Þrúðr’s sleep was a restless thing, fitful pits of exhaustion punctuated by tear-filled hours of wakefulness. Her stomach churned hard enough to force out the feast the dvergar had provided, and even that was an awful, humiliating ordeal. One that saw Þrúðr stumbling around the chambers she had been given, eventually walking into a room tiled in bright mosaics with water running beneath the ground. She hoped desperately she had intuited the function of the facilities correctly. That she had not relieved herself within the bath nor washed herself atop the privy.

Nothing in the place was as it should be, least of all Þrúðr.

Magni and Móði had come to visit, as grim and stone-faced as their hosts, and had informed her that the deal with Brokkr had been struck. She was to be wed to Uni, in exchange for the safety and prosperity of both Ásgarðr and Niðavellir. Upon hearing the news Þrúðr had ensured her eyes were dry and her chin was raised, and she had said, “Well done, brothers mine. Now rest. Tomorrow, you recover Father’s legacy.”

Her voice had not wavered, and for that she was proud. Even when Móði had stepped forward and offered, “Sister, it is not too late. We have the jötunn. He is clever, and—”

The thought of Lain—of being beholden to that fickle, burning madness—saw the bile rise in Þrúðr’s throat.

“No dishonor,” she’d said. “Today, we make Ásgarðr proud.”

And Þrúðr had.

Young dvergar had draped her in gold, their skins rippling with pink and mauve and teal as their stumpy, half-lost tails wagged. Þrúðr’s mood lifted at the sight of them—small and soft-skinned and innocent—and at the way they braided her hair and helped her change into the fine furs and silk she had brought in her saddlebags for the day. In the end, she’d stood in front of a mirror in her room, shining and perfect, and fought back tears.

She looked fit to be a queen.

Pity it would be only the dark to see it.

As she left, she felt cold fingers lace into her own and looked down to see a dvergr child holding out a bouquet of flowers. Green and white and gold. Surface flowers. Dotted with the long luminescent stalks of mushrooms from the deep.

“Thank you,” Þrúðr said, voice hushed and breaking.

When she walked from her room, it was with a small and clammy hand clutched within her own.

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Uni was a good man. Þrúðr reminded herself of this throughout the hasty “wedding.”

He was good, and kind, and stood beside her dressed in mail that shone like the surface of the moon, glittering with every precious gem that could be mined from the far side of the subterranean sea.

“You look very beautiful,” he’d said when he’d seen her.

Þrúðr had nodded, biting her lip and not trusting her voice. Leaves and petals rattled in her shaking grasp, fine stems crushed to pulp beneath her fingers, eyes fixed only on where carvings on the wall told the tale of Uni’s family. Smiths and merchants, diplomats who bridged between the world above and one below. And Þrúðr, who was that bridge.

Somewhere, below her eyes, Brokkr sang with a voice like pounding stone.

Then he called forth his brother, Eitri, and his nephew, Tóki, to hand over Megingjörð and Járngreipr to Magni and Móði.

And then Þrúðr was wed.

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“Sister, your brothers beg your indulgence.” Móði bowed, deep and low, eyes glittering with irony in the dark. “Lend to us your jötunn bondsman, that we may use his guile and cunning to retrieve our father’s honor.”

For a moment—one single pride-filled moment—Þrúðr wondered what would happen should she refuse.

Brothers, who took and took and took. And Lain, who was vicious and cunning and sly, and who spoke of his wife with such soft devotion, and whose stitched-shut lips were even now twisted into a baleful sneer.

You should be wielding Mjölnir, he’d said. The words echoing in Þrúðr’s skull, so loud she wondered if the beast could hear.

And Þrúðr knew it was a lie, as all things the goða dólgr said were lies. Tricks and tests, to find weakness in Þrúðr’s heart. Jealousy. Pride. Dishonor.

Ergi.

For what else to call a daughter who would usurp her father’s place?

And so, when Móði asked for Lain’s—for Loki’s—service to his quest, Þrúðr granted it with gladness in her heart.

“Take him,” she said. “He is yours and will serve you well. If you can keep him leashed.” She grinned a brittle grin and Móði returned it.

