INTRO
 
Welcome to CHAPTER 81 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 Vidar Odinsson. We last saw Vidar in Ch 79 where he, and his warband, got their asses kicked first by a pack of snow bears and then the snow bear matron.

If you recall, Vidar’s second-in-command, Garilon, suspected that the snow bears were dominated by Jotunn shaman. As readers, we know this is what happened because way back in Ch 33 we were with Vafthrudnir when he, the shaman Kali, were with the warband Helveg when those snow bears were dominated.

Let’s rejoin Vidar now.


Chapter Eighty-One
Vidar
Vidar’s strength was failing. Another drop of spittle struck his chest and burned the skin beneath. That he’d lasted this long surprised him. The matron’s horns, despite being gripped tight in his hands, dug a burning furrow in his shoulder and dragged a line of pain toward this throat. He’d gotten his legs up between himself and her broad chest. But her weight was too much. She’d bent him nearly double.
You are weak, little cousin, came the whisper from his emerald-eyed fylgja.
Despite his surprise at her speaking to him he growled, I’m not weak.
She laughed at him with the voice of a geyser’s hiss.
Venom sizzled on his cheek, just below his eye. Heartbeats remained. After her pack broke the shield wall, the snow bear matron had swatted Garilon aside and leaped atop Vidar. He’d only just succeeded in getting his hands and legs up to stop her from goring him. If not for the cliff behind him, he’d be dead.
Your weakness is good, his fylgja whispered, fangs gnashing.
He coughed, breathing in the hot reek of the matron’s breath swamped him. Her spittle dripped on him and one of her golden eyes was locked on his. 
He pushed against the matron, roaring with the effort. He bought himself a knife’s length of breathing room. But the matron just bore down harder. She probably could have disengaged or maybe gutted him with her hind legs, but she seemed to be enjoying this. 
His grip slipped and her horn crept a finger-joint closer.
Your father would have broken that thing by now. Yet here you lay.
I’m not my father.
Too true, his fylgja said, prowling back and forth. The green glow of her eyes shimmered and undulated like the lights of Ymir’s Breath above Utgard’s mountains. The runes binding her to him, delicate as a fish’s breath, glowed like a ship’s wake.
He met her gaze. Why do you speak to me now?
His arms trembled, the matron’s breath was hot on his face. She licked his cheek and left a long sizzling trail behind.
Is it because I’m about to die?
His fylgja grinned.
But won’t you die too, bound as you are?
Better death than this. She met his eyes and, deliberately, lifted her chin. The blue bindings pulsed there, encircling her neck just like the same runes encircled his own.
I can’t undo my father’s magic. We are bound, one to the other.
She laughed. This? It’s a mockery of what such a joining should be.
There is another way?
She sat on her haunches, as tall as he was, staring back at him as if she was considering.
I only became a baresark because my father convinced me that it was necessary. You and I are one. You must realize I speak the truth.
Even if she didn’t, Vidar showed her. He flung out memory’s net and, hand over hand, dragged in the conversation in which his father had convinced him to become a baresark. Gladsheim needs such warriors, such leaders, Odin had said, especially if we mean to settle new lands—and hold what is ours.
Vidar showed her the memory of his dismay at learning that to become a baresark he must have a spirit bound to his own.
Do you see that? Feel it as I do?
The disir stared at him, eyes burning bright. Why could she see into him but he couldn’t into her? There should be a balance to the bond between them.
His grip slipped again and the matron’s horn crept still closer to his neck. Her hot, thick rotten breath quickened. She must sense him failing…because he was so very close to death.
My death now means yours too, doesn’t it? Is that better than continuing as we are?
His fylgja cocked her head and swatted her tail. He pictured a river breaking its banks.
I told you, I can’t unmake these runes. This is my father’s magic.
Not true.
It is true.
She shook her head.
Pain burned like seawater in his eyes. The matron had finally lost interest. Her muscles bunched and she shoved one of her horns deep into his shoulder.
He screamed. Pain swept him toward his fylgja. Green eyes glowing, she spread her jaws and he tumbled into them.
