"The Courting of Mengloth" from The Jotunbok
(as told to me by Mengloth, and parts of it by Hela)

What name she was given at birth, we shall never know, for she does not speak of it, but by the time she was old enough to sing, her love of jewels and fine necklaces prompted her family to call her Mengloth, which is Necklace-Glad. She was a fair child, with flaxen hair, but pale and sickly; her mother nursed her through illness after illness, despairing of bringing her to health like the younger brothers and sisters who had come after her. While they ran through the mountains to play and hunt, she would stare mournfully from the window of her bedchamber, which looked out through the rough stone caves of the mountains of northern Jotunheim.

A sickly child is alone much, for other children grow impatient, and small Jotnar especially. Her parents consoled her with special morsels and pretty trinkets, but they could not buy her health. Wisewomen were called to see her, but though each sang over her and fair stuffed her with herbs, she never grew entirely well. Old Hyndla herself came down to see the child, and announced that she had inherited weakness of bloodline, and that she would either die or be very important. Such strange pronouncements were not unusual for the odd old Bloodwalker, but her parents worried much over her.

But by this time, she was no longer alone so much, for little Mengloth had a secret that she told to no one. One night while she lay much fevered, her very spirit left her body, and her mother feared to lose her entirely. Her soul hovered in the air and then found itself borne on the wind, wafting like a weightless leaf. Then, the next thing she knew, she was riding along behind the eyes of someone else, staring up at the face of a tall, strikingly handsome man.

The eyes were blurred, for they were wet with tears. It was a boy-child, she realized, not much more than her own age, and he was crying. The man shook his handsome head and said in a fine mellifluous voice, “Sometimes I wonder how a child so clumsy could even be my son.” Then he picked up the broken pieces of something -- Mengloth could not see through the tears -- and took them away. A pair of hands covered the eyes, and the sobbing continued in darkness.

Mengloth waited, uncertain, wanting to comfort the boy whose head she had landed in, but not knowing how. After a while, he fell asleep, and she found herself drifting back to her body. The fever had broken, and her mother rejoiced, but the thought of the boy haunted for some time. Eventually, being bored with her convalescence, she undertook to find him by putting herself in a trance -- and find him she did. This time he was happier, laughing and playing with his older brother. The frail Mengloth found his wild, energetic antics wonderful; she had never played so hard herself.

From then on, whenever she was ill and confined, she visited the boy-child in her mind. Sometimes she saw things as he saw them, and sometimes she seemed to hover about him like a ghost, watching from the outside. The connection seemed entirely one-way, though -- no matter how loud she called out to him, he never seemed to hear her. Sometimes, though, when she was hovering around him, he would pause and look oddly at where her consciousness hung in the air, and then shake his head and go on with his play.

Mengloth learned a great deal about him, though. She learned that his name was Svipdag, and that he was the son of the great star-hero Aurvandil, companion and friend of Thor, and the sorceress Groa. Svipdag’s intimidating mother always frightened Mengloth, for whenever she came around, Mengloth feared that the sorceress might see her and do something. She would flee at the very sound of Groa’s voice, and not return until Svipdag had run off again.

His relationship with his father was even more complex. Though it took her years to figure out, she came to realize that Svipdag idolized the great star-hero Aurvandil...and that he was a constant disappointment to his father. His older brother Thjalfi was already in service as a page to Thor, well on the way to being a hero himself, but Svipdag was poor hero material. He was forgetful, and dreamy, and could not hold a sword without tripping over his feet. His hands were clumsy with knives and crafts, and he would injure himself regularly. He was nearsighted as well, and would accidentally knock things about. He would sometimes trip over his tongue and stutter. Put to weed a field, he would wander away in the middle of it; put to watch sheep, they would all be lost in the woods while he played with stems of grass. In spite of this, he was cheerful and good-hearted, and laughed often, but it was clear that he would be neither warrior-hero nor craftsman nor skald, nor even a farmer...and his father knew it, and watched him often with an unhappy look on his face. Svipdag seemed not to notice it, but Mengloth saw it, and her heart bled for him.