“Ah,” he said, winking. “We have ways enough for that.”

From somewhere to her left, Þrúðr heard the jötunn’s vicious growl.

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Not long after, Þrúðr’s brothers and their beast were gone.

Þrúðr stood beside her new husband on a pier, watching the glow-edged waves of the Skærasær lap the ship.

To retrieve Mjölnir, Magni and Móði would have to travel to Miðgarðr. The dvergar knew the way, deeper into the mountain and through the twisted paths between the Tree. Þrúðr had given Magni her bouquet, and she watched him wave with it in big extended arcs as he slid into the dark.

Þrúðr stood for a long time, the boat growing smaller and smaller on the tide, until it was nothing more than a faint and bobbing star. Then nothing at all.

Still, Þrúðr did not give up her vigil, eyes fixed on the slow undulation of the undersea tide. Black water leaving foaming crests of iridescent blue along the black stone of the shore.

She had been alone long enough for her legs to ache and her eyes to sting, when she heard footsteps behind her on the pier. The waddling clank-clank of the dvergar and his iron shoes.

“My lady? If you desire reprieve from your vigil, your morning gift is ready.”

Þrúðr blinked, then blinked again. Willing tears not to spill at the sound of Uni’s soft and gentle voice. Þrúðr was done with crying. She was a wife now, her brothers gone. Her will had been done and now there was nothing left but to be glad of it.

When she turned, she made sure it was with a smile to greet her spouse.

“H-husband”—and if her voice stumbled, just a little, Uni was kind enough not to mention—“forgive me, I only worry for my brothers on their quest.”

“They are strong men,” Uni said, “and their cause is just. They will triumph, and all the Realms will be better for it.”

Þrúðr smiled, and did not speak the words that hid beneath her heart.

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Uni took her back into Brokkr’s hall, into the wing he claimed as his.

“Yours now, also,” he said, showing Þrúðr through the maze of rooms and scurrying servants.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

When Þrúðr was well and truly lost, Uni stopped them in front of what looked to be a huge golden sphere, set into the wall and floor such that only a quarter of it protruded. More gold adorned the walls around its edges, emerging in sunbeamlike geometric rays.

The “sun,” as it turned out, was a door; bisected down the middle and opened with a strange key shaped like a sól-rune. The key was threaded onto a chain, and Uni proffered it to Þrúðr.

“This is your morning gift,” he said, coloring rippling strangely at the words. “This room is your solitude, your retreat. Go there, and none will come after you. Not I, nor my family, nor any other who dwells beneath the Mountain.”

“A prison?” Þrúðr snapped. Then flushed in humiliation just as quickly. “Forgive me. It . . . it has been a trying time.”

But Uni waved a hand, colors darkening even as his large dark eyes could not meet Þrúðr’s own. “No,” he said. “Not a prison. The key is yours, come and go as you please. The room is locked for . . . for other reasons.”

Þrúðr’s eyes narrowed. “ ‘Other reasons’?”

Uni bowed, just slightly. “Please,” he said. “Enter, and you will see. Just beyond the door is a plinth. Place the key within its lock, and you will know why you must do this thing alone.”

It could be a trap. With Magni and Móði gone, perhaps Uni was as talented a liar as the jötunn beast Þrúðr had traded him for. Perhaps the dvergar did mean to keep her here, imprisoned. For her hair, perhaps, and Þrúðr’s mind was filled with a nightmare of being strapped into some awful engine, her hair grown and shorn in endless cycles even as her body withered into nothing in the dark.

Þrúðr took the key, fastening the chain about her neck.

“Thank you,” she said, and unlocked the door.

When she did, the sun orb split in two, each half rolling away with the roar of dragging stone, leaving the key without a lock. Þrúðr gasped as, inside, a circular room was revealed, wrought in gold and patterned with more shapes and lines.

She glanced down at Uni, then forward again. “What—?”

“Please,” he said again, bowing and gesturing forward.

Þrúðr stepped inside the dome, in front of the plinth Uni had described. There was, indeed, another keyhole at the top of the pillar, and Þrúðr had to remove the chain from her neck to fit the lock. As soon as she had turned it into place, the grinding began anew, and Þrúðr gasped as the doors behind her closed and the entire room began to spin.

