VOLUME. I. ORIGIN.

Chapter 1

I was late enough to hurry and early enough to resent it.

The city had chosen the most inconvenient possible hour to be ordinary. A bus sighed at the stop ahead of me. Someone was dragging a wheeled suitcase over the cracks in the pavement with a noise like loose cutlery. The wind had pushed a receipt into the gutter and kept changing its mind about whether to carry it away. I checked the time, calculated that I could still make it if the next light was kind, and immediately watched the next light turn red.

The traffic light changed before I reached it. I slipped through with the last two pedestrians and took the corner too quickly, nearly colliding with a woman who had stopped to examine something in a shop window. She gave me the look reserved for people who treated pavements as private corridors. I raised a hand without breaking stride.

A ball rolled into my path.

It came from the small playground behind the low fence on my right, bright red against the grey pavement. I caught it with the side of my shoe before it could reach the road.

Three boys had stopped near the gate. One had red hair; the other two stood behind him, equally unwilling to be the first to climb the fence after it.

I nudged the ball back through the open space below the railings. The red-haired boy trapped it against his sneaker.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Don’t let it escape again.”

They were already arguing over whose turn it was when I crossed the next street.

The door to the building was heavier than it looked. I had to put my shoulder into it, then took the stairs two at a time until the familiar narrow corridor made me slow down. At the end was the room where my mentor and I had met every week for long enough that I no longer remembered deciding to come back after the first time.

He had left the door unlatched.

“You’re late,” my mentor said without looking up.

I stopped with one hand on the handle. He was seated at the smaller of the two desks, a cup of tea beside a slope of handwritten pages. His hair was cut short and had begun, or perhaps had always seemed, to carry silver at the temples. His face never helped with the question of his age. From one angle, the lines beside his eyes belonged to someone who had spent decades narrowing them over small print. From another, they were merely the lines of a man who smiled rarely but well. He wore the same kind of plain dark shirt he always wore for lessons, its sleeves rolled past his wrists, and held a pencil between two ink-stained fingers.

Then he glanced at the wall clock.

“Oh.” He sat back. “No. For once, you’re early.”

“I was told punctuality was a virtue.”

“You were told many things. I had begun to suspect you sorted them by convenience.”

“That sounds like a lesson, which means I should have brought a notebook.”

“You did bring one.”

I lifted the manuscript a little. He nodded toward the other chair.

The room was barely large enough for both desks, two chairs, and the shelves that had gradually acquired books in every available gap. Pages lay in orderly stacks where they were allowed to be orderly and in less defensible piles where they were not. A chipped sugar bowl sat between the teapot and a plate of dry biscuits. My cup was already on the desk opposite his.

The window had been cleaned recently. This made no improvement at all to the view of the neighbouring brick wall.

“Magnificent,” I said, dropping into the chair. “I can see almost three whole bricks today.”

“You should write about it.”

“A tragedy in masonry.”

“At last, a subject within your range.”

He pushed the teapot toward me. I poured, set the manuscript on the desk, and watched him rest one hand on its cover without opening it. He had a habit of touching a manuscript only after its author had put it down. As if the interval between arrival and examination belonged to the person who had carried it.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well what?”

“You carried it here as if it might bite. That usually means you have already decided it is finished and would prefer me not to find the one thing you missed.”

“I brought tea money.”

“A bribery attempt. Promising. Open it.”

I did.

We did not begin at the first page. We had passed the beginning too many times for that. He went to a fold near the end, where a scrap of paper marked a paragraph I had rewritten twice the previous evening.

“This,” he said, tapping the margin, “is better than it was.”

I waited.

“It is still trying to get away with too much.”

“The hall has been established. The men are already waiting. The argument has been going on for three pages. How much more does it need?”

“Not more. One thing that follows from what you have already given it. At the moment everyone reaches the same conclusion because you need them to.”

“They reach it because the alternative is stupid.”

“That is not a reason characters possess. It is a reason authors possess when they are late for dinner.”

I looked down at the paragraph. He was right, which was irritating mostly because he was right in exactly the place I had hoped he would overlook.

The sentence itself was not difficult. The difficulty was the page. I had written it in the middle of a clean stretch, with the lines above and below leaning close enough to make any insertion look like a confession. On a screen I could have moved a clause, tried three versions, and put it back without leaving evidence.

I took out my pen.

“You enjoy this part,” I said.

“Which part?”

“Watching me regret not typing it.”

He considered that. “No. I enjoy watching you think before you change it.”

“A keyboard does not prevent thought.”

“Of course not. It prevents some kinds of reluctance. Those are different things.”

I made a small mark above the line, then stopped before committing the rest of the sentence.

“You can search a file,” I said. “You can move whole scenes. You can keep ten versions without turning the desk into a paper graveyard.”

“All useful.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“I sound like a man who owns a computer.”

He lifted his cup, found it empty, and set it down again.

“But when your hand is slower than the thought, you have to remain with the thought,” he said. “You see the sentence arriving. You see what it has pushed aside. Sometimes you notice the thing you were about to omit because it takes you longer to escape it.”

“And sometimes you discover you have crossed out a page so thoroughly that it looks archaeological.”

“Then you write another page.”

“A philosophy with a suspiciously low opinion of wrists.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “It has worked for you.”

That was the inconvenient part. It had.

I rewrote the passage in the margin, then read it under my breath. The men in the hall no longer agreed because the story had ordered them to. One of them had given the others a reason to accept what he could not admit plainly. It was a small change. It made the argument feel less like furniture I had arranged and more like something that could have happened without me.

He read it after I handed the page across.

“There,” he said.

“There what?”

“There is the sentence you were avoiding.”

“I was not avoiding it.”

“Naturally. You merely wrote around it at length.”

He turned two pages, then stopped again. I knew the pause before he spoke. He used it when he had found a fault but had decided I was capable of finding it first.

Earlier in our lessons, he would have said exactly what was wrong. Later, he had begun to ask what I thought he was looking at. It had felt unfair at first. Now it was worse, because it usually worked.

“What has changed?” he asked.

The passage concerned the square below the castle. A crowd had gathered there before dawn, when rumours moved faster than any official messenger. I had given them worry, fear, curiosity, a few shouted opinions. I had also given them a captain who crossed the square, spoke to three people, and somehow arrived at the right information before anyone else did.

“The captain knows too much,” I said.

He tapped the page once.

“Does he?”

“No. I made everyone else know too little.”

He waited.

I read the paragraph again. The baker’s apprentice had heard the bells. A woman with a basket had seen guards run toward the gate. An old man had claimed his nephew was on watch. They were details I had put there because a crowd without details was only a weather effect. Then I had let them stand around until the captain explained the situation.

“The old man doesn’t need to be lying,” I said. “He knows someone on watch. The apprentice saw the bells begin. The woman saw the guards. They can make the captain’s information possible before he says it.”

“Can they?”

“Not all of it. But enough that he can confirm it instead of delivering it.”

“And what does that change?”

“He has a reason to be listened to. They aren’t waiting for an answer from above. They already have pieces of one.”

My mentor leaned back, folding his hands over the manuscript. The chair creaked under him, a sound it had made through too many lessons to be worth noticing until it happened at exactly the wrong moment.

“Write it.”

“You could simply have said that.”

“And then you would have written my answer.”

“It would have been a good answer.”

“It would have been mine.”

I hated how often that ended an argument.

The alteration required less room than the previous one. I added a few lines, crossed out the captain’s too-perfect speech, and shifted the weight of the scene toward the people already in the square. When I finished, I held the page out without comment.

He read it twice. On the second pass, one thumb rested over a smudged word. He did not point out the smudge.

“Better,” he said.

“That is almost praise.”

“Don’t become dependent on it.”

“Too late.”

The remaining questions came more quickly. A promise from an earlier chapter; a door that had become convenient because I needed someone to pass through it; a journey I had made important by giving it too many wagons; a sister who had been mentioned but not given a place in the story. I corrected what needed correcting, defended what did not, and learned to recognize the difference before he had to say it twice.

Between a question about a gate and one about a messenger, he asked, “And have you left a way back?”

“Provided,” I said.

He made a small mark in the margin and moved on.

By the time the tea had gone cold, the manuscript had acquired a few new marks and lost none of the things I cared about. He closed it and rested his palm on the cover.

“You can keep going,” he said. “You can always keep going.”

I looked at the pages. The uneven edges, the corrections, the places where I had pressed too hard and left faint ridges in the paper. It did not look perfect. It looked ready enough to frighten me.

“That sounds dangerously like permission.”

“It is not permission. It is your decision.”

He opened the drawer beside him and took out a scrap sheet. It was already scarred with old practice lines, numbers, a sketch of something that might once have been a teapot, and the first half of a shopping list. He turned it over and put the blanker side between us.

“One more thing.”

I knew what he meant before he said it. Over the past months he had made me draw the mark again and again until it stopped looking borrowed. At first I had tried to construct it carefully, recalling each turn as if I were copying an emblem from a book. Later, the shape had become faster, cleaner. Mine.

“You still make that face,” he said.

“What face?”

“The face of a man being asked to sign a treaty with a demon.”

“You compare it to a swordsmith’s mark often enough. Swordsmiths at least have the decency to make things that can be tested.”

“A painter signs a painting. A jeweler stamps a hallmark. A carpenter leaves a maker’s mark where no one will see it until a wall comes down. They are not making treaties.”

“They are telling everyone where to send complaints.”

“Exactly.”

I looked from the scrap sheet to the closed manuscript.

“And this means I stop blaming you for the parts I regret later?”

“It means you stop pretending the work belongs to me because I made you rewrite it.”

That landed more cleanly than I wanted it to. I picked up the pen.

The mark was not a word and not quite a picture. It had the compactness of a thing made for the corner of a page: a few turns that had gradually become mine because I had ruined enough attempts at them. I put it on the scrap paper. The lines came without hesitation.

My mentor studied it for a moment. His hands were still on either side of the sheet, fingers folded loosely, as if he were resisting the temptation to turn it and check whether I had made the same shape on the other side.

“Yes,” he said.

I looked up. “Yes?”

“Now it is yours.”

He said it in the same tone he might have used to confirm a measurement. The clock continued its small, indifferent work above the door.

I capped my pen and slipped the scrap aside. The manuscript stayed closed, unsigned, between us.

“Thank you,” I said.

He gave me a look that made the words feel more formal than I intended.

“For the tea?”

“For not letting me get away with things.”

“You have not got away with very much.”

“That is why I am thanking you.”

He looked toward the brick wall outside the window, as if it had offered a useful reply. Then he nodded once.

“Go home,” he said. “Read it tomorrow if you still think it needs reading. Then decide.”

I gathered the manuscript before he could find another question in it. The motion was familiar enough to make me pause halfway through it. There would not automatically be another pencilled time next week, another climb up the narrow stairs with a folder under my arm, another cup already waiting on the desk.

It was a ridiculous thing to notice while he was still sitting across from me. Still, I adjusted the manuscript under my arm as if that could make the ending of the lesson less final.

“I’ll bring you a copy when it’s done.”

“Bring yourself on time first.”

“A more difficult request.”

“Then begin practicing immediately.”

I left laughing quietly, which made the corridor feel too narrow for the sound.

At home, I put the manuscript on my desk and stood over it for a while without sitting down.

The room had the ordinary untidiness of a place that belonged to one person: a charger looped around a glass, a sweater on the back of the chair, a book I had intended to return to someone three weeks ago. Nothing in it suggested that the day had been more important than any other day on which I had come back with too much paper.

The manuscript made a different kind of mess. It had weight even when it was closed. The pages were not uniform; some had been replaced, some carried notes in margins, some bore pressure marks from sentences I had written and then forced into other shapes. It was all there without him across the desk from me, without a pencil tapping a line I had hoped would survive scrutiny.

