I lower my forehead to the steering wheel and press in, letting the dull pain focus my fever there instead of that hot place where Astrid’s hand holds my knee.
“All citizens of the United States of Asgard are cautioned against moving outside of city centers. Greater mountain trolls—”
She violently changes the station back to HM. The emergency broadcast is blaring there, too. Astrid dials the volume down and gently replaces her hand on my knee. The effort to be calm makes my bones tremble.
After a moment, the HM announcer cuts in, apologizing for the interruption in regular programming, and says, “We received the official statement from President Adamson, and it’s true that Tyrsday evening greater mountain trolls crossed Leif’s Channel onto Vinland, wreaking destruction along the coast, including burning down the village of Jellyfish Cove and the National Historic Site where Gudrid Traveler and her family first landed. At least fifty-six people have escaped the island, but over a hundred residents are not yet accounted for. The Mad Eagle and Flying Bear berserk bands were dispatched from New Scotland to stop the trolls before dawn. No herd has caused such a death toll since the renegade Rock Mountain herd that famously killed Luta Bearsdottir’s family in the sixties.
“The captain of the Mad Eagles reports that the trolls left symbols of Ragnarok painted in blood on the ruined walls of the town, and it’s been confirmed that the president’s warning has been put into effect because he and Congress believe the troll-mothers will use our time of loss to create as much chaos as they can.”
I switch off the radio. I can imagine how brutal those people’s deaths were, and don’t want to hear more details.
Astrid slowly gets out of the car, moving with exaggerated grace as though she’s afraid of falling over. With her seething kit, she kneels on the gravel shoulder of the highway and braids some of the tall prairie grass into a circle. She sets the kit before her and lights a slim candle. “For all the children of Asgard who were killed,” she whispers, and then repeats it more loudly. “May their spirits lift as smoke and find peace in the halls of death, wrapped in Freya’s feather-warm pillows.”
She uses her hands to waft the thin gray smoke up toward the sky.
It’s said that all our prayers are gathered up by the wind, are seen by the stars, are captured in the claws of ravens, and given into the ears of our gods. But the gods have been remarkably vague about why and when they choose to turn their attention to individuals.
As I watch Astrid, I wonder if she thinks any of them are listening to her now.
But I suspect if I asked, she would tell me that the prayer itself has power, regardless of who hears it.
We’ve been back on the road for only ten minutes when we begin to see hills in the distance, turned shadowy and violet in the late-morning light. We turn off the highway where a carved-wood sign declares the entrance to Badlands National Park. Astrid says, “Mom and I used to stop at all of those kinds of signs to take a picture.” She sighs. “Uncle Richard has the album. It’s just us, standing there grinning. Sometimes Mom helped me climb up to the top, and held my ankles so I wouldn’t fall.”
“Too bad we don’t have a camera,” I say.
She smiles wistfully.
I drive to the small booth in the middle of the road. A rack of heavy spears and steel shields leans against it. On either side, an eighteen-foot fence of reinforced logs spreads out, enclosing the park. There’s probably a war band based near here for emergencies. I’ve heard that most such postings are considered cushioned ones, because it is extremely rare for any of the parks to see more danger than the occasional pack of wolves. Though given what’s happened in Vinland, that may not be true this week.
We’re greeted at the gate by a woman in a brown ranger suit, blond braids falling from under her hat. Her eyes barely pause at my tattoo. “You two should be moving along to a city. Didn’t you hear about the trolls?”
Astrid leans over me and says brightly, “We won’t be long.”
The ranger purses her lips, but then shrugs. I hand over money for the seven-day pass and an overnight camping ticket.
“If anything happens, make for the visitor center. There’s a shelter in the basement,” the ranger says. She hands me a glossy brochure along with the change.
Astrid flips through it as I pull the car forward. “I wish I knew which of these hiking paths Mom and I took that last night,” she says, holding open the page with a green-and-tan map crisscrossed by red roads and tiny dotted lines.
“Why don’t you look outside and I’ll just keep driving until you recognize something.”