More stars than he had ever seen on even the blackest nights opened before him, below him, around him. He splashed into them, a current caught him, tossed him like a leaf in frothy rapids.
His death wouldn’t end her—couldn’t end her. He’d been a fool to think it might. His death must mean her release. And when he died, perhaps she’d return to this milky river that roared with a voice louder than the snow bear matron above him.
His fylgja spoke again, her voice floating beside him on the starry river. Your father saw this and more.
Open-mouthed, he stared at the expanse into which he’d fallen—the great tree, Yggdrasil, its spreading branches above and its immense trunk, and its roots, shadowed and dark, and yet he somehow saw something moving within that darkness, maggots gnawing on a carcass.
A never-ending cascade of white-green mist flowing from above, colliding with a stream of red-yellow, roiling fire blossoming from below. And where they met, the maelstrom roared and churned. From it flew eleven rivers of stars and glinting metal and showers of ice and chunks of rock.
His fylgja’s emerald cat eyes appeared before him, wide open, the vertical slits white and filled with stars. How do you think your father killed Ymir? We taught him.
What?
She gestured with her feline head toward the vortex, spinning below him. Around him. Above him. Yggdrasil’s upper limbs shone golden, mountain peaks at dawn. 
He’d never thought about it. His father was like the tree before him. He just...was.
He told me that he hung on Yggdrasil, a sacrifice, himself to himself, and that he strode upon death’s shores.
He did. But that was only part of what he did.
I don’t understand.
Do you want to?
Pain pounded in his ears. Understand? He nearly laughed. The torrent of fire raging upward into the spinning, churning Cauldron cast off a dozen streams of Muspell’s sparks that shot slowly toward Yggdrasil’s roots. Something shifted within the darkness, something that clung to the roots, and devoured those sparks whole.
He shook his head and tumbled backward, a stone dangling from a string. Of course I want to, but I need your help now—to save myself and my warband.
I will help. But she lifted her chin again, exposing the fetter that glimmered like a bird’s spittle. Her intent was clear.
The tattoos on his wrists pulsed in time with his quickening heartbeat. I won’t be changed again, not as you did before. What assurance do I have?
As much as your father gave me.
Pain blossomed in his shoulder and dragged him back into his flesh. He found it hard to breathe; his face was buried in the matron’s thick pelt, matted with blood and gore.
Help me now, or I die.
Vidar met the fylgja’s flat green gaze, opened his mind and she leaped toward him.
Like a bowstring, Vidar snapped back, himself to himself. His chest burned with venom. The matron’s horn was buried deep in his shoulder. One of her yellow-slitted eyes, bigger than his palm, bored into his. He could see the fine scaly texture of her black skin beneath the long, white-gray matted fur. He had both hands on her horn, his forearm against her lower jaw; his legs pressed against her straining neck and chest. Every muscle trembled with the effort of keeping her at bay. His skin sizzled and burned with every drop of slobber from her jaws. Her hot breath smelled like rotten eggs; he felt her low rumbling growl in his belly.
Are you ready? his fylgja asked.
Past ready.
Vidar’s limbs thrummed like the deepest-toned string on Bragi’s harp as his fylgja extended her limbs through his. The note swelled, till he felt scoured by the cold, rushing waters of a mighty flood that swept his pain away.
In its absence, his wounds and burns might as well not exist. And if they didn’t exist, there was no reason to lie pinned beneath this stinking beast’s foul body.
He shoved the matron’s head up. Surprise flared in her eye. His shoulder squelched as the horn pulled free. But he felt no pain. His arm worked. He stood. The matron, stunned perhaps, didn’t react.
Had she been smaller, she would have dangled from his hands like an unruly hound. But she was twice his height and many times his bulk. She thrashed her head from side to side, broke his grip, and stumbled sideways. A moment later she was up on all fours, her head level with his chest. She rushed in, horns slashing right and left to spill his guts.
Faster than he’d ever been able to, except once, Vidar dodged. Her horns merely ripped another ragged line across his ruined armor.
That moment, where horn met armor, stretched taut, like those moments between a dream and waking up when he was never quite sure which was which.
