The child was female, and Wulfric was angry. “Useless! Weak!” A bearpaw of a hand slapped at the still-warm face of the dead woman the chieftain of the Skraels once called wife, life given for another to enter the world. Live flesh on dead created a thick, wet sound as the midwives scurried to be anywhere but in the canvas tent hastily erected when the cheiftess went into labor, her ill state preventing her from even reaching the chieftain’s hall.
“Four longboats of gold for her,” grumbled the mountain of a man, stamping about in the straw floor in thick boots. “Strong, healthy, would bear many sons, those were her father’s words.” Shaking his thick head, snow still clinging to his shaggy red beard, Wulfric glared at the screeching bundle held tentatively in the last remaining midwife’s arms, an old, half blind crone who nevertheless could read portents and tell fortunes when the moon was right in the sky. “Four longboats of gold,” he muttered, “for that.”
“She is still your firstborn,” tentatively reminded the crone without the fear of her companions. “She will have all that you have. It is law.”
“I am the law, Inga” growled Wulfric.
“You are a man,” Inga replied, the light of the braziers in the reflected from the white cataracts in her milky eye. “This is the gods’ law. Are you a god?” The old woman knew her value to the tribe all too well, taking barbs at a man who would hew the head of anyone too slow to kneel upon entering his presence.
Wulfric’s hand rested on the knotted wood of his axe’s hilt, considering that value, but his hand fell away. He drew himself up, looming over Inga and the swaddled child in her arms. “I am the reaver of men, the ruler of ten tribes and the terror of the southerlings. No law rules me but my own.”
“The Allfather may disagree.”
The reaver of men’s hands rose again with malicious intent. He could have seized Inga by the neck and broken it, strangled her like a spring chicken. Yet she was not his target. The girl-child’s screams intensified as if sensing the malicious intent of her father as she was lifted from the midwife’s arms, the old woman helpless to resist but for a warning of, “and He will not approve this.”
Wulfric turned the girl over in his hands as one would when inspecting a yearling calf, pushing and pulling at the arms and legs and holding the cheek between a thick finger and thumb. Even for a female, she was small, her skin pallid and malnourished, tiny limbs flailing in search of warmth in the bitter winter night.
Tiny, weak, a poor heir for a Skrael king, he thought, hating her. “My Firstborn will not be some sickly waif,” rumbled the chieftain aloud. “My Firstborn will be a storm incarnate, a razer of holds and slaughterer of legions, a conqueror. This…this will not do.”
“Kill her, and you break the Allfather’s law.”
He rounded on her, eyes mad with anger—and fear. He would not admit his reverence for god or man, but that did not mean it didn’t exist. “Is that so, crone?”
Inga closed her eyes and sighed, knowing Wulfric’s plan before he’d even fully fathomed it himself. Striding out of the tent with the babe held as far away as possible, ignoring her cries and protestations in the cold, he bellowed for three of his men. “Take this child to the top of the mountain, and leave it there until morning.”
Each of the man before him was a hardened killer who had slain and defiled the women and children of their tribe’s adversaries for years. No other sort of warrior existed among the Skraels. “She is yours?” The closest to an objection being raised.
“No,” replied Wulfric, shoving the babe roughly into the man’s gloved hands before turning away and back to Inga. He glared into her milky eyes. “Let the Allfather and the cosmos decide her fate. If she survives the night, then clearly it is His will that she lives and…have all that is mine.” Even saying it in jest disgusted him.
Inga gazed to the edge of the village, at the shrinking silhouettes of the men beginning the climb up the sharp, snowy slope beyond the perimeter fence. “You bring misfortune on yourself and your tribe by doing this.”
“And you, old woman,” sneered Wulfric. “You are part of this tribe. You will suffer our misfortunes too.”
“No,” she continued to gaze after the Firstborn of the Skrael and her executioners. “I will be safely dead by then.”
“As will that embarrassment of a spawn,” Wulfric shot back. “Unless the gods spare it and deem that runt worthy of life as you seem to believe.”
