Yule Log [Fandral]

[aa_fandral]

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center.

Margaret Atwood, Variation on the Word Sleep

Once every midwinter, Fandral would carry his little sister on his back from the healing halls up to Breakneck Cliffs so she could find milkroot to emulsify for pain treatments. Of course, he did it partly so that the other maidens in town would see. Secretly, he did it to get stronger. Fray knew, but it didn't bother her; it was a long walk, and it made their family look happier than it was.

Not that they were unhappy, really. The sunshine lifted the smell of dust off the cobblestones, sometimes rosewater or manure when you were close enough to the edges. The foot traffic was light and they passed marketers carrying fruit and Yule boar, workmen, couriers as they swung away from the rainbow bridge. The siblings did not say much, as ever, perhaps because Fandral was saving his breath and Fray had found him profoundly boring to talk to ever since he had tried (failed) to cultivate his first beard. Today they were, however, content with each other's company up until the moment they passed by their home.

Just ahead of them, a tall man was joining the street. He shrugged through the gate of their estate and left it open.

They knew him instantly. He was tall, grizzled and raw-boned like age had filed away all signs of indulgence and musculature, both, dress rapier at his hip, and brocaded like a lord: he was. His tunic wasn't in his belt properly, and not the most slipshod of smithies or herbalists would have forgotten to fold down one of his boots. He was walking around as brazen in the daylight as if he'd hauled the blocks himself, or had them gifted upon him by the King himself. He hadn't, of course. That would have been their father.

Fray's arms went tight around his neck, and it did nothing. She croaked something, the beginning of a warning, but he had already twisted away. Fray dropped her basket but caught herself in the stumble. The snarl of her gloved fingers sailed past his ponytail seven pointless inches, her next grab. He had already taken the old man's sword and skidded through the gangling arch of his legs, turned on him, sneering.

"Fandral!" she screamed. She clapped her hands over her mouth when he kicked the old man in the groin, where he imagined the stink of his mother remained unwashed. "Fandral!" He was rewarded by a terrible groan, and the man took a knee, heavily. Another mad dash, and Fray caught up. She said, "You're making it worse, if you--!"

"Thief," Fandral supplied, helpfully. "You're a stinking th--" –but he caught his heel in the mortar of the street and met the brunt of the man's fist. Went backward, furious, already bringing the sword around—


"You are a precious fool." The objective truth of his sister's judgment was usually in question, as far as Fandral was concerned, but today it seemed to be reinforced by the fierce ache around his left eye. He ignored it—her—all of it, anyway.

He told himself the sky was nice: it was, especially up here. For all that the great city was still nearby, its towering masonry did not block out sections of the sky out here. He kept his head pillowed on his arms, looking up at Torus Major and its powdery garland of asteroids. A flock of birds slashed by overhead. Their wings were open, nearly motionless, holding thermals that didn't feel quite strong enough where they were. The sweat from climbing remained unpleasantly hot under his neck but was turning into a chill on his forehead that he could barely feel under the pounding of his eye, which he had to start ignoring all over again.

Fandral decided that she was probably just annoyed because she'd dropped everything in the street, including her trowel, and had to dig everything up with her fingers now, her gloves laid aside to spare them the dirt and damage. Soil caked her fingernails. It was her fault, being too flustered to go back for it. He listened to her mutter about his qualities, or lack thereof, for a few more minutes.

Then he heard himself say: "Prince Thor is going to Earth, someday. He's sworn it, and I'm going with. We're friends now."

"Oh?" Fray said, snippy, but the furrowing of her fingers into the soil slowed. She was always on about humans: Uror's influence, Fandral had no doubt. Healers invariably proved to be a stubbornly eccentric and ill-tempered bunch once you were returned your health; even the ones that didn't make themselves exhaustingly kind in the interim. Fray was not, had never been kind. She said, "How many cups of mead was he into, when he said that?"

"We slew a cannibal ogre," he replied. "Neither the drink nor the oath were lightly taken." Odin never allowed his children such excesses, anyway.

She rustled through grass fussily. "Fancy that. Four brats and a boy witch overseen by a fat old man who'd sooner be reading. You stabbed and cut an otherworlder until you bled him dry. Lovely."

"He was a cannibal," Fandral emphasized, "ogre. Yes it was lovely thank you much."

