The Weight of Stars

  I kick him lightly in the side of the leg with my booted foot. “Both, rockbrains.”

  “Well then, flowerlips, I want freedom to wander, to interfere with what I want and ignore what I don’t. I want to…be loved.”

  “You act like you want to be worshipped. At least, your abs and smile do.”

  He laughs once. “Gotta be loved for who I am.”

  Tears tickle my eyes as I smile, for no cursed-good reason. “Yeah,” I manage thickly. “Well.”

  We’re quiet again for a long time, listening to the prairie wind. I breathe with it, breathing as deep as I can, holding it as long as I can.

  Visby says, “Why do you want to meet the dragon, really?”

  “To see if I’m like her at all,” I say before I can stop the thought.

  “Like her.”

  I nod, even though he probably can’t see it. “My frenzy is a dragon,” I whisper. “She stretches and roars in my chest, nested in my heart and caged by my ribs. She wants to fly, she burns all the time. I love her, I love this power, but I can’t share it or explain it to the berserkers. Not completely. They love their frenzy differently, the ones who love it at all. It connects them, it maddens them, it makes them into brilliant stars; but mine…the Alfather woke her up in me, but I think she was born of something I always had.”

  Visby makes a strangled sort of sound, and I glance at him, flushing with embarrassment that I said so much. He stares at me with eyes wide, an expression like he’s been gutted.

  “Forget it,” I say kind of harshly, standing up. “You’re not the one I should have told. Rag.” I start away, stumbling in the dark toward the stream, because at least it’s a path. Rag and rag and rag me.

  “Vider!” he calls after me, voice higher and almost desperate-sounding. “Wait. Who should you have told? Who should you have told?”

  I stop, fists clenched. I have to go back anyway, because my axes are there. I spin around, and he’s standing directly upstream from me, legs wide, hands at his sides, palms out, expression eager and visible even in the bare starlight. His hat is on the ground; his black hair gleams.

  “Who?” he asks again, nearly begging.

  “Loki,” I say, out loud for the first time in four years. “I should have told it to Loki Changer, because he deserves to know.”

  My words release something in his posture, and Visby relaxes, wilts almost, and nods.

  I take a single step toward him, nervous suddenly, feeling like my hackles are up, my ears perked. Before I can even consciously think what I suspect is happening, I’m running at him.

  His eyes widen, going bright green.

  Crying out wordlessly—with fury, glee, laughter, I don’t know how to contain it all—I throw myself at him.

  Loki catches me easily, and I shut my eyes like that will help me hug him harder.

  His arms around my back, my toes an inch off the ground, I wind around him, chest to chest, cheek to cheek, digging my hands in his thick, short, white-blond hair. “You ragger,” I whisper.

  “I love you,” he whispers back.

  My hands fist up; I squeeze with all my substantial, tiny pit bull strength. “Why?” I beg.

  He drops me, but I’ve got too great a hold and slide slowly down his chest. The Loki looking at me is part me, part young god: androgynous features, solid shoulders, flawless-plastic-green eyes, but my mouth, his hair thin and jagged like mine but red as the strips of freckles slashing over his longer nose. Part me, part him.

  “Why?” he repeats, incredulous.

  I shrug and snatch my hands off his chest.

  “Why shouldn’t I?” he asks. “What reason is there not to love you?”

  “You’d have to ask all the people who don’t.” My voice is haggard.

  “It’s my fault you think like that, isn’t it?” he snarls.

  I just shake my head. I don’t know.

  Loki stomps away, then whirls around. “Do you know why I love young people? Children and teenagers? I could spend time with anyone, anything I wish, and everyone knows I prefer the young.”

  Swallowing hard, I shrug. “They say you like our lack of responsibility. You like taking care of kids, and kids need the most from you. You’re the god of orphans and mothers; of course you like kids.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know then.”

  The god spreads his arms invitingly and waits. It’s brighter around us now somehow, maybe a hidden moon, maybe a subtle magic. He looks like the angel I thought he was when he helped me climb that tree, a decade ago, to get away from my dad.

