“We got them, Dad!” one of the women squeaked—or it would have been a squeak if she hadn’t been the size of South Boston.
“Yes, but why?” their father asked.
“They’re yellow!” another giantess chimed in. “We noticed them right away! With a ship that color, we figured they deserved to drown!”
I mentally began composing a list of words that began with F: Frey. Father. False. Friend. Frick. Frack. And some others.
“Also,” said a third daughter, “one of them mentioned mead! We knew you’d want to talk to them, Dad! That’s your favorite word!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Alex Fierro waved his hands like there was a flag on the play. “Nobody here was talking about mead. There’s been some kind of mistake….” He hesitated, then frowned at me. “Right?”
“Uh…” I pointed to Samirah, who backed away, out of range of Alex’s cutting wire. “I was just explaining—”
“DOESN’T MATTER!” boomed Frowny. “You’re here now, but I can’t have you in my cauldron. I’m just cooking down the mead. A Viking ship could totally ruin the flavor of the honey!”
I glanced at the bubbling liquid around us. I was suddenly glad I hadn’t inhaled any of it.
“Honey?” I asked.
“Don’t you dare call me that,” Alex growled. Possibly he was kidding. I didn’t want to ask.
A massive hand loomed over us, and Frowny plucked up our ship by the mast.
“They’re too small to see properly,” he complained. “Let’s scale things down.”
I hated it when gigantic people changed the proportions of reality. Instantly the world telescoped around me. My stomach imploded. My ears popped. My eyes expanded painfully in their sockets.
BOOM! SCRAPE! THUMP!
I stumbled over my own feet, and found myself standing with my friends in the middle of a vast Viking hall.
In one corner, our ship lay on its side, hot mead still dripping from the hull. The room’s walls were columned with dozens of ship keels, soaring hundreds of feet up and curving inward to form the rafters of a peaked ceiling. Instead of planks or plaster filling in the space between the columns, there was nothing except rippling green water, held in place by no physics that made sense to me. Here and there, doors lined the watery walls, leading to other undersea chambers, I guessed. The floor was carpeted in squishy kelp that made me glad I had shoes on.
The hall’s layout wasn’t much different than your typical Viking party pad. A rectangular feasting table dominated the space, with chairs of carved red coral along either side, and an elaborate throne at the far end, decorated with pearls and shark jaws. Freestanding braziers burned with ghostly green flames, filling the hall with a smell like toasted seaweed. Hanging over the main hearth fire was the cauldron we’d been floating in, though it now appeared much less massive—maybe just big enough to cook a team of oxen in. The pot’s polished bronze sides were engraved with designs of waves and snarling faces.
Our host/captor, the frowny-daddy giant guy, stood before us, his arms crossed, his brow knit. He was now only twice as tall as a human. The cuffs of his army-green skinny jeans were turned up over pointy black boots. His suit vest was buttoned over a white dress shirt, the sleeves pushed back to show lots of swirling runic tattoos on his forearms. With his panama hat and his gold-rimmed glasses, he looked like an agitated Whole Foods shopper, stuck in the express line behind a bunch of people with too many items, when all he wanted to do was purchase his macrobiotic matcha smoothie and leave.
Behind him, in a loose semicircle, stood the nine wave girls—who were not (shockingly) doing the wave. Each giantess was terrifying in her own special way, but they all leered and giggled and pushed each other around with the same level of excitement, like fans waiting for a star to come through the stage door so they could tear him to pieces to show their love.
I recalled my encounter with the sea goddess Ran, who had described her husband as a hipster who liked microbrewing. At the time, the description had been too weird to comprehend. Afterward, it had seemed funny. Now it seemed a little too real, because I was pretty sure the hipster god in question was standing right in front of me.
“You are Aegir,” I guessed. “God of the sea.”
Aegir grunted in a way that implied Yeah, so? You still tainted my mead.
“And these…” I gulped. “These lovely ladies are your daughters?”
“Of course,” he said. “The Nine Giantesses of the Waves! This is Himminglaeva, Hefring, Hrönn—”
“I’m Hefring, Dad,” said the tallest girl. “She’s Hrönn.”
“Right,” said Aegir. “And Unn. And Bylgya—”
“Bigly?” asked Mallory, who was doing her best to hold up a half-conscious Halfborn.
“Nice to meet you all!” Samirah yelped, before Aegir could introduce Comet, Cupid, and Rudolph. “We claim guest rights!”
Samirah was smart. In certain polite jotun households, claiming guest rights could get you a free pass from being slaughtered, at least temporarily.
Aegir harrumphed. “What do you take me for, a savage? Of course you have guest rights. Despite the fact that you ruined my mead and you have an insultingly yellow ship, you’re in my house now. We at least have to have a meal together before I decide what to do with you. Unless one of you is Magnus Chase, of course, in which case I’d have to kill you right away. One of you isn’t he, I hope?”
No one responded, though my friends all glared at me like Dang it, Magnus.
“Just hypothetically…” I said. “If we had a Magnus Chase, why would you kill him?”
“Because I promised my wife, Ran!” Aegir cried. “For some reason, she hates that guy!”
The nine daughters nodded vigorously, muttering, “Hates him. A lot. Yes, tons.”
“Ah.” I was glad I was drenched in mead. Maybe it would hide the sweat popping up on my forehead. “And where is your lovely wife?”
“Not here tonight,” Aegir said. “She’s out collecting trash in her nets.”
“Thank gods!” I said. “I mean…thank gods we at least get to spend some quality time with the rest of you!”
Aegir tilted his head. “Yes….Well, daughters, I suppose you should set extra places at the table for our guests. I’ll talk to our chef about cooking up those juicy prisoners!”
He waved toward one of the side doors, which swung open by itself. Inside was a vast kitchen. When I saw what was suspended above the oven, it took all my willpower not to scream like a wave giantess. Hanging in two matching extra-large canary cages were our long-range reconnaissance experts, Blitzen and Hearthstone.
THAT AWKWARD moment when you lock eyes with two friends hanging in cages in a giant’s kitchen. And one of them recognizes you and begins to shout your name, but you do not want your name shouted.
Blitzen staggered to his feet, gripped the bars of his cage, and yelled, “MAG—”
“—NIFICENT!” I bellowed over him. “What beautiful specimens!”
I jogged toward the cages, Sam and Alex on my heels.
Aegir frowned. “Daughters, see to our other guests!” He made a sweeping take-out-the-trash gesture toward Mallory and T.J., who were still trying to keep our semiconscious berserker from face-planting in the kelp. Then the sea god followed us into the kitchen.
The appliances were all twice human size. The oven knobs alone would have made decent dinner plates. Hearthstone and Blitzen, looking unharmed but humiliated, dangled over the four-burner cooktop, their cages knocking against a tile backsplash that was painted with buon appetito! in garish red cursive.
Hearthstone wore his usual black biker outfit, his candy-striped scarf the only flourish of color. His pale face and white-blond hair made it difficult to tell if he was anemic or terrified or just mortified by the buon appetito! sign.
Blitzen straightened his navy-blue blazer, then made sure his mauve silk dress shirt was properly tucked into his jeans. His matching handkerchief and ascot were a little askew, but the dude looked pretty good for a prisoner who was on today’s dinner menu. His curly black hair and beard were well trimmed. His dark complexion coordinated beautifully with the iron bars of his cage.