The Apple Throne

“Rag me, no.”

  I glance at Amon, whose gaze is locked on the highway.

  Amon adds quietly, “Even if I was, I still couldn’t, ah, do anything about it.”

  “Why?”

  “T is for Twat.”

  “I think your father would understand,” I say.

  Amon snorts. “Wrong.”

  “His best friend is…fluid when it comes to such things.”

  “Loki’s behavior is exactly what makes Dad rigid and impossible. I’m bad enough for Thor’s reputation as it is.”

  I sigh.

  Amon glances over. “I’ve plenty of vices to keep me company, jill. Don’t worry about me.”

  “It gives me something to worry about besides Soren,” I say lightly.

  “Sune will find him. He’s the best—that much I can admit.”

  I nod, sinking back into the memory of Soren’s frenzied gaze. Closing my eyes, I recall the cold cave, the chains on his wrists. Suddenly, I sit up. “Amon—the elves-under-the-mountain! Soren is being kept in a cave.”

  “You think elves might have him?”

  “Follow the gold. Amon, she said to follow the gold! Maybe all the way back to the elves themselves? What if Eirfinna or another of her people found Bell to be their new entry point for the gold after you stopped working with her?”

  Amon slaps both hands against the wheel. “Oh, that’s just ragging shine. Sune’s gonna love that theory.”

  “Shine,” I murmur. The word is slang that means everything is good, everything will be bright and beautiful. It comes from alfscine, an ancient word for the magic the etinfolk used. I think of Eirfinna as Amon described her: built of crystal and bone, with diamonds for teeth. There’s an old fairy story about an elf princess who only ate butterflies and autumn leaves, for she loved the delicate crunch on her tongue. That elf fell in love with a human boy, as happens in most such tales. She loved him and took him to her palace under the mountains to show him the beauty of her home and the riches she could offer him. He laughed with joy and kissed her and begged that she go home with him in return, to meet his family and share the wealth with them. She agreed, but when they emerged from the mountain, a hundred years had passed and the boy’s family was dead. He flung himself to the ground, weeping, and cursed the elf princess until she screamed, and that scream rent the valley in two, creating the canyon where a river flows now. The Shining River, they call it—a reminder and warning both, of what happens when you love an elf.

  I tell Amon and the six Thor bobbleheads the story slowly, gathering my bearing with each word, as if the story itself can make the time pass, and when it ends, Soren will be here.

  • • •

  At our halfway point gas stop, I switch cars to fill Sune in on what Amon and I discussed. As if my presence denotes the right to lead, Sune peels out in front of Amon and sets our pace.

  The Jeep is a smoother ride, though the heater doesn’t blow as hard and my fingers remain frozen sticks even once we’ve moved far beyond the Jotunwood and into barren desert foothills. Sune drives with his right hand resting casually on the gear shift. His radio is tuned to the highway info channel, which is mostly static and occasional bursts of traffic alerts or weather patterns. We pass almost no evidence of humanity but for cars driving against our direction.

  I’m brief in my articulation of my thoughts connecting Bell with the elves-under-the-mountain. Sune startles visibly when I say Eirfinna’s name, and then his face remains poised in a sour expression. But when I finish with my visions of Soren chained in a cave, he nods reluctantly.

  “That is a solid theory, lady.” He rubs one hand over his stubbly scalp. “I don’t like it, but I can’t fault it.”

  “Her involvement—or any elf involvement—will make it all more complicated, won’t it?”

  “Yes. I should report the possibility to the Thunderer.”

  “What will he do?”

  “Charge in, hammer ready. Or forbid us to pursue it. I don’t know what his treaties are with the last of the elves. Until I met Eirfinna, I didn’t even know they still existed, and after that, I was sworn to secrecy by my god himself. However, we could detour to Bright Home and you could speak with him.”

  “Bright Home is even farther away than Salt City.”

  Sune nods. “But there Amon could try contacting Eirfinna directly. That’s where they used to meet.”

  “Amon said he only met her at the holidays.”

  “True.”

  “We need to stick to the prophecy. The hunter will follow the gold to your heart’s desire. Follow the gold, Sune, not Eirfinna.”

  “I shall, my lady.”