As Mengloth grew older, her brothers and sisters found mates, one by one, but she resisted it. Somehow, after being in Svipdag’s head, she could not imagine that a physical relationship could be more intimate than that, even though it was only one way. Instead, she apprenticed with the local healer, feeling that since she was so often ill, she ought at least to find out what could be done about it. After all, she told herself, my mother will not always be there to care for me, and so I must care for myself. In spite of her sickliness she grew giantess-tall and broad, clear signs of her mountain-etin blood. She felt herself to be plain and awkward, unlikely to gain the eye of those seeking beauty, and so she went about oblivious to many whose eyes followed her. If they had been asked, they would have spoken about the warm glow that emanated from her when she smiled, lighting her up from the inside, and making her almost beautiful in some indescribable way.

When Mengloth had learned all the healer knew, she went to another, and another. She found that she had the healing knack; her large hands were gentle and warm, and she had a gift for looking into the bodies of others and seeing their hurts and imbalances. She also discovered that the Jotun healers in different places had similar knowledge, but each possessed some skills or lore that was unknown to the others. Sometimes it had been learned from their teacher, and not always completely; some spoke of lost lore that had slipped through their fingers.

After a time, she made a decision: she would dedicate herself to collecting all the healing lore of the Jotnar that she could find, that it might not be lost to the vagaries of time and Death. To this end, her life became a series of apprenticeships that moved further and further afield from her home in the northern mountains, eventually taking her out of Jotunheim completely. She studied with hedge-witches in the western islands, and -- for a week -- with Ran beneath the waves, who taught her about dampness and moisture in the body. She studied with snow-frosted healers in the Niflheim caves, learning about teaching the body to bear up in the cold. She studied with troll-women in the Iron Wood, who knew a great deal about how to heal a deformed body and help it to compromise with the world, and also the healing uses of shapeshifting. She learned about bloodlines and their diseases from Hyndla, the Hag of the Northern Mountains; about herbs and their growing from Gerda, the daughter of her mother’s old friend Aurboda. She studied with healers in the fiery land of Muspellheim, their hands soot-blackened with ash, for none knew better than they how to deal with burns and fevers. Eventually, she met and became friends with Sinmora, the Lady of Muspellheim, who taught her about healing with heat and the warm steam-room.

Her travels even took her down into the caves of Nidavellir, where she learned from a Duergar healer-man who excelled in setting bones and doing surgery. She then traveled westwards out of the lands of the Jotnar and into Vanaheim, where she studied with a Vanir healer who knew much about the nourishment of the body. It was there, in Vanaheim, that she met another fellow traveler far from her home, studying with the same teacher: an Asa woman named Eir, who was a handmaiden to Frigga, the queen of Asgard.

The two met eye to eye with the kind of excitement that comes only from knowing a kindred spirit. Within an hour of meeting, words were spilling from them about the many things that they had learned, about their passion for the arts of healing. They both moved quickly through the skills taught to them by the Vanir healer, but both delayed leaving for their homes immediately, because they were too busy sharing with each other. Day after day folk would smile to see the tall, broad, plain giantess and the short, slender, plain Asa woman animatedly discussing some bit of lore about livers or lungs, or whether the gland of light that lies behind the eyes is more developed in the Alfar than in other races, or some other such subject that no one else could decipher, or cared to.

All during this time of travel and learning, though, Mengloth still kept watching Svipdag. When she would fall into her bed, exhausted at night, she would touch his life gently once more before falling asleep. When she had a moment of peace during the day, she would go into trance and see where his life was leading. She watched him struggle to impress his father, to become a hero and a warrior, to do battle first with his fumbling hands and feet. She watched him try to learn the arts of weaponcraft until he wept with the frustration of it, saw the repressed laughter and pity in the eyes of the friends who reached out and tried to help him, saw him shove his mother away when she tried to comfort him. Rarely did more than a week or two pass without Mengloth seeing him, wanting more than ever to reach out and speak to him, to be more than a ghost that rode along. Even being his ghost, though, mended her loneliness somewhat.

Yet somehow she missed certain things, adventures that flew by while she had her head deep in her studies...or deep in her conversations with her new friend Eir. So it was that she was taken by surprise when she found him holding the hand of a pretty young island-giantess who was already showing with child, and them both standing before the intimidating Groa and her star-hero, telling them that they wished to be married. Mengloth felt as if she had been struck beneath the ribs with a great club. She watched, frozen, as Groa dropped the bones to read their omens. “Not good,” the old giantess muttered, “but not so bad either, if you’ve already gone and done the deed and there’s no helping it.”