I should have put it in a drawer and done what I had been told. Tomorrow would have been a better reader. Tomorrow would have been less pleased with itself, less tired, less vulnerable to the belief that a completed day ought to end with a completed book.

Instead I sat down.

His last instruction had been sensible. Read it tomorrow. Let the pages cool. Decide later.

I opened the manuscript near the end anyway.

The final scene had always pleased me. It took place in the public square below Odin’s castle, where the broad stone opened before the rising mass of the walls and towers. I had arranged the last image carefully: the square catching the first thin light, the castle dominating the view beyond it, the city held for a moment between night and whatever came next. It was a good place to stop. A reader could close the manuscript there and feel that the story had arrived at a real horizon.

That was the problem.

It arrived too cleanly. The last page settled everything into a picture, and a picture could be satisfying without being alive. I wanted the reader to leave with the sense that the world continued after the paper ran out, that the quiet in the square had not earned the right to remain quiet.

I read the passage again, slowly this time. The castle was still there above the square. The people below it had reached the end of their immediate argument. The morning had done exactly what I had asked of it. None of that was wrong. It was only complete in the wrong direction.

The pen lay beside my hand. I picked it up, put it down, then picked it up again.

The addition came easily enough that I mistrusted it for a moment. I wrote it once, crossed out a word, wrote it again beneath the ending, and sat back.

No more than a month remained before Ragnarök.

There. Not an answer. A promise of trouble.

I read the final page from the beginning. The sentence did not undo the square or diminish the castle. It put pressure behind them. The image was no longer a place where the story rested; it was a place where something waited. The hall, the arguments, the promises, the city beyond the walls all seemed to lean toward the same unfinished distance.

It was not a large change. That was why I liked it. Nothing had been explained away. I had only given the ending the smallest possible opening and trusted the rest of the story to make use of it.

I smiled despite myself.

The mark belonged beneath it.

I did not make a practice stroke. I did not pause to think through its parts. The pen moved, and the familiar shape settled into the lower margin. It was not a flourish for anyone else to admire. It was simply the point at which I stopped being allowed to pretend the pages were still only almost mine.

I set the pen down. For a few seconds I let the manuscript remain where it was: open under the desk lamp, completed but not yet put away. The ordinary noise of the building continued around it. A car passed outside. Somewhere above me, water ran through pipes in a wall. The chair pressed a familiar edge against the backs of my knees.

I ought to have closed the cover. I turned back instead, checking whether I had carried the same name through a later passage. My fingertip pressed the paper flat near the middle of a page.

The support beneath me was gone.

For the fraction of a second in which my body was still arranged to sit, I had the absurd certainty that someone had pulled the chair away from me.

Then I hit stone.

Chapter 2

For a moment, stone was only stone.

It was cold through my palms and harder than any floor had a right to be. My buttocks had found it first. The rest of me arrived in no particular order, followed by a sharp breath that did not seem interested in becoming a complete one.

I stayed where I was because moving required deciding what had happened, and I was not ready to do that yet.

The air smelled wrong.

Not bad. Just absent of everything my room should have contained: dust warmed by the radiator, old paper, the faint detergent from the sweater over my chair. This air had cold in it. Somewhere nearby metal rang once, then again. Voices moved across open space, not through walls.

I looked up.

The square rose around me in pale, thin light. Broad stone stretched away in front of me, broken by dark seams and one shallow place where water had gathered in the night. Beyond it stood the castle.

For several seconds, I could only stare at it.

The walls climbed above the square in the same heavy sweep I had described the night before. Towers cut into the paling sky. The first light caught their upper edges and did not quite reach the lower stone. I knew the angle of the open space. I knew the way the castle had been meant to dominate it. I knew it with the flat certainty of remembering a sentence I had read too many times.

I had seen this place.

No.

I had written something like it.

That was different. It had to be different.

A cart creaked somewhere behind me. A woman in a grey shawl crossed the far side of the square with a basket held against her hip. Two men argued quietly beside a doorway where someone had repaired the stone around the frame with mortar of a different colour. Steam rose from a covered stall near the street, carrying hot fat and bread into the cold.

I had not written the stall.

I had not written the woman. I had not written the patch of darker mortar, or the way one of the arguing men rubbed his thumb across the rim of his cup as though the argument had been waiting for him before I arrived.

The square in my manuscript had contained people. They had worried, shouted, and waited for news because the scene needed them to. These people were not doing any of that. They were simply here.

Someone stopped in front of me.

“Are you hurt?”

The question was close enough that I flinched.

She had crouched a few steps away rather than over me. Sensible. Her cloak was short enough not to drag in the wet stone, and several small pouches hung from the belt beneath it. Long light-brown hair had been gathered into a braid that had started practical and surrendered somewhere along the way. A loose strand had fallen over her cheek. She pushed it behind one ear without taking her eyes off me.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

My knee objected to being consulted. I put a hand on it and tried again.

“I mean, probably.”

She considered that answer for exactly as long as it deserved.

“Can you stand?”

“That seems like the next thing to find out.”

She held out a hand. I looked at it, then at her face. She looked young, perhaps my age or a little younger, but there was nothing tentative in the way she had asked. She had already decided that I was either going to stand or need help standing, and both possibilities appeared equally manageable.

I took her hand.

She pulled me up without making a performance of it. When I was upright, the square seemed larger. The castle seemed worse.

“There,” she said. “Any blood?”

“Only the usual amount.”

Her mouth moved, not quite a smile. “Then you have done this before?”

“Fallen off a chair? Not professionally.”

She glanced past me, apparently looking for the chair in question. There was only open stone.

“Where did you fall from?”

I turned with her.

There was no room. No desk. No book. The thought came with a small, stupid relief. At least I had not dragged my apartment into the middle of whatever this was.

“I don’t know,” I said.

That was the first honest answer I had managed.

The woman looked from me to the castle, perhaps checking whether a guard or a servant might claim responsibility for a confused stranger on the ground.

“Do you know where you are?” she asked.

“No.”

She glanced up at the walls. “Then you are in Asgard. Outside Odin’s castle.”

The name did not arrive dramatically. It simply landed in the space between us.

Asgard.

I looked back at the walls.

The breath I had failed to take when I hit the ground finally came in too fast.

“No,” I said.

She did not look offended. “No?”

“No. I mean, yes. Obviously. You said it.”

“That is usually how names work.”

“I am Gina,” she added. “Since this is becoming a conversation.”

“René.”

She repeated it once, quietly, as though fixing the sound in place. Then she looked toward the side street. “I was going to Frigg’s rooms. I can be late for that if you are about to fall over again. Are you?”

I put both hands over my face for a moment. The cold had reached my fingers. I could feel grit in the lines of my palms.

Asgard. Odin’s castle. The public square below it, lit by the first thin morning light.

Those were facts, or at least the kind of facts a stranger could tell another stranger. They did not explain the missing chair. They did not prove that the castle above me was the castle I had put on paper rather than a place my own words had copied from some other source.

But I had not imagined the arrangement. I had chosen it. I had spent an evening deciding where the towers should sit in relation to the square because a reader needed to feel the castle before anyone said its name.

I looked again, more carefully this time.

The square was not identical to the page. It could not be. My final scene had given it broad stone, a gathering of worried people, pale morning, and the castle above them. It had not supplied the wet seam running through the paving, the smell of breakfast, or the woman on the far side now setting down her basket to argue with the stallholder. It had not supplied the boy leading a dog away from a pile of vegetable peelings.

It had supplied the shape.

Or the shape had been there, and I had somehow described it.

Neither thought helped.

“Are you lost?” Gina asked.

There were probably answers a person gave when they woke up in an unfamiliar city. A name. A road. A village. Someone who would recognize them. I had none that would improve this conversation.

“I was at home,” I said.

“In Asgard?”

“No.”

“Then where?”

I opened my mouth and found that explaining Earth to someone standing beneath Odin’s castle had become difficult in a way it had never been before.

“Midgard,” I said at last.

Her expression changed, though only slightly. Not alarm. Interest, perhaps.

“Midgard is large,” she said. “Where in it?”

“Not anywhere you would know. I was in my room. Sitting at my desk.”

“And then?”

“Then I was here.”

“What happened before that?”

I looked at her.

The question was so ordinary that it took me a second to understand why it helped. I had been trying to decide what impossible thing had taken place. She was asking what I had actually done.

“I was finishing something,” I said.

“Finishing what?”

“A manuscript.”

She waited.

I wished she would stop doing that. My mentor waited like that when he had found the point I was avoiding.

“I read the end again,” I said. “I thought it needed more pressure. So I added a line. Then I marked it finished. I was checking something in the middle and I touched the page. Then the chair was gone.”

“The chair was gone.”

“I know how that sounds.”

“What was the manuscript about?”

The answer stood around us.

I turned slowly toward the castle. The square opened beneath it exactly as it had on the last page, except that it had acquired a hundred things I had never asked it to have. The wet seam in the stone. The stall. The woman in the grey shawl now arguing with the stallholder about something too small to matter to anyone but them.

“A story,” I said.

“About?”

I did not answer.

She followed my gaze. “The castle?”

“Asgard.”

The word felt ridiculous as soon as I said it.

Her eyebrows rose. “You were writing about Asgard.”

“I was writing about an Asgard.” The correction came out before I had decided to make it. “I did not know this one. I have never been here. I had a story.”

“And it ended here.”

“It ended in this square.” I pointed at the ground, then the towers. “Below that castle. The last image was supposed to be this view.”

Gina looked at the castle, then at me. “You know Odin lives there.”

“Yes.”

“Who told you?”

“No one.”

That was not true, but it was closer to the truth than anything I could explain.

I took a step toward the open part of the square and stopped. The stone beneath my boots was rougher than I had imagined it. I had written broad stone. Broad stone had been enough, until it had to hold my weight.

I reconstructed the final page in my head as if it might defend itself. The crowd. The castle. The first light. The argument that had just run out of words. I had given no name to the square because I had not needed one. I had not described the street where Gina had been going or the place Frigg kept her rooms. I had not even decided what someone would sell at a stall before dawn.

But the scene had been here. Not merely near a castle, not merely in a place that might have been Asgard if someone was generous with coincidences. Here.

My mouth had gone dry.

“I think this is the place I wrote,” I said.

Gina did not take a step back. She did not kneel, laugh, or ask whether I had been struck on the head before falling. Her gaze moved over me once, practical and unreadable.

“That is a large conclusion,” she said.

“I am trying.” My voice came out sharper than I intended. “That is what I have been doing.”

“Then keep thinking.” She did not seem offended.

That was almost exactly what my mentor would have said, except he would have been holding a pencil and enjoying himself more.

Gina. I tried the name against every page I could remember. Against the scraps in the folder on my desk. Against the abandoned notes I had never shown anyone. Nothing caught. No Gina had crossed the square. No young woman with a practical braid had appeared in a deleted scene. No one in Frigg’s household had needed to exist for the story I had written.

Yet she stood in front of me with dampness darkening the hem of her cloak, a message waiting somewhere under her arm, and enough impatience to make clear she had been going somewhere before I interrupted her morning.

I had not written Gina.

The fact would not become less strange when repeated, so I did not repeat it.

“You said you were going to Frigg’s rooms,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Do you work for her?”

“Sometimes.” The loose strand had fallen again. She pushed it back. “Today I am carrying a message. That is generally what carrying one looks like.”

She said it without grandeur. As if Frigg’s household, messages, and an unknown man landing in the square were all merely different things likely to delay the morning.

Behind her, the woman in grey had won whatever argument she had been having and walked away with two wrapped loaves instead of one. The boy and dog disappeared down the road. A guard shifted his spear below the castle gate because his hand was cold.