  We drive in silence but for the static of the info-radio channel. The snow’s gone from the landscape but these dusty desert hills are the opposite of warm or welcoming. Nothing about the Jeep is whimsical, nothing personalized like Amon’s bobbleheads. This is a military vehicle through and through, with no clues about its driver.

  Sune suddenly says, “He told you all about what happened with Eirfinna?”

  “He told me some. You shot her, kept his name out of it.”

  “He’ll never forgive me for that. Like he’d rather have gone on believing her lies. He thought she loved him.”

  I touch his knee briefly, wishing I could say the right thing to ease his obvious frustration. “Tell me about something else, then. You’re young to be the Thunderer’s best hunter. You must’ve joined the Army when you were young.”

  “Joined?” Sune laughs dryly, but there’s no smile behind it. “My parents gave me to the Thunderer when I was nine years old.”

  “Why?” I twist in my seat. Sune’s closer to me in the narrow Jeep than Amon was in the van. I can see the detailed lines of his spiral horn tattoos clearly despite the shadow of hair, and the fine lightning bolts embroidered at the high collar of his military coat.

  “To fix me.”

  “Fix you!”

  Before answering, Sune flicks on his blinker to pass a slow-moving semi, hits the gas, and we burn around it. After settling back into his cruising speed of about ten over the limit, eyes on the rearview to make sure Amon follows, he says, “I told my aunt her husband was having an affair and was right. A month later, I caught the senior league stoneball coach fixing games at the academy my brothers went to. I saw too much for them to be comfortable. Then I asked my dad why my cousin was hiding the fact that he wanted to kiss his Anglish tutor because it seemed like a fine idea to me. His male Anglish tutor. And that was the last straw.”

  “They didn’t know what to do with you.”

  “So military school it was.”

  “You chose not to leave when you reached majority?”

  “I was born for this job. I like the rules. I’m good at it, and I’ve made the personal acquaintance of Thor Thunderer himself. None of the rest of my family can say that.”

  “They must be proud.”

  “They’d be happier if I found a charming Thunderer’s girl to commit to.”

  “She’d be a lucky one, if you did.”

  “Oh, definitely.” He meets my gaze with a false smile. “Were yours proud?”

  “She was,” I say slowly. “But I think whether she still would be is going to be determined by what I do now.”

  I think of Mom’s messy braids and the layers of scarves she used to wear around her waist or neck or in her hair. She’d sit on them, trip on them, or shut them into car doors. Uncle Richard prophesized she’d die strangled by them one day. Mom answered, “I won’t die until I’ve done what I was meant to do.”

  She died the moment I became Idun. That was her fate: to bring her daughter into Freya’s arms, to be the hook that pulled me to the orchard, to hold the apple throne vacant until I was ready to fill it. She would say to me, Kitten, you haven’t played out your role in Destiny until the moment you die. You’re still alive: you still have a job to do.

  • • •

  By the time we make it just north of Reno, to a walled in
dustrial town called Fernley, the sun is nearly set behind us and the desert foothills are black beneath the purple sky. We’ll have a morning’s drive ahead of us tomorrow. The Fernley walls are bright as a beacon even from a distance, a desert oasis against prairie trolls ringed with UV floodlights. Sune says they turned the lights off once, a month after the Stone Plague hit, thinking it was safe, and were brutally attacked by a small group of rabid, sun-mad trolls.

  “When the townspeople got the lights back on, the UV made them actually explode. They’ve got the saber-teeth on display at the welcome center,” he says.

  “Too bad we don’t have time,” I murmur, not sorry at all as I watch the stars disappear into the harsh glow of floodlights as we enter the city gates. I’d rather drive all night to keep myself awake. Twice I nodded into a doze and woke up sweating with panic, dreams of Soren’s frenzy-wild screaming and twisted grimace throbbing in my vision.

  We find a hotel, and while we settle into the room, Amon flings open the rear of the van and lifts the massive trunk of relics onto his shoulder with little apparent effort. “My van’s been stolen while I sleep in a hotel,” he answers my surprised look.

