Free Such Sweet Sorrow by Jenny Trout

no thicker than ribbon, but stronger than iron.
    She’d told him of the Vikings too, and their mighty warrior kings, Hamlet’s own ancestors. Their pride and courage was legendary, and Hamlet had just seen one completely obliterated by a Frost Giant. Being trapped in the Afterjord forever seemed a small price to pay to witness such an amazing feat.
Perhaps he was driven by a longing for the mother who’d existed before Hamlet had come of age and realized all her faults. Or perhaps this misadventure simply gave him an escape from a life that had been recently turned upside down. He knew that he should be worried about what was happening on the other side of the corpseway. Would Horatio do something completely mad, like run for help? What about the Friar? How was Hamlet to keep the corpseway secret if he was trapped beyond it?
    But he had to concentrate on the situation at hand, if he was to escape and avenge his father’s murder and protect the corpseway.
    “Do you wonder if this place changes from soul to soul? That is, does it change its appearance and structure to suit what an individual believed in life?”
    Beside him, Romeo grumbled in response. “You don’t have to speak that way, you know.”
    Hamlet waved his fingers through the blue, then violet, then pink light that rose from the rainbow bridge, Bifröst, if he remembered the name correctly. “Speak what way?”
    “As if you were trying to sound too smart on purpose. Like you don’t want me to understand you.” There was a note of hurt frustration beneath Romeo’s rough tone. “I’m not stupid. I know what you’re saying, and no, I don’t think it does.”
    “You don’t think it does what?” Of course, Hamlet knew what Romeo referred to, but he couldn’t help himself. The Italian was an easy mark for vexation. Hamlet much preferred him in that state, rather than weepy, sentimental, and utterly useless on their quest.
    Romeo rolled his eyes. “The Afterjord, as you call it. If it changed to suit everyone individually, why am I seeing all the trappings of your odd Northern ways?”
    “They’re not our ways.” Hamlet took a strange sort of offense to the mockery. Though he’d never been able to profess a disbelief in the supernatural—he’d been plagued by spirits for as long as he could remember—he’d refuted any notion of God with a methodical sort of detachment. After all, no priest had ever been able to explain to him where spirits roaming the physical world had their place in a dogma that spoke of Heaven and Hell and Purgatory. No, they fit so much better with his mother’s stories of trolls and strange beings lurking, awaiting the end of time. He didn’t appreciate some foreigner poking fun at the closest thing he had to religious beliefs. “They’re the ways of the people before us. Perhaps the geographical location of the portal has something to do with it? Or the people who put it there? If we went through a corpseway beneath the Vatican, I’m sure we’d be surrounded by incense and men in frilly dresses.”
    “So, in all your vast knowledge of your ancestors, is there anything that will help us find Juliet and get us home?” Romeo’s jaw was set quite stubbornly.
    Hamlet considered, watching his feet make disrupting waves in the colored light beneath them. Bifröst was a far longer and wider bridge than he’d imagined when listening to mother’s stories, but not nearly as sturdy. The glow they walked upon was a thin haze, and beyond that a yawning chasm of blackness. With every step, the bottoms of his feet tickled, pricked by fear of falling. But they would soon reach the end. A stone arch was visible through the rainbow-hued mist. “I do believe you will see her again. Spirits have been coming to me since I was a child, and most of them want to see their living relatives as much as their living relatives wish to contact them. My own father appeared to me, after all.”
    “That must be a great comfort, to be able to