INTRO
 
Welcome to CHAPTER 77 of the Kinsmen Die podcast, home of fantasy fiction based on Norse mythology that’s written and read by me, Matt Bishop.

In this podcast I read my first novel, Kinsmen Die, one chapter at a time. And, with each episode, when it makes sense, I provide some commentary about the source materials I’ve referenced in the text.

This week we’re back with Frigg who we’d last seen surviving the attack of the witch Yelena. The witch killed the baresark Gulfinn and then, having shapeshifted, escaped from Gladsheim’s main hall. 

Let’s rejoin her now.

Chapter Seventy-Seven
Frigg
“Look again, Heimdall. You can’t see Odin anywhere?”
Frigg stood, cloaked and hooded, on the promontory above the city. The night was clear, chill, and windless. Muspell’s sparks glowed in the western sky, while the stars above were barely visible beside Máni’s glow.
“I can’t see him, Almother,” Heimdall said, gloved hands gripping the waist-high stone battlement—the post, the watch, he had abandoned nearly two dozen winters earlier.
She glanced at Ráta, who leaned against the battlement, arms folded across her chest, with no expression on her face. The faint buzzing of bees emanated from Ráta.
“Again,” Frigg said. “Try harder. Listen for him, instead.”
His ice-blue eyes fixed on her. “Just let me have a drink and I will.”
She laughed. “I’d sooner break every cask in Gladsheim than let you near another cup of wine or beer or whatever else you swill down.”
“Please, I can smell the beer you brought. Just give me a cup, and I’ll look again.”
She stepped forward and slapped him so hard her palm tingled and the bones of her hand throbbed. He rocked back several paces, eyes wide in surprise. His fists clenched.
The faint buzzing sound from Ráta grew louder. Heimdall shot a wary look at the baresark and then made a show of unclenching his fists.
She massaged her hand. “Last night, a witch attacked me in the Lower Hall. I don’t know how long she’s been here, nor do I know what seidr she might have woven throughout the city. But I do know she’s murdered at least one woman, maybe just to get to me. Maybe not. And then she killed Gulfinn. You should have been standing here watching her flee so you could tell Ráta where to find her.”
Shame crept across Heimdall’s features as he glanced a second time at the baresark.
“Instead, the witch escaped – and since she’s a shape-shifter, she probably didn’t even leave the city, but I haven’t been able to find her because we couldn’t find you. And now that you are where you’re supposed to be, you can’t find the witch nor the Alfather, who  isn’t where he should be.” She gave a disgusted snort. “All I see before me is fire and dea—”
Heimdall dropped to his knees before her, big hands clasped together like someone pleading for her mercy. Frigg thrust out a hand, telling Ráta to stay back.
She put her hands on her hips. “Well, Watcher, what is it?”
His broad, pale face with its scar across his nose, was a battleground between indecision and hope. He seemed to shrink into himself. “I’ve heard you and the Alfather talking, and just now you said ‘see.’”
Her heart sank. She knew what was coming.
“Tell me my doom, Almother, please. Will I ever be free of this curse?” He hammered at one side of his head; the other pounded his thigh.
With a thought, she conjured the vision-flames above Heimdall’s head. In them, she saw a sword’s bloody tip emerge from between his shoulders. She tried to change her perspective, to see whose hand held the blade, but the vision wouldn’t budge.
She sighed. “In my youth, I always answered that question. If someone wanted to know, and I could see it, then didn’t they deserve to know what lay ahead? I always saw their deaths but sometimes other…events…would creep in. Mind you, I never saw—nor do I see—the when.”
She squatted so they were face-to-face. She laid her hand on his shoulder. “Only much later did I realize that telling them made some people stop living. It made others reckless. Sometimes that ended up causing the deaths of many others. But I wonder now if perhaps everything was already doomed to happen no matter what I said or did. Mimir seems to think so. Did my telling alter anything at all? Or was it just a part of the greater weaving?”
“None of that will happen with me, Almother. I swear it.”
She smiled sadly at him. “Won’t it? Say I tell you that I see you die from falling from a cliff. Perhaps you’d take that to mean you pitch yourself over it. Or that, drunk, you fall accidentally. Or maybe there’s a battle at a cliff’s edge, and you take a wound and fall over. Would you not live every moment in anticipation of your death? Would you avoid all cliffs? Or seek them out?”
He shook his head. “You don’t know what it’s like. All I hear is my name, endlessly croaked from a thousand throats. I welcome the silence that comes with death.”
And all she saw were the deaths of everyone she lay eyes upon.
Frigg laid her hand on his cheek. “No you don’t, Heimdall. If you did, you’d be dead already. But you’re right, I don’t have any idea what it’s like. Loki went too far.”
She stopped herself before mentioning their suspicions regarding Loki’s involvement in the threat on Baldr and the Jotunn attack on Háls—although perhaps Heimdall had overhead that, as well. Even the witch’s obvious participation didn’t necessarily absolve Loki. There was still the matter of those male voices the husband had heard. For all she knew, Yelena and Loki were the same person—he, like Odin, had been known to take a woman’s shape. And the witch had mentioned a mistress. Could that have been Angrboda? Or maybe the mistress was Loki.
