We continue to celebrate Release Day for Marie Sinadjan’s Nameless Queen here with this excerpt.
Standing on the bank of the river Gjoll, Hel listened to the names of the Dead in the wind. This was her life now, as difficult and strange as it was to accept.
The Allfather had banished her from Asgard for treason, trapping her in Niflheim and erasing her name. However, she eventually realized that the realm itself was alive and had other plans. Niflheim did not intend for her to merely wallow in her despair and slowly starve herself to death.
The realm wanted her to be its caretaker.
A line of longships stretched toward the horizon and disappeared into the mist. In the ships were bodies, and the first one had come alive at Hel’s accidental touch.
The man lurched like he had been holding his breath underwater for far too long. “Where am I?”
For a moment she stared back at him with an equal measure of fear. What just happened? Was it her appearance that scared him?
But it soon became clear that it was not the case. “Who am I?” he asked her, distraught.
His name came to her in the wind. “Egil Hringson,” she repeated.
Her eyes flew wide as the man clung to her and wept like a child. She hadn’t realized how important it was for the Dead to be remembered, not until then. And while she did not have the details of his life, revealing his name seemed to help him find peace.
She did not sleep for three whole days, traversing the bank of the river to bring the newly deceased out of their stupor. There were surely hundreds of them; she’d stopped bothering to count after she reached twenty. Some ships had elaborate carvings on the prow, while others were simple wooden vessels that appeared to have been put together at the last minute. None of that mattered to her, however. It was not her place to judge or choose who awakened in this realm, unlike Odin the Allfather and his band of Valkyries.
At first, only the old woman helped her. But after three days of tireless work by the river, the inhabitants of Niflheim came to see that she was something more than merely a deranged soul who could not embrace the fact that she was dead. One by one, they joined her, seeing those she’d awakened into settlements and communities. Most of them were patterned and named after actual Midgardian locations, which provided a small comfort to the Dead.
“Who is she?” Egil asked the old woman when he returned to the river the day after his awakening.
“Hel,” the old woman answered.
It was not Hel’s real name, but it was all she had.
The one she had been born with had been taken away from her.
Interested in the rest? Go grab your copy of Nameless Queen by Marie Sinadjan now at https://books2read.com/NamelessQueen!