  After tucking it into the corner of the room, he heads back out to find decent takeout while I get into the shower and let hot water strip the crust of travel from my skin. I do my best to scrub away the shadowy permanent marker runes on my palms. Fate and truth. They fade, but remain like ghosts. Then I put on a scratchy hotel robe and give Sune his turn. As the sound of Sune’s electric razor starts its whine in the bathroom, I sit on the corner of one bed to comb my curls out with my fingers. I’ve not been in a hotel since Soren and I traveled with Baldur to the orchard. The sun is down, and Baldur would’ve been passed out already, dead to the world as the sun was. I close my eyes and remember the shock of Soren’s frenzy pinching my heart, shivering heat through my bones. I can’t shake it. Maybe Sune and Amon can sleep for a couple of hours, and then we can be on our way before dawn.

  The memory of that hot frenzy pulses in time with my quick breath, and a pain in my scalp snaps my eyes open: I’ve fisted my own hand in my wet hair.

  Sune turns off the shower and emerges in a puff of steam, wearing only sweatpants. Water glints off the rest of him, dripping down his long nose. “Amon returned?”

  I shake my head. There are more tattoos on his shoulders and chest: a green and black snake, with every scale detailed, curls around his upper right arm and onto his chest; a large knotwork replica of Crusher, Thor’s own hammer, over his heart; his hard stomach is covered by a ram skull with thick, black, curling horns like those on Sune’s head. And a cross of iron nails hangs around his neck from a thin leather thong.

  Taking my dirty clothes, I begin to wash them in the sink. I use the bar of hand soap to scrub at a stain, thinking of Soren, always of Soren. Three days now to find him. Maybe we can switch to the van only and rotate drivers and not need sleep at all.

  I hear an odd wooden creak behind me and turn to see Sune kneeling before Amon’s trunk, opening the heavy lid.

  “Sune!” I say, shocked. Nearly as long as me, the trunk is crafted of dark, scoured wood and protected with a key code padlock.

  “It was easy to guess the combination,” Sune says derisively.

  “The trunk is locked for a reason.” I stride over to him, less than queenly in the bathrobe.

  “To keep illegal merchandise safe.” Sune looks up at me, one hand firm on the open lid. “I will see what he’s hiding.”

  Biting my lip, I kneel with him, curious despite myself and not a little desperate for distraction.

  The cluttered inside is lined with fur and leather pockets. I immediately see smaller jewelry boxes, rolls of old parchment I recognize for holding dried herbs. There are satchels and long wands tied together with silk. Yew and ash certainly, and a few vials of clear-to-milky liquid. The heavy lid is covered in small pockets, too, with a variety of small silver chains coiled inside, and unsealed envelops. Sune draws one out, and when he lifts the flap, a puff of pale brown powder explodes on his hands.

  “Skit,” he chokes, grasping at the stuff like he can catch the air itself. It disperses, and immediately he puts the envelope back. He goes to the sink and washes his face, splashing vehemently at his eyes and nose, and scrubs his hands. “Bearbane,” he mutters as he rejoins me, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand. “In berserkers it draws out the frenzy or stops it depending on when it’s administered, but in others it causes a fever-high and atypical aggression.”

  “I didn’t know it affected regular men,” I say darkly.

  “Some, to different degrees. It’s unpredictable, sometimes mixed with other drugs or diluted for a slower effect or longer high. It gets into the system and slowly builds to fever, aggression, even hallucinations if enough is taken. I’ve seen it used by fighters in the ring or to pump up for a street battle.”

  My stomach turns. “We should flush it all. He’s been selling it to my berserkers.”

  “At least we need to seal it better than that. And this is probably trollwater.” He points to a vial of milky purple. “More controlled than bearbane, even. Distilled from their lichen, and most people OD on it the first time.”

  Beneath two silk-wrapped stone troll organs I find a small photo album, scuffed and soft. I settle it onto my lap and flip through as Sune continues raiding the trunk. The album is sparsely filled, mostly with pictures of younger Amon and his mother Grid, as well as his little sister, also a godling. I find another of her, at least sixteen, in the blue habit of a Sister of Sif. Her pert, round face is serene and smiling. Unlike Amon, her eyes are dark as earth. Gunn-Elin. The connection registers finally: this is his sister and the same person we’re heading to see in Salt City, to ask about the elf gold.

  I find a folded newspaper article about Sune. It’s from last year, when Sune was promoted by Thor himself after recovering the Mask of Loki. I offer it silently to the hunter between two fingers, and he drops his mouth in surprise.

