Odd and the Frost Giants Read Free Page B

never love another. And yet I am doomed to give my heart and my caress only to he who lets me touch the Hammer of Thor.’
    “I reached out a hand and touched her cold, wet cheek. ‘Dry your tears,’ I told her. ‘And behold…the Hammer of Thor!’
    “She stopped crying then, and reached out her delicate hands and held the hammer tightly.I had reckoned I could have my fun with the lady and still get the hammer back into the hall before Thor woke up. But we would need to get a move on.
    “‘Now,’ I said. ‘About that kiss.’
    “For a moment I thought she had begun to cry once again, and then I knew that she was laughing. But the noise she made was not a sweet, tinkling, maidenly laugh. It was a deep, crashing noise, like an ice sheet grinding against a mountainside.
    “The maiden pulled my shoes from the hammer and dropped them to the ground. She held the hammer as if it was a feather. A wave of cold engulfed me, and I found myself looking up at her, and to make matters worse she wasn’t even a she any longer.
    “She was a man. Well, not a man . Male, yes. Yet big as a high hill, icicles hanging from his beard.And she—he, rather—said, ‘After so long, all it took was one drunken, lust-ridden oaf, and Asgard is ours.’ Then the Frost Giant peered down at me, and he gestured with the Hammer of Thor. ‘And you,’ he said in a deep and extremely satisfied voice, ‘ you need to be something else.’
    “I felt my back pushing up. I felt a tail pushing its way out from the base of my spine. My fingers shrank into paws and claws. It wasn’t the first time I had turned into animal form—I was a horse once, you know—but it was the first time it was imposed on me from the outside, and it wasn’t a nice feeling. Not a nice feeling at all.”
    “It was worse for us,” said the bear. “One moment you are fast asleep, dreaming about thunderstorms, and the next you’re being scrunched into a bear. They turned the All-father into an eagle.”
    The eagle screeched, startling Odd. “Rage!” it said.
    “The giant laughed at us, waving my hammer around the while, and then he forced Heimdall to summon the Rainbow Bridge and exiled the three of us here to Midgard. There’s no more to tell.”
    There was silence then in the tiny hut. Only the crackle and spit of a pine branch on the fire.
    “Well,” said Odd, “Gods or not, I can’t keep feeding you, if this winter keeps going. I don’t think I can keep feeding me.”
    “We won’t die,” said the bear, “because we can’t die here. But we’ll get hungry. And we’ll get more wild. More animal. It’s something that happens when you have taken on animal form. Stay in it too long and you become what you pretend to be. When Loki was a horse—”
    “We don’t talk about that,” said the fox.
    “So is that why the winter isn’t ending?” said Odd.
    “The Frost Giants like the winter. They are the winter,” said the bear.
    “And if spring never comes? If summer doesn’t happen? If this winter just goes on forever?”
    The bear said nothing. The fox swished its tail impatiently. They looked to the eagle. It tilted its head back, and with one fiery yellow eye it stared at Odd. Then it said, “Death!”
    “Eventually,” added the fox. “Not immediately. In a year or so. And some creatures will go south. But most of the people and the animals will die. It’s happened before, back when we had wars with the Frost Giants at the dawn of time. When they won, huge ice sheets would cover this part of the world. When we won—and if it took us ahundred thousand years, we always did—the ice sheets would retreat and the spring would return. But we were Gods then, not animals.”
    “And I had my hammer,” said the bear.
    “Well then,” said Odd. “We’ll set off as soon as it gets light enough to travel.”
    “Set off?” said the fox. “For where?”
    “Asgard, of course,” said Odd, and he smiled his infuriating smile. Then he went back to his