I had not written any of them either.

The thought led me back to the ending.

No more than a month remained before Ragnarök.

I had added it beneath the square because the scene had been too clean. The castle had looked finished. The people had finished their immediate argument. The morning had promised that the story might close its cover and leave everyone where I had arranged them.

So I had put pressure behind the image. A line. A promise of trouble.

Now the woman with two loaves was going somewhere. The guard was rubbing warmth back into his hand. Gina was late with a message. They had plans for the rest of the morning, and perhaps the next day, and perhaps a month that I had given a shape without knowing what it meant to anyone inside it.

My stomach tightened.

Until then, Ragnarök had been useful. It had been the thing after the ending, the dark edge that made the last page feel as though it opened onto more story instead of stopping because I had run out of paper. I had not pictured a guard with cold hands. I had not pictured someone deciding whether two loaves were worth an argument. I had certainly not pictured Gina trying to deliver a message before the morning got away from her.

None of that proved I had made any of this happen. I did not know what I had done, if I had done anything at all. But the sentence was mine, and it sat in the air above the square with a weight it had never possessed on the page.

“What is it?” Gina asked.

I looked at her. “Ragnarök.”

The word did not strike her as a revelation. It struck her as a word she knew. That was somehow worse.

“What about it?”

“How long?”

“Until it?”

“Yes.”

She gave me a careful look. “If you know a date, you have chosen an odd way to ask for it.”

“I do not know a date. I wrote that there was no more than a month left.”

For the first time, she looked at me as if the ground might be less reliable than she had assumed.

“You wrote that.”

“In the manuscript. Yesterday.” I heard how it sounded and pressed on anyway. “If this is the Asgard I wrote about, then that line applies here. It cannot be more than a month. It might be less.”

She looked toward the castle. This time she did not look as if she expected it to provide an answer.

“I do not know anyone who can tell you that,” she said.

Neither did I. That did not make the sentence go away.

Then something else from the manuscript rose with it, almost too quickly to trust.

I had left a way back.

For one clean second, the square loosened its grip on me. My room appeared in my mind with ridiculous clarity: the desk under the lamp, the charger looped around the glass, the book I owed someone, the chair that had betrayed me by remaining exactly where it belonged. I could go home. I could explain to my mentor that his advice about leaving the manuscript until tomorrow had become unexpectedly important.

The thought was so welcome that I almost smiled.

“There is a way back,” I said.

Gina waited.

“In the story. I made sure there was a book that would take someone back to the place the story began.” I swallowed. “To Midgard. To my home.”

Her attention sharpened. “Where is it?”

“Odin’s treasury.”

The relief lasted just long enough for her to close her eyes.

“That is inside the castle,” I said.

“I had noticed.” She opened them. “And it is Odin’s treasury.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Because an unknown man who fell into the square and says he has a book inside it is not how people are admitted to Odin’s treasury.”

“I wrote it.”

“You say you wrote it.” Her tone was not cruel. It was simply exact. “At the moment, I have no way to tell whether that makes you its owner, its thief, or a man who needs to sit down before he falls again.”

I had no answer to that.

She looked toward the castle. Guards stood at the broad approach below the main gate, small from where we were and unmistakably present. I had not written their faces. I had not written the way one of them shifted his spear to scratch the side of his boot.

“I know where the treasury is,” Gina said. “I know who keeps its doors and what they do when someone asks questions about it. I cannot take you in because you say you belong somewhere else.”

The hope went away more slowly than it had arrived. It left behind a more useful problem, which was not the same thing as a better one.

“Then I need to get into the treasury,” I said.

Gina frowned. “But you got here without it.”

“Yes.”

“Then go back the same way you came.”

I stared at her. “I was sitting in my room.”

“What did you do just before you came here?”

I looked at my hands.

Ink still marked the side of my right thumb. A thin crescent near the nail. I had not noticed it until then.

“Paper,” I said.

Gina waited.

“I was writing. I finished writing, and I touched the page. That was all.”

“Can you do that again?”

She meant the things I had just listed. She did not know which of them mattered; neither did I. But I had been sitting at my desk, and then I had been standing in this square. Between those facts had been the manuscript, the last line, my mark, and the page under my hand.

There had been no boat. No bridge. No ordinary journey at all.

The manuscript was still on Earth. It had to be. The desk and chair had not come with me. Somewhere under my lamp, my mark sat in the lower margin of the last page, and I could not reach it.

Unless the manuscript had been part of what brought me here.

The thought was not a plan. It was barely a sentence. It required paper, ink, and another finished story. I knew how to begin that much. I had just done it. But the first manuscript had grown over months of pages, corrections, and arguments with myself. I did not know whether repeating any part of it would work. I did know that I could not make months appear because I needed them.

The square was waking around us. A shutter opened above the road. The castle held the first light on its walls, exactly as I had wanted it to, and nothing about that made it less frightening.

The first manuscript had taken me months.

The sentence I had added said this world had no more than one.

Chapter 3

Gina watched me for a moment after I stopped talking.

The square had not changed because I had discovered a deadline over it. A man near the gate had started sweeping water from the shallow seam between the stones. Someone laughed too loudly in the street behind us. The castle kept the morning light on its upper walls.

“Do you have money?” Gina asked.

It was not the question I had expected after Ragnarök.

I looked at her.

She pointed at my coat rather than explaining herself. “Food. A bed. Somewhere to put your things.”

My hand went into my pocket so quickly that I nearly caught it on the lining. The wallet was there.

For a second I only held it. It was black, scuffed at one corner, and so ordinary that my throat tightened around it. It had crossed. The chair, desk, and manuscript had not.

“Maybe,” I said.

Gina considered that answer. “That is better than no.”

Inside were my cards, my identification, receipts I had been meaning to throw away, several notes, and coins. It was not much by any standard I had known yesterday. It was also all I had brought with me.

I left the cards and identification where they were. They might have been strange objects here too, but they were mine, and neither would buy bread in Asgard.

“I have cash,” I said.

“From Midgard.”

“Yes.”

“Can people spend it?”

I looked down at the pale printed paper in my hand. “Usually.”

She nodded toward the street. “First I need to deliver my message. Then we can find out.”

The square had been built to look upward. Its stone ran broad and open until we passed the last line of palace-facing buildings. Then the streets narrowed, their lower floors still stone but their upper stories timbered and crowded over the paving. The castle disappeared behind roofs after the first turn.

Water ran in a shallow channel beside the street. A woman tipped a bucket into it from a doorway and sent yesterday’s grit past my boots. Two men wrestled a cart around a corner while a third held its load of firewood in place. Shop shutters lifted one after another. Some bore painted signs; others had a boot, a comb, or a little wooden cup hanging outside instead. I knew what the boot meant. The cup took me longer, until steam and the smell of grain told me it was food rather than a cooper’s shop.

The open air of the square went with the castle. Here sound stayed between the walls: wheels, doors, a baby crying somewhere above us, a hammer beginning and stopping behind a half-open workshop. Bread came first, then wet wood smoke, then leather and an animal smell from a narrow yard I only saw through a gate. A group in cleaner cloaks moved uphill toward the palace quarter, talking too quietly to hear. Everyone else seemed to be going the other way, carrying bundles, baskets, tools, or nothing but the expression of someone late for work.

Gina stepped around a broken edge of paving without looking down. People made room without staring. One man lifted two fingers to her as he passed; she returned the gesture and kept walking.

I followed because I had no better plan.

At a stall with bread, cheese, and a steaming pot whose contents I could not identify, Gina bought two rolls before I could object and pointed across the street.

“Wait here. I will not be long.”

She crossed to a modest door set back beneath an arch, spoke to someone just inside it, and disappeared. Nothing announced what was beyond the door except a small token worked into the lintel. I ate half a roll under the stall’s awning and tried not to stare at every passerby as if one of them might explain Asgard.

The bread seller gave a customer his change, then had to repeat the count when a small boy insisted that one of the coins had been his first. A woman in a damp cloak passed with a bundle of laundry against her shoulder. Behind her, a man carried a long board badly enough that everyone coming toward him had to flatten against the walls. Nobody gave me more than the quick glance people reserved for someone standing in the way of breakfast.

Across the street, the door opened twice. A young servant came out first with a covered basket and hurried downhill. A moment later someone else accepted a rolled packet from a rider whose horse was lathered around the neck. They spoke briefly, then went separate ways. Whatever lay inside the arch had a purpose in the morning’s traffic. I was only waiting outside it with crumbs on my coat.

At home, a stranger lingering beside a food stall would have been equally easy to ignore. The fact that I had fallen out of a chair into Asgard did not alter the practical rule.

Gina returned before the bread had cooled much.

“Now,” she said, looking at my wallet, “show me this cash.”

I took out a note.

The woman accepted it between two fingers. Her thumb moved over the surface. She turned it toward the light, frowned at the little window in the paper, then looked at me.

“What is this?”

“Money,” I said.

Gina gave me a brief sideways look. It was not encouraging.

“It is money where I am from,” I amended.

The woman held it closer. The printed lines were too fine to be drawn by hand, the colours too even. A bridge stood in the middle of it, familiar and useless. There was a number in one corner and another along the edge, not quite the same. The woman rubbed a fingernail across the paper as if expecting paint to come away.

“I do not know this mark,” she said. “I cannot take it.”

I put the note away. Gina had already paid with two local coins, one dull silver-coloured and one darker.

Gina watched me finish half of it, then held out her hand toward the open wallet. I gave her one of the coins.

It was ordinary enough in my hand that I had never really looked at it. Here, against her skin, it looked absurdly exact. The rim was clean. The tiny stars were all where they were supposed to be. The two metals met in a neat circle that had not been persuaded into place by anyone’s patient fingers.

“This was made where you are from too?” she asked.

“Yes. There are lots of them.”

Her eyebrows moved. “Lots like this?”

“Not exactly. The pictures change. But they are meant to be the same.”

She turned it over once more. “Someone who deals in old metal might want this. Or someone who sells curious things.”

She gave the coin back. “Come on.”

We went downhill until the street widened around a crossing where carts had made dark grooves in the stones. The shops changed with it. Food and household goods gave way to work done behind open fronts. A leatherworker was pressing a line of small patterns into a belt with a tool no larger than his thumb. Next door, rows of buckles caught the light from a tray: plain ones, silvered ones, and a few worked with knots so fine I could not tell where the metal began to turn back on itself.

Farther on, a woman held a decorated clasp against a customer’s cloak while the customer complained that the pin caught the weave. The clasp was beautiful in a way my euro coin was not. Its tiny leaves had been cut by hand, and one of them was bent just enough to show it had been worn before. Through another doorway I saw an apprentice rubbing oil into a carved wooden handle while his master checked the fit of a scabbard beside him.

I looked at the coin in my palm again. It had no leaves, no story, no visible hand behind it. It was one of millions. That, apparently, was its strange part.

The person Gina found had a narrow shop wedged between a leatherworker and a place that sold lamp oil, with old metalwork in the window and trays of small objects arranged under the counter. The doorbell was a strip of bronze that clicked against the frame when Gina pushed it open.

He set it on a square of cloth, lifted a small glass to one eye, and made a sound somewhere between suspicion and interest. He asked where it had come from. I said Midgard. He asked which ruler had struck it. I said that was not quite how it worked. He asked who had made the ring of different metal.

“A machine,” I said, then regretted it.

He lowered the glass. “A what?”

“A very precise tool. Many tools. I do not know enough about them to explain.”

That part, at least, was true.

He did not believe I had personally made anything in my wallet. He also did not need to. The notes interested him differently. Their printed patterns repeated too well. Their serial numbers were separate without looking accidental. The transparent patches made him hold them against the window twice. He asked if I had more. I said yes before I had decided whether that was wise.