“It never stops, Almother. Never. I try to sleep, but their croaking keeps me awake. And then all the other voices—crying, screaming, laughing, whispering. I hear it all. I used to stand post here, trying to hear what the Jotunn plan. I used to be able to block out almost everything I didn’t want to hear. But there was something about those birds and their constant croaking. It drowned everything else out. I try not to listen, but all they do is say my name over and over.”
His ice-blue eyes burned into hers. “The drink is all that gives me some peace.”
“If that’s peace, Heimdall, then let me put a knife in you now.” She lowered her voice to a whisper only he could hear. “You and I are kindred in more than ways than one—we both perceive things we’d rather not. But drifting in a drunken stupor through every moment is not the answer.”
“Then tell me of my death, Almother. Give me a destination.”
 “Before I married Odin, I once told a woman that she’d die in her bed at night, coughing out her last moments. I described her pallid face and blood-flecked lips. So what did she do? She joined the Jotunn army and fought against the Aesir. She took a spear through the chest and died in a bed, coughing up blood.”
Heimdall looked at her, not seeming to understand.
“My point is that the vision came true but not in the way either of us expected. She assumed it meant she’d die of some sickness or maybe old age. Not wanting that, she went to war. But here are the questions that keep me awake…if I dwell on them. Did my words cause a different outcome? Might she have died of a sickness if I hadn’t told her what I did? Or was she always meant to die in battle? If the former, then I can change outcomes with my prophecies. If the latter, well, then I’m simply an instrument of doom.
“The Norns claim they’ve seen, scratched, and painted the doom for all of us: Jotunn, Aesir, Alvar, Vanir. Are they right? And if our doom…our destination, as you put it…is fixed, does that mean the route is, too? I know what I prefer to believe.”
And she knew what Odin preferred. She let her whispered words hang in the air and put her hands on his shoulders. “I’m not going to tell you what I see ahead of you. You must decide to stand up and help me, or keep staggering drunkenly down the long hall of your life. To the Ginnungagap with everything else.”
She gave him a little shake, a small, sad smile and stepped back. Heimdall’s pale face was intense, his eyes burned brighter than the hottest witchlamps. His gaze dropped to his hands, clenching into fists and then relaxing again.
A wispy cloud passed before Máni’s face and then drifted farther eastward. Far to the west, there was nothing but stars and the red glow of Muspell’s sparks.
Ráta stood by, impassive, until she caught her eye. The buzzing sound had faded away. The baresark nodded slightly. Approvingly?
Heimdall chose that moment to breathe out long and slow. His ice-blue eyes settled on her, he gave a small nod, and then he stepped to the northern battlement where he stared in that direction for several long heartbeats. Then, he turned slowly in place, gazing first westward, then southward, then to the east, until he again settled on her.
“I still see no trace of the Alfather, not along the shores of Gjoll nor anywhere in the realms between us,” he said, voice distant.
He cocked an ear. “Nor do I hear him.”
“How is that possible, Heimdall? Even when he was gone these past twenty winters, you could see and hear him.” When he was sober enough to look.
Heimdall shrugged. “He’s vanished before. If he’s taken another’s shape, I would see him but not know him. If he’s in among Yggdrasil’s branches, as he’s been before, I can’t always see him there, either.”
“What if you sat upon Hlidskjalf?” she asked.
He shook his head, golden teeth gleaming in a quick smile. “I tried only once before, when the Alfather first found it. Had he not been there to pull me off, it would have killed me.”
“What of Sleipnir? Freki and Geri? Huginn and Muninn? Can you see or hear any of them?”
“They are harder to spot, but I will look again.”
She laid her hand on his arm. “Thank you, Heimdall. Will you stand watch through Midwinter? I’ll have food brought. And water.”
Pain flickered across his face, followed quickly by something new. Resolve. “I will, Almother.”
She gripped his arm a little tighter, smiled, and left, descending the snow-covered stairs down to the ground. Ráta followed behind.
When they reached the bottom, Ráta hefted the cask of beer she’d carried up the hill.
“No, leave it here,” Frigg said, knowing Heimdall would hear. “The jarl seems resolute, but even a reforged blade needs tempering.”

OUTRO
Well, folks, that was CHAPTER 77 of Kinsmen Die. I hope you enjoyed it.

There’s not much going on myth wise in this chapter. 

So we’ll just move on to next week’s chapter where we rejoin Odin…or should I say, the Wayfarer.

Until then, if you have the time and inclination, please rate and/or review the podcast — that helps boost the show’s visibility. As does sharing it.
  
As always, I’m going to read from both the Bellows and Larrington translations of the Havamal, the sayings of the High One, Odin himself.

Again, there’s some weird numbering going on across the different translations, but as I mentioned last episode, this will resolve itself soon.

Bellows, Verse 77
Cattle die, and kinsmen die,
And so one dies one's self;
But a noble name will never die,
If good renown one gets.

Larrington, Verse 76
Cattle die, kinsmen die,
the self must also die;
but the glory of reputation never dies,
for the man who can get himself a good one.


Thanks for listening.