“Uni—” she managed, but then the doors slammed and she was alone, surrounded by walls that began to fall away in segments, opening like a strange flower and into a light more blinding than any Þrúðr could remember. She cried out, hands coming up to shield her eyes and waiting for the warmth on her skin to turn to burning, cursing the dvergar with her last breath that they would dare to burn a daughter of Ásgarðr in this awful furnace and—

—and the pain never came. Just the warmth, and the light, and when Þrúðr lowered her arms, when she blinked, her eyes adjusting from the dim world of the mountain, what she saw before her brought her to her knees.

Morning gift, Uni had called it. A tithe from a husband to a new bride, yet perhaps Uni’s words had held another meaning, for what Þrúðr saw hanging above her, set high up in a vaulted ceiling of blue tile that shimmered like a summer sky . . .

Above her hung the sun.

Or, perhaps not the sun—not Sól’s daughter—but some magic of the dvergar’s making. A false sun, shining bright down onto a garden filled with lush green grass and trees and flowers that spread in rainbows over loamy soil.

There was a pond and stream, not too far away from the podium, set behind a silk-shrouded stone gazebo in which Þrúðr could see the shapes of lounges and of tables. Somewhere in the distance, behind artfully arranged menhirs, came the sounds of a waterfall, while, all around, butterflies and bees traced lazy paths upon winds with no source Þrúðr could see.

Nor could she see the edges of the room, so immense was the cavern. And it was a cavern; they must have been below Sindri, below the Skærasær. Uni had certainly brought her down enough stairs to get there and—

“Uni!”

Þrúðr’s hands flew back to the key, wrenching it from the pedestal. As she did, the sun door began to grind and rotate once again, hiding the cavern and replacing it with the gloom beneath the mountain, made all the dimmer by contrast to the false sun of the garden.

As soon as the doors had opened wide enough for Þrúðr’s passing, she was through them, calling Uni’s name as she ran frantically up the corridor.

“Þrúðr? My lady?”

Then Uni was there, rounding a corner, large dark eyes wide and colors flashing in panic at Þrúðr’s voice.

“What has happened? Are you hurt?”

Þrúðr fell to her knees, arms thrown around Uni’s shoulders, choked by racking sobs.

“I’m sorry,” she cried. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry I’m sorry I can’t I’m sorry I—”

Thick, four-fingered hands came up to brush tears gently from her cheeks. Uni said nothing, just held Þrúðr as she wailed against his heart.

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“You built all of this?”

Later, back in the garden. Uni knew a way to dim the sun, and had shown Þrúðr the dials on the control plinth that would turn the golden orb into a shining silver moon. There were even stars, glittering against the inky blackness up above.

“Designed,” Uni said. “I had help with the labor.”

They were sitting together in the stone gazebo, looking out over the pond to where a waterfall bubbled down a slide of rocks.

“It’s beautiful.” Þrúðr’s voice was thick, her eyes burning from the fall of tears that had now, thankfully, dried.

“Thank you. My cousin, Tóki, is the smith. But I have some skills of my own, also.” His color flashed a deep blue-green within the dark. Then stopped, as he inhaled and said, “Þrúðr, this marriage. If your brothers have—”

“It was my design.” Þrúðr would not have the dvergar blame Magni and Móði for her own soft and foolish will.

“Yet you do not wish it, not truly.”

Þrúðr had no answer to that, only tears, and she had vowed to shed no more this day.

Uni sighed. “This ‘marrying’ “—he said it strangely, as if the word tasted foreign on his tongue—“it confuses me so. Father explained it, but . . .” He stopped, and Þrúðr heard him shift. Then, “The dvergar do not do this, did they tell you? This is a tradition of the æsir.”

Þrúðr blinked, startled as the words set in. “No, I—” She turned to look at Uni. “Dvergar have asked for it before.”

Uni flashed green, just for a moment. “Yes, Alvíss. I have heard of his ill-fated plot.”