Gina stood beside the door, saying almost nothing. When the man named a sum, she looked at the notes still in my hand.

“He has more than one,” she said. “They belong together.”

The man held one note against the window again, then placed another beside it. The designs matched. The tiny printed marks did not. He asked for the rest of the notes and the remaining coins.

“We can show them elsewhere,” Gina said before I answered.

He gave her an irritated look. She did not move.

The second offer was better. It took longer than I expected after that. There were questions, weighing, and a second man called in from the back to inspect the two-metal coins. I nearly ruined the conversation by saying there were millions of similar notes. Gina stepped on my boot before I could explain what I meant.

In the end, most of the cash left my wallet in careful piles. Local coin replaced it, heavier and less familiar. I kept one small note folded behind my identification and a single coin in the shallow inner pocket of the wallet. The man asked about those too.

“Those are not for sale,” I said.

He looked at me as if he understood that sort of answer perfectly well. He did not ask again.

Outside, Gina took the local coins from my hand, counted them twice, then put them back into my purse.

“Do not buy the first room you see,” she said. “And do not let anyone tell you that paper costs more because you are from Midgard.”

I looked down at the coins. They were enough to make the next few problems possible. That was more useful than an amount I understood.

“A month is enough,” I said.

Gina’s mouth tightened for a moment. Then she turned toward the next street.

By then the market traffic had thinned behind us. We crossed beneath a covered passage, passed a courtyard where someone was rinsing wool in a trough, and climbed toward streets that held fewer open shops. The houses were narrower there. Laundry crossed the gaps between upper windows. A child leaned out to call down to someone carrying a bucket, received an answer, and vanished again. The city wall appeared at the end of one lane, pale above the roofs; at the next corner it was gone behind a tall house with fresh plaster on its lower floor.

The first room Gina showed me sat above an eating house. Its owner opened the door while arguing with someone downstairs about an unpaid tab and led us up a stair that smelled of spilled ale. The room itself was warm and cheap. It had a bed, a shuttered window, and a little table wedged against the wall.

I put my hand on the table. It rocked hard enough to slosh the cup already standing on it.

“It can be fixed,” the owner said.

I looked through the floorboards at the noise rising from below. Someone had started a song, and three other people were helping badly.

“Do you have another room?” I asked.

“Not for that price.”

Gina glanced at the table, then at me. “You will not get much work done here.”

The owner shrugged, which was fair. The room would have suited someone who wanted sleep between shifts or a place near dinner. I needed a table that did not move when I breathed near it.

We left before the singer reached a second verse. The next few streets were quieter, though carts still passed often enough to keep mud at the edges of the paving. A woman swept a front step while two older men repaired the hinge on a gate opposite her. Neither looked up as Gina led me toward another house.

The room she found was on the second floor of a house that leaned slightly toward the street. Its owner let three other rooms to travellers and workers who needed a place in the city for a while.

The room had a bed, a narrow chest, a basin on a stand, and a small hearth with old ash in the corners. A shuttered window held several small panes of glass in its upper half. Beyond it, roofs stepped away toward a line of wall and a tower whose top caught the sun. It was still better than the brick wall outside my mentor’s room.

The table stood under the window.

It was scarred, broad enough for a stack of pages, and solid when I put both hands on it. One rear leg had been repaired with a darker strip of wood. The chair beside it had a loose joint that clicked once when I sat down.

“This one,” I said.

The woman who owned the rooms looked from the table to me. “You work at it?”

“I need to. Is it steady?”

Gina folded her arms. “He writes.”

The owner accepted this with the calm of someone who had rented rooms to people with worse habits. She named a price for a month, then added that a longer stay would cost less per month if I paid ahead.

For one strange second I imagined agreeing. Three months. Half a year. A key of my own. A routine. The thought died as soon as it appeared.

“One month,” I said.

The owner shrugged. “One month, then.”

I paid. The woman gave me a key for the room, and I tried not to look too closely at the extra months she had offered.

Gina waited until the owner had gone downstairs before she said, “You need the paper before the light goes.”

“I also need ink. And thread. A knife, maybe. Something to make holes with.”

She looked at me. “A manuscript, then.”

“Yes. I made the last one myself. I want this one as close to that as I can manage.”

It was the best answer I had. I had written the first manuscript by hand and assembled its pages myself. I had changed it until the work on my desk felt finished. If any of that had mattered, I could not assume a notebook would do.

Gina nodded once. “There is a binder’s supplier nearby.”

The shop she took me to smelled of paste, leather, and old dust. It had sheets stacked in wrapped bundles, jars of ink along one wall, thread on wooden spools, and tools whose purpose I could guess only by process of elimination.

Folded gatherings waited in neat piles to be sewn. A heavy board pressed down on two fresh covers near the back wall. An older book lay open beside a knife and a small pot of paste, its broken spine held together with a strip of cloth. At the far table, a girl cut thread to measured lengths and set each piece into a tray without looking up. Someone behind a curtain complained about a manuscript with its margins ruined by damp.

I recognized enough of the work to feel briefly less lost. I had folded pages, pricked holes, and cursed thread that twisted at the wrong moment. Some of the tools here were better than mine had been; others had shapes I had never seen. The owner watched me pick up the awl, then moved it out of reach when I held it by the point.

I bought more paper than I thought I could use, then more again after remembering the pages I had rewritten on Earth. I bought dark ink, two plain pens, a small knife, thread, the awl, and thin stiff pieces suitable for covers. A ready-made blank book sat on a shelf near the counter. I touched its cover, considered how easy it would be, and left it there.

The owner noticed. “You do not want that one?”

“I need to put it together myself. Or as close as I can get.”

He seemed satisfied with that answer.

After I paid him, I counted what remained in the purse without letting Gina see me do it. The room and supplies had taken a serious bite out of it. Still, by my rough estimate, the coins left would buy plain food for two people for about a month if neither of them developed expensive habits. Since one of those people was me, that was enough.

By the time we carried everything back to the room, my arms had started to ache. I set the bundles down carefully and flexed my fingers.

Gina set the last bundle of paper on the table and looked toward the window. The strip of sun on the roofs had moved while we were gone.

“I should get back to Frigg’s rooms,” she said. “There is work waiting.”

I looked at the room around us: the paper, the coin purse, the bed I had paid for, the unfamiliar hearth. The door was shut. The castle remained somewhere above the roofs, invisible from here and no less present for it.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Eat something more than bread,” she said. “And be careful with the hearth.”

“I can manage that.”

“Good.”

Then she was gone down the stairs, quick enough that the house seemed to settle afterward.

For a while I stood beside the table without doing anything.

The room was not silent. Someone coughed behind a wall. A cart rattled over the street below. The hearth clicked as the first small fire took hold in it. I had spent enough of the remaining money on dried fruit, cheese, a little honey, and a bundle of leaves the bread seller had assured Gina could be steeped in hot water.

It was hot, and for the moment that was close enough.

I opened the shutters a little wider. Cold air slipped in around the frame, and the tower beyond the roofs became sharper. From this room, Asgard was no longer a final image or a castle above a square. It was chimney smoke, wet slate, someone shouting for a child in the street, and a city wall cutting the pale sky into pieces.

A woman on the floor below opened her door, spoke to someone on the stairs, and closed it again. A delivery cart stopped outside long enough for two sacks to be dragged across the paving. Later, when the cart had gone, hammering started somewhere nearby and settled into a steady rhythm. The light on the roofs had shifted while I was out.

Then I shut the shutters again and went back to the table.

The chair clicked when I sat down. I adjusted its loose joint with a folded scrap of paper until it stopped. I set the ink where my hand would not knock it over, the pens beside it, the knife and awl farther away. I separated the clean sheets from the spare ones and put the thread and covers within reach.

I warmed water, ate a piece of cheese, and added honey to the herbal drink.

At last the room looked ready.

I had a table. I had a chair. I had paper and ink and a door I could close. I had enough food not to be forced back into the street before I understood what I was doing. There was nothing left to buy before I began.

I placed the first clean sheet in front of me.

The Asgard manuscript had begun with notes on loose pages, then scenes, then rewrites of scenes I had thought were done. Every answer had opened another question. A journey needed time. A character needed a reason to leave. A line in one chapter changed what could happen later. The months had accumulated while I was doing one ordinary piece of work after another.

I had spent the morning treating a new manuscript as a task with a shopping list. Now the paper, ink, thread, and tools were arranged in front of me, and I could see the work they implied.

I did not know how to make it fit into the time I might have.

My pen remained beside the first blank page.

Chapter 4 — Something Smaller

The first sentence lasted perhaps five minutes.

I had expected it to be easier. I knew where I wanted to go. I knew the room better than any room in Asgard. There had been a desk under the window, a chair with one arm worn smoother than the other, a charger looped around a glass, and a stack of papers I had meant to sort before sleeping.

I wrote: My room was on the third floor.

Then I stopped.

The third floor of what? I added the building. The building had an entrance, a lift that occasionally made a sound like an injured animal, neighbours whose names I did not know, and a street outside. The street led to other streets. I could see a bus stop from the corner. I knew which way I normally walked to buy groceries. None of that seemed impossible to write. It merely sat behind the first sentence like a queue of people who had all been told their business was urgent.

I crossed out third floor and tried again.

I was sitting at my desk at home.

That was worse. It used the word I wanted to reach as if it explained itself.

Outside my shutters, a cart passed and somebody swore at a wheel. I had learned how long the hearth took to catch and how close wheels sounded from the street. None of it helped me with the page.

I wrote the date I thought it had been. Then I wondered whether I had checked the date before leaving the apartment. I wrote the time, then remembered that I had looked at my phone only because I was late for the lesson. The phone had not crossed with me. The exact minute had gone with it.

By midday, I had two sheets filled with room, building, street, weather, and questions I had not known were questions until I put a pen to them. Every time I tried to cut something away, I found myself writing a sentence to explain why it could be cut away.

I set the pen down.

The Asgard manuscript had taken months because it had been a story. I had known where the people were going, what they wanted, what they could lose. This was supposed to be simpler. It was my room. My city. My life.

Instead I had spent half a day describing a door and wondering what stood on the other side of it.

If I kept going, I would have another work that took months. If I stopped after a few pages and nothing happened, I would not know whether I had failed because I had written too little or because I could not do this twice.

I turned the sheets face down.

The next morning, Gina knocked while I was still deciding whether face down was the same thing as throwing them away.

I opened the door with ink on two fingers and did not get out of her way fast enough.

She looked past me at the table. “You have been busy.”

“I have been avoiding being busy.” I stepped aside. “Come in.”

She entered, glanced at the pages, and chose the chair furthest from the hearth. The loose joint clicked when she sat.

“Is that Midgard?” she asked.

“Home.”

She waited for an answer.

I picked up the top page, read the first two lines, and put it down again. “I thought I should begin with the place I want to reach.”

“And now?”

“Now I think I should begin with a better idea.”

Her attention went to the stack. “How long have you been writing that?”

“Since yesterday.”

“How much of home have you written?”

“A door. Part of a building. Some weather I am no longer certain about.”

She considered this for a moment. “Does it have to be home first?”

I looked at her.

“You want to find out whether writing another thing changes anything,” she said. “Home seems large for that.”

It was irritating because I had been telling myself exactly that since noon and had not done anything with it.

“An empty room would be smaller,” I said.

“Would that help?”

“It would tell me whether another finished manuscript does anything at all.” I looked at the blank paper beyond the failed pages. “It would be a perfectly good test.”

“Then why are you looking as if you dislike it?”

Because an empty room was still several days of work if I did it properly, and because several days of work felt expensive now. I did not say either thing.

“If I am going to write a room,” I said, “I might as well write one worth having.”

Gina nodded. “You want it to be useful.”