  He seems so different to me, and also the same. I know I’m different now, but am I still the same Vider he loved as a little girl?

  “You change,” Loki says, not in answer to my thoughts but to his own question. “The process of childhood is change. Growth. New patterns. Forming bonds, breaking them. Some people never stop changing, growing, and those people are always young, Vider. But when you are a little girl, when you are a teenager,” he pauses, takes a deep breath, and, with reverence coating his voice, says, “the entire purpose of your existence is to become.”

  I feel my dragon, my seed of fire, spreading her wings.

  “Look at you,” he goes on. “Look what you’re doing to yourself, no, for yourself. You want to meet a dragon just to—what did you say? See if the dragon smiles back?” Loki laughs. Uproariously. High and full of delight. “Not to challenge her! Or kill her, not for glory or honor or money or anything outside yourself! You aren’t proving yourself to yourself, or sacrificing; you aren’t doing it for somebody else. You just want to find out what will happen! You want to know. To become whatever the experience will forge you into. And you barely even see it. There’s no pride or false modesty. Just you.”

  My hands find my chest. I press hard against the blossoming hot wind, against the awful, awesome swelling there.

  “Vider, the real question is, how could I not love you?”

  His smile is so familiar, hooked up and curled wickedly, tenderly.

  I nod a little, still aching inside.

  “All right, fire girl.” Loki Changer’s hair sparks at the ends again, flicking into flames as if struck by a match. The red glow shimmers in his black-black eyes. “I’ll introduce you to a dragon you can smile at.”

  EIGHT.

  The road we travel now is a road of light. A rainbow bridge, a swirling, windy path of magic between worlds. Loki tucks me against him and whispers I should hide my face and hold tight to his neck. I press my cheek there but leave my eyes wide open. His arm is around me, anchoring me. All I see is the world dissolved into colors: a melted painting, chalk on a sidewalk dripping with rain. My frenzy churns, beats with my heart—there is no earth beneath my feet, and I gasp, holding onto Loki.

  Images, shapes, colors, darting at me and all around, changing and flickering and solid or none of those things. I can’t name the sounds I hear or think I hear; I can’t say what I see, though I know it all. And none of it. Both, neither, all, none, unfocused and aching.

  I close my eyes.

  Now there is only a rush of wind, my heartbeat. In and out, I breathe. In and out. I am a ball of fire, my bones are the mountain, and Loki’s arm around me is like a binding spell, holding me together in this place of light and nothingness.

  Then my toes touch down, and we’re standing on the earth again—my middle world, I can only hope.

  “Here, Vider,” the god of mischief murmurs. “Be quiet if you can manage it. We’ll wake her gently.”

  “Wait.” I keep my eyes shut, my face against his neck and arms holding tight. Wind knocks into us, a humid nighttime wind, dragging the whisper of prairie grass behind.

  Loki waits. He holds me patiently, no words, only an arm around my back, a hand on my neck, playing with the ends of my hair.

  I say, “You’re only supposed to get one apple a year. Are you in danger because you haven’t eaten yours?”

  His fingers still in my hair
, he tugs a strand once, quick and sharp. “I am not in danger, no. I ate mine. The one I offered you was an extra that I won.”

  It is sheer relief that blows out with my breath. I nod, stepping away. “Good. I wouldn’t…I don’t want that sort of pressure.”

  “You should eat it, so I can relax, too.” He produces the little ugly thing from some invisible pocket. In the moonlight, it looks less horrific but remains unappealing.

  I pluck it from his hand. “I gave this to you when I thought I gave it to Visby. Did I ever even meet the real Visby Larue?”

  “No. My daughter Fenris waylaid him on his way to the hunt. She’s been entertaining him for the past week.” There’s the pride of a trick well pulled in Loki’s voice.

  “You’re terrible,” I say.

  The god smiles in agreement. “Eat the apple.”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “If I die, I die, Loki. And I go to Hel and hope my name is remembered here. You’ll remember it, at least.”

  “I don’t understand you.” His face is less him now, more me, but smoothed like a marble statue’s and just as pale. But his eyes are black and starry.