She did not stay to watch them be wedded, or -- her mind shied away from it -- the wedding night, even if the girl was too swollen with child by then to give much pleasure in bed. Instead, she went back to her apprenticeship with new intensity, nursing a wounded heart. She did not blame Svipdag -- how could she, when he did not even know of her existence? She was too sensible a girl for that. You could have gone to him before this, a nagging voice in her head kept whispering. You could have shown yourself to him, and perhaps you would be standing there now, in front of his mother and father.

No, she gritted back; how could I tell a young man that I have been spying on him since childhood, using him like a storybook that always tells a new tale, to salve my loneliness? Besides, what if he spurned me? That would be the far worse fate. No, let him have his young bride and his new family, and let me have my mission. It’s better this way.

So she buried herself in her studies, and for two years she did not look in on Svipdag, though there were nights when she wept into her pillow from missing him.

It was meeting Eir, the repository of all the healing knowledge of the Aesir -- and by extension, much of the healing knowledge of the Alfar, under whom Eir had also studied -- that Mengloth’s resolve hardened. So much had been lost, had gone into the grave...surely there was a way to recover that, too? There was still one world that she had yet to plunder, and that one lay at the foot of the Tree, and was ruled with iron hand by a Goddess who did not like her Dead to be bothered. If healing is the enemy of Death, she thought to herself, then I must face that enemy at the center of her domain, sooner or later, rather than merely facing it in the countenances of those I am trying to heal. Yet Mengloth turned it over, night after night, until the day that Eir went back to Asgard. She knew that it was time to leave fair Vanaheim, but she quailed at the direction that her footsteps were to take. Through the winter she lingered, and finally as the spring dawned she forced herself to go back to Jotunheim. From there she passed into Midgard, and her feet eventually found the dusty stretch of the Hel-road.

Many stories have been told about the brave ones who walked living down the Hel-road, including that of Hermod who did it in nine days and nine nights. Hermod, however, had one of the best horses that Odin could supply, and a swiftness spell to carry him along. Mengloth walked the Helvegr on foot, so that she would not lose it, with a stout stick and her pack of herbs and healing-magics over her shoulder. As she passed through Niflheim and saw the sheer black cliffs of Helheim in the distance, the Dead grew thicker on the road, passing her like misty fog packed into shapes with arms and legs. Some were old and wizened, and these did not bother her; they had lived a full life and had gone gladly into Death. The war-dead did not bother her so much either, as they had chosen their deaths. It was the young ones taken by disease, especially the children, that made her weep. Once she saw a ghost of a tiny child, its body swollen from the poisonous bite of some creature, toddling along in the mist. She dropped to her knees in the snow to weep at the sight, for she knew both the poison and its antidote.

She passed over the golden bridge of knives, her head held high, and found her way blocked by its guardian. “What business have you in the Land of Death, you that still breathe?” Mordgud asked her, but the armored woman’s voice was gentle.

Mengloth lifted her head and breathed the cold air deeply. “I have come to learn from the healers of my ancestors, who have passed Hel’s Gate,” she said. “If they will speak to me...and if the Mistress of this realm will allow me...then I would bring their knowledge back to the Nine Worlds.”

Mordgud smiled, but it was keen wry smile; without much pleasure in it, but with a good deal of respect. She stood aside to let Mengloth pass, but then commented to her retreating back, “Just remember, healer-woman, that we here are not the enemy you battle.” Mengloth turned back, startled, but Mordgud had gone up into her tower to await the next gaggle of ghosts.

The giantess moved toward the great dark wall with slow steps, fearing at the last moment that the gate would not open for her, but it did. As she passed through it, chills ran up and down her spine, and a cold wind passed through her, strangely colder even than the snows of Niflheim which she had just left. Indeed, the air here was warmer; she stood on a carpet of autumn leaves looking at a road that wound through an orchard laden with fruit. It looked mouthwatering, but Mengloth knew enough not to taste of it. She followed the road, not sure where to go. It arched over a small bridge, and as she came down the other side, she saw an etin-woman standing in the road, waiting for her.

The woman was not as tall as Mengloth herself, but her presence loomed as huge and dark as the gate that she had just passed. She was clad in simple black, and one side of her face was that of a lovely woman, with long fair hair trailing down her shoulder. The other side was a skull with scraps of flesh clinging to it, and an odd light in the empty socket. One skeletal hand clutched her dark mantle around her, and she regarded Mengloth silently.

