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Asgard has no seasons.
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It is the silence that disturbs her at first. Oh, not right away. There is the great roar, and disorientation, and abruptness of the Bifrost that scrambles her wits. There is the dazzle and the song of the bridge (does no one else hear the music their footsteps create?). There is the rumbling murmur of a thousand voices, a thousand-thousand voices, of a great mass of humanity living on top of their neighbors. There’s the echoes of Gladsheim’s halls, the boom of Odin’s voice, the whispers of his court.
Her ears grow deaf with talk until Sigyn’s own voice is reduced to a buzzing drone.
After awhile, she stops talking.
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On Vanaheim, the play of seasons was like the stretch of a glorious tapestry that told a tale too large to be understood in one telling.
Winter was a cold, bright blue with flourishes of white snow, expanses of grey seas; pale golden sun, cheery orange flames; the eastern sky touched by rosy dawn; the silver beacon of the full moon falling into the lifted arms of the western hills. Winter told his tale in a harsh voice. Storms that blew in from the sea and shook the barren ranks of the forest and whistled around the crags of Njord’s ancient home; the hiss of snow and ice shifting, drifting.
Spring was distant and elusive, a proud maiden shunning her suitors. The pale green of her veil drifting over the winter-stark forest. The orchards shy displaying shades of lavender and peach. She spoke in the sharp crack of ice breaking on the streams and the soft hiss of rain on the slate roof.
But spring was pursued by summer, who was boisterous and full of undeniable charm. He traded spring’s chill for languid warmth, turned her uncertain temper mellow. Summer dressed in living greens; in cerulean, and goldenrod, and violet. His voice was song of thrush and robin, of the shush of waves on sand, sometimes booming in thunderous laughter when the heat dared become oppressive.
And when summer passed, so followed Autumn. She was a woman who dressed in all that her labor had produced over the long year. She threw great feasts for her neighbors, so that they might eat and rest in her company. She displayed great bolts of gold, and red, and orange cloth for all to see her skill at dyeing, and when the wind blew she cackled and ran with it.
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Asgard is the crowning achievement of a virtuoso, a monument to perfection, to harmony, to stability.
Perfection does not fluctuate. Perfection cannot change.
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There is a wind that sweeps across the face of Asgard, that makes the banners of Gladsheim sway, that ruffles her hair when Sigyn can find a courtyard that is not hemmed in by tall stone wells. If she closes her eyes she can pretend she is home; the breeze on her face, the far-distant sound of water crashing and rushing. She must breathe through her mouth; there is no salt-tang on the air, but instead the heavy perfume of flowers she cannot yet identify.
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Sigyn is not the first of her people to live in fosterage under Odin’s provision. There was a suite that faced away from the city and the Bifrost towards the southern mountains. There was a garden that was not forced to conform to the Aesirs’ standards of sculptural beauty. It was not wild – not to Sigyn who knew the bite of rough bark under her hands, the stinging score of nettle, the musty scent of last year’s fallen leaves – but it did not have the forced precision of Asgard’s public gardens.
It is not home, just as the wind is only familiar if she closes her eyes, but it is enough.
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Once, long ago, the Vanir and the Aesir went to war. Those who started it are dead; no one else remembers why it started. Pride made it drag on, both sides suffering horrendous losses. Among the Vanir were those adept at seid, at channeling the magic of Yggdrasil through their bodies, and in the beginning they wiped out the armies of Asgard. But the price of being a vessel for so much power burned the adepts where they stood and scarred the land so that it was barren and dead. One by one the adepts died, and one by one the Asgardian armies won their victories, until only old women and children were left. Then Njord, the last chieftain of Vanaheim made peace with Odin All-Father. Njord’s children were the first hostages of Vanaheim’s peace.
It was Freya, daughter of Njord who taught the All-Father what she knew of seid – little enough, for the masters had all died long before and what knowledge was left was simple and unimpressive. But it was enough, for the All-Father built upon what he had learned and brought about the Great Peace.
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Sigyn sits in her garden where no one ventures, because sharing a room with three cousins and a home with a score of others is not the same as living in a palace with a thousand strangers. She spins, because for her people there is no difference between magic craft and thread craft; order is created out of chaos, whether they be woolen fibers or shards of power. And if one cannot tame wool, which has no mind of its own, then how can magic be tamed to the bearer?
And, oh, how she wonders about the Great Peace of the Nine Realms. Vanaheim may have peace, but so much of her people’s culture had been lost in the long centuries of conflict while here on Asgard the wind always blows gently, and every day is no warmer or cooler than the one before, and the buildings show no sign of age or disrepair.
Njord had agreed to peace because his father, and his brothers, and his sons were all dead; and if he did not, then his grandchildren would have marched to the battlefields. And is that making peace or bowing to loss?
And she, Sigyn, is a strand of that Great Peace. She who shows signs of becoming an adept of her people’s magic if only she can live long enough and learn discipline enough. She who comes from a people who have chafed under their powerlessness, and seen in her a chance to regain strength. She who had been taken away from her home to prevent the possibility of uprisings.
If they are at peace, why would her strength be a threat?
If that is peace, then how many other realms exist in the same feeling of futility?
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She asks Freya this – Freya, who is not blood but is family because in Njord’s home family is what you make it – asks about Asgard, and change, and peace, and defeat.
Freya, who is older and wiser, has no answer. Instead she tells the story of Yggdrasil, the world tree. Of the serpent whose name means Malice Striker who gnaws at its roots, of the eagle who sits far at the top and sees far with his wisdom, and of the squirrel that carries insults between the two.
It is many long years before Sigyn knows to look at the story as more than story. By then she has learned to walk the branches of Yggdrasil, and seen the realms contained within. She has seen the dead wastes of Niflheim that is a dark reflection of Asgard’s static life. She has journeyed through Alfheim, and Nordheim, and Midgard; has met frost giants, and fire giants; has learned how to craft runes in wire and thread from the dwarves and seen the libraries of the dark elves.
Then she thinks of the old story, of the serpent that devours and the far-seeing eagle that never flies, and the living tree in between. All the realms change and expand except for Asgard and Niflheim, and Niflheim has died. And she who remembers the wild trees of Vanaheim knows that the day comes when even trees cannot grow any taller.
What happens when the realms expand and Yggdrasil does not?
But before that she is a young woman, barely more than a girl, who lies awake in her bed and weeps because the night is silent and she is homesick for the sound of waves on the shore.