INTRO
 
Welcome to CHAPTER 88 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.

The last time we were with Frigg, she’d just welcomed her son Hodr back to Gladsheim. Then, she re-took her place on the platform where the jarls sit in the great hall. Let’s rejoin her, now.

Chapter Eighty-Eight
Frigg
“It’s been too long, my brother,” Baldr called out, his voice floating above the din. Baldr’s happiness spread like warmth from a fire—when he laughed, the folk did, too.
Frigg allowed herself to smile, despite her worries over the witch Yelena who could be anyone here, assuming she was willing to become a man. The reverse was of course possible: Long ago, Odin had become a woman, as had Loki. 
Her smile faded as her eyes flicked from the throwing ritual to each of the hall’s doors. No wolves. No ravens. No husband. Another broken promise added to the pile.
At least Tyr was in the hall, along with Bragi and Idunn. Heimdall stood his post as he’d promised, and as the wardens had confirmed. He hadn’t reported any issues anywhere in Asgard.
It was odd that Loki and his wife Sigyn, along with their boys, were not present—they’d been here for every Midwinter since Odin’s departure—but it was just as well given the suspicion she couldn’t help but treat Loki with and at least she didn’t have to pretend to enjoy Sigyn’s company. It was conceivable, too, that Loki was here but shapeshifted. Much as Yelena might be here. 
Frigg cast another suspicious eye across the hundreds gathered in the hall. She refused to dwell on the vision-flames that kindled over the heads of many. So far, Midwinter had passed by—nearly—without any major problems, aside from the usual drunken brawls. Baldr had passed safely through the entire city and now he was here, in the hall, where she had controlled everything she could control.
Nanna gasped. Her daughter had covered her mouth with one hand, green eyes wide, and was pointing at Baldr.
Hodr stood opposite Baldr just inside the wide circle of Aesir surrounding his brother. Hodr held a stone; his arm was drawing back. What was Nanna seeing that she wasn’t?
Frigg’s gaze ran the inner arc of the circle surrounding Baldr. Nothing appeared amiss. The Aesir were swaying and dancing, some in place, some beginning to move sideways as the music stirred them like a ladle in a pot. Something flickered in the corner of her eye.
She looked back at Hodr, his arm almost fully back in the throwing position. But something wasn’t quite right.
Nanna screamed unintelligibly, flew out of her chair, across the table, and all but dove into the throng of people below the raised platform on which they stood.
Frigg looked back at Hodr, to his hand holding the rock. It was the wrong grip for throwing a stone, but the right grip for a spear.
She shook her head and squinted.
Just as a fish could seem to jump out of the reflected image of a tree in the water, so too did the long spear in Hodr’s hand leap into Frigg’s sight.
How had he gotten that spear? And why had it looked like a stone?
“No. Stop!” Frigg was on her feet before she realized she’d moved. Her voice rang from the rafters, but it was too late.
Hodr’s arm rushed forward and the dark-tipped spear blurred through the air. Her eyes skipped to Baldr. He stood smiling, hands up in invitation.
The spear split his chest with a sound that broke her world. Everything stopped, shocked into stillness.
Baldr staggered backward. His hands came up to grip the spear that sprouted from his chest. Blood flowed reluctantly around the long spear. Apologetically.
Screaming, Nanna clawed frantically at the bewildered Aesir revelers between herself and her dying husband. 
Across the gulf between them, filled with the bobbing jumble of Aesir heads, Frigg watched Baldr look up from his chest. He stared up at the ceiling, his eyes losing focus and blood bubbling from his lips. He gave an inaudible cough, and his face went slack. The pain etched into his handsome features vanished—that was, thanks to her, the first physical pain he had ever felt.
Golden Baldr dropped backwards like a felled tree.
In that moment, the vision of Baldr aboard the flaming ship roared to life as if it were a sail cut loose to fly before a gale. And that sail burned brighter than Baldr ever had. Frigg staggered back as if the heat were real.
The vision-flames leaped from head to head above the crowd. Disaster consumed the guests as if they were kindling for the conflagration. At first, the visions made some sense—a life stomped out beneath a Jotunn’s boots, another speared like her son, yet another devoured by a beast. But as the visions roared through the hall, they grew jumbled. Yellows and reds and oranges, whites and blues. Death upon death, juxtaposed, layered in a midwinter bonfire that only Rán would extinguish.
Sound burst back into the room like an avalanche. Hodr’s confused face vanished beneath a landslide of raised arms and fists. She tried to make out the vision above his head but lost it amid the dozens of other deaths.
Frigg met Tyr’s eyes—he was already out of his seat and moving—and called above the roar of the crowd, “Don’t let them kill Hodr.”
He nodded once, quick and sharp, then bulled his way into the crowd.
“Hermod,” she said, looking past Nanna’s collapsed body into her daughter’s horrified face. “Go with Tyr. Get Baldr. Bring him here.”
Hermod blinked, eyes wide, tears welling up, unmoving.
Frigg took a step toward her and jabbed a hand toward the crowd. “Move, Hermod. Get Baldr.”
Was that her voice? So controlled. So cold.
“Ráta, go with her,” she said. The big baresark leaped to obey.
The hall vibrated like a string on Bragi’s harp. She closed her eyes for a moment but opened them again when blackness whirled sickeningly around her.
