The Lost Sun (35 page)

TWENTY-TWO

FREYA TOUCHES US both. “It is time to go to him. Odin will come with the dawn. You will receive your boons, and the moment you step out of this valley, all memory of Astrid will vanish.”

It is a worse feeling than ever the sharp frenzy was. It bites and gnashes, and I can’t think of a thing to say. I won’t recognize myself in a few hours.

Idun plucks a leathery apple from the golden tree and tucks it into her daughter’s hand. “When he rises, give him this, and you will become the Lady of Apples.”

Astrid takes it, not looking at her mother. She gives her other hand back to me, and it’s Vider, always willing, who asks Jenna, “What will happen to you?”

“She’s coming with me,” Freya says. “My most devoted, my beloved. Women will call on the spirit of Jenna Glyn for generations, and meet her in the seething dance.”

I don’t care, and by the way her hand in mine remains loose, the way she turns from the apple tree and begins the walk back
to the orchard gate, I know Astrid is convincing herself not to care, either. If we had more time, I might try talking her into forgiveness, but I’m selfish for her touch.

The gate looms like a giant’s iron mouth. Torches flicker, and in the far east a line of silver illuminates the mountain peaks.

Henry and his berserkers have been busy. They’ve set Baldur upon a pyre, and at each corner a bowl of herbs burns, sending acrid smoke into the predawn light. All nine berserkers stand at attention with spears and shields. Even Alwulf is there, blood dried on his neck, holding himself tall with his spear.

Their vigil is soon to end.

Freya goes ahead of us and, with a swooping gesture of her arms, makes the gate flow open. Every berserker sees us then, and as one they bow low.

The Feather-Flying Goddess glides over the meadow to where Baldur’s body lies. Idun follows close, and the three of us after. Vider was silent for the entire walk, and now I hear her footsteps pause. But Astrid and I go on.

There’s no spectacle of magic to his resurrection. Freya merely bends over his head and kisses him. Perhaps she speaks, perhaps not. Astrid holds my hand so tight.

Then Vider is at my other side, slipping her hand into the pocket of my bearskin coat to remind me where the troll eye rests.

No one moves, though Henry Halson glances at me. His face is joyful; I wish I could be as glad.

Baldur’s eyes flicker.

To our left, Jenna gasps, and then collapses.

Astrid cries out and runs to her mother’s side. She kneels. Her hands hover over Jenna’s shoulder. But the sun slips over the mountains just then, and Baldur takes a deep breath.

“Idun,” Freya says, in a summons not to be ignored. Astrid touches her mother’s slack lips and stands. I can see her shaking as she walks to Baldur and Freya. The sunlight catches her curls, highlights the gold in her eyes. She is so beautiful.

A murmur goes through the assembled berserkers, but they’re too controlled, or too afraid, to approach.

Astrid says, “Eat, Baldur.”

The god of light opens his eyes. I strain forward, longing to see him closer, to look at the dawn reflected there in all its silvers and pinks.

He sits tentatively, rearranging his weight on the pyre. Though he blinks with confusion, he takes the apple Astrid offers. His fingers brush hers and she smiles. It is the smile I know from the first moment she saw him, when she recognized the godhood in his glance.

I cannot forget that smile
.

It seems impossible that I should stand, but my legs remain solid as Baldur puts the small apple between his teeth. He closes his eyes as he eats, and when he swallows, a smile creeps over his mouth. His skin glows from internal radiance and the sun
fills the valley with golden light. They are twins, Baldur and the sun, and I blink. It’s hard to stare at him now, to study him in any detail. There aren’t any shadows on his face to give his cheeks or lips depth.

But I know his voice.

“Idun!” he laughs. I squint as he holds his hands out to Astrid. Uncertainty flits through her expression, but she takes his hands and helps him from the pyre.

“This is different,” Baldur says as he stands tall and surveys the valley. Despite myself, I feel warm and comforted. Parts of me that turned themselves to stone crack open.

“Aunt,” he says to Freya, who remains cool and still, “are we in Bear Vale? Where is my father?”