The dry prairie spreads out all around us, but ahead and to the side are tall spires of layered rock. The road winds us closer to the spires, and when Astrid points, I stop the car on the gravel shoulder. There’s a footpath leading toward the edge of the prairie, where the ground cuts away. I open my door.
The path crunches under my boots as I walk out through the scraggly prairie grass alongside Astrid. At the end of the path, a small sign proclaims the Badlands to be twenty-two thousand acres square, butting up against the Lakotas Buffalo Reservation to the south. What we’re looking at is the bottom of an ancient sea, where layers of sediment were deposited and pressed into stone. Five hundred thousand years ago the land began eroding with rainwater and streams; it was water that cut these fissures and canyons.
“I prefer to imagine rock giants hammering their homes out of the flat prairie,” Astrid says.
“So do I.” The canyons stretch as far as I can see: striped gorges flushed deep golden and orange by the sun behind me.
We drive all afternoon, around Cedar Loop Road, which winds from one end of the park to the other. Mostly we’re quiet. Astrid stares intently out her window or the windshield, occasionally telling me softly to stop. I do, and follow her as she picks her way down the first few steps of a hiking trail. Some are just boardwalks through the prairie, and we can see black dots on the horizon that must be bison grazing. Some trails cut down into the canyon, and each time, Astrid pauses before descending. “This isn’t it,” she says. At first she’s calm when we head back to the car. But as the hours pass, she becomes more and more frustrated. The dazzling sun and our increasing thirst can’t be helping. Her fingers curl tightly into her skirt and she frequently murmurs “Where is it?” to herself.
We hike a mile down the Castle Trail, surrounded by sharp stone peaks like miniature mountains. There’s dust in my throat and my shoulders are tense. We’re vulnerable out in the open like this. When Astrid halts suddenly, I nearly run into her. She says quickly, “Soren, I know this is the place. I was here with Mom the last night.” Her lips press together hard enough that they turn white. “Where is he?”
“Maybe he isn’t here. Maybe … maybe you were supposed to come here for some other reason.”
“Oh, Soren.” She looks away. “Are you interpreting my seething now?”
My instinct is to apologize. “Isn’t that what seethkonas need sometimes? Someone … else? To interpret.”
She nods. “Perhaps I will dream tonight. Let’s go get something to eat.”
At the visitor center, we first find the restrooms and then share a bag of potato fries and a couple of club sandwiches at the small café attached to the museum. Astrid doesn’t finish hers, but insists I take it. I’m hungry enough not to protest. When we’re satisfied, we tour the museum panoramas and watch a movie about the formation and now the preservation of the Badlands. There are fossils and stuffed examples of the ancient equines that used to roam the area, as well as swift foxes and black prairie dogs, which have been reintroduced.
We’re alone but for a ranger at the information desk. This early in Wildmonth must not be high tourist time here, even when there’s no troll advisory. As always, I keep my left side turned away from the ranger, even as we go straight past him into the gift shop for Astrid to buy a postcard.
She fills it out quickly, to her uncle Richard, and we drop it into the m
ail slot by the front doors on our way out. As the sun sets, dark shadows streak toward us and silhouettes of the rocky spires jut up against neon pinks and oranges that should not be natural colors. “It doesn’t look real,” I say, though I’m thinking about what we heard on the radio this morning: now is when Ardo Vassing, prince of Mizizibi, is beginning his televised prayer service. Astrid thought we’d have Baldur by now.
Coming to stand next to me, her shoulder nearly touching mine, she says, “What I like is how vibrant it is, how the sky burns, and yet it seems calm from this distance. Like a controlled explosion.”
When I glance at her, she isn’t watching the sunset. She’s staring at me. My breath shakes, but before I can respond, we’re interrupted. “You kids need anything else? I’m about to lock up,” calls the woman in the striped baseball cap behind the café counter.
Astrid dashes over. I take a moment to relax, to center the burn in my heart and push it slowly down and down into the desert floor. We meet back at the Spark and Astrid dumps an armful of sandwiches in little plastic boxes onto the rear bench. “For later. I know you’re hungry,” she explains before sliding into the driver’s seat.
