The Apple Throne (16 page)

The short but rather complicated answer softens his shoulders, pulls down the corners of his mouth. “So you are exactly what I thought: a contradiction.”

“Yes.”

“You’re in love with Soren.”

“I knew him…before.”

Sune stands and paces away from me, then back again. “It does not seem like a thing that needs to be a secret.”

I shrug one shoulder, not willing to give away the true secret: that without Idun, the apples of immortality wither. If the world knew how vulnerable they were, the entire pantheon would be in danger. I only say, “Like you, I never questioned my goddess’s will.”

“Freya the Witch.”

“Yes, as I am a seether. Or I…was. Lately, I don’t know if I’m the goddess they named me or just a girl.”

He looks down at me for a long moment, then offers a hand. I take it, and he pulls me to my feet. “It seems to me, lady, that we’re going to find out if you can be both.”

M
y hands tremble as I unroll my seething kit beside the small fire.

Overhead, the first stars poke through a pink circle of sky, the empty hole of canopy where this redwood used to grow. The surface of the stump is smooth with moss, dangerous to spin on, but a perfect window into fate: both alive and dead, rooted in the world and gone from it, with living green spreading over its bones. My altar, my ladder to the upper worlds.

Signy and Amon and Sune stand on the ground, faces level with the top of the stump. Amon had to boost me up here. The Valkyrie has painted thick black lines around her eyes, which make her seem feral as she stands waiting for me to dance. Sune has buttoned the high collar of his uniform coat up to his chin and wears his double-axes again, as if going into battle. I rub my hands on my thighs and quickly shrug out of my coat. I toss it to Amon, who snatches it in one hand, then lets it hang to the ground. His expression remains dark. In the growing shadows, I can see the flash of lightning in his eyes. But he holds out the web of yarn, corrberries, and the rest of the tools we raided his van for: a black boot string and a permanent marker.

Kneeling on the stump, I set the yarn and plastic bag of corrberries aside and uncap the marker. Hesitating, I glance at Signy. “What runes do you see in my eyes?” I bend toward her as she leans up onto her toes.

“
Fate
,” she says quietly, and then she purses her lips as if surprised. “
Truth
.”

“I don’t know how to draw
truth
,” I admit. It’s not one of the basic twenty-seven I learned for seething. The Valkyrie grunts and impatiently holds out her hand for the marker. I give her both it and my hands, hanging half off the stump for her. She expertly draws
fate
onto my left palm and
truth
onto the right. Then she pulls my hands closer and kisses them, breathing hot breath across my skin. A Valkyrie benediction.

Abruptly, she lets go, and without another word, I get to my feet with the corrberries and red yarn. I spread out my yarn web and drop the center over my head. It falls to my waist, and I tie it there like a top skirt, making me the center of fate, not only a player within it.

Raising my face to the sky, I touch the horn-bead necklace Soren gave me and take a deep breath to relax, to squash the tight cord of fear curling around my spine. I don’t want any of them to see it; I wish I could hide it from myself. It isn’t fear of seething or fear of the answers I seek. It’s a cold, trembling fear of the berserker frenzy. That deep shaking rage, the blackness, losing control of my body, flailing and lost.

I breathe evenly and upend the corrberry sack into the palm of my hand. I lick several off and toss the rest into the fire. They spark and crackle red; the flames reach for me. Closing my eyes, I crunch the berries between my teeth. Their bitter flavor runs down my throat. Ready to separate me from this world.

Crouching, I reach for Sleipnir’s Tooth from Signy. She offers it hilt-first, and I wrap my hand around the grip, then tug it free of the sheath. The wide fuller catches orange firelight, glinting like blood.

I stand and with the boot string I tie a knot around my left hand and the sword, weaving the blade to my wrist. Swaying slowly, I begin to hum an old prayer that’s just invocations of disir names over and over. I whisper the names and begin to dance slowly in a circle around the tiny fire. The toes of my boots slip on the moss. The stars overhead bleed together.

My invocation grows stronger, becomes a chant of disir names; my breath grows shallow, and my vision blurs from the corrberry poison.

I look into the fire and thrust Soren’s sword against the tips of the flames. They flutter around the steel like petals in wind.