“Yes, Prince,” she replies. “Your father will be here momentarily. You’ve had quite the adventure.”

“You remember nothing of the last few days?” I say, my voice breaking.

Vider echoes my dismay. “No, Baldur, you idiot.”

He frowns at her, likely unused to such abuse. The frown changes from displeasure, though, into confusion again. “You … and …” He glances at me. “It is like a dream. I remember you as if I’ve spent days dreaming of you.”

It is what he said before, only then we were reality and his godhood was the dream.

Astrid stares at him like he’s a ghost. And I realize that what I feel, the horrible betrayal of forgetfulness, is what she will face in me. She sees Baldur and knows that soon she will
look at me and I will not know her. My heart twists; my fever blossoms hot.
No
.

Tugging away from me, Vider steps close to the god of light. “I’m Vider,” she insists. “And this is Soren. You were teaching me to fight, and that’s Astrid—not Idun, whatever they say—and we’ve driven hundreds of miles to get you here. There were trolls and …” Vider trails off as Baldur’s eyes widen.

“It sounds incredible,” he says, his mouth widening into a grin. He spreads his hands. “You must tell me everything. Trolls, you say?”

He’s giddy and bright, so pleasant, and with none of the sorrow or fear I’m used to. I look to Astrid and she’s looking back at me. Baldur the Beautiful lives, and so the sun will be safe in the sky. But the man who became our friend is only a dream.

Freya brings Astrid before the berserkers, introducing her as their Lady of Apples. They all nod, unquestioning, as if the forgetting magic permeates the valley already. Then she instructs them to move Jenna onto Baldur’s pyre, and tells them they should prepare for the Alfather to appear.

While she speaks, Baldur pesters Vider to tell him more of the story. He says she should go with him to find something to eat, because he feels like he hasn’t eaten in a week. His smile is half-cocked, and when I realize he’s flirting with her, I start for them. But Astrid catches my hand. “She can take care of
herself,” she murmurs. I turn to her and she takes my face, drags me down, and kisses me as if she can breathe only with my help.

It’s overwhelming and painful, and I twist my hands in her hair. Her nose crushes into mine, and she kisses me hard enough I feel her teeth. It is not pretty, but a mess of kissing. “I will never forget you,” she whispers, “and somewhere inside, you’ll know.”

Words die on my tongue as a cry echoes up from the gathered berserkers:
“Hangatyr!” “Alfather!”
Odin is coming. It’s time.

I jerk away from Astrid. “Astrid. My boon.” I laugh as I kneel and grab her around the waist. “My boon.”

She lowers her eyes and puts one hand over my heart. “You must ask him for what will make you happy. What will make you live a long life, with love and peace and—and happiness.”

“Yes.” I smile at her, and I feel the fever waking again. This time I welcome the warmth of it, as a comforting power, a familiar storm.

We gather in a crowd, shielding our eyes from the bright morning sun as a great eagle soars over the mountains and spirals down. A nine-foot wingspan at least; his feathers glint bright as gold. Flanking him are two ravens and a red-tailed hawk.

Astrid clutches my hand, and I wish I had a moment to tell her what I’m thinking, but Vider finds us again. She casts a look of horror toward Baldur where he stands beside Freya, hands on his hips, in the white shirt the berserkers gave him but the
same jeans we bought at that gas stop just outside Fort Collins. “I can’t trolling believe it,” Vider hisses at us while the eagle banks back. “You’re giving up everything for a nack-brained surfer with about as much in his head as the World Snake.”

I put a hand on her shoulder and say, “He is Baldur the Beautiful.”

“Remember when he ran away to Fiji a few years ago?” Astrid adds with a little smile. “With the whole corps of the Bostown Ballet?”

Vider huffs and crosses her arms. “We should have left him in Mimirsey.”

She continues shooting him furious glances. I watch him, too. Before we arrived in Leavenworth, Baldur asked me to be his friend. And he expected, too, how changed his memories would make him.

Nerves fist in my guts as I think of having my memories torn away.