  I look into them and then kiss him very lightly on the lips. He doesn’t close his eyes and neither do I, and all I see are the stars inside him.

  When I step away, I say, “Good” again and smile my own most mischievous smile. I tuck the apple into my pocket.

  Shaking his head, Loki takes my hand and pulls me up a steep hill. At the crest, wind slams into us, and I gasp as it knocks me back a step. I spread my free hand, fingers splayed, and let my dragon-frenzy unfurl her wings, as if she could catch the wind, too, and send us aloft.

  “Here she is,” Loki whispers.

  Before us, the prairie stretches miles and miles in every direction; gray, brown and shadowed green, toward the black horizon. The hills dip and flow, and the wind presses the tall grass into waves that flicker silver and blond. The moon is low in the east, oblong and burnished, casting thin light over the world. I hear nothing but the wind, smell only dust and hot grass, and see no dragon at all.

  “Where?” I ask.

  “Sleeping here, part of the hills.” He stands close to me, words almost carried away by the hissing, powerful wind.

  “I don’t see her.” I stare and stare, but it is a world cast in silver and bronze, metallic waves of grass, iron-black sky, thousand-eye gaze of heaven.

  “She is good at hiding, Vider. And has been for longer than I’ve been alive.”

  Longer than he’s been alive. It makes me cold, makes the ground spin, to imagine so many years. I shiver, urged by instinct to pull away from him, but I swallow it down. I want this. I am going to meet this dragon. “Will she appear?”

  “For me,” he says, cocky and regal. Turning his attention from me, he strides a few paces away and says, not loudly or softly, not with urgency, but as if he’s speaking to someone waiting just before him, “Mother.”

  I dart forward and smack his shoulder. “You’re ragging with me,” I say, but my voice is soft and urgent, shaking with disbelief. He smiles over his shoulder, teeth glinting, and his mouth stretching too wide to be natural.

  My frenzy staggers. I twist my fingers into his T-shirt, so tightly the material stretches and tears. I can’t breathe; I can’t even shut my mouth, staring at him and past him at the undulating prairie.

  Loki Changer’s mother!

  Said to be a giant, said to be long dead: Laufey the Needle is not supposed to be a dragon. Not supposed to be sleeping in the center of the United States of Asgard.

  I shake my head. I still can’t close my mouth, and the wind tastes like sticky panic.

  Because I am alone here with a god, I welcome the hot strength of my frenzy. It will protect me, make me powerful, make me fast, and, in the end, make me numb to pain and fear and the agony of death.

  “You don’t need that,” Loki says. My fist pulls at his T-shirt again, and Loki curls a hand around my wrist. He draws me along the broad back of the hill. His eyes are looking forward, seeking, and he pulls me along one step at a time.

  “What—what is she doing here?” I gasp.

  “Stretching her wings.”

  I grunt high-pitched in disbelief. My breath comes in shallow pants. I am about to leap off a cliff, I think, dive out of a heliplane with no parachute.

  “Mother!” Loki calls again, louder this time.

  The entire world trembles.

  Loki laughs. “This way!” He dances to the side with me, turns us in a wide circle, and then tugs north again, like he has no real clue what he’s doing. But his laughter is contagious. I force my mouth into a smile, so my panting starts to sound like breathless giggles, and three steps later, it is.

  “Mother!” I yell. Loki’s head snaps around and his wide, shocked eyes find mine. Then together, we cry for her again.

  Mother!

  Our hands together, we race along the crest of the hill. The ground trembles.

  Loki skids to a stop. He jerks me back. “There!” He points at the next hill to the west, to the earth falling away like shedding skin, layers of grass and flowers and dirt tumbling down. It is silver-copper-gold rain in the moonlight.

  There is so much of her. The prairie hills arc around us, a curve of land risen up and churning, loosening itself. She must be massive, buried here or burrowed like a hibernating snake.

  “Loki,” I whisper, groping for his hand. He opens his arm, and I lean in and grab the waistband of his jeans.

  “Vider,” he whispers back, hugging my shoulders.

  Slowly, slowly, she rises.