  That’s how Amon finds us.

  “You assholes,” he gasps, stomping in. He drops paper bags of takeout onto the counter beside the small TV. He kicks the door shut and puts down an eight-pack of beer.

  Guilt makes me slam shut the picture album on my lap. “I’m sorry.”

  But it isn’t me Amon is glaring at.

  Sune glides to his feet with the paper clipping in hand. “Bearbane and trollwater?” he says dangerously.

  “You know exactly what I am, Sune Rask, but it doesn’t seem to make you wanna back off.”

  Stepping nearer, Sune puts the folded edge of newspaper under Amon’s nose. “You’re such an elegant source of information for a hunter, though, darling.”

  I can see Amon’s hands tremble. He reaches for Sune’s chest as if he’d grab him up by the shirt—if Sune were wearing one—and ends up with his fists under Sune’s face. “Leave my skit alone.”

  “Stop,” I say, sliding between them. I put a hand on Sune’s chest and push, angling him back toward the bathroom.

  Amon pulls his glare off Sune and settles it on me. “Which one of the gods taught you to pick locks?” he says meanly.

  Sune grins at Amon over my head, almost viciously, and says, “I didn’t have to pick it. I cracked your password in two attempts. Me, not her. Don’t be angry at her.” Then the hunter disappears into the bathroom.

  I let out a slow, controlled breath.

  Amon lifts out a beer from the eight-pack, uncaps it, and I reach for it. Laughing a little, he hands it to me and opens another. We clink the bottles together and drink long. I sit on one of the two lumpy beds.

  “I’ll share with Sune,” I tell Amon, so he doesn’t have to worry about it, if he was worrying about it. The godling pushes away from the rickety TV stand and grabs the photo album off the floor where I dropped it. Setting it on the bed, he flicks to the back, beer loose in his free hand, and draws out a battered photo and holds it out.

  The picture is mo
stly shadowed, but in a sharp cut of light from a stone window, there’s a thin, shining woman. Her face and one bare shoulder gleam like porcelain, and flares of light mottle the air around her like double-exposure. I can see her eyes, full black and empty, and the ridge of black crystals that grows out of her prominent cheekbones. Her lips are barely distinguished, but parted slightly.

  “Amazing,” I breathe. Amon nods, takes the picture back, and slides it into his jeans pocket.

  TWELVE

  I dream of trees made of crystal—long, elegant trunks of amethyst and emerald leaves sliced so thin light shines through. The leaves quake and shiver because of a roar as loud as an avalanche. Soren, chained, screams wordlessly over and over again. He slams into the smooth stone walls of his prison, blood smearing his fists. I dream of a mountain lake, the water creamy orange with dawn sunlight. I dream of a bathtub, pink-tinged water swirling down the rusty drain, Soren’s body drooped against the porcelain. I dream of my hands crusted with thick yellow gold.

  I wake, gasping, before the sun. Sune is a warm presence at my back, and I’m sweating.

  “Lady?” Sune says thickly.

  “It’s time to go,” I whisper, climbing out of bed. I pull on my mostly dry clothes, boots, and Soren’s sword before snagging a key card from the bedside table and slipping outside. The air is clear and cold; jagged pink and orange draws me east. My throat is raw as if I’d been screaming, my skin tacky with sweat. I run through the parking lot, down the cracked sidewalk. Soren should be out here with me, going through his meditations and his weapons dance, doing a million push-ups or squats while he holds me over his shoulder.

  At the crossroads of two double-lane highways lined with metal warehouses and dusty junkyards, I kneel. I clasp my hands together, rings cold and pinching, and pray to Baldur the Beautiful for hope. I know better than any that the prayers cannot reach the ears of our gods without some magic involved, especially a god like Baldur and especially when he’s dead in Hel. But praying calms me.

  In three months, Baldur will rise from the dead. Soren and I will be there for it—to greet him, to give him his apple. Together. Reaching into my coat pocket, I pull out the three apples of immortality and Soren’s yellow glass apple. The latter is heavy and cool on my palm, but the magical apples barely seem to sit against my skin, light as the air around them. I brought them for trade, for leverage, and maybe, I think now, for reassurance. What superstitious thinking, to believe having them here connects me to the orchard. But like memory charms or these black beads at my neck, they remind me.