• • •
We do whatever we like, the purple-eyed man and I. Mostly, that means lying in the meadow or lying in his bed or wandering in great circles through the tall summer grass. It is always purple afternoon here, or quiet purple twilight. Sometimes I turn around and expect something, like memories have flashed in my peripheral vision, like just-forgotten dreams. A man with a silver and gold hand. Great roasted pigs laid out for feasting. A woman with silver curling through her bob. A vicious black machine I think of as my bike. Older bearded men I don’t like to think about, two of them judging me in some confusing way. Silver chains.
I catch my golden companion frozen sometimes, staring at the middle distance, as if he, too, remembers things. Once he asks me, “Do you think my name is Soren?”
It’s a name I know and feel matters somehow, so I tell him perhaps it is, but I don’t really care. As I speak, a face forms in my memory, darker and more solid and not so easy with a smile as my golden friend’s. I say, “I think your name is Sunshine, sunshine,” and he laughs.
“I think your name is Beast.”
Shocked, I laugh, too, and curl my fingers into claws, wondering why it is no insult but rather that I relish the name as a compliment.
• • •
A woman arrives and the sky tilts silver.
A luscious full moon rises. I study the cool, mottled rock hanging low enough to touch, while a new echo beats in my belly.
I want it.
The woman’s eyes are like that moon, as she slinks toward us in a simple gray dress, barefoot as we are, her hair loose to her waist in a great fall of starlight. I like her, I think, for I know her, and am very glad to have on one of my friend’s shirts, belted at the waist with a tie from the curtains.
“Fenris,” she says in a voice deep and calm. I know she means me. My name rings through my bones.
I don’t move as she comes near and touches my temples with gentle fingers. Her skin is cool, and when she whispers my name again, my knees buckle with memories.
• • •
Freya the Witch kneels with me, stroking my neck and back in tiny circles while I shake and shudder.
A hand clenches against my chest, where my Tyr stabbed his elf-made hand inside me and broke my heart.
“How long have I been dead?” I gasp.
“What a question,” the goddess of fate and dreams says, half in a laugh, as if the answer should be obvious.
I growl and bat her hand away.
“The apple you ate calls you back to the living, Fenris,” she says.
“I’m not hungry here,” I whisper. “You should leave me.”
I can feel the wind is cooler now, and the silky grass itches, when two moments ago, it tickled and teased.
“Too many would not like that,” Freya says dismissively.
I shake my head. Nobody, nobody will argue if I stay here. Jenny Calsdottir will wonder where I disappeared to. Soren Bearstar will think of me when he drives through Cheyenne. Frig might wish that other godlings volunteered at her hospitals, as I did.
Tyr.
I stare at the grass, unseeing, remembering his cold metal hand against my heart.
And I am not hungry.
“I don’t want to starve, Freya,” I say.
“Then you should not eat the apple Tyr brings you again, and when you die, you will remain so.”
“Here? With Baldur?” I glance toward the house now, where the simple golden man I’ve spent three hours or seven weeks with, I cannot say, has transformed into my bright Baja California surfer cousin. To my mind, at least. Where he lounges on the unmade bed, legs dangling, staring at the play of light through his fingers, he still forgets us all. For once, I do not desire to swallow him whole.
“Baldur is not always here,” the goddess of dreams reminds me. “But I will have you at peace in death, because the Alfather will not want you in his battle hall.”
It is a bitter sort of comfort. And the rules of the apples are firm: I must go back.
• • •
Rising is painful, a gentle reminder of the consequences of life. It hardly bothers me, for this ache in my bones and guts and heart is a bare echo of the pain of my hunger.
I know climbing through twisted roots; I know dirt under my fingernails. I know blackness and the taste of mud, of earthworms and damp, rotting leaves, and fertile waste in my nostrils. A quiet slip of perfume.
My fingers reach thin air; a hand grips my wrist.