"You could have killed Lord Magni." Fray changed the subject abruptly, but it wasn't like court games; it was the exact opposite and inverse, her temper flaring, searing through learned, banal pretense. He was ready for it, insofar as that he had wanted to say for decades:
"He would have deserved it."

"Mother is allowed her choice of playm—"

"Our mother had nothing to do with it," he retorted, sharpening, "other than what she allowed."

They were quiet awhile after that, though it wasn't as brittle as the dinner conversation was wont to get. He listened to the scuff of her fingers through soil, the elastic snap of vegetable fibers in her grip when she uprooted weeds and ivy. He could tell from her breath, and the receding noise of her work, that she had found nothing. Most of their trips, they returned to the healing halls empty-handed. For all that it was simply named, milkroot was rare in natural incidence and did not take well to farming.

"Maybe I could take you. To Earth, if you want. Someday." He said it because he could not outright offer, not riding on the coattails of the Prince's glory the way he was.

He also said it because he knew Fray would never ask. She didn't even answer right away, too many years of built-in suspicion or merely habitual standoffishness, a self-sufficiency she bricked together over years, a road that led toward an opposite horizon from the one that Sif was building toward. He didn't have to look at her to know her mouth was in a sour twist and face still downcast, stubbornly keeping the motions of her work even as she was driven to distraction by the dangling bait in their conversation.

Finally, Fray spoke again. "The poets like to compare them to flowers. Humans, I mean. Short-lived—daughters have buried their mothers and borne children of their own, in the time that we have been alive, Fandral. Short-lived and. And—frantic for it. They will grow and advance as Asgard never will."

Fandral measured his words more carefully than he was normally wont to, with his sister. It took his mind off his eye. "Father would say Asgard does not need to."

"Because Asgard, like father, does not think she needs it." Abruptly, she crawled over to him, palms flattening the grass. She looked down at him with mud on her chin and her eyes huge with conviction. "We can cure nigh anything but madness, Fandral. We will not even admit to its plague upon us when it visits the battlefield and makes old men out of young warriors, speaking nonsense. Don't you notice? The artwork grandfather paid for in troll relics is the same mother buys now. The Valkyries have hardly changed their armor since their portraits and statues were raised in Valaskjalf. We've no great poets since Bragi's work, nor changes to the law since Forseti penned them in the wartime of Odin's rule, and none would even dream of writing new. Even our appetite for conquest is sated, and we have ever lacked the discretion our rivals exploit.

"Asgard still stands, but so too does she stand still. Complaisance ill suits her and we will pay for it, someday."

Fandral looked at her in silence. Her rhetoric was familiar, but he'd never heard her speak it at such length. Granted, he couldn't recall her having spoken at such length with him at all, in recent years. "Your words might hold some truth, Fray," he answered, eventually. He grinned at her, lopsided. "But with your expectations so lofty, I fear you will be disappointed when you meet them. A remarkable people cannot all be remarkable people, and you're in the habit of offending."

"You've no scholar in you."

"And you've too much. What are you doing?"

"There's grass and mud in your hair," Fray told him. There was grass and mud on her fingers too, but Fandral knew without having to look that she wrapped her hand in her skirt before touching him and not for his sake, either. He obliged his little sister to turn his head away, felt the bob of tension through is head as she undid his ponytail. He did not notice her pull out the talisman braided into his hair and shred it.

Fray wrapped her arms around her legs once she was finished. There was an inch of mud on her dress. "It's Yule tomorrow," she said, looking over the city. "Do you have to be back in time for the Hunt?"

Fandral flopped his head back down on the grass, a few inches left of his original rest. "I haven't yet been invited," he said, gloomily. Princes were much harder to impress than the girls of the city, or this is what he thought. The truth of it was, there was only one prince he was desperate to matter to, and a lot of girls he might give or take—and who well regarded him the same way.

"Thor is good for you. He'll keep you humble," Fray answered, smirking when he frowned. "You ought to cut your hair. He must think you're trying for the same audience. Perhaps you ought to seek your bride among the humans, with your gift of navigating around offense."

"Marry?" He kicked out his feet. "And take all the pleasure out of drinking? I'll leave the cross-breeding to you."

"Well, I suppose I've many cups to catch up on. I haven't Kelda's looks or temper."

