The Lost Sun

  Astrid can never tame my frenzy—because she only makes the frenzy louder, stronger, and more potent.

  Besides, I’m filthy and wide awake.

  Retreating, I open the Spark and dig around in the trunk for my backpack. I move slowly around the barn through the crackling cold prairie to where the creek shines silver in the moonlight. My breath hangs before me and frost glimmers like diamonds from the tips of the grass. The water will be freezing.

  I strip down and quickly wash dirt and dried blood from my skin. My muscles tighten and I clench my jaw as the icy water makes my bones want to crack. When I drink, the water cleanses away the last of Glory’s death-sweet smell from my palate.

  Most carefully, I wash the raw spot on my shoulder where Dad’s sword has been rubbing. The sheath wasn’t meant to be worn with only a T-shirt, and I’m lucky the skin didn’t break open.

  When I finish, I stand alone and naked between the stars and the earth.

  My outsides are tight with cold, but inside, the berserking fever churns. Tendrils of it worm toward my extremities, flushing up the back of my neck. I’m in no danger of freezing.

  They say the berserkers used to run into battle without armor, sometimes without clothes, with only their weapons and voices at hand. They say the roar of a bearskin band was the most feared sound across a dozen countries. They say we cannot be cut down, cannot be controlled. Cannot control ourselves.

  But more than controlling myself now is the need to understand why Glory—why the Fenris Wolf, daughter of Loki the Mother—insists that I am the key to finding Idun’s orchard.

  I dress slowly, back into my worn jeans, but into the last of my clean shirts. I sit cross-legged at the edge of the creek. I should pray to Odin, to the Alfather, whose gift this berserking is. I should abase myself, beg him for answers.

  But I can’t bring myself to do it. I swore myself to Baldur the Beautiful, and I still intend, if we succeed in returning him to Bright Home, to take for my boon the freedom from this battle-rage.

  I can’t ask Odin for help now.

  The stars are reflected in the creek, winking at me as the cold water ripples over gray stones. I tilt my head up to the sky. Here, I am between the stars of the sky and the stars mirrored in the water.

  And there’s this chunk of that sky in my chest. I wish it were a tether, and that I could tug on it until the stars overhead listen to me, until they answer my prayer.

  If I fell asleep, perhaps I would dream the answer. But although I play a game to relax my muscles one at a time, to sink into the earth as though I’m becoming part of it, and I quiet my mind with the smooth sounds of the wind through the grass, I cannot sleep.

  Stretched out on my back, I watch the stars curve across the sky. I try and try to think of how I can know but not know the location of the apples. All our destinies seem to ride upon my understanding. Baldur’s, certainly—he’s the lost god of the sun, depending on me for immortality. And Astrid’s quest to find her mother will charge forward only if she wins Odin’s boon. Even Vider is with us now, and I suspect she’ll remain through to the end. Even if the end is here at this abandoned barn.

  Sunk as deep as I am into thoughts, I don’t hear the barn door open, or her whispered footsteps through the grass. She says my name with the harsh rattle of shock.

  “Soren?”

  I sit in a smooth motion. In the dark, her eyes gleam like twin stars and I think briefly that the sky sent an answer after all. “Astrid.”

  She huddles in her cardigan, arms wrapped around her stomach. Her seething kit is tucked under one elbow. “You’re here.”

  I do nothing but stare back.

  “Alive?” Astrid chokes on the word.

  I’m on my feet and gripping her shoulders. “Alive.” My voice is deeper than normal. As if I dragged the word out from the pit of my intestines.

  A tiny noise squeaks out from between her teeth and Astrid falls forward into my chest. She trembles and I put my arms around her, my nose brushing her dark curls.

  “I thought I’d never see you again,” she whispers.

  “I’m here.”

  Astrid shakes her head against my chest. “No, you don’t understand.” She backs off, and my hands fall away reluctantly, fingers curling for her. “I read it in your bones.”

  My bones. And I recall the dread that passed over her as she stared at the journey rune, the rune she purposefully misread for the crowd. “What did you see?” I ask, more harshly than I mean to.