After she left, I stood at the window for a while. A reading room would be useful. A quiet room, shelves, a table, decent light. Then there would be no reason not to give it more tables. More than one room. Somewhere to keep paper dry. Somewhere to wash ink from my hands. Somewhere I could make tea that might actually be tea.

By the time I sat down again, I had stopped calling it a room.

I wrote Library at the top of a clean sheet.

The work changed immediately.

The Asgard manuscript had been a story, worked out over months. The Library had no people, no plot, and no history I needed to account for.

It had a main hall large enough to read in without hearing every chair scrape. It had smaller rooms for people who wanted a door between themselves and other people. It had tables, chairs, shelves, a desk where someone could answer questions if there was ever someone to answer them. I wrote storage rooms, utility rooms, a staff room with a kettle, toilets, sinks, and a small place for food. I wrote clean drinking water and a refrigerator because I had spent enough time pretending cheese was a plan.

The first version had windows. I crossed them out.

Windows required something to look at. I did not want to write another street, another city, another weather report. I replaced them with broad lanterns in the ceiling, built into the roof where skylights might have been. They gave good daylight. They did not show a sky.

That sentence stayed.

I gave the building fresh air, a comfortable temperature, outlets along the walls, and ceiling lanterns that kept the rooms bright. I did not write a power station. I did not write pipes running beneath a city. The taps gave clean water. The toilets worked. The rooms stayed comfortable. That was what I needed from them.

The shelves took longer than the plumbing. At first I filled them with titles, because a library without books looked like a shop before opening. Then I read the names I had invented and felt the same trouble I had felt with the window. Who had written them? Why were they there? What else had I accidentally placed behind their covers?

I crossed out every title. The shelves held blank bound books instead: small ones, large ones, and plain volumes with unmarked spines. In the storage rooms, I added clean sheets, ink, quills, knives, thread, awls, boards, and leather for covers. They were supplies, not somebody else’s work.

The city outside my rented room kept moving while I wrote. I went out for food, ink, and more paper when I misjudged how much I would ruin by deciding a sentence was wrong after the ink had dried. I learned which stair in the nearby passage was faster than walking around the block and which vendor saved yesterday’s flatbread for the end of the day.

Gina appeared twice that I expected and once that I did not.

The first time, she found me carrying a bundle of paper badly enough that a corner had begun to drag in the street.

“You are losing it,” she said.

“I have noticed.”

She took the end I could not reach without dropping the rest and led me through a courtyard between two houses. I would not have recognized it as a route. It looked like a place where people stored buckets and argued over laundry.

“This is quicker,” she said.

“Than what?”

“Than the street with the carts.”

That was all the explanation she gave.

Another day, she arrived while I was trying to decide whether a building meant for long work needed a place to eat.

“It is a library,” she said, reading the word at the top of the page.

“Yes.”

“Why does it need a kitchen?”

“Small kitchen.”

“Why?”

“Because people get hungry in libraries.”

She looked at the room around us, at the cheese on my table, then back at the page. “That is true.”

I did not ask what she thought a library was supposed to contain. I was not sure I wanted another list.

The third visit came late in the week. She stood in the doorway while I sewed a gathering of pages together and watched me miss the same hole twice.

“You have been doing that for a long time,” she said.

“I keep missing the same hole.”

“Then stop missing it.”

“I will add that to the plan.”

She did not laugh, but she stayed long enough to drink the herbal infusion I had made. She had brought no message and asked for no explanation. When she left, the room seemed too quiet for several minutes.

By the seventh day, the manuscript had a cover, a spine that was not entirely straight, and a last page waiting for the mark.

I read it once from the beginning. The main hall. The rooms. The shelves. The water. The food. The light. I checked every interior door twice. I checked the ceiling lanterns. I checked the sinks, which was a sentence I had never expected to take seriously in a manuscript.

Then I reached the end and understood that I had done it again.

If it worked, I would enter the Library. I had written no way to return.

I sat back from the table and looked at the final page.

The Asgard story had included a way home because my mentor had asked the question before I finished it. This time nobody had. I had been so occupied with getting somewhere smaller than Earth that I had forgotten the part after getting there.

The correction took the rest of the afternoon.

At the centre of the main hall, I wrote, there stood a pedestal beneath armoured glass. Under the glass lay a book called the way back.

The sentence gave me a name for what I needed, if not an explanation.

The glass opened with the access code 1234.

I went back through the manuscript from the beginning after that, because I no longer trusted any sentence that said it was finished. Nothing else jumped out. I had described rooms and the doors between them. I had not described any route out of the building.

At last I put the page flat beneath my hand.

My mark went in the lower margin. The shape came without effort now. I had practised it too often to think about each turn. When it was done, the manuscript looked exactly as it had a moment before: thread, paper, ink, a cover slightly too stiff at the corners.

I got up from the chair.

For a moment I stood beside the table with one hand on its edge. The pages lay open near the middle. There was nothing ceremonial about touching them. I did it because that was what I had done on Earth.

The room went away.

I was standing on polished floorboards beneath a high pale ceiling.

The first thing I did was not look around. I put both feet more firmly under me and waited for the delayed part of falling.

The delayed fall never came.

The hall was larger than my rented room and quieter than it had any right to be. Tables stood in long rows beneath the ceiling lanterns. Their light had the clear, even quality of a good morning, though I could not see a sun through the glass above. Shelves rose along the walls and across the far end of the room, full of blank books with unmarked spines. A desk stood near the entrance to one of the smaller rooms. Beyond it, a corridor led toward doors marked by their use: work rooms, storage, staff.

It had the plain, settled order of a library: tables, shelves, light, and space enough to work without hearing every chair scrape.

I walked to the nearest table and put both hands on it. Solid. I pulled out a chair and sat for a moment, then stood again because I had not come here to admire furniture.

The taps in the washroom produced cold clear water. The toilets worked. The ceiling lanterns kept the same clear daylight over the hall and the smaller rooms. In the kitchenette, a refrigerator hummed beside a counter with a kettle, cups, tea, and food that looked harmless enough to eat. There were outlets along the wall near the work tables, exactly where I had described them. I had nothing to plug into them.

I found the smaller rooms, the storage room, the staff room, and the work rooms. Every door I tried led to another room. There were no windows at eye level and no view beyond a wall. I walked the main hall twice before remembering that I had crossed out the windows and never given the Library an exterior door.

The pedestal stood at the centre of the hall. The armoured glass around it made the book beneath look both important and faintly ridiculous. Four small number wheels sat in the base.

I set them to 1, 2, 3, 4.

The glass released with a small click.

I left the book where it was. There was a chair at a nearby table, so I dragged it close enough to sit beside the pedestal without leaning over it like a thief. The chair scraped softly across the floor.

The way back was thinner than the Asgard manuscript and bound in dark cloth. I opened it while seated. The first page held the same plain weight as every other page I had touched that week.

I put my thumb against the paper.

Gina

The first time Gina saw the Midgard man, he was already on the stones of the square.

He was on one knee outside the castle, studying the stones. His clothes were wrong for Asgard but not for travel. His hands were empty. He looked as if he had been asked a simple question in a language he almost understood.

People had gone around him. They had errands. So did Gina. She was carrying a message for Frigg, and the shortest way to her rooms did not pass through a stranger sitting on the ground.

She stopped anyway.

“Are you hurt?” Gina asked.

He looked up at the castle before he looked at her.

He said he came from Midgard. That was possible. He said he had been in a room there a moment earlier. That was less easy to place. Then he said he had written about Asgard, which was the point at which Gina decided he needed food before he needed anyone else’s opinion.

He told her about Ragnarök after that.

Gina could not decide what to make of him in the square. She did not need to. He was lost, he had no one else with him, and he did not know the city. Those facts were sufficient for the morning.

Later, after Gina had taken her original message where it belonged and René had a room, she spoke to Frigg.

Her rooms were busy. Someone was waiting with folded cloth in both hands. A servant crossed behind Gina with a tray and changed direction to avoid her. Frigg was listening to an older woman describe a dispute over a marriage gift. Gina waited until the woman had finished.

“There is a Midgard man in the city,” Gina said when Frigg looked at her. “I found him in the castle square this morning. He says he had been writing about Asgard before he arrived.”

Frigg set down the cup she had been holding. “Did anyone see him come in?”

“Not that I found. I did not.”

“Is he armed?”

“No. He has a wallet, strange coins, and too much paper.”

“What does he want?”

“To go home.” Gina hesitated. “He also says Ragnarök is close. He says the story he wrote gave it less than a month.”

Frigg was quiet long enough that the sounds of the room returned around them.

“Does he know when?”

“No.”

“Does he offer a reason to trust him?”

“Only that he knows things he should not. And that he is afraid his warning may be right.”

Frigg looked toward the open doorway, not at anything in particular. “Where is he staying?”

Gina told her.

“Let me know if the situation changes,” she said.

Frigg had other people waiting. Gina went back to her messages.

Over the next week, Gina saw René when his errands crossed hers.

He paid for his room. He bought food. He bought more paper, which appeared to be his preferred answer to almost everything. Once he stopped her in a passage because he wanted to know whether there was a shorter way to the binder’s supplier. She gave him one. Another time she found him standing outside a shop with an ink stain across the side of his hand, comparing two bundles of paper.

“The heavier one,” Gina said.

“Why?”

“It will survive the walk home.”

He bought the heavier one.

He spoke less about Midgard after the first day. When he did, it was usually because a detail in the room he was writing had made him remember something. Mostly he spoke about the Library.

At first Gina thought he meant a place where books were kept. Then he asked whether a building needed more than one room where people could sit quietly.

“How many people?” Gina asked.

“I do not know yet.”

“Then make more than one.”

Another time he asked whether people would need food in a place intended for reading. Gina told him yes. He wrote for several minutes after that, his pen moving faster than it had while he was talking.

He asked strange questions. He did not ask Gina for money, permission, guards, or a place in Frigg’s rooms. He wrote in his rented room and occasionally forgot that he was holding a cup until it went cold.

There was no reason for her to stand over him.

On the seventh day, Gina went up to his room because she had been sent past the house and had not seen him for two days. She meant to ask whether he had eaten properly.

His door was closed.

She knocked.

“René?”

No answer.

She knocked again, louder. Still nothing.

The latch turned when she tried it. The door had not been locked.

The room was empty.

His coat hung where it had been before. The coin purse sat near the hearth. The new manuscript lay open on the table, finished by the look of the mark in its lower margin. A chair stood pushed back from the table.

Gina pulled the door closed behind her and went downstairs.

The woman who rented the rooms was carrying a basin from the back of the house. Gina waited until she put it down.

“Have you seen the Midgard man leave?” Gina asked.

She thought about it. “Not today.”

“Would he have passed you if he used the stair?”

“Unless he climbed out of a window.”

“Did he?”

The landlady gave Gina a look. “Not that I saw.”

The window was too small for a sensible exit, and the drop below it was not impossible but would have made a great deal of noise. Gina went back upstairs with the landlady behind her.

They were halfway along the hall when something hit the floor inside René’s room.

The sound was hard enough to make the landlady swear.

Gina opened the door.

René lay on the floor beside the table, one hand on the boards as if he had been trying to catch them. His coat was still on its hook. The manuscript was still open where Gina had seen it. Nothing stood between him and the door.

Then Gina asked, “Where were you?”

He blinked at the ceiling once, then turned his head toward her.

“The library.”

Chapter 5 — A Place to Talk

Gina

The landlady looked from René to the manuscript on the table.

“Can you stand?” she asked.

René pushed himself upright with the table. He had landed hard enough to leave one side of his face red, but he could stand. The landlady made him turn once so she could see that nothing was broken, then picked up the fallen chair and set it out of the way.