His fylgja shrieked and he chose—for now he had a choice—to let her cry pass through his lips. It felt very good. Right, even. His body thrummed.
He unsheathed his knife, somehow still there in its sheath at the small of his back, and buried the long blade in the hollow between the matron’s corded shoulder muscles and neck.
The matron bellowed. Vidar sawed his blade in the wound, widening it. He was bloodied to the elbow; her blood was on his face, in his mouth, and it tasted very good.
His knife ground against bone, so he sawed it back and forth until something parted like a taut rope. 
She screamed again and whipped her head sideways and knocked him away, skidding across the icy, rocky ground. He squelched against something soft, but leaped to a fighting crouch, one arm up to defend or strike, but his other dangled like a broken tree limb.
She dies, his fylgja whispered.
It was true. The matron weaved and staggered like Heimdall after a long night in the hall. Except she vomited blood and venom.
Are you ready?
For what?
You’ll feel your body’s pain when I leave.
You’re leaving me?
Everything feeds, cousin. Or would you have me eat as we did before?
Memories sprouted like weeds: Jotunn breastplates split open, the stink of shit and blood in clean winter air.
He shook his head.
The matron gave a long, undulating cry, staggered backward, and fell heavily on one side. The bronzed hilt of his knife protruding from her neck like a woman’s brooch.
Prepare yourself.
And then his fylgja was gone—she leaped out of him and into the matron’s wound.
Once his fylgja departed the hole in his shoulder burned like a forge fire. A thousand other agonies made their voices heard—burns and cuts, his ribs, the meat of both thighs. He’d hurt less when he’d sparred with Thor. Vidar toppled to one side like a chopped-down tree. 
Bodies covered the reddened ground between himself and the matron. He forced himself up to his elbow, then up higher, bracing himself with a hand that squelched in a puddle of red snow. More bodies showed themselves, white eyes stark and bright and staring.
The matron screamed once more, shuddered, and lay still. His fylgja remained hidden.
Bodies lay strewn all around. The soft thing that had halted his slide was Jalla’s corpse, one arm gone at the shoulder, the other flung wide, axe in her dead fist, half her face a venom-scorched black sizzle of what it had been. One of her eyes stared accusingly at him.
He staggered up and away and then tripped and fell over another body behind him.
His sob…his failure…was as vicious, as vile a wound as the rent he’d carved in the matron’s side.
The pack of snow bears were retreating, leaping up the ravine wall to disappear behind the sharp stones and glinting ice. They fled because he killed their matron.
Where would he flee now that she had slaughtered his warband?
His wounded shoulder and arm threw waves of pain that made it hard to think much less move.
“Jarl,” a voice came from behind him. Garilon’s voice.
He swung toward the sound and took in Garilon’s stern face, bloody and scorched by venom, armor ragged, one bloody fist gripped tight around the haft of a wicked axe. A dozen of his warband gathered behind him.
He grinned, relieved to see that he hadn’t led his warband to complete slaughter, then he stumbled, swayed…a ship’s mast in a gale…and fell.

OUTRO
Well, folks, that was CHAPTER 81 of Kinsmen Die. I hope you enjoyed it.

Vidar reached a new agreement with his fylgja one that we, as readers, know is possible because we’ve seen how Vafthrudnir and his fylgja, Fimbulthul, interact.

There are some repeated motifs in this chapter — Yggdrasil, the Roaring Cauldron and a little bit more.

When describing the runes binding Vidar and his fylgja, I borrowed language from Snorri’s description of the chain called Gleipnir which binds Fenrir the wolf.

Gleipnir is the only chain Fenrir could not break. It is described as being made of six things: “the noise a cat makes in foot-fall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a rock, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish, and the spittle of a bird.”

Next week we’re back with Frigg.

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.

Bellows, Verse 81
Give praise to the day at evening, to a woman on her pyre,
To a weapon which is tried, to a maid at wed lock,
To ice when it is crossed, to ale that is drunk.

Larrington, Verse 81
At evening should the day be praised, the woman when she is cremated,
the blade when it is tested, the girl when she is married, the ice when it is crossed, the ale when it is drunk.


Thanks for listening.