LITMIR.BIZ

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next she was gamboling about in a meadow as if she had never seen a sword. This was the life. It was fantastic to be doing heroic deeds together, but it was equally fantastic to have this moment of absolute indolence too.

      Brunnhilde finished her stretching and began combing her hair, which, as there was rather a lot of it, was a time-consuming process. “Olympia. They don’t have a Godmother because they have gods instead.” She frowned. “Which is not altogether a good idea. I mean, look at Vallahalia.”

      Leo picked a grape and ate it, still admiring the view. The sweet juice ran down his throat and at this moment, tasted better than wine. “I have to admit I am rather confused about that. If Godmothers are so good at keeping things from getting out of hand, why are gods so bad at it?”

      “I’m not sure.” Brunnhilde paused, and put the brush down on her very shapely knee to regard him with a very serious and earnest gaze. “The ravens told me once that gods are nothing more than another kind of Fae, who get power and shape from worship and the mortals who worship them. So I suppose it’s because we are made in mortal image? Formed the way that mortals would choose to be themselves, if they had godlike powers?”

      “Hmm, awkward,” Leo acknowledged. “Given that every man I know would think he was in paradise if he could carry on with women the way the gods do. And given that gods don’t seem to suffer the sorts of consequences from that sort of carrying-on the way mortals do.”

      “And other things. Mortals, given the choice, would rather not think too far ahead, or even think at all. So—the gods they worship don’t, either.” Brunnhilde nodded, and took up the brush again. “Then, of course, because awful things happen, the logical question becomes Why didn’t they see this coming? and then the mortals make up all sorts of excuses for why infallible gods end up being very fallible indeed. Like Siegfried’s Doom. Then they make us live through it. Ridiculous, really. I wish that there were no such things as gods. I’d rather be a nice half-Fae Godmother, and be on the side of making The Tradition work for us, instead of on us.”

      “But if you had been, I would never have met you, and that would be a tragedy.” Leo grinned at her. She twinkled back at him.

      “I don’t think Wotan likes the idea of the others knowing about our true nature,” she observed. “He’d rather we all believed the creation stories, which, even before the ravens told me about being Fae, I didn’t entirely believe. My mother, Erda, told me there was no nonsense of me springing forth fully formed from Wotan’s side, or his head, or any other part of him. I was born like any of the others, I was just first.” She sighed. “Poor Mother. The shape and fate The Tradition forced her into was rather…awkward.”

      “Your mother is very…practical, and she seems to have done the best she can with her situation,” Leo said, doing his best to restrain a shudder at the thought of that half woman, half hillside, who had done her awkward best to make polite talk with her new son-in-law without lapsing into fortune-telling cries of doom. “I was going to say ‘down-to-earth,’ but that is a bit redundant.”

      Brunnhilde barked a laugh. “Since she is the Earth, I would say so. It’s a shame that the northlanders are so wretchedly literal minded.”

      Her nephew Siegfried’s escape from his fate had seriously disturbed the northlanders’ unswerving view of The Way Things Were, and had shaken them all up a good deal. Having Brunnhilde take up with a mortal, and an outsider, had shaken them up even more.

      That just might be all for the best. If it shakes them up enough to start changing how The Tradition works up there, everyone will be better off.

      Once they had left Siegfried and Rosa, Queen of Eltaria and his new bride, Leo and Brunnhilde had worked their way up to the northlands to break the news of their marriage to Brunnhilde’s mother in person—in no small part because they weren’t sure Wotan had done so. It had been an interesting meeting, if a bit unnerving. He’d sensed that Erda hadn’t really known whether to manifest as a full woman and offer mead and cakes, or manifest as a hill and leave them to their own devices. She’d opted for a middle course, which made for a peculiar meeting at the least. He’d ignored the beetle and moss in his mead and brushed the leaves from his cake without a comment, and tried to act like a responsible son-in-law.

      “My mother is delusional, as they all are,” Brunnhilde responded dryly. “I’d come to that conclusion once I saw what life was like outside of Vallahalia, long before you woke me up, you ravisher.”

      Leo raised an eyebrow and smirked a little, since the “ravishing” had gone both ways. “You promised me you were going to explain why you seemed to know all about everything when I woke you.”

      She laughed. “You see, while Father was planting me in meadows and on rocks across half a dozen Kingdoms, he forgot that I would see what was going on around me in my dreams. It’s something the Valkyria can do—we get it from Mother. She sees everything going on around her, no matter what state she’s in. I might not have been trudging through all those places afoot the way Siegfried was, but I learned a lot. Probably more than he did, because I wasn’t having to do anything but watch and learn, while he was trying to keep from starving to death or being hacked up.”

      Leo blinked. He tried to imagine what that must have been like, and failed. “Well, that must have been useful.”

      “Useful enough to know when you came marching across my ring of fire I had a good idea of exactly what I wanted.” She winked at him. He grinned. He hadn’t awakened her with just a kiss, and they had very nearly reignited the fire ring all by themselves.

      “At any rate, unless the mortals of our land manage to actually learn to think, now that my sisters have told Wotan what he can do with his magic spear and flown off, what will probably happen is that he’ll seduce Erda all over again. She’ll have another litter of daughters, Wotan will create another swarm of Valkyrias. Then, not having learned his lesson the first time, he’ll philander with another mortal, produce another set of twins-separated-at-birth, another dwarf will steal that damned Ring from the River Maidens, and it will begin all over again.” She sighed. “Stupid Tradition.”

      He echoed her sigh. Godmother Elena, Godmother Lily, Queen Rosa and King Siegfried had carefully explained The Tradition to both of them before they left Eltaria. It seemed prudent to all of them, given that Leo was a tale just waiting to happen and Brunnhilde was a goddess. It had left Brunnhilde nodding, and Leopold outraged, but with no target to be outraged with. Just some nebulous force that was going to make him dance to the tune it piped unless he learned how to avoid it or manipulate it himself.

      “Well, maybe we can find it a whole new path,” he replied. “We’ve got time to think and plan. Well, you do.” He felt a moment of melancholy. That was the one fly in their soup of happiness. He was mortal. She wasn’t.

      “Well—it just might be that we do,” she replied, her blue eyes going very serious indeed as her brush stopped moving. “I asked Godmother Elena’s dragons about other places with gods, and they knew all about this one, and what is more, they had some interesting things to tell me about The Traditions here. This Olympia is just stiff with ways for mortals to become immortal. That’s why I brought us here.”

      He sat straight up, grapes and melancholy forgotten. He was hard put to say whether he was more shocked, delighted or terrified. Probably all three at once. “You—what?” he gasped. “You mean—”

      She nodded. “We’ll have to be really careful, though. Some of the ways for mortals to become immortal are not pleasant. For instance, becoming immortal but continuing to age. Or becoming immortal as a spring or a rock. Or a constellation of stars. Not the sort of thing I want to see happen to you.”

      He thought about the first, and shuddered. A bit of waterworks or a rock would be far preferable, and still not something he wanted to think about.

      “So how do you go about it without nasty consequences?” he asked. “Or have you found that out yet?”

      “Nothing that will work yet, but I expect to. Either we’ll find a god-tale, or we’ll go introduce ourselves

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