The Lost Sun (21 page)

I spend the rest of the ride with my cheek against the back of Glory’s hair, my eyes wide open to watch the black lines of Cheyenne at night.

It’s better I can’t talk to Glory while we ride. I also can’t tell how much time passes, and it’s difficult to believe I’m huddled up against Fenris Wolf. That she seems to have decided helping us is in her best interest.

Finally, Glory slows her motorcycle in the middle of the highway. There aren’t any cars, and I look out in every direction to see nothing but blackness and stars. The sky gapes overhead; the grassland appears at first to be a solid flat surface of sagebrush and sand. But as my eyes adjust to the stillness and shadows, I see the land rolls very gently, in wide plateaus and valleys. There could be houses or whole towns tucked away.

Glory says, “Hold on,” and just as I do, she turns the bike in a quick U and drives slowly back the way we’ve come. Her head tilts up. She’s smelling the wind.

All I smell is grass, exhaust, and bubble gum. But Glory finds an invisible turnoff, only a dirt road next to a green mile-marker sign. She kicks off again, but keeps our speed low. The engine putters and we rile up the dust. I want to bury my face in her hair so it doesn’t get in my eyes, but I keep my gaze ahead. There in the distance is a small orange flicker of light.

A minute later she stops. She puts a foot down and says, “Get off. This is it.”

I don’t react. In the starlight I can only barely see her impatient expression. “That’s where they are? That light?”

“It’s a barn, I believe. And yes. I smell pine smoke and ash. Gasoline and old horseshit.” She sniffs long, probably for my benefit. “Also Baldur. He’s there. With two other girls. One with cotton candy shampoo and the other smelling of snakes.” Glory grins. “A cousin of mine.”

“Vider,” I say, glancing off at the distant fire. Part of me is relieved she went with Astrid and Baldur, part of me unsure what I’ll say to her.

“Mmm. Well, be nice to her, or I’ll snap your fingers off one by one.”

I remain on the bike, hands loose on my thighs.

Glory twists all the way around. “Off you go!”

“You aren’t coming?”

Her smile is small and flirtatious. “I have to get my ass down to New Spain and pretend to smell Baldur there. Get them off your tail after today’s fiasco.”

I grimace.

“Yeah, it’s all over the news, big boy. Baldur the Beautiful in the Cheyenne kingstate. Burn some pig fat in thanks that nobody recognized you.”

Slowly I swing my leg off the motorcycle. I stand, swaying slightly as I adjust to being on solid ground. It isn’t as though I’ve been sailing the ocean, but the day was so rough, the food not enough to refuel my losses. I wish I had my spear to use for balance, but it’s long gone. At least it was only a practice weapon from Sanctus Sigurd’s. “Thank you,” I say to Glory.

She tilts her head and eyes me. “If you get Baldur safely to the orchard, you’ll owe me nothing.”

I put my fists against my heart. “I have sworn to Baldur, Lady Fenris, under the sun and to the edges of the world. Everything I do will be to serve him.”

The corners of her mouth turn up mischievously. “A berserker sworn to the sun god? What fantastic gossip. Perhaps it will cheer my father.”

Bowing, I give her my permission to tell Loki, though I cannot imagine she would care if I didn’t. The idea of the god of fire and lies knowing my intimate business is so distant and far outside my purview that it rolls off my shoulders like rain.

Glory walks her bike around and makes to remount.

“Glory,” I say, the false name falling out of me more naturally than her title.

She glances over her shoulder. In the darkness, she’s only a shadow with green glitter at her eyes. “Soren.”

“Tell me why they need me. Why me? Why can’t they find the orchard alone?”

“Because you know where it is.”

“But I don’t!”

Glory shrugs. “Then you’re all doomed.”

I call out again, but she ignores me and climbs onto her bike. She leans over it, back arched provocatively and elbows out. The engine rumbles and she growls, too, as if in conversation with it. Then she’s gone in an instant, leaving only a wake of dust and the smell of exhaust.

TWELVE

DAD’S SWORD CHAFES my shoulder as I walk toward the firelight. I can’t wait to remove the sheath, to rub out my sore muscles and change into a shirt that isn’t caked with sweat and dirt. My boots are the only things that aren’t the worse for wear.

My pace picks up as I near the barn, eyes on that pinprick of light. I am so near to her. To Astrid. After being afraid I wouldn’t see her again for weeks or months, if ever, knowing now how close I am makes me ignore the aches woven through my body.

Could wanting Astrid be enough to hold my frenzy in check? After today the madness has become my burden, my responsibility. A curse that I must tame again and again, every day.

Surely it can’t be controlled the way Fenris Wolf keeps her hunger in check, with a need stronger than starvation.

With love.

I pause and close my eyes to trade the world’s darkness for my own.

It’s a thrilling possibility, but I don’t know if I can embrace it. No matter how much of a relief it might be to think I only have to find something I need more than the rage, if it’s true, and love can hold back the rage, doesn’t that mean my father didn’t love us enough?

Either Glory’s solution doesn’t work for berserkers, or Dad’s need for us wasn’t strong.

The barn is closer than I thought. It looms on the grassland, heaving to one side where the roof collapsed. Several of the windows are unbroken, and though dusty, the glass gleams dully back at the sky. The tiny fire is burned down to embers but still glowing like a dragon’s eye, casting light at the Spark. There’s a ripple from a nearby creek stirring the silence.

I approach quietly, but nobody curls inside the Spark, and there’s no sign of any of the three near the fire. The barn doors hang intact, and the one I pull slowly outward hardly creaks at all. Inside is black, with thin shafts of starlight like ghosts in the rafters. Waiting for my eyes to adjust, I hear the flutter of wings overhead. The entire place smells of hay and must, and entering is like pushing into a deep, black sea.

Something shifts dryly to my left, where a mound of old hay rises gray and dark. I see their sleeping forms, and walk carefully closer as relief warms my skin. Vider has climbed to the top of the pile and splayed herself on her back with her face tilted up toward the windows. Her white-blond hair catches the
starlight. Lower, where hay spills down across the dirt floor, are Baldur and Astrid beside each other. Her back is against his shoulder, and she curls tightly in upon herself. She must be cold. It’s chilly even with the walls of the barn cutting the wind, and Baldur doesn’t give off heat the way I do. It should be me there with her.

For a moment I bend down, as if to take my place at Astrid’s side.

But my flushed skin reminds me the fever is alive. I could warm her nightmares, but at what price? The memory of the iron star tearing at my ribs from the inside holds me in place. I’m a berserker. A danger to all around me.

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.”