She found herself backed up against one of the hall’s columns, palms pressed against her temples. The wolf’s head carvings tore into her back. She pushed off the column and stepped back to the platform’s edge, as if it were a ship’s prow and she the figurehead.
Tyr moved through the crowd, clubbing aside those who moved too slowly. He was nearly at the dense pack that had closed in around Hodr.
She reached up and touched her face. No tears yet. No time for them. There would be too much time for that later.
Hermod and Ráta were right behind Tyr, following the open path he’d made. An open ring stood around the spot where Baldr must lay.
Slowly, her mind made sense of a ripped-throated sound behind her. The wail swelled in volume. It was Nanna. Fire within fire within fire raged above her daughter’s head. She knelt on the floor, back hunched, rocking and wailing, knocking her forehead against the wood. Her keening was loud even above the hall’s din.
Baldr dead and Hodr, if he wasn’t already, soon would be. Everyone had seen him murder his brother. She’d have to allow him to be executed. She wanted to collapse, but she could not. She would not. There was no time for wailing or visions now. She and Odin had missed something. Something that someone else had figured out. But who? Hodr? That felt as wrong as the murder she just witnessed. But if that witch Yelena could charm Harald and Klakki, then maybe she had also charmed Hodr.
Eir fell to her knees beside Nanna and wrapped her arms around her, head sideways on Nanna’s convulsing back, providing what comfort she could. Too little. Not enough.
Frigg looked back out over the crowd, ignoring the vision flames that reached high above the tightly packed folk in the hall. More fire within fire; dark flickers of movement in those visions.
“Eir,” Frigg said. She didn’t hear. How could she? Frigg could barely hear her own thoughts. Frigg stepped forward, bent, and touched the chief valkyr’s shoulder. “Eir.”
Eir looked up, tears flowing down her face, eyes red. A wine cup behind her on the floor leaked dark wine into the darker wood. “Get Nanna out of here. Give her something to make her sleep—not too deep. Stay with her, please.”
Eir nodded and tried to pull Nanna to her feet but couldn’t. It wasn’t that Nanna was resisting, but she was oblivious to everything around her.
Frigg strode to the side of the platform where Hamnen, a warden, stood slack-jawed. The man’s gaze was as vacant as if the black-feathered arrow that sprouted from his chest in the vision above his head had already killed him.
She grabbed his shoulder and shook him. She pointed at Nanna and Eir. “Hamnen! Carry Hár Nanna to wherever Eir commands. Guard the door. Let none but myself or Eir in to see her. Do not let her leave. Do you understand?”
Hamnen nodded, tears streaking his face.
“Go, then.” She slapped his shoulder, palm stinging from the impact.
She touched her own face and found that it was still dry. She should have been crying.
Tyr was striding back, Hodr’s limp body over one shoulder. Faces black with rage, the crowd followed.
Every few paces, Tyr spun slowly, his bared sword keeping open a wide circle around him. Naked rage twisted his face. In the fires above his head, he stood before a tremendous hound, bloody froth on its muzzle; in the distance, a black ship advanced, its prow rising and falling on choppy seas.
Frigg closed her eyes for a moment. The noise in the hall boomed like the sea in a narrow fjord and the sickening blackness threatened. As soon as she felt Tyr and his burden step onto the platform, she opened her eyes.
As if the platform were the shore, the crowd crashed against it.
Frigg nodded her thanks to Tyr and ushered him past her. She held up both hands to the crowd, palms outward, as if she alone could hold back their tide. Their voices crashed over her, demanding she turn Hodr over to them.
In the lull of the crowd’s gathering breath, she called to Heimdall, knowing that unless Baldr’s murder had turned the watchman back to his cups, he would hear her. “Sound your horn. Quickly.”
She turned back to the crowd. A pair of stocky, long-bearded merchants had advanced into the empty space between the platform and the crowd.
She pointed at them. “Get back.”
They hesitated, glancing at one another.
Beyond the crowd, Hermod’s waving hand caught her eye. A covered body lay on a table before her. Ráta stood between the body and the crowd, arms wide, her expression brutally sober.
But it wasn’t just a body. It was her son’s body. And still she wasn’t crying.
Several Einherjar stepped in from the side door and began clearing a path by shoving tables and benches out of the way, along with folk too dazed to move.
The roar of voices swelled in front of her. The pair of merchants rode it forward, the red ribbons laced through their beards seeming more like streaming blood than harmless affectations.
Frigg was about to warn them off again when a wall of sound fell on her. She staggered. The flames in the iron sconces blew out, and dust filtered down from the rafters. She clapped her hands to her ears, but it did nothing to lessen the sound. She resisted the urge to sink to her knees like Nanna had, instead letting the horn’s voice pass over and around her as if she were a river rock.
Heimdall had heard. Gjallarhorn was more than simply loud. Its voice resonated from the deep, rumbling growl of a bear’s chest to a note higher and sharper than the peaks of the northern range. Sharper than the spear that split Baldr’s chest.
And like the seed of grief in her heart, that mournful note grew till it seemed like it would never stop.