I am tugged up through the ground and sprawl naked on the middle world’s cool, itchy grass. My head is cupped in somebody’s lap, fingers brushing hair off my face. Traffic sounds and wind in a million tiny leaves, the smell of crisp autumn leaves, of rain high in the clouds and unfallen. Stone smell and bricks and polished wood, more distantly, minty incense and evergreen.
I’m at the foot of the New World Tree, in the garden of the Philadelphia Death Hall.
A growl slips up from my throat, and I pull my lips back from my teeth. I do not wish to engage with that cranky new Valkyrie.
“Tsk, hisk,” my mother says, putting her hands against my face.
I open my eyes to look up at her. She leans over me, so her freckled face is upside-down and her choppy red hair falls around it. “Hey, Daddy,” I say, because nothing annoys her more. She is small but voluptuous today, pretty in pale green and pink, lip gloss and curled eyelashes—her most motherly persona and resembling me, for once.
Loki Changer purses her lips in displeasure. “I’ll leave you here naked for the Valkyrie to find.”
Though I should sit, should roll away into a crouch, run off to show my mother I don’t need her charity, she keeps combing her fingers though my hair, and it feels so good. My eyes sink shut again, and I sigh.
I’m hungry.
It’s small, as tiny as a seed.
Familiar. Cursed. A little bit comforting.
“Why did you try to eat him, why now? Why in front of the world?” Loki whispers.
I shrug. “How did you know I was coming back today?”
Bending over me, the god of tricks and changing puts her lips to my forehead. “I brought your body here, Fenris. I waited. I made Tyr leave so you would not have to see him.”
My mouth waters at the thought of Tyr’s thick apple blood and delicate crunching bones. I shudder and hug myself.
“Cold?” Loki lifts me by the shoulders and stands, transforming larger and male but still red-haired, freckled, gentle. He reaches over our heads to pluck a long golden leaf off the ash tree that unites the nine worlds. Skimming the tip against my shoulder, he hums a discordant note, and the leaf becomes a robe.
“Hungry,” I say, wrapping the robe around my waist. It falls to my knees.
My mother laughs, loud and thick with dark amusement.
I smile despite myself.
“Let’s go feed you then, daughter,” he says, and my smile grows three times.
• • •
It’s Moonsday, and after finding real clothes, I lead Loki to a Philadelphia food bank where the chief volunteer knows me. She shies away this time, fear plastered on her mouth and in her flared nostrils.
Glory the Fenris Wolf is famous: the country saw my face as I tried to attack Baldur. Dangerous. Hungry. But Loki’s presence keeps the woman from turning me away. So we don our gloves and work the line. I take a bite from every tray I serve, grinning dares at the homeless and poor who come through the line. I say, “Call me Fenris” to some and wink at others. When they are afraid, I let my smile fall tenderly and say, “May you find the end of your hunger,” like a blessing. When they bravely tell me to help myself, I accept a second or third bite and offer a different prayer: “I will still starve long after you are full, and the sun will stay in the sky.”
It’s exhilarating to feed others when they know how hungry I am. When they look at me and see my needs and desires and know I survive. I lick my lips and know they survive, too. There are many hungry people in the world
.
On Tyrsday, I get on my bike and ride the high wind for Memphis, where I wait in the line of petitioners to see Tyr the Just sitting judgment. I allow all who come to go ahead of me, so that I am the last, at the very end of the day. The hall of justice is lined with columns, sticky in late autumn without any air conditioning. Benches spread on either side of the aisle, and a box for lawspeakers, two news crews and the nine regular citizens summoned as official witnesses to Tyr’s judgment. I stride in, heavy steel-toed boots crashing against the marble floor, jeans tight, emerald T-shirt even tighter, and a leather vest laced up my back with silver wire. I’ve left my hair down, painted my lips, and put glitter on my eyelids. This is the Glory Mask, the face of the girl wolf.
When Tyr sees me, he grows even more rigid, his flesh hand fisted atop the armrest. His glacial eyes widen just a fraction, something even I would not have seen had I not been staring at him. “This is done,” he orders, getting to his feet.
“No,” I call out, continuing down the aisle toward him. “I am here for judgment.”
