The Apple Throne

  I stuff my seething kit between the wall and my bed, aching to unroll it and throw runes, to dive into dreams and look at my future, at Soren’s future, at my Uncle Richard who was my only family left in the world and won’t remember he ever had a niece.

  But I’m not ready.

  Fifteen nights.

  I do not regret my sacrifice.

  It’s hard, but sacrifice is meant to be so.

  I’m used to being surrounded by people—friends who want my advice and prophecies, strangers offering sympathy for my mother’s loss. I’m used to having a place, a future full of crowds calling my name. I’m used to being able to help others, find answers, and know which questions to ask. I’ve found missing children with my seething, and warned towns of natural disaster. I’ve fought holmgangs over my honor and the honor of my friends. I’ve made fun of movies in a crowded living room. I’ve danced around a bonfire with Lokiskin and played the drums for the greatest seething circles in the last generation. I’ve been interviewed by newspapers and Teen Seer magazine. I’ve cooked at my uncle’s shoulder for a dinner party of famous Asgardians and their marriageable sons. I have raised the dead! I’ve complained terribly over the shallow nature of people’s desire to see the future. I’ve ranted hard that nobody serves the gods for the sake of serving anymore. We all want the next big thing, the immediate payoff, the instant gratification.

  Except for me. I claimed I only wanted to love the gods, to be loved in turn, to follow my destiny into their service. But how well and deeply could I have meant it, to chafe so raw when I suddenly got what I wished for? So what if nobody remembers my name? What is fame in the face of such a glorious chance to serve my gods?

  I was a child. A hypocrite.

  I will not be. I will accept this destiny. And more than that, I will embrace Idun. Idun is a gift to me and the world, a way I can make it a better place by tending the gods’ immortality. We need them, and they need me. Simple.

  But it is so, so hard to let go.

  Freya tells me most girls who become Idun are called around the time of their first period, when they transition from childhood into maidenhood. My mother may have done me a disservice, the goddess says, by giving me these years I’ve had to make friends and become used to people, to fall in love and learn ambition.

  “Why did you allow it then?” I ask her, walking through the apple trees at her side.

  Her long white dress brushes the wild grass at our feet, and she shrugs the way a willow moves in a breeze. “I loved your mother, I told you that, and she asked it of me. I granted her wish for you, though it has led to this.”

  I stand so near her that Freya’s thick moonlight hair flicks against my shoulder as she shakes her head softly. I say, “You looked ahead, to see the ripples of those choices.”

  “Of course. I saw Baldur and Soren Bearstar. I saw you arrive here. I saw much of what happens now, outside these mountain walls. The world changes. I will be ready.”

  Though summer is pressing, the breeze remains cool, the leaves as bright as neon. Freya the Witch is a cold sliver of moonlight against sunlit nature, not quite alien from it, but apart.

  “What is he doing?” I whisper. Soren, my berserker, who hated the wild frenzy inside his heart, who walked away from this orchard to serve Baldur the Beautiful.

  She casts me a disappointed look, lips pursed in a bow. “You should not allow thoughts of him to distract you from your peace and work here.”

  “I don’t dream of him like I used to,” I confess.

  “Of course not, Idun,” she says, chiding me for some slight I don’t recognize.

  A chill dances up my arms. “You knew I would not dream?”

  “A girl with no connection to the fate of the Middle World cannot dream of it.” She hesitates, and I pull ahead of her, walking on before she can say something irrevocable, before she can tell me I will never seeth again.

  “I thought you understood, Idun,” she calls quietly after me.

  I touch the black pearls at my throat and say, “Did my mother lose her dreams?”

  “Jenna was never torn out of fate as you were, as all true Iduns are.”

  My knees feel loose, my tongue thick. “I’ll never seeth again, either,” I say dully.

  The goddess does not answer. She tucks my hand through her elbow. I lean my temple against her shoulder, dizzy and unsure. Freya walks with me for hours through the orchard, until I can walk on my own again.

  Twenty-one nights.

  Something has changed: imperceptible to me, but the gods know. They arrive one at a time, assuming I’ve settled, that Idun is here and waiting to serve.

