Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, Book 3: The Ship of the Dead (Rick Riordan’s Norse Mythology) by Rick Riordan

Author:Rick Riordan [Riordan, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Disney Book Group
Published: 2017-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

Othala, the rune of family inheritance. Hearthstone had insisted he would never use that rune again. Its meaning had died for him in this place. Even his new set of rowan runes, the ones he’d received as a gift from the goddess Sif, did not contain othala. Sif had warned him this would cause him trouble. Eventually, she’d said, he would have to return here to reclaim his missing piece.

I hated it when goddesses were right.

Should you take it? I signed. In a place like this, silent conversation seemed better than using my voice.

Hearthstone frowned, his gaze defiant. He made a quick chopping gesture—sideways then down, like he was tracing a backward question mark. Never.

Blitzen sniffed the air. We’re close now. Smell it?

I smelled nothing except the faint scent of rotting plant matter. What?

“Yeesh,” he said aloud. Human noses are pathetic.

Useless, Hearthstone agreed. He led the way deeper into the forest.

We didn’t make for the river, as we had last time to find Andvari’s gold. This time we moved roughly parallel to the water, picking our way through briars and the gnarled roots of giant oak trees.

After another quarter mile, I started to smell what Hearth and Blitz had talked about. I had a flashback to my eighth-grade biology class, when Joey Kelso hid our teacher’s frog habitat in the ceiling tiles. It wasn’t discovered until a month later, when the glass terrarium crashed back into the classroom and broke all over the teacher’s desk, spraying the front row with glass, mold, slime, and rancid amphibian bodies.

What I smelled in the forest reminded me of that, except much worse.

Hearthstone stopped at the edge of another clearing. He crouched behind a fallen tree and gestured for us to join him.

In there, he signed. Only place he could have gone.

I peered through the gloom. The trees around the clearing had been reduced to charcoal stick figures. The ground was thick with rotting mulch and animal bones. About fifty feet from our hiding place rose an outcropping of boulders, two of the largest rocks leaning together to form what looked like the entrance of a cave.

“Now we wait,” Blitz whispered as he signed, “for what passes for nighttime in this dwarf-forsaken place.”

Hearth nodded. He will emerge at night. Then we see.

I was having a hard time breathing, much less thinking in the miasma of dead-frog stench. Staying here sounded like a terrible idea.

Who’s going to emerge? I signed. Your dad? From there? Why?

Hearthstone looked away. I got the feeling he was trying to be merciful by not answering my questions.

“We’ll find out,” Blitz murmured. “If it’s what we fear…Well, let’s enjoy our ignorance while we still can.”

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