“If you damage the floor,” she told him, “you pay for the floor.”

“Understood.”

She left them with the door open and went downstairs. Her steps stayed audible until she reached the lower landing.

Gina closed the door.

“You were in the place you wrote?”

“I was somewhere that matched it.”

“And you came back here.”

René glanced down at the boards. “More or less here.”

He spoke carefully. He had finished the manuscript, touched an inner page, and found himself in the Library. A second book stood inside it. He had used that book and returned without the chair on which he had been sitting.

Gina listened, then looked at the manuscript again.

“Can you do it again?” Gina asked.

“I have only done it once.”

“Do you expect it to work?”

“Yes.”

He moved the chair back from the table and stood before the open manuscript. The pages showed dense lines in his hand. Nothing about them looked different from the pages Gina had watched him spoil, scrape, replace, and rewrite during the week.

“You touch the writing?” she asked.

“An inner page. I don’t know if the writing matters at that point.”

He placed two fingers on the sheet.

There was no light or sound. One moment René stood beside the table. The next, the space beside it was empty.

The manuscript remained open.

Gina walked around the table before she touched it. René had left his coin purse near the hearth and his coat on its hook. Nothing in the room suggested where he had gone. The page felt like paper beneath her fingertips.

Then the room was gone.

She stood in a wide hall under a pale ceiling. René waited several paces away, watching her feet.

“I didn’t fall,” she said.

“You were standing.”

“So were you.”

“This time.”

The hall looked newer than any working building Gina knew and less decorated than most rooms intended to impress. Long tables divided the floor. The chairs were shaped for use rather than ceremony. Shelves covered the walls and formed rows beyond the central space, every shelf crowded with books whose spines bore no names.

She pulled one out. Its cover was plain. Every page inside was empty.

“They are all like that,” René said.

“How many did you check?”

“Enough to stop checking.”

Gina returned the book and walked the nearest circuit of the hall. Doors led to smaller reading rooms, storage rooms, work rooms, and a room with counters, water, and food. René showed her a metal fitting above a basin. He turned its handle, and clear cold water ran from it. Gina tried the handle once herself, watching the stream stop and start. The ceiling fixtures cast an even daylight over the shelves, though there was no sun or sky visible above them.

In a work room she found paper, ink, thread, knives, boards, awls, and leather. The tools were laid out with the tidy completeness of René’s list-making, but several of the storage shelves were inconveniently high. She had to reach for the top one.

“Is there a door to the street?” she asked when they returned to the main hall.

“I haven’t found one. I didn’t describe a street.”

Gina tried two more doors anyway. Both opened into rooms. She could usually orient herself in a strange building after one walk through it. Here she could find every route René had supplied and none that led beyond them.

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know.”

“How far from Asgard?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can anyone use the manuscript?”

He looked at her. “You can.”

That was an answer, though only just.

A covered dish in the food room held eight small biscuits. Gina took one. It was crisp, lightly sweet, and ordinary enough that she finished it while they walked. René showed her the washrooms, the smaller work spaces, and the rows of blank books.

When they passed the food room again, Gina lifted the cover.

There were eight biscuits in the dish.

“Did you put another one there?”

“No.”

She counted again, then replaced the cover.

At the centre of the main hall stood a pedestal beneath thick glass. Four number wheels were built into its base. René set them to one, two, three, four. The enclosure opened with a click.

Inside lay a thin book bound in dark cloth.

“This brought you back?” Gina asked.

“Once.”

“And if it does not now?”

“Then you will know before you try it.”

“Useful.”

He touched an internal page and disappeared.

The book remained beneath Gina’s hand. She waited long enough to make sure he did not return at once, then touched the same sheet.

René’s rented room returned around her. He stood beside the table. The Library manuscript still lay open where they had left it.

Gina checked the room once, including the window and the closed door. Then she looked at René.

“Stay here.”

“I have nowhere else planned.”

She went to Frigg.

Frigg’s rooms were busier than they had been during Gina’s first report. Two servants were sorting household accounts at a side table. A petitioner waited near the wall with a wrapped bundle on his knees. Someone had left damp cloaks near a brazier, and the wool gave the room a wet, heavy smell.

Gina waited until Frigg finished dictating an answer to a dispute over stored grain. When the clerk moved away, Gina stepped forward.

“The Midgardian’s situation changed.”

Frigg set the next tablet aside. “How?”

“I went where he said he went.”

The people at the side table were still within hearing. Frigg glanced toward an inner room and rose. Gina followed her through; the door remained open, but the household noise covered their lower voices.

“Tell me exactly what you did,” Frigg said.

Gina did. René touched the manuscript and vanished. The manuscript stayed in his room. Gina touched the same page and entered the place he had described. Inside, another book returned them one at a time.

“You used it yourself?”

“Both books.”

“Was René beside you when you arrived?”

“Yes.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“No. He answered what he could. Mostly he said he didn’t know.”

Frigg asked whether the place held weapons, people, or an ordinary road out. Gina had seen none of those. She described the rooms, the blank books, the working water, and the return to René’s lodging. She left the replenished biscuit until last because it seemed less urgent than a room that could lose two people and return them.

“You believe his warning now?” Frigg asked.

“I believe he can go somewhere by touching a book. I still don’t know how much else he is right about.”

A man appeared in the outer doorway. He did not interrupt from there. He waited until Frigg saw him, then spoke her name.

The clerks at the side table stopped writing.

Frigg

The messenger asked to speak with her alone.

Frigg took him into the inner room and closed the door this time. He delivered the message in a few sentences. He had clearly practised them on the way and lost the practice before reaching the end.

“Say it again,” Frigg told him.

He did.

Baldr had been killed. His body was being brought in.

Frigg reached for the cover of the household order she had left on the table. The wet ink ended in the middle of a name. She picked up the sand shaker instead, held it for a moment, then put it down without using it.

“Who confirmed it?”

The messenger answered. Frigg asked him to repeat the name. This time she set the cover over the unfinished order.

“Find Hermod,” she said. “Tell him I ask him to go to Hel. If Baldr can be returned, he is to learn the price.”

The messenger bowed and left.

Frigg opened the inner door. Gina had moved the waiting petitioner and the clerks out of the immediate room without being told. She stood beside the cold brazier, hands empty.

Beyond the shutters, wind pressed at the building. Summer should have settled over Asgard by now. Instead, frost had formed twice that week in shaded courtyards, and the bronze latch was cold enough to hurt bare fingers in the morning. René could not have known what weather belonged here. He had called Ragnarök close anyway.

Gina had walked into a place René had written and returned. Now Baldr was dead, and the summer cold had lasted too long to dismiss. Frigg could no longer leave the Midgardian’s warning for another day.

She looked at Gina.

“Where is he?”

“In his room. I told him to stay there.”

“Go ahead of me. Tell him I am coming to ask about Baldr. Nothing more.”

Gina left at once.

Frigg finished the order she had abandoned, because the people waiting on it would still need grain tomorrow. Then she called for one attendant and went to hear what the Midgardian remembered.

René

By the time Frigg arrived, I had put the fallen chair back at the table and washed the dust from my hands. Neither action made the room suitable for a queen.

Gina entered first. Frigg followed, wearing a dark outer cloak fastened without ceremony. One attendant remained at the foot of the stairs. I could hear the landlady explaining, with growing satisfaction, that she had rented the room to me before anyone important had taken an interest.

Frigg looked at the completed manuscript on my table. She did not touch it.

“Gina says you knew Baldr would die.”

“I knew a story in which he died. I didn’t know whether this place would follow it.”

“How did he die in your story?”

I remembered mistletoe, Hodr, Loki, a hall full of gods testing an oath. I also remembered several versions that did not agree cleanly with one another.

“Before I answer that, we need somewhere else to speak.”

Frigg’s attention moved from me to the door. “Why?”

“Because the part after his death involves someone who can listen, lie, and wear another face. If I am right about any of it, saying his name here may be enough to ruin the only useful thing I remember.”

“You propose another room?”

I indicated the manuscript. “One he cannot overhear from Asgard unless he follows us.”

Frigg looked at Gina.

“I went there,” Gina said. “I came back.”

I asked both women to stand. I touched an internal page and entered the Library. Gina appeared several moments later near the end of the table. Frigg followed last.

She arrived standing and immediately stepped away from the manuscript page she could no longer see. Her gaze passed over the long tables, the pale ceiling, the blank books, and the nearest doors.

“Speak,” she said.

I chose a table near the central pedestal. None of us sat.

“You asked how he died,” I said. “In the story I remember, mistletoe was left out when everything else was made harmless to Baldr. Hodr used it against him. Loki arranged it, or guided him, depending on the version. I don’t know whether that is what happened here.”

“In the story I know, Hermod goes to Hel after Baldr dies.”

Frigg’s hand settled on the back of a chair. “I sent for Hermod before I came to you.”

I had never put Hermod’s ride in the manuscript. Frigg had sent him before I had even spoken his name.

“Then this may be moving faster than I thought.”

“What does Hermod find?”

“Hel may agree to release Baldr. There is a condition.” I tried to recall the wording without improving it. “Everything in the world has to mourn him. Living and dead. In some versions, everything has to weep for him.”

“And does it?” Gina asked.

“Almost. Someone called Thökk refuses. That refusal is enough. Baldr stays dead.”

Frigg moved the chair aside. “Who is Thökk?”

“Loki. At least, that is who the story says she was.”

Frigg walked to the end of the table and back.

“Does Loki know the condition?”

“I don’t know. In the story he learns enough to interfere. I don’t know when.”

“You spoke of Hermod after I had already sent him,” Frigg said. “How much of the rest should I expect?”

“I don’t know. I knew these stories on Earth, but I never wrote Baldr’s death or Hermod’s ride into my manuscript. You sent him before I said his name. I don’t know what the resemblance means. I only know I don’t want to wait for the next part.”

“What must happen before the refusal?”

“Hermod has to reach Hel. Hel has to offer the condition. The request has to go out. Loki has to learn enough to become Thökk, or to put Thökk where the refusal will matter.”

Gina leaned over the table, following the sequence. “Then he has not refused yet.”

“No.”

I heard my own wording again: everything in the world, living and dead.

“In the world,” I said.

Frigg waited.

“If Loki were somewhere else when the condition was tested, perhaps his refusal wouldn’t count.”

“Somewhere else in Asgard?” Gina asked.

“No. Outside this world. Here.”

I gestured at the Library, immediately aware of how little I knew about the place surrounding us.

“Perhaps,” Frigg repeated.

“That is all I have.”

Frigg looked toward the rows of shelves. “Then tell me how you propose to bring Loki here.”

“Can this place hold him?” Frigg asked.

“Only while he cannot find the return,” I said.

Gina left the table and walked once around the pedestal. “If he finds it, I cannot stop him.”

An open attempt to seize Loki would warn him. I could try to write another place, but the Library had taken most of a week. They might not have several more days, and another manuscript might fail.

“So we use this one,” I said.

“This place has a return,” Frigg said.

“Yes. If it didn’t, you and Gina would not have come.”

Gina walked to the central pedestal and looked through the glass at the dark book beneath it.

“Loki does not know that book exists,” she said.

“He doesn’t know the manuscript in my room can move him either.”

“He may know once it does,” Frigg said.

“He’ll know the manuscript mattered. He may decide the books here matter too. But there are a lot of them, and he won’t know which one returns him. He won’t even know that touching a page works both ways.”

Frigg looked along the shelves. “The one book under armoured glass will attract his attention.”

“Then it should not be there,” Gina said.

I looked from the pedestal to the thousands of blank spines.

“Put it on a shelf.”

“Among blank books?” Frigg asked.

“Not only blank ones,” Gina said. “I can bring others. Enough that one written book is not the answer to the whole room.”

