“What’s wrong with Astrid?” Vider asks, coming up beside us. I don’t think she’s heard our conversation.
“Yes, Soren, what’s wrong with Astrid?” Baldur nudges me with his elbow, as if I’m his little brother.
I open my mouth, then clap it closed again. Vider’s eyebrows are lifted, her cheeks flushed from effort. Baldur’s lips pinch expectantly.
“She and I …” I pause. What can I tell them? Nothing that doesn’t make me sound exactly like what Astrid accused me of being: a fool.
“Go talk to her.” Baldur bends over and grabs the roll of Astrid’s seething kit, which she left out here last night when she stormed away. I take it reluctantly.
“She’s mad at you?” Vider asks. Something I don’t understand wavers like uncertainty in her eyes.
My hand tightens around the leather kit. “Yes.”
Vider throws her arms up. “That doesn’t make any sense! She was desperate yesterday afternoon for you to be all right, and now you are and she’s angry?”
With a laugh, Baldur wraps his arm around Vider’s shoulders. “Are you sure you’re a girl?” he says, and receives a sharp smack on his hand in return. He takes her fingers and raises them to his lips. The smile he offers is smooth and perfect. I see the moment she meets Baldur’s eyes, because the sunlight brings her to life, too.
I can’t be upset with him. Not with the morning turning his hair to gold, and his laugh making everything brighter. I see ghostly chain mail hanging from his shoulders, and a silver helmet caught under his arm. It’s some image of him I’ve seen on TV, I’m certain. He has gold rings in his ears, and bracelets lining his forearms like gauntlets. The memory wraps around my ribs.
We must get him to safety. And Astrid should be out here with us.
Grimly, I take my father’s sword and swing the strap over my uninjured shoulder. Before I can give in to fear, I head for the barn.
The sunlight crushes through the fallen section of roof, filling the barn with yellow light. It transforms the dust motes into elf-gold.
Astrid has put on the exercise bra and pants she wore at the holmgang in Nebrasge, and she carries a thick branch in her hands as she silently moves through a pattern of combat. It’s a dance we’re taught as children, incorporating the seven basic sword strikes that are legal for holmgang. I stare at the muscles of her back as they move beneath her skin, at the appearance of ease with which she lifts the branch. Her form is excellent. I walk forward to take my place beside her. I mirror her movements, find the rhythm of her breath with my own. We do not touch; she doesn’t even acknowledge my presence, but there’s no way she isn’t aware. Her pace never changes, and when she transitions into the seven-defense dance, she flicks her eyes at me briefly.
Both of us know this well enough to do it with our eyes closed. All I smell is the dust of the barn, the dry hay and old, rotting wood. There’s a gentle rasp as wind off the prairie pushes against the roof.
Our dance is warmth and lithe, and so soothing it never once awakens the frenzy in me.
When it ends, Astrid faces me. Sweat glistens on her face, as I’m certain it does on mine. I’m thirsty from the dry air, but we must speak before going back out to the creek.
“Are you finished outside?”
I nod.
“We should get going, then.” She starts to go past me, heading for the doors.
I catch her hand. “Astrid, wait.” Her hand is limp in mine and she keeps her body half turned away from me. “I only want to explain.”
“Is my seething a curse?” Her eyes remain focused on the packed dirt floor.
“No.”
She snaps her head up. “Our powers come from the same place, Soren. The same wild place inside us.” She pushes a hand flat against my chest, right over my heart. “I feel it. I’m certain of it. Condemn yourself, and you condemn me, too.”
“Your power doesn’t kill people.”
“Doesn’t it?” Astrid removes her hand and crosses her arms under her exercise bra. “Did you know my mother seethed for the Congress just before the Mediterr Conflict? The president was unsure, and so was his assembly, if we should participate. She seethed, and she told him we must. He ordered troops into the desert and more than eight hundred died in that single year.”
“Your mother was doing her job. She’s supposed to read the strands of fate.”
“And your father’s job was to protect, to defend. To kill.”
“Not unarmed families in a mall.”
“Not his job, then, but his purpose, Soren. If it happened, it was meant to happen.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d been there.” My voice is suddenly thick. I don’t want to tell her more. I don’t want to put those memories into words, or make her listen. Give that terrible hour more power over me than it already has.
