Skaði came to Asgard in full armour. Helmet, mail, shield, axe. Laces tied tight. Hair combed back and braided so no bastard could grab it in a fight. She had walked the whole way from Þrymheimr, her father's mountain, and she had not stopped once. Skaði knew what she wanted. She wanted blood.
Her father Þjazi was dead. The gods had killed him. It had gone like this: Loki, the eternal disaster, had helped Þjazi kidnap Idunn and her apples. Then the gods had begun to age, developed wrinkles and knee pain and bad eyesight, and they had realised that their immortality was sitting in a basket at a giant's hall, and they had become furious with Loki. Loki had borrowed Freyja's falcon cloak, flown to Þjazi's hall, turned Idunn into a nut and flown back. Þjazi chased him as an eagle. The gods lit fires on the walls. Þjazi's feathers caught fire and he crashed down inside the walls, and they killed him while he burned. The whole affair was dirty and chaotic and smelled of scorched feathers.
Skaði knew all of this. She knew the gods had the right to defend themselves, and she knew her father had been wrong to steal Idunn, and she did not give a damn. Her father was dead. Rights and wrongs and legal principles are things you discuss around a fire after someone has bled. Blood first.
She kicked the gate of Asgard open. Literally. Wood splintered. Hinges screamed. The gods, who were eating breakfast, looked up from their plates. Thor, who always reacts physically, stood and gripped Mjölnir. Odin put his hand on Thor's arm. Odin had that expression he always has when he already knows how it ends and decides to let it play out.
"I want compensation," said Skaði. Her voice carried through the entire hall. "You killed my father. I can take blood. I have the right to take blood. Give me a reason not to." She set the axe in the floor before her. The blade sank into the wood with a sound that made Freyr spill his mead.
The gods looked at each other. It was that moment, the uncomfortable one, when everyone realises that someone else is right and it would be simpler if she were wrong. Skaði was right. Þjazi was her father. Blood right is blood right.
Odin stood. He was old and limped slightly and his one eye was as always empty, and the empty eye was the most unsettling part, because you never knew where it was looking. "Three things," he said. "We offer you three things. First: you may choose a husband from among the gods." Skaði raised her eyebrows. "However," Odin continued, and there is always a damn however with Odin, "you may only see their feet."
Skaði stared at him. "Feet," she said. "You killed my father, and you want me to choose a husband by looking at feet." Odin nodded. He did not look the slightest bit embarrassed. Odin has never looked embarrassed in his entire life. It is one of his most irritating qualities.
"Second," said Odin, "we must make you laugh. And third, I will honour your father." Skaði considered. She considered with her whole body, shoulders tense, jaw clamped shut, fingers drumming on the axe handle. Then she nodded.
They hung up a curtain. Behind it the gods stood in a row, and in front of it only feet were visible. Just feet. Twelve pairs of god feet sticking out beneath a dusty cloth, and Skaði walked along the row and studied them, and it was the most ridiculous thing that had happened in Asgard since Thor dressed up as a bride. Thor's feet were broad and filthy with black toenails. Freyr's feet were narrow and well kept. Loki's feet were nervous, they moved constantly, the toes curling as if they were planning something. Heimdall's feet smelled of earth and grass. Bragi had corns.
And then there was one pair of feet. Clean. Beautiful. Soft skin, pale nails, straight and symmetrical toes. These were feet belonging to a being who had never run in mud, never jammed his toes in a boot, never stood in muck and sworn. Skaði stopped. "These," she said. "These feet." She was certain. Baldr. Of course Baldr. The most beautiful and purest of all the gods, radiant as morning sun. Who the hell else had feet like that.
The curtain fell. Behind the beautiful pair of feet stood Njörðr. The sea god. An older man with seawater in his beard and fish guts under his nails and salt in every pore. He smiled. It was a kind smile, an honest smile, the smile of a man who spends his days by the ocean and thinks that most things are pretty good. Skaði stared at him. Njörðr smelled of fish. Not discreetly, not a hint. He smelled of fish the way a fish market smells on a hot day.
Skaði had chosen the most beautiful of the gods based on feet, and she had ended up with an old sailor who smelled like a harbour in July.
Then: the laughter. The gods were supposed to make her laugh. They tried. Freyr told a joke. Skaði did not flinch. Bragi sang a funny song. Skaði yawned. Thor lifted things. Skaði looked the other way.
Then Loki came. Loki, who always arrives last and always makes it worst. He had brought a goat. A large, bearded, angry goat. Loki took a rope and tied one end around his own testicles. The other end he tied to the goat's beard. The goat stared at him. Loki stared at the goat. Then the goat backed up.
The rope went taut. Loki screamed. The goat bleated and pulled the other way, and Loki pulled back, and his face was white with pain and his eyes watered and he screamed things that cannot be reproduced in text, and the goat kept pulling, and Loki slipped on the floor and scraped his knees, and the goat bleated again and jerked, and Loki screamed louder. The whole hall watched. Thor laughed so hard the bench cracked. Odin smiled with one corner of his mouth. Freyr had covered his eyes with his hands.
Skaði laughed. She tried not to. Lips pressed together, teeth biting the inside of her cheek, eyes turned away. It did not help. Loki was on the floor with the rope taut between his crotch and a furious goat, and it was too much. She laughed. Not a happy laugh. A laugh that broke through against her will, like water through a crack.
Odin took Þjazi's eyes. He had saved them. Of course Odin had saved a dead giant's eyes. He held them in his hand, two dark, glassy orbs, and then he threw them upward. High. Higher than the roof, higher than Asgard's walls, up into the darkness. They stuck to the sky as two stars. Cold, distant, staring down at a world that had killed their owner. It was the most beautiful and the most brutal thing Skaði had seen.
The wedding was short. Njörðr smiled the whole time. Skaði did not smile. They drank mead and ate fish, because Njörðr always had fish, and then they went to bed, and Skaði lay beside a man who smelled of salt and seaweed and who snored with the rhythm of the sea.
They tried living together. Nine nights in Þrymheimr, Skaði's mountain. Nine nights in Nóatún, Njörðr's harbour by the sea. In the mountains Njörðr lay awake listening to the wolves howling in the dark, and he pressed the pillow against his ears and sweated from sheer terror. He was a man of the sea. The sea sings. The mountains scream. "I cannot sleep," he said every morning, with rings under his eyes and hands that shook. "The wolves. Damn the wolves."
By the sea Skaði lay awake listening to the gulls. They screamed at dawn and at dusk and the whole damn night. Sharp, metallic, idiotic sounds. "I cannot sleep," she said every morning, with her jaw clenched and her eyes red. "The birds. Your wretched birds." Njörðr smiled apologetically. He no longer heard the gulls. They were part of his silence.
They gave up. Quietly, without fuss, without drama. They gave up the way people do when they realise they simply belong to different worlds and no amount of effort can change that. Njörðr went back to his sea. Skaði went back to her mountains.
She walked the same way home as she had come. The boots unchanged, the stride unchanged, the braid tight against her neck. The difference was that she had arrived with an axe and fury and was going home with two stars in the sky staring down at her. Her father's eyes. They followed her the whole way, cold and silent, through the forest, up the slope, into the snow.
Skaði closed the door of Þrymheimr. Alone. With wolves outside howling exactly the way she wanted. The compensation was paid. A husband she had gained and lost. One laugh the gods had wrung from her, against her will. And her father's eyes shone in the sky. And whether it was justice or merely the gods' way of making guilt comfortable, nobody knows. Skaði did not know. She stood at the window and looked at the stars and said nothing, because there was nothing to say.