“And the pedestal?”

“Another book,” Gina said. “One anyone in Asgard might know.”

“How do we make him open the manuscript?” Frigg asked.

“He will not come because I invite him,” I said.

“No,” Frigg said. “He may come if he thinks he learned something we meant to keep from him.”

“Something about Baldr would be too obvious,” Gina said.

I rested both hands on the table. “I can say I am reconstructing material I remember from Midgard. A text attributed to an ancient sorcerer, concerned with the dead or their return. The manuscript is new because the reconstruction is new.”

“Not a promise that it restores Baldr,” I said. “Only that it might contain something relevant.”

“And he must inspect the manuscript on your table,” Gina said, pointing toward where it remained in Asgard.

“He has to open it himself,” I said.

Frigg asked how the account would reach Loki. I had no useful answer. Gina offered two possibilities, then rejected both because too many people would hear them. Frigg said she would decide after they returned. The fewer people who carried the account, the less of it could change along the way.

“No one repeats what we said here,” Frigg told them. “Not in my rooms. Not in his. Not if the person asking has my face.”

Gina nodded. I did the same.

I looked toward the pedestal.

“Everyone who used that book came back to my room,” I said. “Me twice. Gina once.”

“And soon me,” Frigg said.

“It has happened that way every time,” I said. “I can’t promise it will happen for Loki.”

“Before he takes the bait, one guard at the stair,” Frigg said. “Only you, Gina, and I may enter the room. No one else.”

The guard would have three permitted faces and no way to test who wore them. Anything stronger before Loki crossed would announce that the room mattered. After I saw him disappear through the manuscript, Frigg could control the room and its ordinary exits. If someone appeared inside, the people there would try to keep that person from leaving.

“If he does not return before Hermod’s attempt is decided?” she asked.

“Gina knows where she puts the book,” I said. “She can lead others back in.”

“Others who can do more than I can,” Gina added.

“When we leave,” Frigg said, “what do you say if someone asks about the manuscript?”

“That I am reconstructing Midgardian material about returning the dead. I don’t claim it works.”

Frigg looked at Gina.

“I say no more than that,” Gina said.

“I will decide how Loki learns it. Hel, Thökk, and the condition stay here.”

“It is a chance,” she said. “We will use it.”

Gina

René opened the glass over the way back and set the wheels to 1234. He touched an inner page and vanished. The book stayed on the pedestal.

Frigg went next.

Gina returned last. René’s room appeared around her, with Frigg already beside the hearth and the Library manuscript still open on the table.

At the foot of the stair, Frigg gave a guard his order.

“Only René, Gina, and I may enter that room. No one else.”

Then she sent Gina to bring several books to René’s lodging.

Gina knew where to find books that would not be missed for an afternoon. She chose worn copies in common bindings, the sort passed through households, schools, and copyists’ shops. Some held stories. Some held prayers or records. She did not stop to read them. For the pedestal she selected a familiar collection of Asgardian tales whose cover was neither expensive nor damaged.

It took more than one trip. On the last, she carried a strapped bundle against her chest and climbed the lodging stair without assistance. The guard outside René’s door knew her as one of the three people named in his order and stepped aside.

René opened the door. Gina took the bundles to the table, stood beside the Library manuscript, and touched an internal page.

The main hall received her and the books she carried.

She brought the other bundles through the same way, returning each time by the book under glass. René remained in the rented room. By the final crossing, a small uneven stack stood on one of the Library tables: dark leather, pale leather, repaired cloth, scarred boards, and titles Gina had known for years.

She began with the pedestal.

The enclosure opened to 1234. Gina removed the way back and set the familiar story collection in its place. She closed the glass. The common book looked strangely formal beneath it, but it did not look like a secret.

Then she carried the remaining volumes into the shelves. She placed them one or two at a time among the blank books, changing rows and heights as she went. A prayer book sat beside a thick empty volume. A school text leaned against three plain bindings. A repaired household record disappeared between two books that had never held a word.

Blank books still filled most of the shelves. The imported volumes broke the easy pattern.

Gina took the way back into the middle rows. She passed the first shelf she considered because it could be seen from the pedestal. The second stood too close to a work-room door. On the third, halfway along an ordinary row, she slid the dark cloth binding between two volumes of nearly the same height.

She stepped back. Its unmarked spine matched the neighbouring volumes, and the row offered no obvious place to begin.

Gina walked once to the end of the row and returned. She could still place her hand on the correct volume without hesitation.

She left it on the shelf. Holding the neighbouring books apart with one hand, she opened the dark cover only enough to slip a finger between the pages. Her fingertip touched an inner sheet.

René’s room replaced the shelves.

He stood at the other side of the table. Frigg had returned and was waiting by the closed door. Gina set the empty carrying strap on the table. Frigg turned toward the door.

Frigg left to arrange the rest. Gina followed her out. Behind them, René closed the door on the fresh manuscript lying open on his table.

Chapter 6 — Worth Checking

The folded scrap waited inside a prayer book in one of Frigg’s outer rooms.

Baldr’s death had changed the traffic through those rooms, and Loki had been watching who came and went.

Loki saw the attendant put it there. The young woman had checked the doorway twice, pushed the scrap well into the binding, and left the book in the middle of a shelf whose other volumes wore dust along their upper edges. She had done everything expected of someone hiding a message except choose a place that no one was watching.

That could mean carelessness. It could also mean Frigg wanted the message found.

Loki left it where it was until the room had emptied. Then he drew it out by one corner and read it without unfolding the paper farther than necessary.

The Midgardian had made a fresh copy of a much older text, one attributed to an ancient sorcerer. It concerned the dead and, perhaps, their restoration. Frigg had taken an interest in it after Baldr’s death. The manuscript was being kept in the Midgardian’s rented room until she decided what should be done with it.

The account offered no proof. It did not even offer the name of the supposed sorcerer.

Loki slid the scrap back into the prayer book.

If Frigg had planted it, she expected him to notice the lack of proof. If the attendant had disobeyed her, the woman had concealed enough to make questions awkward. Either way, the manuscript existed. René had already arrived with knowledge he should not have possessed.

It was worth checking.

He watched the lodging before he approached it. One guard stood at the foot of the stair. A servant carrying a covered bowl tried to pass him and was made to leave the bowl on a bench.

“Only René, Gina, and Frigg,” the guard said. “Those are my orders.”

The servant complained about the food cooling. The guard pointed to the bench again.

Frigg would draw every eye in the street. René was already upstairs. Gina had visited often enough that her return required no story until someone asked why she had come.

Loki had seen her at close range. He borrowed her height, her face, the fall of her hair and the travelling coat she had worn that morning. A brief exchange with a guard required no imitation of the quieter details that betrayed a person over dinner or a long walk.

The guard looked up as he approached.

“Gina.”

Loki answered with a small nod and kept climbing. The guard stepped aside.

René’s door was closed. Loki knocked once.

The Midgardian opened it. He had ink on the side of one finger and a loose thread clinging to his sleeve. Behind him, the room held a bed, a narrow hearth, and the writing table. The fresh manuscript lay open on the writing table.

“Frigg wants the manuscript brought to her,” Loki said.

René did not move out of the doorway at once. His attention passed over Gina’s face, then the stair behind her.

“Now?”

“Before anyone else learns enough to come looking for it.”

The answer was plausible. René still waited a moment before stepping aside.

Loki entered. The door shut behind him.

The manuscript was newly bound. Its leather had not yet softened at the corners, and the pages lay unevenly where hand-cut edges met. No title marked the cover. No author had put a name on it. The open page was dense with René’s writing.

René stayed on the other side of the table.

“How many books have you read that had a way back?” he asked.

Loki looked up from the manuscript. “Had a way back?”

“Never mind.”

It was the sort of remark René made when his own thoughts had moved farther than the conversation. Nothing in his expression turned it into an accusation. He made no attempt to close the manuscript or draw it away.

Loki rested one hand on the table and bent over the open page. If the writing contained what the hidden message suggested, a few lines might be enough to tell him whether Frigg possessed anything dangerous.

His fingertips met the paper.

René’s room vanished.

Loki stood beneath a high pale ceiling. Shelves rose in ordered rows beyond a wide central space, their bindings repeating in dark cloth and plain leather. Tables and chairs occupied the open floor. Rectangular fixtures overhead gave off a steady white light, although there was no flame inside them and no window showing daylight.

He did not move for the first breath.

His feet were on a smooth hard floor. His clothes, knife, and borrowed shape had come with him. René had not. The manuscript was gone as well.

Loki turned once, slowly. No one stood between the shelves. No footstep moved in the adjoining rooms. The air was cool and carried the dry smell of paper, leather and clean wood.

He crossed back over the place where he had arrived. Nothing resisted him. There was no mark on the floor and no thinning in the air. Touching the manuscript had been followed by transport; the manuscript had not arrived with him. It might still be on René’s table, but he could neither see the room nor reach it from here.

The nearest doors opened into smaller reading rooms and individual workrooms. One led to a tiled room with basins and unfamiliar metal fittings. Another opened on shelves of cups, sealed containers, food and a tall white cupboard whose interior was cold. He tested the handles, the walls behind open doors, and the ends of passages. Every door he found connected one part of the building to another.

There were no windows. There was no visible outer door.

The place did not behave like an illusion. A chair had weight when he moved it. A metal fitting above one basin released clear water when he worked its lever. The cold cupboard remained cold after he closed and reopened it. Whatever had happened belonged outside the risks he had considered when he entered René’s room.

In the centre of the main hall stood a pedestal beneath armoured glass.

Loki returned to it.

Four numbered wheels were set into the base of the enclosure. He tried the straight sequence first: one, two, three, four. The lock released.

He raised the glass by its edge.

The book beneath it was familiar. Not this particular copy, perhaps, but the collection itself: common Asgardian stories, copied for households and schools, with a title on the front and repairs along the spine. It looked no more important than the versions he had seen passed between children.

He did not touch its inner pages. The appearance of an ordinary book proved little now. Still, this one advertised its identity, and someone had placed it under protection better suited to a treasury object.

He lowered the glass without locking it and looked across the hall again.

The shelves nearest the pedestal held hundreds of blank spines. Between them, at irregular intervals, stood books made in Asgard: a prayer book with a worn cord, a school text, a household record in scarred boards. None belonged to the same set. They had been carried here separately.

Someone had entered this place before him. Someone had brought objects in, opened the glass, changed what stood beneath it and left again. The familiar book suggested a substitution. An empty pedestal would have made the missing object obvious to anyone who arrived and began with the centre of the room.

So his arrival had been expected.

René’s question returned to him, still without a useful shape. How many books had a way back?

Loki walked between the first two rows. The volumes there were blank. He took one by its covers, pressed the page block apart at the fore-edge and saw clean paper within. Another was the same. Most of the shelves held clean paper ready for someone to write in.

Who had arranged this?

Loki turned the blank book in his hands while he considered Frigg.

Frigg had the authority to place the guard, restrict the room and turn palace servants into a narrow trail of information. She could support the attempt and order silence around it. Yet when Frigg wanted a person stopped, she usually used the powers already in her hands: guards, summons, messengers, obligations. She did not need a Midgardian manuscript to move someone into a building no one in Asgard had seen.

Gina was another matter. She knew the city, carried out errands without making a ceremony of them, and could have moved the scattered Asgardian books onto these shelves. The pedestal’s substitution suited hands-on preparation. If she had done it, then the real Gina had already entered this place and learned how to leave it.

He walked to the next imported volume, a school text, and checked its closed edges before moving on.

René’s question would have been unnecessary for her.

The false Gina had stood at René’s table, and René had asked how many books had a way back. He had then allowed the manuscript to be touched.