Alvíss, the All-wise, who had not lived up to his name, and who had lost a battle of wits to Þrúðr’s father for his conceit. Fatally so.

Þrúðr had been young, then, and Alvíss unpleasant in a way Uni was not.

“We know it is your custom,” Uni was saying. “To forge alliances and fortunes. But it is not ours.” Another flicker of emerald light. “Surely you have noticed no mother in our house?”

Þrúðr felt the flush rising in her cheeks. “Forgive me, but your shapes are somewhat strange to me. I had perhaps thought—”

“That we are belched forth from the rock itself?” Uni laughed, the sound deep and loud in the stillness of the garden. “Or perhaps that we must steal Ásgarðr’s women to spawn our sons?”

Þrúðr hunched, shamed to hear her fears so plainly spoken.

“Forgive my humor,” Uni said. “But these things . . . our ways are not the surface’s ways. And so you whisper dark things of us, I think. That we covet your strange dull skin and spindly limbs.”

“You told me I was beautiful!” Þrúðr felt foolish as soon as the words left her mouth, clamping a hand across her lips and wishing for some great beast to rise through the rock and eat her whole.

Uni merely laughed. “What else was I to say! Father tried to tell me what he knows of your courtship, but . . . atch!” A strange, guttural sound of frustration. “Am I instead to ask your skill in smithing? Or compliment the weaving of your clothes? Or the speed with which you can find a vein within the mines?” Another laugh, and then Þrúðr was laughing, too, something strange and light fluttering in her gut.

“I do weave,” she said. “This.” She gestured to the gold embroidery on her hangaroc. “Mother taught me when I was young, to pull strands from—”

“From your hair!” Bright blue-green danced across Uni’s skin. “Of course,” he said, at Þrúðr’s nod. “You weave the threads and lay the stitching. May I?” He held out his hand.

Þrúðr nodded, biting her lip and trying not to giggle as Uni’s fingers ran across the pattern. Across the tops of her breasts, though there was nothing lascivious in the touch. Þrúðr wondered if Uni even knew there should be.

“This is wonderful craft,” Uni said, leaning back again. “You have great skill.”

Þrúðr couldn’t help the smile that split her lips, nor the pride that swelled within her chest. Her own fingers raised to trace the images. Her mother, her father, her brothers. Family. Surrounded by the branches of the Tree and the watchful eyes of ravens and of wolves.

“Þrúðr.” Uni’s voice was serious, colors muting to dull silver. “You do not wish me as your husband, not truly.”

It was not a question. Þrúðr’s joy and pride falling like stones into the void, and she looked away lest she meet Uni’s large, dark eyes. “Truly, I do not wish any as my husband.”

One small, selfish, childish wish. One she’d told no one since the day her father had ridden out to best a dvergar at riddles. Since the day her mother had set her aside and told her to take a man, lest such things happen more often.

“What do you wish?”

Þrúðr blinked, felt the sting in her eyes and willed no more tears to fall. She was a woman, not a child, and she had been asked a woman’s question. To be answered in a woman’s way.

“I wish,” she began, “for peace and prosperity for Ásgarðr.”

It was not a lie. Nor was it what Uni had asked.

“And for yourself?”

“I . . .” Þrúðr’s fists rolled into tight balls against her knees. Somewhere beyond the dark, a stream babbled gently beneath a mountain.

“I wish for freedom.”

Barely a whisper, but Uni heard it.

“Well,” he said. “Soon, I think, your brothers will have their hammer. And you and I? We will make between us treaty for the surface and Mountain both. That is two of your three things. As for the third . . .” He paused for a moment. “Things are different beneath the Mountain. Perhaps there can have been a . . . cultural misunderstanding, if you take my meaning? And we will have you back beneath the open sky once more, and both our realms will be closer for it.”

Þrúðr closed her eyes, feeling the cool breeze of the mountain of her cheeks. “Thank you.”

Beside her, she felt Uni stand. “I will have servants bring tools for weaving. You will find much adulation for your art here, I think. It is beautiful.”

Þrúðr nodded, listening to Uni’s snuffling footfalls as he walked out of the garden. She stayed beneath its false moon for longer yet.