But Astrid touches her fingers to her lips. “You were there?” she whispers.
I nod. They always leave that out of the television spots. No one cares that Styrr Bearskin went mad in front of his eight-year-old son.
She clutches my hands. “I’m listening, Soren.”
Astrid tells so many stories. Surely I can endure telling her this one. And if it’s a story, maybe it will be easier. I close my eyes. Images assail me and I open them again. Astrid’s face is there. Her sepia eyes are level with my mouth, her face tilted upward. She has no expression on. No smile or frown, no expectation. She only waits, ready for me to fill her ears with my story.
At first I whisper. I know to set the stage because of how she’s always told her stories to me. “There was music in the restroom. A cheerful song about tricky goblins for the Hallowblot. Father and I had been at the food court and I drank an entire giant cream beer float by myself, so I really had to go. If I hadn’t, it might never have happened.”
I remember that as I walked back to him, I stopped to stare at the clothes in the window of the Fashion Hole, thinking how you could never fight in them successfully. The tight green skirt especially, I was going to tell Dad about. And then I heard the first scream. Followed by his roar.
“I heard him yell,” I say to Astrid. “And it was so wrong. Not his practice roar, but deeper and more—more raw than I’d ever heard. I ran for him.”
My sneakers skidded on the tiles and I had to grab the corner of a trash can to keep from falling. It crashed to the ground, though, and I crouched behind it as a woman’s body slammed down in front of me. Her neck was broken and her eyes wide and staring. Blood slipped away from her head. Coming at me like a red snake against the yellow floor tiles. The colors were so bright. All the memories are that bright. But I don’t have to look at them as long as I can see Astrid. “He was killing people, pulling them apart with his hands.”
She doesn’t flinch.
I say, “It was so fast.”
There were two boys, torn open and bleeding, still clutching hotpigs, then a man who tried to fight. Dad swung around and crushed his face with his bare hands. He did everything with bare hands! His sword still strapped to his shoulder. I tell Astrid, “I hid from it, my hands clutched over my ears. All the screaming drowned out the music and crashing. Chairs and plastic tables were ripped from their bolts, and the bodies … But I don’t know what made it happen, Astrid. What set him off.”
The words are blocks of ice in my mouth, numbing my tongue. “I couldn’t move. To help. There was so much noise, wailing in my ears. And then it was gone.”
Only the tinny music floating down from the ceiling remained, the soft groans of death, and Dad’s heaving breath. In and out.
I blink slowly, taking a moment to feel that panic again, the not knowing if it was safe for me to crawl out. Not knowing if he’d kill me, too. Then I focus on Astrid. “Of all things, I remember that the walls were decorated with plastic pumpkins and holly berries. Crepe paper streamers fluttered from helium balloons and I just stared at them until he stepped in front of me. I saw the fury in Dad’s eyes, the twist of his lips and the br
ight flush tearing across his cheeks as he turned to me. I stepped back. Slipped. I landed on my butt, slapped my palms down into a streak of sticky blood. I scooted away, smearing it everywhere, sliding past a couple of girls with bright bangles glittering in the fake light. Their eyes were wide open. Their chests, crushed.”
I suck in a shaking breath. “Dad said my name then, and his voice was rough from screaming. I couldn’t look away from him.” From the splatters of blood on his hands and across the T-shirt I’d given him for Yule the year before. “With his free hand, he reached down and grabbed the front of my shirt, dragging me to my feet. I gripped his wrist, terrified, and shaking all over. I clenched my eyes closed, until he said my name again. I fought against him and he dropped me. I sprawled on the flat tiles of the mall floor and gaped up at him. Dad crouched; his knees touched the floor. ‘My son,’ he said, putting his bloody hands on my face. I tugged away. I wanted to run as far from him as I could.
“He told me to take his sword, Astrid. It was still sheathed on his back. He’d never drawn it, even in the midst of his frenzy. He shook me, and I fumbled for it, unbuckling the strap holding it in the sheath. Dad said, ‘This is the sword of a bear, my son. Always the bear, no matter who you serve.’ ”
My throat closes, and I swallow several times before I can speak again. Astrid waits, eyes grown heavy with sorrow.