The eagle’s wings snap, pushing at us with a sudden warm wind, and all the layers of feathers fold into a broad coat, rather like mine, that settles over Odin’s shoulders. He seems so modern, in black jeans and scuffed boots. His silver hair is braided down his back in a thick rope, and his wide hands hang relaxed at his sides. From here, his empty eye socket is only a shadow. I’m used to seeing him like this, appearing casually with Congress or beneath the New World Tree. Unlike Thor, who will not give over his armor, or Frigg, with her love for the old weaving ways, Odin has always been a god who changes with the times.

The berserkers go onto one knee in unison, saluting with spears held high and a sharp yell of
“Hangatyr!”

Their call suspends in the air a moment, while the two giant ravens duck down from the sky, laughing loud enough that I wince. One lands heavily on Odin’s shoulder, and the other flaps up to perch on Jenna’s pyre. The red-tailed hawk lands on the ground, shaking its feathers.

And then, suddenly, Odin’s single eye slides over me and in the empty socket next to it I see the frenzy. Odin scowls fiercely. His hair spreads wild around his head. He takes a spear and stabs himself with it so that his heart’s blood spills into the valley with a hiss of steam. Red is everywhere, drowning me in heat.

I blink and the vision is gone. Nothing changed, except my fever is awake. Burning.

My knees tremble. Here is Odin the Mad One. Odin Dark-Bringer. Father of the Slain. No matter how he plays at being a man, at aiding us when we request it, pretending to be nothing but a figurehead, this is the Alfather. Poetry comes from the pinpoint of black at the center of his heart, and the piece of sky in my chest was born in him, too. The battle-rage flares along my skin and shakes through my bones. I hold tight to it, knowing if I let go so near him, I could scorch the earth with my fury.

I was so unaffected by Freya, but I fall to my knees before the god of berserkers.

Though Vider and Astrid kneel as well, Odin doesn’t even
glance their way, but zeros past me and onto Baldur. In three large strides the Alfather is before his son, embracing him tightly enough to wrinkle his coat. Baldur claps Odin hard on the back. As Odin pulls away to study his son, tears fall onto his godly beard. “My son, my arrow,” the Alfather says in a voice like the crashing of waves.

“Father. I am well; no need to worry.” Baldur says it like a child. And he opens up to swing his arm toward us. “These are the friends who brought me here, Father. Soren and Astrid and Vider.”

Freya inserts herself, and quietly says, “Astrid is Astrid no longer, but Idun, Lady of Apples and Youth.”

I stand up, holding Astrid’s hand tight as all the power of Odin’s attention focuses on her. He comes, one arm about his son, and it takes all my energy not to back away. I avoid looking at his eye socket. The shadowed hole gapes there in his face, daring me to try again.

“So,” he says to Astrid, “you are the new keeper of our immortality. And here with Baldur.” Odin’s smile is a wicked one, belying the plain coat and jeans, making him more like the raven on his shoulder. “That must be quite the story. You will come with us to feast, and tell it to all my children. For they are your cousins now, girl.”

Astrid’s hand shakes in mine and I feel the stress in her arm as she hangs on to me, as she barely manages to remain upright. “Alfather,” she says. Her voice is empty.

Odin laughs. Both the raven perched on his shoulder and
the raven on the funeral pyre laugh with him. “You are too old to go easily with this, are you not? When you were a child, you’d not have feared me so.”

“There is much to fear in dancing so close with the gods,” she replies, a little of the familiar snap in her voice.

“Only too true, lady.” Odin bows to her, much to my astonishment, and Astrid puts her free hand to her heart and returns the gesture.

The Alfather’s gaze travels to me again, and his single blue eye takes everything in. Not just my bearskin coat and tattoo, but the edges of my frenzy and all the desire I’ve ever had to cut it from my heart. His stare leaves me breathless, as if he has reached in and filled my lungs with lightning. “Soren Berserker, newly named Bearstar. Son of one of my most wayward warriors. I see my son Baldur in your heart. I see you raise your spear against him.”

I quail at his words, and now it is my turn to hold myself up by the touch of Astrid’s hand. “Yes, Alfather,” I say.