The giantess paused, swallowed her fear, and then came forward to kneel before Hela briefly, touching the ground at the hem of that black robe that seemed to blur into the autumn leaves. She stood again, and called the Queen of the Dead by the title that most Jotnar were taught to speak of her. “Your Ladyship. I have come to beg a boon of you.”

Hela regarded her without expression, unmoving. The cold wind picked up and whistled the leaves around the shivering giantess. “And why should I grant any boon to one who has declared herself to be my enemy?” she asked, finally. Her voice was low and husky, not loud at all, yet it chilled Mengloth more thoroughly than the wind.

“It is my job to fight death, when I am given to do a healing,” Mengloth faltered. “If I did not do so, I would be doing a disservice to those who have come to me.”

The wind settled down a bit. Mengloth noticed that it did not disturb Hela’s robes or hair in any way, merely fluttering the dried leaves around her. “No matter how great your skill,” the Lady of Death said, “there will be times when you cannot heal those who come to you. If you cannot help them, and their lives have become one great round of suffering with no joy left to them, can you grant them mercy?”

Mengloth shivered again, but not from the chill wind. “No, Your Ladyship,” she said in a low voice. “...Only you can do that.”

“And the evil spirits of disease that you would cast out of a suffering body?” Hela asked. “When you slay them, into whose hands do they pass?”

“Yours, Lady,” Mengloth whispered.

“A true healer, then, would see me as a partner in their work,” Hela said. “One who would take over when their skill failed. Who would gather the suffering soul to their breast when there was no more earthly remedy to be had.”

For a moment, Mengloth was as still as the figure before her, and then she slowly dropped again to her knees in homage. “You are right, Your Ladyship,” she said. “You are not my enemy, and I have been wrong to treat you as one.” Her head touched the dust and dry leaves. “I suppose that this is the wisdom that I came here to get, though it is painful. I thank you for that, then.”

One skeletal hand reached down and took her by the shoulder, hard like a grip of steel, and drew her to her feet. “Let us be partners, then,” Hela said. The bony hand withdrew from Mengloth’s shoulder and uncurled like five strings of lightly clacking beads. The giantess took the dead hand in hers, head bowed. “There are those who would speak with you,” Hela said, and pointed to the distance. A great lake lay there, mists rising from its waters, and there was an island in the center. “Go to them,” the Lady of Death said. “You have until the cock crows at sunset to learn all that you can.” She turned, then, and limped slowly away. Mengloth’s first instinct was to do something to aid her limping foot, then she saw the skeletal toes beneath the hem of the black robe, and bit her tongue and said nothing.

She went to the water’s edge, but there was no boat. Dead faces swirled beneath the surface of the water. Hesitantly, she stepped forth onto the lake and found that the water would bear her up, like shifting sand. Carefully she walked across its haunted waves, until she reached the shore. A row of old giants and giantesses stood there, bones braided into their hair, faces wizened or smooth or lumpy, holding their bags of root and stone and herb in their hands. Holding out their wisdom to her. They converged on her, babbling, as she set foot on the shore...and then she realized that it was already late in the afternoon here in Helheim, and the sun was slanting lower in the sky. There was no way she would be able to hear them all, not when what they had learned might have taken them years to master. Realizing this, she burst into tears.

The ghosts drew back, and one old woman patted her on the arm, comforting her. Mengloth blinked through wet eyes and watched as the old woman picked up a stone and began to mutter to it. The stone glowed for a moment, and then the glow faded away. The other ghosts began, similarly, to seize stones from the rocky island beach and speak to them. The first old hedge-witch held the stone out to Mengloth. “I put my knowledge in this stone for you,” she said in a voice like the faint rushing of winter winds heard through stone walls. “Take it with you, and it will speak to you.” The giantess held out her shawl, and the stone was dropped in. It was not a small stone. The others followed, stone after heavy stone, until she was weighted down with the great burden of centuries of knowledge.

The bag of her shawl was so heavy that her feet sank into the water up to the ankles as she crossed back over. She left Helheim by the main gate, bent like an old woman under her burden. It took her many days to pass through Niflheim, sometimes carrying her heavy burden and sometimes dragging it behind her. When her shawl wore through, she wrapped them in her cloak and kept going.