Inga tilted her head in thought, “or someone else does.”
***
Born aloft on the northern winds and the cold magic of the Jotar, Skie glided across the mountain range like a mouse upon the snow, her booted feet light as the smallest flakes despite being the length of a cabin made of redwoods. The Frost Giantess hunted beneath the moon and clear sky, prowling in the manner of a lone wolf, a literal yew tree bow and set of arrows slung across her back.
Long hair the color of the snow below her whipped in the wind, she paused in a sloping valley and turned her azure skinned nose to the for an expectant sniff, inhaling in deep gusts like a bloodhound, her breasts rising and falling behind the leather straps that covered them along with a fur skirt. Meat, blood; she smelled the warmth of life nearby.
Prey.
She pursued the scent like a lion on the hunt, gliding faster than a longboat in a full headwind, a wake of snow falling lightly in her wake. Shy of the peak, the scent ever stronger, Skie came to a stop and dropped to a crouch, then stalked up the mountain, the sharp ice and searing cold of the snow offering no discomfort against the bare skin of her palms and knees or against her top’s exposed midriff. She reached back as she neared the apex expecting a troll or perhaps even a Fenrir.
Instead, much to Skie’s delight she found humans, great and strong and therefore excellent quarry. A cry went up among the trio of mortal men as the giantess appeared over the icy edge of a cliff, upon which they appeared to have set down some sort of tightly wrapped bundle. They were not the type to flee, to run even in the face of the embodiment of primal chaos and the devouring aspect of winter. Instead of running, they drew ax and sword and stood together to meet the giantess head on.
Skie cared for bravery as much as cowardice. A courageous plaything provided as much amusement to a frost giant as a craven one, more so as they do more than just quiver, she thought as she lunged forward and laughed at the tickling sensation of their weapons meeting her skin, hard as the ice it took the color of. One of the men, dark-haired and coated in thick plate armor, leapt onto her outstretched hand and with a bellowing cry drove a sword down again and again.
Like a child with a creeping insect running along the back of the hand, she held him up to her face with interest until, growing bored with the game, took him in her other hand and calmly pulped him between her fingers, a river of blood and gristle running down between her fingers.
The two remaining humans lost their courage, dropped their axes, and ran. Skie gave them a head start of twenty breaths—humans running in the snow was always so pitiable with their sinking steps and slogging—then, summoning the frost magic again, glided after them as she had done when crossing the alpine spine of the mountains.
In one smooth motion her hands swept down and seized both terrified, gibbering men, bearing them aloft to her face. The one in her gore-soaked hand appeared the most agitated, screaming and wailing as he found himself clenched in the guts and blood of his compatriot. The other simply stared slack jawed at the icy giantess in moribund silence, the calm, dead acceptance of a prey species knowing its fate.
But I want him to squirm, Skrie frowned. How can I make him move? The other one was certainly livelier, wriggling and struggling and coating himself further in blood. Maybe he just needs—different surroundings.
On that, she got an idea. She lowered the shivering, frozen man down to the waistband of her skirt and pushed her clenched hand past her belt. Her hand slipped forward, down between her legs and to the junction of legs and into the nestled bush of her crotch.
The Skrael warrior, who’d forced himself upon dozens of southerling women during raids, who’d carnally known the wives and daughters of enemies he’d killed in battle, found himself wedged headfirst up the vulva tunnel of a woman a hundred times his size, the clenching labia dragging him further in, a fate Loketh the Trickster could not have orchestrated better.
Skrie knew nothing of this ironic turn of events, nor would she, a predator herself, care of them. But then he began to wiggle—ah-ha—and that she did care for. Humming in pleasure as her loins were tickled and stimulated, the giantess turned to the remaining man.
Two inside are better than one. Better still, this one was already lubricated. Yet her hand rose rather than fell, nearing her face as her frost-colored lips parted and out darted a tongue wider than the screaming man’s shoulders, the tip trailing around the sides of her opening mouth.