Perhaps he had noticed an error in the face or voice. Perhaps the request itself had been wrong. Loki could not tell when the Midgardian’s hesitation had become suspicion, or whether René had known whose face lay underneath Gina’s.

But René had possessed the manuscript. The bait concerned René’s reconstruction. The effect that brought Loki here had begun with René’s writing, and René had made no effort to prevent it.

The central idea was probably his.

René was still mortal, still ignorant of Asgard in ways a child would have found embarrassing, and still capable of giving an armoured case the sequence one-two-three-four. He was also capable of arranging an unfamiliar danger and allowing another person to choose it for himself. Ignoring him in future would be wasteful.

Loki set the blank volume back in its place.

Knowing who had devised the arrangement did not explain what it was for.

No one had met him here. There were no guards behind the doors, no chains on the chairs, no binding marks on the floor. No voice demanded a confession. The rooms contained water, food, places to sit and more blank paper than anyone could use in a short visit.

If René had wanted something done to Loki here, he had neglected to provide anyone to do it.

René’s purpose was probably to keep him somewhere other than Asgard.

The hidden message had concerned the dead. Frigg’s interest had begun after Baldr’s death.

As far as Loki knew, no one had found his part in that. Höðr had loosed the weapon, and grief had filled the hall too quickly for anyone to examine the guiding hand behind the act. René had been in Asgard only days. He should have known less than almost anyone.

Perhaps he knew anyway. René had already shown knowledge that did not fit a newly arrived Midgardian. Or perhaps he suspected Loki for reasons of his own. Neither possibility explained why absence mattered more than accusation.

René might instead be responding to something that followed Baldr’s death, something Loki could affect. The supposed sorcerer’s text might have been only the shape given to the bait.

Loki looked toward the unbroken rows.

René seemed to have expected him to spend his effort here, searching for a way out.

He started with the books. He had touched one written manuscript and arrived in a Library containing thousands of volumes. That connected books to the event. It did not tell him whether another book could reverse it, whether the same action would work, or whether a return had been provided at all.

He inspected the central rows without pulling anything at random.

Whoever had hidden an important object would expect the pedestal to draw the first search. The shelves directly facing it were nearly as exposed. A position beside a door, an intersection, or a distinctive table would be easy to remember and easy for someone else to describe. The farthest corner was less visible, but it was also the first place an unimaginative searcher would call properly hidden.

An ordinary row at a moderate distance offered fewer landmarks and far more neighbours.

That still left a large part of the Library.

Loki returned to one of the worktables and examined the tools laid out there. Most belonged to binding and repair: thread, awls, knives, weights and smooth thin folders for working paper. He took one of the folders.

René’s manuscript supplied the only example he had. It had been new. It had no title on the cover and no author named outside. Its inner pages carried text. When Loki’s skin had touched one of those pages, René’s room had vanished.

That did not make anonymity a law. A familiar story collection might conceal the same effect. A blank book might lead somewhere despite having no words. He had one observation, and the Library had been prepared by people who knew more about it than he did.

Still, the observation was better than choosing at random.

He began with unmarked books in the middle rows.

The first had a stiff spine and pages pressed into a block that resisted the folder. Blank.

The next opened too readily, but its pages were also blank. Someone had handled it before, perhaps checking the stock or moving it by the covers. A third showed a faint crease where leather met board. Blank again.

The marks mattered, but not enough. A worked hinge could mean use. It could also mean poor binding, curious hands, or a book that had been opened once and discarded.

He changed rows.

Several more anonymous books had promising wear and nothing written inside. One had a loose spine and uneven pages, but the folder exposed clean sheet after clean sheet. Loki went back to the pedestal, compared the familiar story book with the imported volumes nearby, and left it under the glass.

Near a workroom door, he found three written Asgardian volumes in quick succession. Each announced itself by title or familiar binding. He checked their covers and edges, then left them. They might matter; he simply had less reason to prefer them over the anonymous books that resembled René’s manuscript.

He moved deeper into the shelves, testing fewer volumes as the signs improved. A rigid book with untouched page edges could wait. So could one placed where it was visible from the central hall. He gave more attention to softened hinges, page blocks that fanned unevenly, and bindings pressed slightly out of line by repeated opening.

Twice those signs led to blank paper.

The third time, they led to a book bound in dark cloth.

It stood halfway along an undistinguished row, between two volumes of nearly the same height. No title marked its spine. The cloth at the hinge had bent often enough to lose the stiffness of the neighbouring books. Its pages did not sit in the perfect block of untouched stock.

Loki drew it partway out by the upper and lower edges of the cover. He did not put a finger between the pages.

The paper folder slipped under the front cover. He opened it a little. The first leaf moved with the cover, exposing another beneath it.

There was writing on the page.

He held the book where it was and read what he could without touching the inner sheet. The text did not announce a destination. The binding offered no author, title, seal or mark that distinguished it from the blank volumes surrounding it.

The book was new, anonymous, written in and visibly used.

It matched the useful features of René’s manuscript more closely than anything else he had examined. It might be the missing object from the pedestal, or it could carry him farther from Asgard. It could do something else entirely.

The only test he had seen was immediate. Touching an inner page had not given him time to decide whether he approved of the result.

He could search another row. He could return to the familiar book under glass, or pull apart the walls, or keep looking for a door René had concealed. Each choice consumed more of whatever interval the Midgardian had wanted.

Baldr was dead, Frigg was acting, and René had found some use for Loki’s absence.

The reason remained hidden in Asgard.

Loki set the paper folder aside. He opened the dark book far enough to reach the written sheet.

Then he touched the page.

The Library disappeared.

Chapter 7 — Before He Comes Back

The manuscript remained open on the table after the false Gina disappeared.

I kept my hands away from the pages and went to the door. The guard stood where Frigg had placed him, looking down the passage rather than into my room.

“I need you to carry a message to Frigg.”

He turned. “What message?”

“Gina entered the Library. Those words. Nothing else.”

His eyes went past me to the table. He had admitted someone wearing Gina’s face less than a minute earlier. As far as he knew, she was still in the room.

“Do you want me to fetch her first?”

“No. She isn’t here.”

He looked at me again.

“Please take the message.”

He went.

I closed the door and returned to the table. The ink on the manuscript was dry. The paper had not changed. I could still see the place where the visitor’s hand had rested before the room lost her.

The real Gina knew where the Library manuscript led and where she had placed the way back. Asking Frigg to inspect it, then studying it like an unfamiliar object, did not fit her.

I had never seen who was under Gina’s face. I still believed it was Loki.

The room remained quiet. Somewhere below, the landlady moved a pot across a hearthstone. A cart passed outside. The ordinary sounds made it difficult to believe that a god had just vanished through several sheets of my handwriting.

I moved the manuscript away from the edge of the table without touching an inner page. Then I waited.

Every moment I waited here also passed for Loki in the Library. I could track how long he had been gone. His progress was impossible to judge: he might still be checking the first door or already have found the shelf.

The guard returned with several people behind him. None wore a badge or uniform I recognized. They entered without touching the manuscript and spread through the small room as well as the furniture allowed.

One moved the chair aside. Another stood near the wall opposite the table. They left the door and window alone.

“Frigg’s order,” the guard said. “Anyone who appears inside this room is to be seized and held. Whatever face they show. Whatever name they give.”

I glanced at the patch of floor beside the writing table. “Here?”

“Inside the room.”

“What if it is Gina?”

“Then she will be held until Frigg says otherwise.”

I understood the order.

The room was too small for all of us to wait comfortably. One of the people Frigg had sent took my place near the table. The guard told me that Frigg wanted me brought to her.

I put on my coat. The manuscript remained on the table, surrounded by people who had not been told what it did.

I pointed to it. “Don’t touch the pages. Don’t damage it.”

No one answered.

Frigg’s working room had changed since my last visit. The household accounts and petitions were gone from the side tables. Maps, message tablets, and scraps of folded paper had taken their place. People came to the outer door, spoke in low voices, and left again.

Gina stood near one wall. She looked at me when I entered, then at the guard who had brought me.

“He gave the message,” I said.

“I heard.”

That was all either of us said about the Library.

Frigg sat at the same table where she had been working before Baldr’s death. There was an untouched cup near her hand. She asked when the false Gina had entered. I gave her the time as closely as I could.

“And you believe it was Loki.”

“Yes.”

“Believe?”

“I didn’t see him change back.”

She accepted that with a small movement of her head. “The order at your room is in place.”

I looked toward the shuttered window. The cold had found the edges of the room despite the brazier. “We don’t know when he will return.”

“No.”

Frigg turned to the next message brought to her. I remained because she had told me to remain. Gina did too.

People entered, reported, and left. Most of what they said concerned places and families I did not know. I learned which messages mattered by watching which ones Frigg answered herself.

The cup near her hand cooled untouched.

I counted the time at first. Eventually I stopped because it told me nothing about how far Loki had progressed.

The outer room grew noisier. A voice called for space. Someone knocked against the doorframe, and two people moved a table before the door opened fully.

Hermod came in looking exhausted from the journey and went directly to Frigg.

She rose before he reached the table.

“You saw her?” Frigg asked.

“I saw Hel.”

For a moment Frigg’s hand remained on the table beside the cold cup. “And Baldr?”

“She will release him.”

Someone near the door began to speak and was immediately hushed.

Frigg waited.

Hermod continued. “If everything in the world weeps for him. Every being and every thing. Living and dead.”

The condition matched the story I remembered. Frigg had sent Hermod before I told her that story, and nothing in my manuscript had directed his journey. He had returned with the same condition, and I did not know what to make of it.

“Did she say how we are to prove it?” Frigg asked.

“She said what must be done.”

Frigg looked at him for another moment, then turned to the room.

“Send the condition out. Every household, every hall, every road the messengers can reach. Let each person who hears carry it farther. Reports return here.”

Before she finished, people were taking copies of the words. Others repeated them back to make sure they had heard correctly. Doors opened, closed, and opened again.

Frigg did not ask me whether it would work.

I stayed beside the wall while Asgard tried to mourn Baldr completely.

The first reports came from within the palace. More followed from outside it. Some were spoken by people who had run; others arrived on folded sheets or tablets passed from hand to hand. The reports were not uniform. They named halls, streets, households, gatherings, and places I could not locate. Frigg asked short questions and sent several messengers back when an answer was unclear.

I heard grief through the walls as well as reports of it. The sound did not begin at once. It spread unevenly through the palace, voices close by mixing with others farther away.

No one could verify every being and thing named by Hel’s condition. They spread the demand as far as they could and waited for Hel’s response.

I waited for a report of refusal. None came, and no one brought the name Thökk. I did not know why.

Gina crossed the room once to put another piece of wood on the brazier. She did not ask whether I thought we had succeeded. Frigg continued receiving reports. Hermod remained close enough to answer when she needed him.

Each time someone came in, I looked up. Usually it was another messenger.

Then the people in the outer room stopped speaking.

A man came through the doorway without an escort. I had never seen Baldr alive. Frigg left the table at once, and the man had to be her son.

She crossed the room and put both hands against Baldr’s face.

“Mother,” he said.

Frigg’s head lowered. Baldr held her. The others gave them space.

My attention kept moving between Hermod and the open doorway. I still wanted to understand what had happened.

Baldr had returned. Hel had accepted the condition.

I still did not know whether Loki’s absence had changed the result.

People nearby set their work aside. Someone began to cry harder. Another person laughed once and covered it with a hand. Gina moved aside to clear the doorway.

Soon after Baldr entered, another messenger came through the doorway.

He went to Frigg but spoke loudly enough that I heard him.

“Someone appeared inside the Midgardian’s room. We seized him at once. He is restrained.”

The messenger did not say Loki’s name.

I looked at Gina. She had heard the same report.

The person they had caught was almost certainly Loki.