In Midgard, a human with a horse and cart took pity on the poor woman and offered to let her ride in the back, but when she heaved her bundle of stones aboard, it broke both axles on the cart, and she wept and apologized, and continued to drag them down the road. By the time she reached Jotunheim, her cloak had worn through and she continued with the stones wrapped in her skirt. The idea of throwing away a single one in order to lighten her load did not occur to her. She had gone to the Realm of Death and back for them, and every one was precious.

Strangely enough, her body did not give out the whole way back. She had always thought of herself as frail, but somehow the great burden, though difficult, gave her strength. When she reached the western mountains that looked out over the ocean, she was ragged and half-naked and filthy, but the muscles of her arms and legs bulged like mountain cliffs, and she strode up the hillside with the fraying skirt full of stone slung over her shoulder like a baby. Her feet led her to Leirbrimir Mountain, named for an old stone-giant who had become so far one with the rock that his great dead body merged and melded with the cliffside. She built herself a hut with a small bed in it on Leirbrimir’s jutting brow, around which she placed the stones in a circle, so that they might teach her in dreams.

So it was that Mengloth returned and set up a house for healing. Her fame grew quickly, as folk from many worlds came to her. After a few years, though, she had no peace. Folk harassed her night and day, and would not let her sleep. She crumpled exhausted at night to their pitiful wails, and woke in the morning to their begging, or worse, stolid patience in the face of pain. The women were the hardest; big bellies that needed help with hard birthing, or bleeding that would not stop, or bodies worn out from too many children.

There was also the kidnapping. The first attempt came a year into her practice. As her fame spread, some young Jotun toughs decided that there would be a good deal of hamingja in having the greatest healer in Jotunheim as a bride, and decided to take her by force. Mengloth’s uncle Fjolsvith intervened and drove them off, but they were quickly replaced by less violent types who tried to wheedle and court her, pushing into her already overcrowded time with patients. She fended them off, but with more and more anger and frustration. When Fjolsvith suggested that she might as well marry one of them, and thus get rid of the others, she laid into him with an angry torrent of words that took everyone who knew her aback. Her uncle pacified her, saying that of course she need not marry if she did not wish to, and that he would continue to protect her from unwanted suitors, if that was what she wanted.

That night, she gave in and let her sight wander once again to Svipdag. She expected to find him home with his wife and family, by their hearthside, but he was wandering through the wilderness, weeping. Her heart was wrenched to see him, but she could not comfort him with arms of flesh, so she concentrated on stroking his head with her invisible hand. Indeed, it did seem to comfort him after a time, and he fell asleep, exhausted, under a tree. It seemed as if his wife had thrown him out, and he was once again homeless on the road.

The next day a whole family of Duergar came to her for healing. It was unusual to see Duergar who had traveled all the way from Nidavellir to see her, but her fame had spread, and their own surgeons could do nothing for them. They were all suffering from a twisting of their bloodlines, passed down from one to the next. While she could not change their blood, she worked hard on them, teaching their bodies to compensate for what worked wrongly. It took several days, and more than once Fjolsvid had to be called in order to keep away various interruptions. When it was done, the patriarch of the Duergar family bowed to her and thanked her. “I was going to pay you in gold,” he said, “but there is not enough gold in Nidavellir to equal the gift you have given us. Instead, I think that a better gift would be to build you a place where you could work in peace.”

Mengloth smiled gratefully. “That would be a wonder of a gift, indeed,” she said. So the Duergar took their leave, but returned in the spring with a whole crew and began to tunnel and carve out the mountain. They built Mengloth a mountaintop fortress to awe those who saw it from below, all towers and peaks and gargoyle-carved overhangs, unlike the rougher and more natural Jotun fortresses. Leirbrimir’s stone bones were quickly shaped into a work of art, an edifice of twisting spiral tunnels that opened onto bright, airy rooms with large windows and open courtyards, hidden from the eyes that might spy. They forged a great gate of wrought iron in the form of twining vines, which Fjolsvid called Clanging Thrymjol. Mengloth’s uncle was much impressed with the dwarf-made fortress, and jokingly called it Gastropnir, or Guest-Crusher. “It will certainly make my job as your gate-guard much easier,” he laughed. Mengloth laughed as well, and after awhile took to using his name for the place out of habit. Leirbrimir’s Mountain, however, soon began to be named Lyfjaberg by the locals -- the Mountain of Healing.