  Kneeling, Astrid unfurls the seething kit and flattens her hands against it. “I saw that you’ll be alone. You’ll make yourself alone and … that means I …” Her voice trails off. She looks at me. Her eyes are a little wild and whirling in the dark, as they were when she seethed. “I thought I’d be there, too. In your bones.”

  “You have to be.” Though only recently I was pulling away, was telling myself to keep back from her because I’m a danger, I never believed that we weren’t somehow fated to walk together. I’ve felt it since the moment I first saw her. Knots of destiny.

  “I didn’t see myself anywhere in them. Like when I search for my mother, when I seeth for her and there’s just nothing.” Astrid is whispering, and each word is a new, sharp knife. “I thought it meant, when we drove away from you, that you were going to die. Because to the world she’s dead. Because none but me believes otherwise.”

  I tug gently on her hair, to tell her, I believe, because I believe in you.

  Astrid puts a hand on my face. “But you live. You live and you found us. That means only one thing.” She sucks in a great breath and says, “I’m not part of your fate, Soren.”

  “No. You have to be. Look again.” I thrust a finger at her kit, at the pocket that holds the runes.

  She shakes her head. “I’m not. I’m not there.” The words slide over her tongue like thick syrup. Her voice is low and raw.

  I put my face close, inches from hers. “It isn’t set. Fate doesn’t have to be inevitable.”

  “Yes it is! Yes it does!” She wrenches back from me, but I hold tight to her elbows.

  We stare at each other. I don’t know what to say, how to untangle the longing and anger and frustration I feel, and put them into coherent sentences. How to convince her I won’t let fate keep me away from her. I will win Odin’s boon, divest myself of this frenzy, and be with her. If fate can’t foresee such an outcome, it is only because fate is too narrow-minded to imagine a free berserker.

  Astrid’s rigidity slowly melts. “But maybe I’m missing something. I thought I wasn’t going to see you again, and here you are.” Her lips twist. “I’m not infallible.”

  I smile, too, just a little.

  She takes my hands. “Why are you out here? Not inside where it’s warm—where we are?”

  “I couldn’t sleep. Too awake. Too wired.” I shrug.

  Astrid pulls me down to my knees, and I sit so that she can slide between my legs. Her back settles against my chest and I wrap my arms around her. I close my eyes. The ground is hard and cold, but it doesn’t matter because she’s enveloped in my fever. She holds my arms close to her and tells me what the three of them did after escaping the caravan mob. “We drove and drove,” her voice whispers up at me, and I’m glad I can’t see her face. “I kept turning around to look out the back, even though it was ridiculous to think I could see you. I just couldn’t stop hoping. When we got gas, I watched the road. Baldur and Vider broke open the mead bottle for the money, and I didn’t even help pick up all the rolling coins. When we stopped for food, I didn’t want to eat. I was so worried. But we had to go on.”

  “I know. It was the right thing. Baldur is the most important.”

  “He said to me, ‘Do not throw away his sacrifice. Soren gave us this gift, and he expects you to use it.’ And so I climbed into the car with them and tried not to think about the last sight of you I had. Blazing with strength and power. I wanted to go back. To take the car and drive back. All I could think of were
the runes I read, of fate taking you away.” A shudder presses between us. “And I held on to that image of you, painting it with brighter colors in my mind, so that I would always have you with me.”

  I say, “I’ll bend fate to my will for that.”

  She laughs, and twists in my arms. One hand finds my face, her palm cool against my tattoo. “Soren, I half believe you could. You would stand there and simply not move until fate bowed away first.”

  Her smile shows off her teeth, and even in the thin starlight, she’s beautiful. She scratches her nails gently down my face and back into my hair, just under my ear. I’m suddenly frozen. Her lips are centimeters from mine. I can feel her breath in my mouth.

  “Astrid,” I say heavily and fast, “I frenzied today.”

  Her little gasp and laugh cut through the air and I’m free of my paralysis. She pushes back from me, delight widening her eyes. “Soren! You went berserk?” Astrid shakes her head and looks me up and down. “That’s what happened to you? That’s how you found us again? The rage led you here!”