Slicked with blood as he was, the Skrael slipped past Skie’s lips with little fuss, feet going in first. She clamped her teeth lightly about his legs then slurped him out of her hand like a sweetened treat and drawing him into her mouth, his hands gripping at her lips before sliding off and inside.
Eager to get on with her plan, the giantess flicked the hapless male across her palate and sucked him down her throat in a single, powerful swallow. Her now freed hand trailed against her throat as the kicking lump slid down and past her collarbone. She felt him land in her stomach and begin to thrash, the sensation sending bolts of lightning arching up her spine as if struck by Roth the warrior-king god himself.
Down below, her other hand continued to push and force against the thrashing legs of her other captive as the moistening nethers. Sinking down onto her knees in the snow, she rubbed harder with a groan, savoring the combined struggles of the two humans within her until she came with a howling shriek that deafened the wet cracking from under her skirt.
Falling onto her back in the snow, Skie smiled, pleased with herself, staring up at the moon, cleaning out the broken body from her groin and wiping her bloodied hands on the ground, the snow around stained crimson. She lay there for several blissful minutes with only the lingering, fading struggles of her belly’s morsel for company and readied herself to leave, to glide back off to the hunt, when she sudden, sharp question pierced the haze of her thoughts.
What brought the humans up here in the first place?
The bundle, she remembered the bundle. What did they have with them? An offering to one of the gods, perhaps. Maybe even the Jotar, in the vain attempt to placate the giants’ appetites away from humanity.
As the tickling sensation within Skie’s stomach ceased, she thought of nothing now but the bundle and glided back up to the cliff she’d first climbed over where the wrappings sat amidst the tousled snow, having amazingly survived being crushed or buried by the snow the giantess had thrown about.
She scooped the bundle of cloth wrappings up on two fingers, balancing it close to her face in curiosity. A face almost as blue as her own stared back from amidst the wrappings—a human babe, near frozen, she would have thought it dead were it not for the small. White cloud floating front of her purple lips.
Will be dead soon enough.
Too small to provide any amusement, Skie’s first impulse was to discard the infant human—yet she was stopped by a feeling—not of kindness or pity, but an interest, an idea, a consideration of new means of amusing herself.
An opportunity.
Her free hand hovered over the near-still body, closing her eyes Skie gave a prayer to the Great Mother then summoned the cold magic once more. The baby stirred, cried, revitalized with new life as the frost giantess’s magic flooded into her veins.
But the skin stayed blue.
***
Wulfric’s bosom swelled with pride as his nordic champion of a son, the size of a bear with long, flowing blond hair and piercing blue eyes, dumped two chests full of plundered southerling gold at his feet, of foreign coins, golden grails and silken tunics inlaid with diamonds and gems.
Twenty winters ago, he had taken a Vrag maiden in a raid and made a concubine of her and she had bore him what he’d always desired—a firstborn son. And what a son! Krael had been a fighter and a leader from childhood, first battering down the other youths in the training pits and now he left with every moon to plunder and pillage the weakling southerlings and rival northmen tribes along the mountains.
“We spared none at the monastery,” boomed the heir apparent to the Skrael throne, thumping his hand against the breastplate of his armor, broad shoulders draped in a cape of wolf skins. “Ten score monks we put to the sword and burned their so-called Savior King’s books in a great pile. They kept saying, right until the end, that their Heavenly King would punish us.” A pause and a laugh, “yet we had smooth winds and calm seas all the way up the coast. Their God has a strange way of retribution.”
“Ignore the bleating of the weak,” Wulfric embraced his son, his strength waxing with the years. Inga, ten years dead and buried, flashed to mind. “As well as the portents of so-called doom the try to hide their weakness behind.” We are Skrael, we do not fear our actions, nor seek the approval of gods for them.”
A nod from Krael. “The weak fear the strong. As it should be.”
Wulfric smiled, proud, ready to tell his son that he had become everything a father could want and knew that his lineage, their bloodline, would be safe for a hundred generations.