A year after she had thanked the Duergar building team profusely and seen them on their way, they returned again, this time with a strange visitor. The slender Jotun man who had hired them was flame-haired and green-eyed, and bowed before Mengloth with a flourish. “May we have the hospitality of great Guest-Crusher, milady? I would speak to you of important matters.”

“The sons of Solblindi are always welcome here,” Mengloth said, “but who are you, stranger, and what is your errand? For you do not look in need of healing.”

“I am called Laufey’s son, among other things,” he said, “and I come on an errand from my godmother, whom you know well -- Sinmora, the Mother of Muspellheim.” He smiled his three-cornered smile at her. “I believe that you have visited my daughter as well, healer-woman. That must have taken courage.”

Mengloth drew in her breath and quickly ushered Hela’s father into her hall, followed by the swarm of Duergar, who she sent to the kitchen with orders to give them whatever fine food and drink was to be had. Loki she led into the great open courtyard where she did many of her healings, and bade him give her news of Sinmora.

“She is well and dancing in the coals still,” said Loki, “but she would ask of you a boon. I have made for my godfather and my godmother a great weapon; perhaps you have heard of it?”

“Laevateinn,” said Mengloth. “Of course we have heard of it. Surt will wield it only if Ragnarok comes, may the Nornir stave it off! What has that to do with me?”

“Sinmora fears for it, where it lies in Muspellheim,” Loki said. “Do not ask me why; that is not mine to tell. She wishes to find a new home in which to keep it, one which will not be stormed. And you have this lovely new impenetrable fortress, thanks to the sons of Solblindi.” He waved his hand around, taking in all the curving stonework. “If you will guard her treasure, I will build you a special hall for it that cannot be melted away. Sinmora says to tell you that it will provide enough heat on even the worst winter days to aid suffering ones whose bones are chilled, or who need to be sweated.”

“For Sinmora, of course I will do this,” Mengloth said, and so it was done. The Duergar set to work the next morning and built a hall with a floor of burnished gold, which was named Lyr, the Hall of Heat. In the center was an iron box melted to the floor, with no lid or opening, with Laevateinn safely within it. Even enclosed like this, its heat was such that the floor an inch around the box was almost molten. Water could be poured on the floor near the door, and hot steam would spring up. Lyr heated the entire hall in winter, making it comfortable for everyone inside.

In the middle of the night, Mengloth woke with a cold feeling in her belly. She knew, somehow, that Svipdag was in danger. With her heart beating like bird’s wings, she tried to calm herself and find him. His eyes were closed when she moved behind them, and there was a terrible stillness and pain in his body. Moving outside of him, she saw him battered and bleeding, near death. His wounds had become unwholesome, and she cursed herself that she was so far away. If I was there, I would know how to treat him, and he would live, she mourned, and beat at the air with transparent fists. She screamed at the women who surrounded him, tried to call out what herbs should be used, what should be done, but they did not hear her. She wept in frustration, waving her useless arms at the fallen Svipdag, but they could not touch him.

Then, suddenly, she became aware of an etin-woman in the room who had not been there a moment ago, staring her right in the eye. “Who are you,” the woman demanded, “that you are so concerned for my son?”

Mengloth belatedly recognized Groa, Svipdag’s mother -- but the etin-woman had never been able to see her before! “I am Mengloth,” she said, startled, and then almost lost her tongue in shyness, but Svipdag’s dire condition spurred her past caring. “I know how to heal him, but I am far away! If I cannot make them hear, he may die!”

“He will certainly die,” said Groa sharply, “and I will not have that, not my boy. I shall make those foolish geese listen.” She lifted a pot from the wall and flung it at the women, and they scattered shrieking as it smashed onto the floor. Mengloth wondered why Groa did not simply call out to get their attention, and then she knew why with a cold sinking feeling in her belly. Svipdag’s mother was dead. Recently dead, from the look of her. Whatever calamity had killed the star-hero had also slain his wife, and nearly slain their son. This was her ghost, come back to save her boy once more.

