“The giant laughed at us, waving my hammer around the while, and then he forced Heimdall to summon the Rainbow Bridge and exiled the three of us here to Midgard. There’s no more to tell.”

There was silence then in the tiny hut. Only the crackle and spit of a pine branch on the fire.

“Well,” said Odd, “Gods or not, I can’t keep feeding you, if this winter keeps going. I don’t think I can keep feeding me.”

“We won’t die,” said the bear, “because we can’t die here. But we’ll get hungry. And we’ll get more wild. More animal. It’s something that happens when you have taken on animal form. Stay in it too long and you become what you pretend to be. When Loki was a horse—”

“We don’t talk about that,” said the fox.

“So is that why the winter isn’t ending?” said Odd.

“The Frost Giants like the winter. They are the winter,” said the bear.

“And if spring never comes? If summer doesn’t happen? If this winter just goes on forever?”

The bear said nothing. The fox swished its tail impatiently. They looked to the eagle. It tilted its head back, and with one fiery yellow eye it stared at Odd. Then it said, “Death!”

“Eventually,” added the fox. “Not immediately. In a year or so. And some creatures will go south. But most of the people and the animals will die. It’s happened before, back when we had wars with the Frost Giants at the dawn of time. When they won, huge ice sheets would cover this part of the world. When we won—and if it took us a hundred thousand years, we always did—the ice sheets would retreat and the spring would return. But we were Gods then, not animals.”

“And I had my hammer,” said the bear.

“Well then,” said Odd. “We’ll set off as soon as it gets light enough to travel.”

“Set off?” said the fox. “For where?”

“Asgard, of course,” said Odd, and he smiled his infuriating smile. Then he went back to his little bed, and he went back to sleep.