  The moonlight casts her in molten silver, a great winged serpent, too long and perfect for me to bear. Her wings stretch in fringed arcs, blocking out the stars. Her neck arches, and she sits up on her hind legs, claws gouging the earth. She is as white as pearls and moonlight, bearded with tangled vines and long crests of grass; her skin gleams with crystalline spikes, not scales, and her scars are like granite pushed up through the earth. Her tail whips and curls, her forelegs are longer than her rear legs, so her shoulders are mountain peaks and her haunches the foothills, and those forelegs end in hands, great clawed hands with thumbs as huge as minivans. Her neck is a graceful S, and her face elegant and long as an antelope’s. Curved horns grow behind her eyes, twisted silver and white.

  And her eyes are green-blue and swirling, cloudy and streaked with inky black. They are globes of the middle world, spinning slow and easy.

  Screamer.

  The word roars through my skull.

  Not spoken, not heard, only understood.

  “Mother,” Loki says.

  When she lowers her head, I’m pushed back by the rush of air. Angling sideways, she puts her left eye level with us, head tilted. Dirt clings to the cracks in her skin, to her thick wrinkles; flowers are rooted there, and baby trees with thin, electric-green leaves. Her planet eye has no center, no pupil I can see, but I understand she is staring at her son.

  “Her name is Vider,” Loki says.

  All her glorious, grave attention focuses on me.

  I feel it, a weight cracking my ribs. It’s painful and heavy. I fist my hands and try to spark my frenzy.

  Berserker, she says.

  I fall to my knees, and when Loki grabs at my arm, I bat him away and stare back into her terrifying eye. There is a flicker in it, a tiny red-yellow glow like fire, like me.

  My madness flashes, turning over like an old car engine, and I cry out wordlessly to ignite it.

  The dragon in my heart rears up and thrusts her wings out. I throw out my arms, too.

  And I smile at Laufey the Needle.

  I smile even though I am afraid; I smile even though my frenzy is nothing compared to her. It is a helpless, tiny star, and she is the universe.

  But I smile.

  I am the oldest, she tells me, I am the beginning. And you are a moment on the path to the end.

  “Okay,” I say h
arshly, because my throat feels burnt out. “Seems like an all right thing to be.”

  The dragon opens her mouth like a great canyon splitting apart; chunks of rock and dirt tumble free, leathery skin stretches, strings of blood and amber-colored saliva connect her hard lips. Her teeth are iron and diamond spikes. Bones are caught between some of them, but curled around one lower fang are blooming white-rose vines.

  A rush of wind that is a sigh blows over us, smelling sweet and hot, like rust and ocean water and summertime.

  “Is that a smile?” I ask, unable to take my eyes off the dragon to glance at Loki.

  He laughs.

  I laugh, too, because I am amazed and afraid and my frenzy is a burning, blazing thing.

  “She hasn’t eaten you,” the god suggests, still laughing.

  What is it you want, fire girl?

  “Fire girl,” I whisper, and Loki laughs all the more, high and delighted, like a child, choking and catching his breath. I knock him over with a firm shove, and Loki Changer goes tumbling, laughing and cursing and laughing again, down the prairie hill.

  “I want to fly, Laufey the First,” I say, holding my hands out again, palms toward her. They are hot; my frenzy burns.

  I cannot help you to fly.

  That doesn’t hurt me or surprise me, because I know the reply: “I already can.”

  She doesn’t respond but tilts her head in a way I know means accord.

  “They want to hunt you—there are hunters, I mean, here on the prairie.” I wipe my sweating hands on my shirt; I breathe deeply but do not rein my dragon in, only focus, only channel her brilliant fire into strength. I am the mountain; I am a great earth-and-diamond dragon. My frenzy is a flower, too, and a crystal star, everything Laufey is.

  I know.

  “They will find you, eventually. You let yourself be seen.”

  I went a-hunting myself, in the deep black sea where my granddaughter lives.

  Unsure that’s an answer, I suddenly see her flying high in the clouds, over the ocean, only to dive and dive and dive, into cold, saltwater shadows, and I see her dance with a sea dragon, longer than she is, a flash of scales and slinking tails entwined together.