Before he could do that, a foot came through the roof and landed atop of his firstborn son.
The size of a longboat, the color of ice, bare down to the toes, the foot smashed through the top of the Skrael king’s hall with the speed and force of a cursed comet. Krael’s broad warrior frame disappeared underneath the plane of the blue heel with a wet crunch.
Wulfric had just enough time to register that his son was dead before the other foot dropped atop him with a bone shattering stomp. In his case, death did not come quickly; pinned in the arch of the following foot, body mangled and twisted, he stared up along the ankle, thigh and into the unrelenting green eyes of a frost giantess.
Despite her blue skin, her hair blazed red as the blood pooling at her feet—the same color as Wulfric’s hair before it had grayed with the years. In that last moment, that final, terrified instant as death gripped him, he recognized his own fiery wrath, and the cold ruthlessness with which he’d carved his way to the throne atop the great woman’s face, utterly devoid of mercy or sympathy.
At least…he spat out a river of blood…at least she’s no longer small and weak.
Darkness took him.
***
The Skraels poured out of their longhouses and towards the giant woman who stood amidst the wreckage of their warrior king’s hall, weapons drawn and roaring battle cries in challenge. Ten men charged the giantess. A minute later there were ten more crimson stains in the freshly fallen snow. For emphasis, the giantess pinned the last one between her toes and shifted her weight forward on to him slowly, nearly cutting the man in half as she wrenched her foot forward.
After that display, the rest of the warriors thought better of attacking, lingering together for safety in the manner of wolves before a bear, hoping their numbers would intimidate the larger killer.
Fortunately, the frost giantess had not come for wanton slaughter as one of her white-haired counterparts would have. “I am Angra, rightful heir to the Skrael. All who wish to live, kneel before me,” she rumbled, settling onto the great hall. “Those who do not…will may stay with their old chieftain.”
The roof snapped and popped in places, but the hall remained upright, holding her aloft despite the gaping hole in the center. The symbolism, to say nothing of their leaders literally crushed underfoot was not lost on the cowed Skraels. Just in case they entertained further thoughts of treason, the girl propped her feet up leisurely, displaying the gory remains of their brethren who had challenged her.
A solitary warrior stepped away from the crowd and bowed his horned head before dropping down to a knee. It was a risk; the others might have killed him on the spot for joining the usurper. Yet then another followed a suite and another after that and soon over a hundred and fifty savage barbarians kneeled before the giantess as if in worship.
“I am pleased,” she smiled, “now, for my first command—build me a proper throne.”
The Skrael had lost a king and a prince but gained a queen. And the queen had gained birthright, proving herself a razer, a slaughterer, a conqueror, as her father wanted his firstborn to be.
***
As she had done before, Skie hunted across the mountaintops, the human babe she’d imbued with the power of the Jotar and raised to adulthood but a distant memory despite their parting having been just recent.
Two decades was but a blink of an eye to a Jotuun who would live until Ragnarok unless killed by some other means. Two mere decades to take a piece of discarded clay and craft it for what was to her a brief past time, an amusement of a hobby.
She’d made no objection when Angra, the name the girl had taken, not given, announced her plan to return to Midgard and “seize what was denied me,” nor had she made any voice in favor of it.
Human interests.
Were Skie a human mother, she would have tried to turn Angra away from such trivial, material pursuits, to leave her past behind, but she was not human, nor even what would be considered motherly towards the child. A being of chaos, primordial in drive and momentary in vision, all pursuits were equal and fleeting in her eyes.
Conquest of villages, dominance of tribes, the bickering of bloodlines, vengeance, such things did not concern the Jotar and she had said as much when Angra offered to lead them out of Jotunheim and into the mortal realm as a conquering army.
Acting on the last trace of fondness for the brief distraction of the human child, Skie glided to the top of the mountain one last time and peered down, down at the wreckage of the human village Angra had come from. The redheaded, blue skinned giantess stood over her minions, directing them to repair the damage she’d caused to the walls and settlement.