OUTRO
Well, folks, that was CHAPTER 88 of Kinsmen Die. I hope you enjoyed it.

Hodr killed Baldr, as the spirit of Angrboda told Odin. Frigg’s vision of Baldr’s death has also come true.

In the myths, Baldr had dreams of his own death and the gods gathered to find out why. Odin went to the realm of the dead to consult a seeress to find out the meaning of those dreams. These events are from the poem Baldr’s Draumr and also referenced in Snorri’s Gylfaginning.

The Gylfaginning also has this: 

And Frigg took oaths…that fire and water should spare Baldr, likewise iron and metal of all kinds, stones, earth, trees, sicknesses, beasts, birds, venom, serpents. And when that was done and made known, then it was a diversion of Baldr's and the Æsir, that he should stand up in the Thing, and all the others should some shoot at him, some hew at him, some beat him with stones; but whatsoever was done hurt him not at all, and that seemed to them all a very worshipful thing.

So that’s what I adapted for my Midwinter ritual, as well as some references in the previous chapter when Hodr remembered earlier rituals.

There’s a bit more to it, but I’ll leave that for a future chapter. 

Next week we’re back with Vidar.

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.

I have prefaced these verses again to reflect Odin’s warning. 

Bellows, Verse 88

Do not put your trust…

In a brother's slayer, if thou meet him abroad,
In a half-burned house, in a horse full swift--
One leg is hurt and the horse is useless--
None had ever such faith as to trust in them all.

Larrington, Verse 88

Do not put your trust in…

A brother’s killer, if met on the road,
a house half-burned, a too swift horse—
the mount is useless if a leg breaks—
let no man be so trusting as to trust all these.

Thanks for listening.