  I think she’s going to clap, and I catch her hands. I press them together. “I lost it, at the caravan, and ran for the mountains before I could hurt anyone. It was so awful, so dark and spinning—Astrid, I don’t even know how to tell you what it was like.”

  “Like being caught in a whirlpool? Like your limbs will be torn free and—”

  “And if I didn’t hold tight, I would be destroyed.” My chest pinches as I remember falling into the frenzy and losing myself. I close my eyes.

  Silence is her only answer. I can feel her waiting, sitting back on her heels in the dark prairie. The creek teases me with its quiet babbling, like distant laughter or applause. I look.

  Astrid is watching me. Her lips pull down into a pout; a line pinches between her eyebrows. “I was going to say: and all you have to do is let go.”

  I shake my head. “No. Never.”

  “It’s the only way—give in to it and you can swim with the current. You can’t fight the tide, Soren!”

  “I want it out of me. That’s all.”

  “You want to lobotomize yourself! Destroy everything that makes you who you are!”

  “It doesn’t define me.”

  Astrid laughs. A full, high-pitched laugh that tilts her face up to the stars. “Oh, Soren. You’re either blind or a fool.”

  It hurts, but I clench my jaw and say, “I won’t let it define me forever, then.”

  “It’s your every waking thought.” Astrid stands. “What will you be when it’s gone?”

  “Anything I want.”

  She shakes her head. “Can you imagine me without my seething? As anything but a seethkona?”

  I stand as well. “I don’t have to. It’s what you want, who you are. You’ve embraced it.”

  “A berserker is who you are, Soren.”

  “Not when I ask Odin to take it away. Not then. I’ll just be Soren, a warrior. I’ll be able to fight at your side safely.” I reach for her. “I won’t have to worry about hurting you. I can be with you.”

  Astrid doesn’t let me touch her. Her chin lifts and she says with an air of finality, of authority, “If that time comes, I won’t want you to.”

  She leaves me standing alone at the bank of the creek.

  Dawn arrives as a sky full of purple clouds.

  Vider comes running around the barn, a grin splitting her face. Twin braids trail out behind her. “Soren!”

  I push up from my meditative crouch and grimace. Every piece of my body aches. “Good morning,” I manage. It isn’t that I slept, but that I spent the final hours of the night unmoving, staring into the water until I imagined I could feel the earth turning beneath me.

  “Astrid said you came in the night.” Vider stops a few paces from me, her hands clenched together. She’s wearing one of Astrid’s cardigans, and already most of her flimsy pale hair has fallen out of the braids.

  “I want to thank you, Vider Lokisdottir,” I say, holding out my hand. “For aiding in the rescue of Baldur. I owe you a debt.”

  She bows her face and shakes her head so that hair falls over her eyes to hide her blush. “That isn’t why I did it.”

  I don’t reply, but only wait with my palm up. Wind fans her hair over her face and she claps her hand against mine. “Why, then?”

  “I’m not certain.”

  “It was well done.”

  Her fingers curl firmly around my wrist and she peeks up at me. “Teach me more?”

  It startles a laugh from me, and Vider puts her fists on her hips.

  A workout is exactly what I need. And food. But food is where Astrid is, and I’m not ready for that.

  Vider lowers herself down beside me and we begin some stretches. As I show her the proper stance for a triangle stretch, Baldur arrives. “Ho!” he calls.

  It’s such an old-fashioned greeting, Vider rolls her eyes at me.

  But I welcome him on my feet, as I did her. Baldur shines, and his eyes mirror the purple sunrise behind him. I hold out my hand, but he embraces me like a brother. “It’s the best news, that you returned to us,” he says. “I had to come see for myself.”

  “Thank you, Baldur.” At this moment, as the sky-mirrors of his eyes glow and he smiles at me with such simple, friendly grace, it’s worth it that I lost myself to the frenzy. Further words dry up in my mouth, but he smacks my shoulder and says, “Are you ready for a spar? Is that what all the exercising is for?”

  I look at Vider and tilt my head questioningly. She shows a ferocious smile that squints her eyes and reminds me of pictures of forest goblins I saw as a child. I hold up one finger and swiftly flick it at Baldur.