“Freya, Feather-Flying Goddess of Dreams,” I call. “You know me. I am Astrid Glyn, the Lady of Youth, Keeper of the Apples of Immortality. I am Astrid Glyn, daughter of Jenna, daughter of Ariel. I invoke thee, and I invoke the mothers of all fate. I call on Urtha and Verthandi and Skuld who feed Yggdrasil, the Tree of Worlds which unites us all. Mothers, giants, women of the past, present, and future, I call on your names to guide me.”

Raising my left hand up to the stars, I say, “Here is Sleipnir’s Tooth, forged of steel and madness, blood and fire. It is a piece of me, and it is a piece of my heart’s heart: Soren Styrrson, called the Bearstar. We are bound together, Soren to steel, steel to hand, hand to heart. Show him to me, let me see his thread. Separate it—separate it from the weave, glowing gold, for me. I…” My words thicken as my tongue melts from the poison. Beneath my feet, the stump goes slick and soft. I turn in a slow circle, eyes closed. The yarn skirt twirls heavily. My feet move, but it’s the Middle World that spins around me, counterclockwise, a backward tornado.

“Soren,” I say again, as the corrberries distort my awareness, as the sword weighs down my arm, as the acrid smoke burns my throat and the turning-turning world slows and freezes.

That thread of seething power creeps up my gullet, expanding in my skull in a haze of red delirium, and I feel myself spread outside of my own skin, rising, rising, rising—

And—

Light surrounds me.

I stand, only myself, in a cool forest clearing.

I’m barefoot, in an old favorite sundress and violet cardigan, my curls soft beside my eyes. Silver moonlight streams through plump summer leaves. I breathe easily; my hands are empty.

“Here you are, Idun.”

I turn and discover Freya kneeling in a circle of silver light, red lines of fate spreading all around her like a delicate spider’s web. I kneel before her. The lines of fate are unaffected by my presence. “My lady,” I say.

She regards me with soft gray eyes, her face whole, not split into the white of life and the curled, blackened Hel-flesh. A gray feathered cloak folds over her shoulders; her hands rest calmly in her lap. She is beautiful, and she is cold. “Your tree is dying.”

Fear courses through me, and I shake my head in denial. It’s like moving through fog, as if I’m just outside my body, telling it to move, to speak, but there’s a delay between thought and action.

“How long does it have?” I ask, voice distant, muffled.

“Days.”

“I promised to return in nine days. Surely, it will last so long… It is strong enough for that.”

“Soon a god will arrive in the orchard only to find you missing. Soon more than the Thunderer and I will know of it. They will spread word the apples do not thrive and upset much for me, Idun. They will insist I replace you. They will want you dead so that I
can
replace you.”

I shudder. My head falls slowly forward in acknowledgement.

“Return, Idun. Return to your orchard.”

“Soren is in danger.”

“So I see.”

“I need him.”

“I know you believe that.”

Gasping, I glare up at her, the first quick motion I’ve been able to make. “Belief is all that makes me anything. Out here, others believe that I am a god. In there, my own belief in the importance of what I do for those apples, for you…” I reach for her through the thick moonlight. “Freya, you gave my mother years once. You let her take my place because you loved her. My heart has always been yours, my faith and my prayers. I love you, and I love him, too. Please give me more time.”

The goddess is still as glass. She does not breathe, nor does the cool breeze I feel shift the silver strands of hair falling around her shoulders. A thin flush of pink colors in her lips and she closes her eyes. Her lashes shine like snowflakes. “Your line will be the end of me,” she whispers.

Relief spills out of me in a sigh, and I kiss her cold hand. She puts her other on my head. “I will give you the time I can, beloved, but the apples will dictate the boundary.”

“Thank you,” I murmur, pressing my cheek to her knuckles. She strokes my hair, then gently lifts me up. I say, “Will you tell me where Soren is? Give me a prophecy of him?”

The goddess of dreams slides her fingers along scarlet threads of fate spreading all around us, like playing a harp. Where her fingers touch, the lines shimmer. “I see the Bearstar in darkness and in light. I see him live, I see him die. Choices and choices, Idun the Young.”

Fisting my hands, I press them into my thighs. “What can I do?”

Her gray eyes flash at me, twin moons covered in ancient cracks and craters. “I do not see you. We, my love, are outside this web, this tangle. We have no thread of our own.”

“But I can change things.”

“Yes.”

“But you can’t…tell me how.”

“I do not see
you
in the future.”

I lick my cold, dry lips, pinch the bottom between my teeth as I think. “You saw me two mornings ago. I slept, and there you were, watching.”

“As I see you
now
.”

