felt right. I stayed up praying and thinking, and I just felt…confirmed. Like there is something bigger than all this: Loki, Ragnarok, the Ship of the Dead. My dad may have power over me because he’s my dad. But he’s not the biggest power. Allahu akbar.”

I knew that term, but I’d never heard Sam use it before. I’ll admit it gave me an instinctive jolt in the gut. The news media loved to talk about how terrorists would say that right before they did something horrible and blew people up.

I wasn’t going to mention that to Sam. I imagined she was painfully aware. She couldn’t walk the streets of Boston in her hijab most days without somebody screaming at her to go home, and (if she was in a bad mood) she’d scream back, “I’m from Dorchester!”

“Yeah,” I said. “That means God is great, right?”

Sam shook her head. “That’s a slightly inaccurate translation. It means God is greater.”

“Than what?”

“Everything. The whole point of saying it is to remind yourself that God is greater than whatever you are facing—your fears, your problems, your thirst, your hunger, your anger. Even your issues with a parent like Loki.” She shook her head. “Sorry, that must sound really hokey to an atheist.”

I shrugged, feeling awkward. I wished I could have Sam’s level of faith. I didn’t, but it clearly worked for her, and I needed her to be confident, especially today. “Well, you sound supercharged. That’s what counts. Ready to kick some undead butt?”

“Yep.” She smirked. “What about you? Are you ready to face Alex?”

I wondered if God was greater than the punch in the stomach Sam had just given me. “Um, what do you mean?”

“Oh, Magnus,” she said. “You are so emotionally nearsighted it’s almost cute.”

Before I could think of some clever way not to respond to that—perhaps by shouting Look over there! and running away—Skadi’s voice boomed through the hall. “There are my early risers!”

The giantess was dressed in enough white fur to outfit a family of polar bears. Behind her, a line of servants trudged in carrying an assortment of wooden skis. “Let’s rouse your friends and get you on your way!”

Our friends were not thrilled about getting up.

I had to pour ice water on Halfborn Gunderson’s head twice. Blitz grumbled something about ducks and told me to go away. When I tried to shake Hearth awake, he stuck one hand above the covers and signed, I am not here. T.J. bolted out of bed screaming, “CHARGE!” Fortunately he wasn’t armed, or he would’ve run me through.

Finally, everybody assembled in the main hall, where Skadi’s servants set out our last meal—sorry, our breakfast—of bread, cheese, and apple cider.

“This cider was made from the apples of immortality,” Skadi said. “Centuries ago, when my father kidnapped the goddess Idun, we fermented some of her apples into cider. It’s quite diluted. It won’t make you immortal, but it will give you a boost of endurance, at least long enough to get through the wilds of Niflheim.”

I drained the cup. The cider didn’t make me feel particularly boosted, but it did tingle a little. It settled the crackling and popping in my stomach.

After eating, we tried on our skis with varying degrees of success. Hearthstone waddled around gracefully in his (who knew elves could waddle gracefully?), while Blitz tried in vain to find a pair that matched his shoes. “Do you have anything smaller?” he asked. “Also, maybe in a dark brown? Like a mahogany?”

Skadi patted him on the head, which wasn’t something dwarves appreciated.

Mallory and Halfborn shuffled around with ease, but both of them had to help T.J. stay on his feet.

“Jefferson, I thought you grew up in New England,” Halfborn said. “You never skied?”

“I lived in a city,” T.J. grumbled. “Also, I’m Black. There weren’t a lot of Black guys skiing down the Boston waterfront in 1861.”

Sam looked a little awkward on her skis, but since she could fly, I wasn’t too worried about her.

As for Alex, she sat by an open window putting on a pair of hot-pink ski boots. Had she brought them with her? Had she tipped a servant a few kroner to find her a pair in Skadi’s supply closet? I had no idea, but she wouldn’t be skiing off to her death in bland white and gray. She wore a green fur cloak—Skadi must have skinned a few Grinches to make it—over her mauve jeans and green-and-pink sweater vest. To top off the look, she wore an Amelia Earhart–style aviator’s cap with her pink sunglasses. Just when I thought I’d seen all the outfits nobody but Alex could pull off, she pulled off a new one.

As she adjusted her skis, she paid no attention to the rest of us. (And by the rest of us, I mean me.) She seemed lost in her thoughts, maybe considering what she would say to her mother, Loki, before she attempted to garrote his head off.

At last we were all in skis, standing in pairs next to the open windows like a group of Olympic jumpers.

“Well, Magnus Chase,” Skadi said, “all that remains is the drinking of the mead.”

Sam, standing on my left, offered me the canteen.

“Oh.” I wondered if it was safe to drink mead before operating skis. Maybe the laws were more lax out here in the hinterlands. “You mean now?”

“Yes,” Skadi said. “Now.”

I uncapped the canteen. This was the moment of truth. We’d ventured across worlds and nearly died countless times. We’d feasted with Aegir, battled pottery with pottery, slain a dragon, and siphoned mead with an old rubber hose just so I could drink this honeyed blood beverage, which would hopefully make me poetic enough to talk smack about Loki.

I saw no point in doing a taste test. I chugged down the mead in three big gulps. I was expecting the taste of blood, but Kvasir’s Mead tasted more like…well, mead. It certainly didn’t burn like dragon’s blood, or even tingle like Skadi’s cider of not-quite-immortality.

“How do you feel?” Blitz asked hopefully. “Poetic?”

I burped. “I feel okay.”

“That’s it?” Alex demanded. “Say something impressive. Describe the storm.”

I gazed out the windows into the blizzard. “The storm looks…white. Also cold.”

Halfborn sighed. “We’re all dead.”

“Good luck, heroes!” Skadi called.

Then her servants pushed us out the windows into the void.