  She catches my meaning before he does, and we attack together, with a strangely harmonized roar.

  Baldur throws out his hands and laughs, letting himself be tackled. We all go down. It’s a quick skirmish, and I’m against both of them when Vider suddenly switches sides like a proud daughter of Loki. She feints toward him, but inserts herself to block my attack so that Baldur is able to sideswipe me. Then she uses her disloyalty to get around Baldur and sweep his right foot out from under him. I catch him and pin him, and we’re all gasping with laughter. Clearly Vider is the victorious one.

  As revenge, we teach her some difficult blocks and tell her to repeat the string of movements over and over until her muscles know it better than she does. With a scowl of concentration she begins, and Baldur and I face off.

  We’re a few minutes into hand-to-hand, and my forearms are alive with pain from blocking his punches, when I notice Astrid coming around the barn. I try to ignore her, to focus on Baldur. He’s an excellent boxer and I’m already sweating in the cool morning air.

  I won’t want you to.

  Her words snake through my thoughts as she kneels by the creek, some ten paces downstream. I barely deflect the heel of Baldur’s hand as it comes at my head.

  I maneuver so that my back is to her. Baldur frowns as he realizes I’ve put myself at a disadvantage on purpose.

  I focus as I dance around Baldur. My breath moves through me like a calm but strong river, lapping at the edges of the frenzy.

  “If you take me down, we can stop. You seem tired.” Baldur falls into a defensive stance, on the balls of his feet, hands up.

  “I’m not tired,” I say. I attack again; he deflects again. We move around each other, jabbing and blocking. My boots grind into the field dirt and my arms ache. But it’s distracting me. I won’t want you to.

  “Have you ever wondered,” he says between heavy breaths, “what Astrid tastes like?”

  “What?” I swing in and he blocks me. Our forearms jar together as I bounce back again.

  “I suspect she tastes as good as she looks.”

  I aim for his nose.

  Baldur deflects again, slapping me away easily. “Sweet as mead, sharp as vodka.”

  My stomach twists as though I’m starving, or about to vomit. I never should’ve reminded him of his womanizin
g. “She isn’t yours to taste.”

  “Whose is she, then?”

  I falter. Not mine so long as I berserk, by my will. Not mine when I am free, by hers. “Freya’s.” It’s half a question.

  Baldur catches my fist and flings me back. “I doubt Freya would mind sharing with a handsome cousin.”

  My breath streams out raggedly. I remember how Astrid looked at him that first morning. How her face lit up with awe and love. Do you love the gods, Soren? She could love Baldur in my place.

  He would never be afraid of the frenzy.

  The moment I think it, my iron star cracks open. It’s so freshly awake, hungering to be free again.

  Baldur skirts closer and I leap back from him. I shove a fist hard against my own chest as if I can keep the rage trapped; my other hand shoots out. “Stop. Baldur, stop.”

  “Stop what?” He spreads his hands and sneers. The expression, on his beautiful face, is terrible, like the sun burning black. I can hardly believe this is Baldur! I meet his eyes and … they’re calm. As serene as the sky, as a quiet mountain lake.

  “Baldur.” I whisper his name. He doesn’t mean any of it. The derisive mask is only that: a mask. I’m confused, and my hands lower as my rage quiets down.

  His eyes narrow at the corners. He winces. Then his hands, too, fall to his sides. “Soren.”

  “Why did you do that?” I shake my head. “My battle-rage, it … You …”

  Baldur sighs. Wind picks up through the trees on the other side of the creek, shaking free loose pine needles and scattering them into the grass. He closes his eyes briefly, and without their knowing sky-bright gaze he’s only a beautiful man.

  I step away again. “Why are you trying to make me berserk?”

  His eyes pop open, pinning me to the spot. My heart stops beating as he says, “That is not what I’m trying to make you do.” And then his gaze shifts. I follow it to where Astrid is rinsing her face in the creek. We watch as she dries it on her sweater and then stands. She glances at us, but the moment she sees me looking, she turns her back and hurries for the barn.