There is just enough light to easily find the Cedar Loop campground: a barren field with short black stumps separating each camp from the next, and tin-roofed picnic tables to provide shade in the afternoon. Only one space is occupied, by a truck hooked to a pop-up trailer. We choose a spot two tables away: near enough not to seem hostile, but not so close that we’ll have to listen to one another snore.
“Too bad we can’t build a fire,” Astrid says when we’re parked, tapping the visitors’ brochure. “You can only if you have a closed grill or something. Because they don’t want the whole prairie catching fire.”
“You can set yourself to dream without one, can’t you?”
“I can chew some anise.”
“Anise?”
“It reminds me of my mom.”
We watch each other; I’m thinking about my mother, too, and how she’d have liked Astrid’s easy way of smiling. My own seriousness was a burden to a Lokiskin like her.
The sunset catches Astrid’s hair the same way it did this morning, in that expansive moment when I held her in my arms. I remember how her eyes fluttered in her sleep, and ask, “What did you dream this morning, right before you woke up?”
She laughs once, raising her eyebrows. “Apples!” Dismissing it, she gets out. I follow. We both just stand there on either side of our car. The dusty ground has covered my boots in dirt. My shoulders are stiff and I need to go for a run, or find a place for at least one of my routines. I realize it’s been thirty-six hours since my last workout, and suddenly my fingers are itching to hold a staff or sword. Surely I can find a flat spot tucked behind a rock tower, or just get far enough away that I don’t upset the other campers here.
“Soren?”
Astrid has come around the engine to stand in front of me. Her head is cocked quizzically. “Soren?” she says again.
“Yes.” My breathing picks up speed. “Um, yes. What?”
“Are you all right?”
“Just … thinking. I need to exercise. It—it keeps me grounded and reminds me about what I can do—could do—if I let the battle-rage take me. I haven’t run through a routine in almost two days.”
“All right. Go.”
I hesitate.
“Soren, I’ll be fine.” She puts her hands on my chest and pushes gently. “Take your sword, fling it around. Go.” The chill from her cold skin seeps through my shirt, making me tingle everywhere.
My voice barely finds a path out: “You should get into the car. It’s only getting colder.”
“When you come back, you’ll be nice and warm, like my own big oven. There are some convenient aspects to having a fever all the time.”
My desire to kiss Astrid—to lift her up off the ground so that all her weight rests in my arms, to hold her close and bury my face in her licorice hair—destroys every piece of my vocabulary.
Fortunately, she slips away to untie my spear from the roof of the Spark.
By the time I return, it’s fully dark, and all my sweat has frozen to my skin. My eyesight is adjusted so I don’t skid or stumble along the gravel road. It was difficult climbing out of the small gorge I chose, and I nearly put my hand into a tiny cactus. But my blood still sings with the edge of the battle-dance and even now I walk with a bounce in my step. I’m strong and in the middle of an adventure with Astrid. We have food and shelter, and if no showers, at least there are covered toilets on site. What else could I need?
I reach the Spark only to find it empty. In a moment of hot terror, I spin around, raising my spear. My body thrums with bowstring tension.
Then her laughter rings out from the neighbors’ camp. Peering, I barely make out Astrid’s silhouette against the background of their pop-up. She sits in a low folding chair. Red light from the embers of their charcoal grill highlights the springing curls of her hair.
Beside her and across the fire are two people: a man and a woman. The man is telling a story, using precise hand gestures.
As my heart resumes its regular pace, I put away my spear and grab a new shirt and my jeans from my backpack. Changing helps me feel less grungy, but I fold my dirty clothes to use again for exercise tomorrow. Taking a final calming breath, I head for Astrid.
They’re all three laughing when I arrive. “Soren,” Astrid says, holding out her hand. I take it and stand beside her as if it’s where I belong.