  They come with gifts—to welcome me or only out of obligation, I don’t know. The Alfather brings clocks and pocket watches all set to the same time. I hang them from the rafters over my head. Heimdalr comes with his golden smile to bring me movies and recorded TV shows. Freyr the Satisfied, Freya’s brother, arrives in old-fashioned velvet and silk. He pets my cheek and gives me flowers, honey mead, and a silver ring, as if I am an elf to be pacified with offerings. Frigg the Cloud-Spinner brings dresses and sweaters perfectly suited to what she calls my gentle style.

  The first time Thor Thunderer comes, he brings a slab of bacon, a pretty silver ring, and a handgun. Thor, who wears his mail shirt every day, who speaks and walks like the past eight hundred years have never happened, gives me a gun in return for immortality. He says, I’ll teach you to shoot it. My surprise clearly shows, and the god of thunder, of loyalty and strength, puts it into my hand, shows me how to stand, where the safety is, and how to aim. It is heavy for its small size, and the grip is rough against my palm.

  What do I do with it? I ask.

  Defend yourself. You are small, and this powerful.

  I shoot at the ground and wince before I pull the trigger. The kick bends my elbows, the fire rings in my ears.

  The god North gives me a kiss that leaves me with an ache of longing for something I cannot name. His wife Skathi gives me a coat made of white bearskin, furred inside. For the winter, she says.

  Tyr the Just stands with his golden prosthetic hand half-hidden under a plain, black denim jacket. He asks me for the story of my life before. Surprised and sad, I tell him about Astrid Glyn, teen prophet, apprentice, dreamer, girl in love, and he nods thoughtfully. He places his heavy gold hand on my shoulder.

  “There is a balance to every burden,” he says.

  When he asks me for a second apple that he’ll deliver personally to the Fenris Wolf, I don’t hesitate. She isn’t allowed into the orchard herself because of her voracious hunger.

  Gods I’ve hardly heard of come: Mim the Head, who I thought was a story, and Fanderel of the Lake, who is a guardian of fish; Grith, who I believed had died forever a thousand years ago; Beyla, a goddess of fertility but really manure, and her husband who we thought was invented by comic mummers in the tenth century.

  Lofn, a goddess who serves at Frigg’s right hand and is the lady of prerogatives and unrequited love, shows up leaning on my doorframe in jeans and a pink corduroy jacket. She says, “You’re the first girl not to fall for Baldur in a giant’s age. That must be quite the story.”

  Ran, the goddess of drowning, comes at sunset, her tarnished hair knotted like a fisherman’s net, and stares at me as if she sees my sun-bleached bones. She gives me a ring, too, with a small pink pearl.

  They all know that I am new, that I am Idun, and that I am a human girl. They treat me with respect; they call me cousin, though I am not. Like a poor relation, I live in their circle but everyone knows where I belong.

  Loki arrives with a cocky smile and asks, “How goes the deception, pretty young thing?” He looks my age, handsome, but his teeth are sharp as a cat’s. I say, “I lie about nothing,” and he transforms slowly, unsettlingly, taller and brighter until he shines like a silver moon, a note of beauty that hurts me like a perfect sunset. I touch my middle fingers to my heart reverently.

  Loki whispers, “
I’ll take that apple now,” and his breath is sweet wind and flowers against my lips. Trembling, I offer it, and he puts it carefully to his mouth, sucking it in, chewing with eyes fixed to mine. His teeth move in rhythm with my heartbeat, and he blinks in time, too, as if all of his being shifts and starts along with mine.

  “And another,” he murmurs.

  I jerk away, gasping, and nearly fall, catching my hands in the tangle of apples. The tree with those wizened yellow fruits supports me, pokes my face, wakes me from his seductive magic.

  One apple, Freya said, for every god in every year. It is all they need, and eating more will not make the magic last longer. The tree only grows so many, they are a finite commodity, and gods should not be allowed to hoard them. The few extra I may give out as I see fit—if a god has a great need, if they ask well or prove some man or woman in their favor has earned a respite from death. It is my prerogative to choose who receives this extra bounty.