I say, “Then—then there was this yelling that echoed toward us. SWAT called in by escaping shoppers and mall security.” Dad, I begged. I don’t know what I begged him for. My voice falls to a whisper again. “He released me and stood. He said, ‘I shall not come into this hall with words of fear upon my tongue.’ And he just … walked away from me, toward the line of police aiming automatic guns at him. He yelled the entire prayer. Then he—he just ran at the police, and they opened fire.”
The memory of him jerking, then falling back, overwhelms me. I squeeze Astrid’s hands hard enough to crack bones. But she doesn’t wince.
Astrid lifts my hands toward her. “Soren.” She breathes against my knuckles. “Tell me the rest of that prayer.”
“I shall not come into this hall with words of fear upon my tongue,” I say, “for Odin will welcome me. Death comes without lamentation, and the Valkyrie summon me home. Gladly shall I drink ale from the Poet’s Cup, for the days of my life are ended. I die with a laugh.” My eyelids twitch as I try not to blink. “Only he said, ‘I am Styrr Bearskin, and I die with a laugh.’ ”
She holds my gaze. “I understand,” she says.
I’m exhausted. My eyes are drier than birch bark, my ribs tight. My arms throb from the new bruises Baldur gave me, and now my insides feel raw, as though I’ve been throwing up. Astrid pulls me down to sit on the pile of hay. Overhead, thin clouds press into the round of sky we can see through the broken roof. It probably took about three minutes to tell Astrid that story, but already it’s a memory that feels a hundred years long.
She holds my hand, lifting it up. I watch as she touches her lips to my fingers. As she turns my hand and presses her cheek to my palm. Her face is cool and so, so smooth. I want it to stay there, cupped in my hand, forever. But I tighten my fingers, gripping her face until I make white dents in her skin. “I could crush your skull if the rage was on me,” I murmur.
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“You should be.”
“No. I do not fear death. Like the poem says.” A smile teases up the corners of Astrid’s mouth. “My death is woven already, and if it is meant to be by your hand, so it shall be. But it’s unlikely. Your fate is greater than that.” Her eyebrows arc up. “So is mine.”
My hand slides down her neck. “Of course you think such things.”
“I know them. I’m a seethkona, remember?”
“I remember.” I run my hand over her shoulder and down her arm. Astrid shivers. I don’t know if it’s my touch or the breeze against her sweat-damp skin. “I know what you are,” I whisper.
Astrid lies back onto the pile, shifting against the sharp ends of hay that poke into her bare shoulders. “Can you imagine me without the seething?”
“Of course,” I answer automatically.
“Truly?” Her fingers crawl over the hay to my wrist, and tighten around it.
In the sunlight shining down through the roof, her eyes lighten into a color so clear it’s like honey mead. The curling snakes of her hair spill all around her cheeks and neck, emphasizing the shadows under her eyes. Her lips are pink and slightly parted. I imagine her spinning, when her cheeks are rosy and her mouth open so I can see the tip of her tongue, when her eyes stare beyond this world and she laughs at what she discovers there. I hear her voice and that singsong quality that somehow blends seamlessly with the matter-of-fact quirk of her eyebrow, and I hear the hush of wonder when she knows something to be true because she saw it in a dream.
If she did not dream, and did not dance, who would she be? A beautiful girl, but would she still be so strong? Would she be so full of wonder and passion?
What would the wind be if it did not blow? What would the sun be if it did not shine?
My throat tightens. What would the mountain be if it did not stand?
She sees it in my face, and she nods. Understanding shimmers through the honey of her eyes.
I whisper, “I do not want it.”
“Oh, Soren,” she whispers. Releasing my wrist, she pushes up again and wraps her arms around my neck. “I know,” she says into my ear.
I hold her, dragging all of her into my lap and hugging tightly. I shudder.
“I know,” she whispers again, and she does. She told me last week: “You stand between the earth and the sky.” What she meant was, We can touch the earth and the sky.
Because of the wild magic inside us.
THIRTEEN
ASTRID AND I take a box of energy bars around to the creek. She slips her hand into mine as we walk.