The man gets to his feet. “Hi there, I’m Elijah Kelsey. This is my wife, Abby.” He touches his heart with his right middle fingers in a greeting of respect. I nod and return the salute. “Miss Astrid has been telling us about your trip,” Elijah continues, stopping abruptly when he sees my tattoo. A significant look passes between him and his wife; my body goes rigid. But Abby smiles at me, and her husband follows her example after a fraught moment.
Astrid squeezes my hand, tugging at me so I crouch beside her. She doesn’t remove her hand from mine. It’s like a gift. I struggle to focus past it in order to say, “Thank you for hosting Astrid while I was away.”
“She’s delightful.” Abby bends down to pick a long skewer from its holder below the grill. “Marshmallow?” She offers me the skewer, along with a half-full bag of jumbo marshmallows.
I accept, and while my marshmallow blackens, Astrid tells me that the Kelseys are enjoying a second honeymoon along the same route they took for their first twenty years ago.
“We were only eighteen,” Abby says, pulling her bouncy brown hair into a braid. “We committed in a little chapel and had the papers signed by a tyr an hour later.”
“All our stuff was in the back of the Volvo,” Elijah continues, “and we just took off! Stopped at every monument and park and historic site in thirteen kingstates. Took three months, and you know, it was the best time of our lives.”
“It sounds very … free.” I pull my marshmallow out of the coals as it catches fire.
“Yes, exactly. Free and perfect.” Elijah leans forward and his necklace spills out of the collar of his sweater. At first I assume it is a tiny hammer of Thor, but a figure hangs from it. A dead man. It’s a crucifix. I try not to frown.
Astrid offers me a piece broken from a Selway bar. “Want some chocolate to go with that?”
“We have graham crackers, too,” Abby says. I let her help me create a marshmallow sandwich and am glad that eating the messy thing gives me an excuse not to talk.
All I know about the Biblists is that they worship a god of light, who like Baldur dies and is reborn. Taffy said last year at the academy’s Many Gods Day that most of them accept Baldur as their lord, or as an aspect of the same, and hide behind his sun sign. London, an adamant son of the Thunderer, asked later, “Isn’t that disingenuous?” And Taffy only offered him a withering look. “How do you know Baldur isn’t my god?” she said. “Because yours isn’t real” was the particularly stupid response Lon
don came up with. Taffy threw her pudding at him and stalked off. I never asked what he did to make up with her.
I try to unwind, sitting with my shoulder against Astrid’s chair. The Kelseys both attempt to not look at my tattoo again, making up for it with a lot of obvious eye contact. Though they’ve got firm smiles and a natural way of talking, their hands give them away. As Abby eats a marshmallow straight off the skewer, I see how tightly her fingers grip the metal tool. When Elijah asks what brings us out this far from school, he taps his hand against his knee in a fast rhythm. I tell myself it’s only me making them so nervous, but I wonder if it might be more than that: we’re in the middle of uncivilized land during a troll advisory, and the god of light they believe in above all others is missing. At least Astrid has her dreams, and I have … this burning fever.
Astrid tells them we ran off for time alone together, and surely my spasm gives her lie away, but instead they both grin at me as though I’m only embarrassed. Which is certainly part of it. I’m glad when the conversation meanders to their favorite national parks, then to our favorite novels, and eventually devolves into an improvised sort of trivia game where they ask if we can name all four of the Quarrymen and we ask if they know who starred last year in the movie Helgard.
The stars wheel overhead and soon we’re all yawning. It must be near midnight. As the moon begins to rise, it casts pale silver light over the prairie, and we fall quiet. It is a moment of complete stillness.
I allow myself to enjoy the cool wind that cuts down my collar. It helps me stay calm, caging the fever behind my ribs. But as Astrid dozes with her head lolled to the side, she shivers. She’ll be better off in the enclosure of the Spark. Besides which, for the last fifteen minutes Elijah has been casting glances at the pop-up.
Quietly I say, “I should get her back to our camp.”
“Wait.” Abby pushes to her feet slowly and stands at the low fire, with her brows drawn together. Her husband joins her, putting his hand on her back. I move in front of Astrid.