  The magic only requires that the apples must be freely given, and Loki has not asked well or kindly.

  “No,” I say as hard as possible.

  When I turn, he is gone.

  Twenty-seven nights.

  Nearly a month of dreamlessness.

  I have set a pie to baking in my new iron oven, guessing at how high to hold the flames. My first two pies burned at the edges.

  The cottage door slams back; a blaze of orange sunset spills in. Loki streaks inside with it, fury in his eyes. He silently, coldly holds out his hand. I stare at him, at the melting skin on his face as he shifts shape from skinny young man to wrinkled old creature, back to a tall, shining god with red hair and eyes glittering in the way of glaciers. He says, “Give me another apple, Idun.”

  There is a need, a fury, in those cold eyes that freezes my tongue. I work my throat, swallow, and glare back. I must establish a firm rule between us. “No.”

  He looms taller, features darkening and pointed and monstrous. “Give me another apple in return for what I have lost because of you, because of Baldur and the Bearstar.”

  “We have all lost,” I whisper. I fold my hands together against shaking and ignore the sticky dough and flour. He will not scare me into submission.

  “Some more than others.”

  “Vider,” I say. She was the fourteen-year-old Lokiskin orphan who fell in with us and helped us deliver Baldur here to the orchard. Who for her reward forsook Loki’s patronage and asked the Alfather to be made the first woman berserker in two generations.

  Loki’s face crumples, not from magic, but grief. He twists it the way a little boy does, screwing his mouth and nose, rubbing his red-rimmed eyes. His tall frame shrinks, too, until he’s a young boy with a shock of red hair. Freckles blossom on his forearms and cheeks. He stares at me a moment, then stomps to my cupboards and flings things about until he finds the bottle of mead Freyr the Satisfied left. He pops the cork with his fingers and gulps down a third of the alcohol as I watch, the hot oven behind me warming my back.

  “This is useless!” he cries and flings the bottle against the stone hearth. It breaks, and the mead catches the tongues of my fire in a brief flash.

  Loki Changer explodes into a bird and flies out my window.

  I carefully pick up the shattered glass on the hearth. My fingers still shake, but I will them to stop. He is not angry at me, not truly. But all the stories of Loki’s mischief and revenge pummel each other in my head. I must grow used to him, to saying no. He will not hurt me, I remind myself, only trick me or tease me to get what he wants.

  And just as I decide it, he returns, laughing as I crouch with a handful of glass. “Here, cousin,” he coos, brandishing a bottle of pink sparkling wine. “From other cousins of ours and better.”

  I get to my feet, and as I go to him, his features shift prettier, his hips round out, he flutters his eyelashes and rolls back his shoulders to show me the breasts grown under the collar of his shirt. Her shirt. She bumps the base of the wine against my shoulder, and I take it, lift it, and drink.

  The bubbles pop and tease, brighter than anything I’ve tasted. It’s not honey or grapes, but something lighter, something lacking any tart, sugar quality. As if this wine was pressed from orchids or lilies or sunset clouds.

  “Elfish wine,” Loki murmurs, her voice near my ear. She sips from the bottle, too, and slides her arm around my waist, dragging me to the bed. “To the things we have lost!” she crows, tossing back more liquor before thrusting it at me.

  I drink, and she drinks, and my apple pie burns a third time.

  Twenty-eight nights.

  Even drunk, even sleeping in the arms of a god, his red hair twisting across my face, his angry tears smearing between our cheeks, I still do not dream.

  Thirty-three nights.

  Tonight, an arc of shining women appear in the sunset shadows of my orchard. Like ghosts, they are gray and misty, wearing gowns from ancient times or hats feathered and ruffed from the last century, in boots or high heels or jeans, hair braided or bobbed short, smiling, holding their hands out to me. One steps forward, long braids beaded to her knees and wearing a medieval mantle. She says, “It is disir night, Idun the Young, and you are one of us now.”

  I do not know what to reply.