“You…see me
as
I act, but not how I
will
act.”

“I see the ripples but do not know it is you who will make them until you do.”

Carefully, I ask, “How does Soren die in the futures where he dies?”

She skims the web of fate. She plucks one string. “I see him killed with a stone spear in his heart,” she murmurs, with a small smile. She plucks up another. “So enraged he bashes himself into rocks, again…and again…until he is dead.” The goddess’s fingers dance against the scarlet threads as my heart slows, growing cold. “Ah, this here, broken into pieces by a dragon!” She laughs delightedly. “A dragon!”

“So…many…deaths…” I whisper.

“Here,” she slides her forefinger along a strand to her left, leaning far over. The string shimmers gold. “Here he dies sleeping, finally burnt out as must happen to one who rages so bright.”

My fingers are stiff, my breath hard as ice, cutting my throat. I’m not asking the right questions. She is
seething
for me, and I should know better than any that seeking answers depends entirely on the questions. “Where he is? How do I find him? How long does he have?”

“You ask much of me tonight,” she says sharply.

Chastised, I cover my mouth with both hands. All around, the air turns silver, as if it is freezing, wind so cold I can see it, and the leaves curl in upon themselves where the moonlight touches them. I shiver and then can’t stop.

Freya leans forward, pulling the red web toward her. It slinks all around me and under me, as if I am insubstantial as breath. Freya lays threads over each other, twisting them, pulling them apart, tying knots and then unwinding them again. I stare, eyes burning with cold, lashes heavy as if tears have frozen in them. “Give me your prophecy, lady of dreams,” I finally say.

The goddess curls a single thread around her finger. “The gold,” she whispers.

“The elf gold?” The edges of the dream brighten and blur: dawn, or I’m passing out on the stump. There isn’t time.

Her mouth opens and she speaks without moving her lips, a hollow voice filling my cracks and all the air in my lungs.

“
The hunter will follow the gold to your heart’s desire.
”

Vertigo hits me suddenly, as if the forest were spinning, and I squeeze my eyes closed. The air I hiss through my teeth makes them ache with cold. I open my eyes, but Freya is a bright blur against the silver shadows.

The goddess reaches for me. She says my name urgently. “
Idun
.”

I reach for her, and she grasps my wrists in ice-cold hands. “
Four days and Soren Bearstar will join me in Hel. But get the Valkyrie’s heart for me, and I will save him
.”

I am sucked away by a storm, thrown like a rag against a hard rock wall.
Freya,
I cry, but nothing comes out, only a choking wail at the pain lashing through my skull.

Then, there is silence.

The weight of Soren’s sword fills my hand, but I cannot move, my fingers are frozen to the grip. My eyes are glued shut with ice, my toes and lips numb. As I shiver, I hear ice sliding through my curls. Darkness surrounds me.

My breath rattles.

“Astrid?”

It’s Amon. He touches my arm, hand startling hot, and then he grabs me up, under my back and knees, holding me against his chest. “Skit rag
rut
you are a chunk of ice,” he whispers.

The sword hangs from my wrist, string cutting my skin, dragging into my bone like a line of barbed wire. I push my face into his shoulder, groaning. A sharp thing slides against the back of my hand, and the sword falls away. I cry out, but Amon hugs me tighter. There is no sound of the sword hitting ground; it must have been caught.

“Here, this way,” Sune murmurs. He’s near to us, near as a lover, near as a mother, clucking and brushing hair away.
The hunter will follow the gold
. I remember the insistence in her voice, and I let go into sleep.

• • •

I drift toward wakefulness, hardness at my back, and blankets warm enough I imagine Soren’s arms coming around me, holding me tight. He mutters something in my ear, but I don’t understand. When he does sleep, he sleeps hard. I whisper, “I’m here,” and tilt my head back to his. My heartbeat picks up pace as his does. I can feel his pulse in the palms of his hands where he touches me, in his chest where it presses my shoulder blades. There are heavy gold rings on my fingers, a thick golden chain around my throat, pulsing in time with our heartbeat, too. His arm under my cheek grows warmer. My neck itches and I scratch at it, but the itch travels down and out, tingling my skin. The blood drains from my head, my stomach drops, and heat flashes back, raising sweat along my spine and under my breasts.
Sweet swans, so hot
. The blankets twist around my ankles and bind my elbows against my sides. I struggle, I whimper—I want to wake up!
Soren
.