His jaw clenches; he is an old castle wall, handsome and ruinous.
I smell so many aftershaves and body odors, shoe polish and hairspray and cobwebs, overheated computer parts, ink and plastic, taco sauce. I stop at the base of the two-stair dais and tilt my head up toward his.
Tyr the Just steps down to me. I flash him a toothy grin, all bravado. He reaches with his flesh hand and cups my chin. I lean in, and he grips harder; I might get bruises. It is a welcome, wonderful ache.
“What are you doing, Fenris?” he whispers. The cameras have such good microphones, we have only the illusion of quiet privacy. Nobody behind or around us breathes.
I say, “You held my heart in your hand. Tell me if you found it wanting. Judge me, god of truth.”
His hand falls away. “Fenris.”
I lift my eyebrows. I part my lips to draw in a tasting breath of him. “Forgive me or send me away forever, Tyr. It is the Day of Judging, and I need to know.”
“You’ll try again. You aren’t sorry for it,” he mutters.
“You’ll stop me again. You always do.”
Casually, as if the movement is incidental, Tyr slips his hand into the pocket of his slacks. He pulls out a thin, shimmering chain of rainbows.
My collar.
“You cannot offer me your other hand to distract me while some other god slips it on,” I say, trembling at the sight of it.
He takes my hand in his cool gold and silver one, turning my palm up. And he snakes the chain in a spiral against my skin. “I will not put it on you.”
“Why not?”
“I have never been able to look at you without remembering I was the one, all those years ago, who bound you.”
“With love, with trust.”
“It was still a binding.”
As I step nearer, my steel-toed boots knock into the shallow first step. “You’re supposed to judge me, not yourself.”
“No one is above justice and truth,” he says deeply, low and soft.
Closing my hand around the collar, I ask in the smallest whisper I can, “What do you want from me, now?”
“Be careful with yourself until I can fetch you another apple.”
I frown. “I do not know if I will eat it again.”
Panic flares across his feature; everyone present must see it clearly. An awkward, fearful shift waves through the audience. “Fenris,” he begs. “You must.”
The hunger in my belly has encompassed my new heart. Its beating feels desperate. “Why?”
His eyes flick to the cameras, to the rest of his justice court, and back to me. “I won’t stop you if you are not immortal. When you try to devour the sun again, how could I stop you if it meant you died forever?”
“That….” I pause, a gasp in my heart, and deliberately choose to say the rest, though it will be caught on camera, though it is obnoxious. “That sounds like bias, Tyr the Just.”
In reply, he sinks to his knees before me. “It is impossible to be unbiased, if you have a heart.”
“Get up,” I hiss, panicked myself now. I clutch at the shoulder of his suit jacket, tugging. “Get up.”
The god smiles broadly, gleaming teeth and crinkled eyes. “Promise me you’ll take care until I get you an apple so that I can protect the sun. So I can know you will live.”
I shake my head in denial, having expected to make promises about my hunger, about control, about behavior, or about wearing this collar again.
“Promise me,” he murmurs, taking my hands off his shoulders, pressing them together with the gleaming rainbow chain between them.
I let my knees go and fall into him, kissing him so he stops talking, kissing him because he tastes like apples and blood and honey soda and limes.
• • •
On Odinsday, I wake up naked in Tyr’s Miami bed, sprawled beside him, and hungry. When I’ve stayed in his home before, he’s been awake earlier, already frying bacon and brewing chicory coffee, but this morning, he sleeps the sated, deep sleep of a man who is more than full. I scratch at his stubble and skim through the hair on his chest. I drag my hand along his collarbone and walk my fingers against his ancient, faded battle scars. Tyr sighs in his sleep, grumbling and reaching for me.
I roll over him, stretching across his body to the nightstand, where, at the base of an elegant black lamp, the collar of impossible things coils. It clings to every available shard of late-morning light in the room. I take it up, the silky, delicate chain cool against my fingers, and propped against Tyr, I loop it around my neck.
The clasp is tricky, and the moment it latches, I gasp at the flood of sharp sensation running down my spine.