  The disir are our deceased mothers and grandmothers, the female spirits of a hundred generations—goddesses, elf-queens and troll-mothers, priestesses of every sort, and even the giantess ghosts. Tonight, I see no bulbous, toothy trolls or massive, glorious giants, no ethereal and pristine elves here: only women. Maybe my grandmothers, maybe only nearby spirit cousins, or even past Iduns and their kin. My mother herself is not here.

  The medieval disir woman flicks her fingers. “Come with us, Idun. Tonight, you may leave, you may go where you wish and return before dawn, your apples no worse for wear. It is the only night we are free of our bindings!”

  I take her insubstantial hand, and a soft wind seems to blow through my body, though no physical stuff moves my hair or skirt. It is so like the seething magic—that ghost of flight, of spinning power—I close my eyes happily.

  They surround me, petting my hair, plucking at my sweater and dress. They kiss my cheeks, my wrists. They coo and whisper their names.

  “Where would you go?” one asks.

  “Soren, I want to see him,” I say without thinking. I’m not allowed to have him, but see him perhaps?

  “Where would this Soren be?” another asks.

  I look into her gray-brown eyes, through which I see apple-leaves shivering in the night wind. “With Baldur the Beautiful,” I guess.

  “Come, come!” they cry. They grasp at me, dragging me along and up into a whirlwind. The sky batters us; I cannot breathe for the thin air! My lungs pinch. I fear they forget I am alive still, not built for the paths of spirits! But my terror lifts away in a gust of warm, sticky wind and the sound of music.

  I stand alone in a great garden crawling with elephant ear plants and bobbing birds of paradise, steamy hibiscus and spreading magnolias. A white mansion glows nearby with elf-lights and lamps, while some brusque, sharp string band sends peels of dancing music out over the garden. I breathe deep of the thick air, the rich smells of tropical flowers. To be outside the orchard for the first time in more than a month! I’ve never spent so long in only one place before. I hope this will always be a night of freedom, that I did no wrong in Freya’s eyes by going with the disir.

  I hear a small grunt of frustration, and something shiny arcs across the path to land in the bushes. Glancing over, I see a girl seated stiffly on a stone bench. She wears a blood-red gown and her pale hair is braided intricately like a Valkyrie. Her fingers are covered in rings, but she tugs at them angrily as tears streak blotchy tracks down her painted face.

  “Hello,” I say.

  The girl glares up at me, dark mascara bleeding wide around her starkly pale green eyes. Something in her anger draws me nearer. When I was a prophet guided by dreams, I often found myself in the right place at the right time
to help a lost soul. Hope kindles in me. Perhaps some tiny strand of fate has brought me here for her.

  “You seem upset,” I say, attempting not to sound eager.

  “I was here to catch my breath privately.”

  I smile. “I see.”

  The girl studies me through narrowed eyes. I tilt my head so the little lights shine onto my face. Whatever she searches for, she seems to find it and says, “I apologize, lady.”

  I shrug away her apology. “Did someone hurt you?” I ask.

  She smiles a dark smile. “Maybe. Yes? I’m not sure.”

  “Can I help?”

  The girl asks, “Do you know anything about dreams?”

  It startles a laugh out of me, and I sit beside her on the cold stone. “I venture to say I know quite a bit about them.”

  “How do I tell if my dreams are true ones?”

  I touch my neck, where my mother’s black plastic pearls hang. My dreams were always true. I say, “I think…you just know. You can feel the difference, or you see evidence of it when you wake.”

  The Valkyrie girl glowers. “Why would I have true dreams at all? I’m not seethkona. I don’t pray to the goddess of dreams.”

  That she is so dismissive of this thing I want more than anything grates at my heart. I force myself to say, “Because you’re walking along a strong strand of fate, or because she wants you to.”

  “Do you know Freya well?”

  I nod, thinking of the goddess’s hand on my elbow. “As well as any.”

  “Do you trust her?” The girl clearly does not and wants me to agree.

  How like Soren she is in her suspicion. But despite everything, Freya has never made me think she does not want what is best. Carefully, I say, “I trust that Freya acts for the good of the world.”