They laughed together, then fell awkwardly silent at the unfamiliar sound of it. Fray looked down at her lap, picked up her gloves to pull them on again. Her black-rimmed nails disappeared into white cotton, one by one, then her streaky palms, the stink of algae and peatmoss closed up under the tight weave of fabric. It was never grit and plant matter that bothered her. These sojourns helped hide the fact, too, that Fray nearly never touched anybody if she could help it. Uror refused to talk about the day that Fray would become old enough to don neonate colors and begin patient work in the healing halls, and those who would notice and wonder why she did not.

There was a thread unraveling out of her sleeve, but then, all of Fray's clothes were old now except for her gloves which could not survive the boiling she put them through so often. Fandral thought it must be miserable, to hate being here, to see so little of Asgard's greatness. Of course, she pitied that he so stubbornly acknowledged nothing else, despite what he knew.

"There will be a runner for you by the time we get home so you can haul in the Yuletide hog with the rest of them," she said, but the moment was over. She had found no milkroot. They went home empty-handed that day.


When the war party returns from Vanaheim, Lord Gylvi and Lady Gefion are both there to greet him along with the rest of Odinscourt. Fandral's parents look at the others, the humans of Midgard, Lady Sif, as much as they look at him; they look at Prince Thor more, and maybe even some of the trolls who arrive, uncomfortable with the spectacle and splash.

Or perhaps it's Fandral who doesn't look for his family. He is certainly busy enough checking on his new friends as he stands with the old, watching Loki, watching Sif, acknowledging Prince Thor's cautioning glance with a smile that's only a little put upon. He only sees family once or twice because he only looks for them then.

His father looks older than last they met, crow's feet splayed around his eyes and no way of telling how much from straining his eyes over siege and how much from laughter. Gylvi is grayed and thin from war rooms of looser confidence than the ones Fandral had been privy too, but he wears his colors proudly, his chest stuck out as far as his gut. Mother is a numinous beauty in the mirrors and light of the Valaskjalf. Her grip and gesture are articulate as she describes something to her a troll liaison, something of a flirt in her eyes, under the black load of kohl. Her yellow hair is up in a braid around her crown in a way that's meant to hide the white threading through, and does. He is trying to remember where she'd worn that gown before, and then realizes she would have sooner asked him for gold than wear an old dress to momentous occasion; it is just that they all look the same, over years upon years.

Fandral doesn't talk as much as he usually does, at parties. He feels uncomfortably exposed without his beard, is impatient waiting for his hair to grow in again. Diplomacy is a handy excuse that passes for diligence: he speaks with the trolls at length about sharing supplies, timetabling emigration, the subterranean fauna one might expect to attack one's face whilst one is developing tunnel systems. Trolls have never been much bothered or impressed with the Asgardian proclivity for excellent hair.

He doesn't see Fray until the evening reception. She is skulking around the doorway, watching the servants clear away the remains of the shared dishes that were passed to and fro along the table, starfruit and cheeses, apple-glazed fish and elk in peppered steaks, quail-stuffed goose-stuffed pheasant, that tangy chop of Vanir pickles, saffron, and eggs smaller than thimbles, the constellation of spice breads. Fandral sees Volstagg abandoned the table terribly early, for Volstagg; he had overheard the older Aesir deep in conversation with the postwar relief committee captain, intently, about the Bifrost schedule, and guesses the poor fellow is still being pursued around the palace by the steadfast warrior. Without anybody to slap their hands away, the servants are stacking bones and peels in the same bowls as the scraps of fat and excess filets.

"It's not that I'm hungry," she says, without turning around. "It looks awful." She probably means the people, or something. Maybe. No, never mind. Fandral decides not to pretend he knows what she means. It has been dreadfully misleading, thinking he knows people lately. "Some of your human friends nearly fell asleep in their soups. Three hours is excessive."

"Dinner took only an hour," Fandral replies. "The real celebration won't be for a few weeks yet. Maybe you ought to come out from loitering behind the pillars and I'll make introduction." He draws even with her, folding his arms over his chest. A sidelong glance tells him he has her attention, though she isn't looking at him.

"You saved the halls," Fray says

Fandral says, "I did," then finds himself standing very still when she leans over to press a kiss to his cheek.

She says, "I suppose you're due a little family mortification for Yule." It is a more emphatic maybe than he expected; after a moment, he lets it put a smile on his face.