Then it is gone, and I only remember that the sensation was there, not what it felt like.
Tyr says, “Glory,” thick and sleepy. He spreads his hand against my chest, fingers at the collar that has melted into a silvery scar necklace, palm over my heart.
“I’ll be a little bit careful,” I promise him.
• • •
Because it’s Odinsday, I get out of bed and go to the Port Orleans Death Hall. Instead of slipping inside, I wander the ghostly white city of the dead that surrounds it. Mausoleums of marble and pale granite and concrete rise like row houses, decorated with hammer statues and lambs, hands folded in prayer and stone flowers and fire engines. Plastic flowers brighten the metal vases beside vault doors, and some real flowers, too, wilting in the soft autumn heat. I breathe evenly, smelling musty old death and raw salt tears, the mangy water stagnating in the cisterns, iron rust, troll droppings, and molted pigeon feathers. I skim my fingers across Thorson names and Freyan, too, etched into the rock, into monuments to the city’s militia and the oldest decrepit families. I imagine them in Freya’s Hel, in that meadow where Baldur is now, or in the Valhol or sleeping peacefully here until Thor Thunderer calls them to his far mountain for the final battle.
To their graves, I whisper, “Dream deep until that day comes, for it will be me who begins it. Me who swallows the sun for the start of that final destiny.” I smile, lips pressed to rough, gouged mausoleum corners. “I am still hungry.”
• • •
Thorsday, I walk openly in Shield, Colorada, grinning my side-splitting grin for everyone who sees and recognizes me. The brave ones nod encouragingly and ask for a picture. Or they press lips together in disapproval, for I am chaos and unpredictability and also too beautiful. I suspect they were excited when I attacked Baldur; they thought the world was about to change, and now are afraid of themselves. The true cowards run or shy away. One or two, I chase for a few blocks, to give them something to be afraid of. To be wild, to put on a show.
• • •
Freyasday is my day for dancing.
I find a harvest festival in the eastern Kansa river valley, full of Freya’s children and Lokiskin. A hundred people play wild drums, three bonfires burn even before the sun sets, and a family of seethkonas tosses bones and dan
ces through intricate red ribbon labyrinths. They do not stop me from stripping off boots and jacket and flinging myself into their celebration. I spin and sweat with them, cry out in the heartbeat rhythm of the drums and old songs, growl and twist and stomp my feet.
They laugh and scream and welcome me. Me, the Fenris Wolf, the Hungry One. They give me beer and mead and roasted corn, let me share their meat and plentiful grapes and apples.
In my turn, I whisper secrets of Freya’s Hel to any who wish to know. I talk of Baldur and memory loss, of the sweet colors and languid, gentle flow of time there. I promise them Freya the Witch embraces all their dead loved ones, and say that if not for my place to come in the end of the world, I would sleep there still. Live and burn now, I say, so that you may rest in death.
I curl all night in a heap of Lokiskin and Freya’s children, on blankets beside the glowing bones of a fire, under stars and a thin, slivered moon. It is a puppy pile, with me at the heart.
• • •
Freyrsday, I go back to Bliss Church, in the Mizizibi kingstate. I push to the front of the aisle and stand at the stage, quiet and smiling, so that the Vassing preacher cannot miss me. He tugs his braided beard and nods a slow welcome, while his wife makes a sign of peace over her heart but stays away. It’s their beautiful protégé, Rathi Summerling, who crouches at the edge of the stage and holds his hand down to mine. Green is the color of death, and the color of my eyes, but today Rathi wears it: mint waistcoat embroidered with vines, emerald pinstripe linen suit, an evergreen and aqua and mint paisley tie knotted fat under his chin. His eyes are as bottle-green as I remember, and his smile thrills. I take his warm hand, and he heaves me up beside him, murmuring, “We match today, what a sign,” for of course, I’m wearing green, too.
The young preacher lifts our linked hands high, and into the thin microphone that curves around his cheek from a nearly invisible headset, he calls to the congregation, “Can you imagine what this creature can teach us of Satisfaction?”