We interrupt a punching lesson Vider is getting from Baldur, and the four of us sit together to eat and scoop up cold water with our cupped hands. The sun breaks through the clouds and warms my shoulders; the bars taste nutty and full of fruit; Astrid shifts so that her knee touches mine. It’s nearly perfect. Vider huddles with her arms around her knees, picking her bar apart into crumbs that she puts carefully into her mouth. Avoiding the dried cranberries. And Baldur stretches out on his stomach so that the entire length of his back welcomes the sunlight.
There’s peace all around us, and no one breaks it until we’ve eaten our fill. Astrid dips her fingers into the water and flicks droplets at me. Vider watches us from the corner of her eye, pretending to be focused on gathering the last crumbs off her knees with one licked finger.
Baldur sighs, drawing everyone’s attention. His eyes are closed and his lips have relaxed into a smile.
“We need to decide where to go next,” Astrid says quietly. “How to find Idun’s orchard.”
I suck air in through my teeth and launch into the tale of meeting Fenris Wolf. Baldur leans up onto his elbows. Vider presses her hands into her thighs and doesn’t look up from them the whole time I talk; around her knuckles the skin turns white. I wonder why Fenris bothers her so much.
When I finish, Astrid touches my knee. “Do you know what she meant? Do you have any idea where the orchard is?”
“No. None.”
“What—” Vider whispers. She clears her throat and says more strongly, “What is there to know about this orchard? All I know is that it’s magical and hidden, that the gods go every year to receive their apples from Idun the Young.”
“The orchard is charmed to stay hidden,” Astrid says, and begins pulling at the grass. Little sharp tugs that rip it out at its roots. Her eyes are vacant as she looks into her memory.
Vider asks, “Why keep them in Mid-Earth at all, then? Why not in Asgard or Hel? If they’re so worried about mortals finding them.”
Astrid draws a rune in the dust. I know it: it means death. “It is said, in the old poems, tha
t the gods tried that and it led to their first great battle with the giants. And now there’s a pact among the gods that always a woman will guard the apples in the Middle World—sworn to the gods, and sworn to the apples themselves. She is Idun, the keeper of apples.”
“So they say,” whispers Baldur.
“Do you remember the way?” I lean eagerly toward him. This would be so much easier if he suddenly knew how to find Idun.
His eyes close tightly and he shakes his head. “No. No, as I think on it, I see flashes of a face, of a woman with dark hair and dark eyes offering me a small golden apple in her palms. But the leaves obscure the sky and sun, so I can’t tell where on earth she is.”
Releasing a handful of grass, Astrid says, “They also say Idun has her own war band.”
“Berserkers,” Baldur adds excitedly. “I remember that! Idun’s Bears, they’re called.”
“Great.” I try not to glower.
She touches my knee again. And I remember something.
I’m sitting with my mother in the middle of a room covered in Legos. We’ve spent the entire morning building a Rainbow Bridge, and I’m excited because the Well of Mimir came with a special roundish Lego that attaches to the bottom of the well to look like Odin’s Eye. The bridge spans two feet of dingy white carpet, an old grape juice stain acting as the clouds beneath it. Mom laughs as I reach my whole hand into the delicate well to push the eye into place. My hand is nearly too large, but I carefully withdraw it, then clap happily. She grabs me and drags me onto her lap and puts her chin on top of my head. One arm wraps tightly around me and the other reaches out for a ziplock bag filled with green and blue Legos. “This one is a serpent,” she says. I touch her wrist, where the gray-and-green tattoo of the World Snake twists, nearly invisible against her dark skin. “Like this?” I ask. Her nod is soft against my hair. I say I want to wait for Dad. Mom kisses my temple with a smack. “I am always waiting for your daddy!”
Something about her tone makes me uncomfortable, and I squirm until she lets me go. I stand, which makes me taller than her because she’s still seated, smiling up at me. In her nose and eyebrows are gold hoops that she told me she had to take out when I was a baby because I always wanted to tug. I still want to touch them, but don’t. Mom holds out her hands, palms up. She wants me to put my palms against hers so we know we aren’t mad at each other. She says, “I don’t mind waiting, little bear. Your daddy gave up everything to follow me. He gave up an oath to a lady far greater than me, and a promise to his brothers. For me and for you, Soren.” She wiggles her fingers playfully. I put my hands against hers, and she says, “We’ll wait as long as we have to.”