Groa lifted her arms and with an effort of will, made herself visible to the women in the room. They cried out, but did not run -- one of them, her niece, flung herself on her knees and asked her aunt what could be done for her son. Mengloth hurriedly imparted the directions, and Groa translated them, a ghostly apparition in the air. Mengloth wondered why the dead woman could make herself visible when she, still alive, could not -- but put it down to the strangeness of being dead but not yet having walked the Hel-road. Sighing and exhausted, she returned to her limp body, satisfied that her beloved would be safe.

She kept an eye on him, even though it had to be only quick glances -- the ghost of Groa still hung often about her son’s bedchamber. When he became well enough that he could see her, his mother told him that he ought to seek out a bride. “Why, what bride should I have, Mother?” he asked the shade in surprise.

“Mengloth, of Lyfjaberg mountain, ought to be a fair bride for my son,” she told him, and then faded away. Mengloth, who was surreptitiously watching, nearly fell back into her own body with surprise.

Svipdag snorted. “I am no hero,” he said, and then burst into tears. “I could not even save my mother and father when they were attacked. I should be dead, along with them! I am a worthless son, and I cannot win some famous giantess. With what? I am no good with any weapon, nor have I wealth, or land, or even a glib tongue.” He sighed, and Mengloth’s heart plummeted. “No, I’ll wait until some troll-wench living in a log will have me; it’s all I can aspire to.” And he rolled over and wept himself to sleep.

At this point, Mengloth retreated in sorrow and did not go to him again. The walls of Gastropnir seemed to close her in, but she threw herself into her work and determined to forget about him, Svipdag, unknowingly her oldest friend. She was unable to forget him, though, no matter how hard she tried -- and he, in turn, was unable to forget the name that rang through his mind. Mengloth. Again and again, he found himself whispering it. On his own, he began to ask folk what they knew of her, the healer of Lyfjaberg Mountain...and the more he heard, the more he felt driven to find her and woo her.

This is ridiculous, he told himself, but his mind came back again and again to the ghost of his mother, hovering beside his sickbed and telling him that Mengloth should be his wife. I know nothing of her...but why do I feel as if I know her? Finally he decided that the only thing for it was to do what he had always done: consult his mother about the matter. He hunted up an old spell for raising the Dead, burned a few bits of her hair left in a comb, and dragged her spirit out of Helheim to answer his questions.

Groa came to him, of course -- he was her favorite son -- and she begged nine days with him from Hela, who granted it. During those nine days she taught Svipdag nine charms to make something of a hero of him. He had never shown any aptitude for magic before, but he threw himself into learning those nine charms with all the will in his body. Then he set off for Lyfjaberg, to win the hand of the mysterious Mengloth through whatever means he could.

Mengloth, in her turn, was eaten up with impatience. She paced the halls of Gastropnir, shredding the hems of her gowns in her nervousness. Strangely enough, the closer he drew to her, the less easy it was for her to sense him, until she cast her aura around frantically and could no find him at all. It almost made her panic, and she spent a sleepless night... but the next day one of her women noted that there was a strange youth outside chatting with Fjolsvid.

The giantess sat bolt upright. “With Fjolsvid! How long has he been there?” She flew to the window, but the pair had moved under the eaves and she could not see them.

“Quite a long time. They’ve talked a great deal. It could just be a client,” the healer-assistant said helpfully. “Fjolsvid tends to interview them rather severely. And they’ve been there talking for an hour.” All Mengloth’s household, by now, knew the gossip that Aurvandil’s youngest son was coming to court their rather reserved mistress who had turned down so many others, and that for once she was not disinclined to the idea. Various romantic stories were circulating about it, although Mengloth thought privately that none of them even came close to the reality of the situation.

Mengloth dropped back into her chair, trying not to shake. At that moment she heard Clanging Thrymjol open, and Fjolsvid’s heavy tread up the stairs. Her hands clenched on the arm-rests. Fjolsvid’s large head peered around the corner. “There’s a young man here who claims to be Svipdag, m’dear,” he laughed.

She glared at him and said between her teeth, “If you are joking with me, Uncle, the next time you need stitching up, I shall pour hot sauce in your wounds. No, actually, I shall rip your eyes out.”

“I’d make a poor gate-guard then, wouldn’t I?” he grinned at her, not in the least put off by his niece’s sudden fit of venom. “No, dear, it’s who he says he is himself. How was I to know? The young fool kept beating around the bush, asking all sorts of foolish questions, giving all sorts of odd names. I almost set the dogs on him,” he added cheerfully.

Mengloth was still for a moment, and then she bolted from her chair. Fjolsvid’s grin grew wider as he heard her feet take the stairs two at a time.

In the entrance to the main hall, she skidded to a halt, seeing herself in the polished reflection of a silver bauble. Her hair was pulled back severely, but with straggling wisps escaping; there were dark shadows around her eyes from sleepless worry; she was clad in her usual rumpled gown with her favorite jangling mess of mismatched necklaces. Not the sort of fair maiden Svipdag was used to at all, she supposed. Not a fair maiden at all, really. The wind went out of her entirely. She patted at her hair, and then slumped, giving up. This was ridiculous. He would take one look at her and make vague excuses. She knew Svipdag; he would not court a woman just for her wealth or standing. He was too much of a romantic.

So, she told herself, get it over with. You’ve waited this long; even with the worst outcome, you’ll be able to get some sleep and get on with your life. She squared her shoulders and rounded the corner. Why was it easier to walk through Hel’s Gate?

A young man stood in the entryway, looking around at the Duergar-wrought carvings with blinking eyes. He was taller than she thought he would be -- of course, you were either hovering over him or seeing through his eyes, not looking up at him -- and his hair was even more of a bird’s nest than her own, and his clothes even more rumpled. He looked up when she arrived, startled, then his eyes turned inward with a look she recognized as panic -- the panic that happens when one realizes that all one’s carefully rehearsed lines have completely flown out of one’s head. It was probably the same look that she had on her own face. “Milady -- ” he began.

“Don’t.” She cut him off with a gesture. “I know why you’re here. It’s because your dead mother told you that you ought to have me as a wife.”

He blinked again. She clasped her hands to keep them from reaching out to him. “Are you a seer, Lady?” he asked.

“...No. I am only a healer. But I know who you are.”

He collected himself and bowed to her. “I am Svipdag, son of the Star-Bright one Aurvandil -- ”

She cut him off again. “I know all that. I’ve been waiting for you for twenty years.” She realized how mad that must sound, and suddenly buried her face in her hands. “Oh, this is ridiculous! I suppose I ought to explain, but I expect you wouldn’t believe me -- ”

She felt her hands being pried from her eyes, to be clasped in his. Chills ran up her arms at his touch. “You need not explain, Lady. The Norns have decreed that we two are to be together, or so my mother said, and she ought to know, being on the wrong side of Hel’s Gate.” He grinned at her, his lopsided grin, and added, “I’m only glad that you didn’t set those dogs on me. Not every etin-maid accepts her fate so reasonably.”

Mengloth swallowed. “We have always been together,” she whispered, “though you knew it not.” Five ways of explaining it to him ran through her head, and she dismissed them all in favor of falling into his arms and onto his lips. To her great relief, it didn’t seem awkward at all.

On their wedding night, after they had taken joy in one another and Svipdag had fallen asleep, Groa appeared one last time. She rested a hand on her son’s brow and smiled. Mengloth opened her eyes and saw her mother-in-law, and spoke up, no longer frightened of the sorceress, alive or dead. “Why did you prepare Svipdag to take me like a city in siege,” she asked, “when you knew that I would have done anything to bring him to me?”

Groa smiled in the dark, showing her white teeth. “Because I know my son,” she said. “Because I know boys, which you do not, living here in this house of women. If a boy wins a girl too easily, her surrender is of no value -- whereas if he thinks that he has conquerered her, he feels more secure and is more likely to stay. All that I did, I did to bring you two together...after a lifetime of you following him around.”

Mengloth started, and flushed, and Groa chuckled at her in the dark. “Yes, yes, I knew about my son’s little guardian spirit, although for the longest time I knew not who you were. I was glad of you, though, because I knew that he would need a guardian spirit. Take good care of him, now that you have him.”

Her arm tightened around her sleeping husband. “The best,” she said.

“Then the best is what I wish you,” said Groa, and vanished into the night. Neither Svipdag nor Mengloth ever saw her again, but sometimes the hair on the back of Mengloth’s neck would stand up, and she would look around, but see nothing. Svipdag himself gave up his attempts at being a hero, and settled for being a husband, at which they both discovered, to their mutual delight, that he excelled. And if the fragile artworks of Gastropnir had to be placed at a greater height, or tied to their shelves, Mengloth never voiced a word of complaint.