The Lost Sun (37 page)

The Alfather brings Vider and me to the high table and weaves a story of heroism that is so false with Astrid’s absence that I can hardly keep my expression even. But I glance at Vider, and she shows no sign of doubt.

This is the version she remembers. How will I ever speak to her again?

We’re inundated by hands held out to shake. Microphones are thrust into our faces. I don’t trust myself to answer in a way the Alfather would like—I can’t strip Astrid from my story even for show. Fortunately, the reporters know of me and prefer to focus on the so-named redemption of Styrr Bearskin’s son. They’re more than willing to fill in blanks for me. And here is Vider, the first female berserker in decades, sucking their attention as well.

Baldur himself saves me with a charming smile that slides half off his face, and extracts me from the welter of attention.

When we’re a little ways off, Baldur tucks closer so that I can feel the sunlight radiating from his face. “Soren?” he says, uncertainty pulling up the end of my name.

I cross my arms so that I don’t forget he’s changed, so that I don’t offer him a spar or tell him to leave off flirting with Vider. When he pauses and looks up at the false sky, I take the opportunity to look at his eyes. It must be a crystal evening outside, with not a hint of clouds. The blueness deepens the longer I stare into it, and Baldur’s hand is suddenly on my shoulder.

“In my dream, it was you who reminded me who I am,” he says.

Startled, I blink at him. I remember what it felt like to
watch him die, to believe he would never again hold the sun inside him. I rush to say, “I promised you I would serve you. You didn’t know if I would want to, and I do. If you …” I shake my head. “Not that you need it.”

Baldur laughs, and the entire hall gets brighter. The flashes are like miniature sunbursts, the golden pillars glare, and the snap of the pennants hanging from the ceiling is like applause. “Soren, you know how, when you dream, sometimes you don’t remember anything but what kind of dream it was? Frightening or hilarious or just strange? How there’s only the feeling of it like a ghost in your mind?”

I nod once. We’ve had this conversation before.

“Good. Because you’ll understand this, then.” He puts his other hand on my other shoulder. We face each other. “I don’t remember everything that happened, and I’m looking forward to the tale. But I know, I
feel
, that it was good. Even if I did die. It was a damn excellent dream.” He pauses, takes a deep breath, and says, “I need you.”

He holds his right hand out, and I grasp it. “Under the sun, and to the edges of the world,” I promise.

“The binding-by-light?”

“If—if that suits you, Baldur.”

He nods once, and slowly. “It does. Under the sun, and to the edges of the world.”

His father calls him then, and he claps my arm before jogging through the throng to Odin’s side.

I want to leave, but don’t know how or whom to ask, and so I hover at the edges of the feast, finally finding my way outside. The sun sets in a great swath of purple, peering out between the peaks. I walk among the evergreen trees and breathe deeply, planting my feet flat against the earth.
I am the mountain
.

“Feeling dangerous?” asks a voice behind me.

I turn, and there’s Glory, crouched on all fours in a dark bodysuit.

“I would like to go back to the orchard,” I say, “and wait for Astrid there.”

“Who?” Glory says with a wicked grin.

I tighten my jaw and say nothing.

“I’ll take you,” Fenris Wolf says, her green eyes glowing neon, “and happily cause some panic when they realize you’ve gone.”

“Did your father steal Baldur’s ashes and hide him in the desert? I was told that it had to have been a god.”

“That last part is most certainly true.” She rises to her feet and walks closer to me. Even in this dim purple light, the green glitter on her eyelids sparkles. “If he did, it was to repay an old favor.”

“To Freya.”

“Probably. That witch plots out strands of fate centuries forward.” Glory’s tricky smile tells me that’s as close to admitting the truth as she’ll get.

I toy with the stone troll’s eye in the pocket of my coat. “Tell me about Vider.”

Glory’s mouth curves down and she spits onto the bed of pine needles. “She was Lokiskin, and now is one of you.”

“And Loki’s upset about it.”

She puts her lips inches from mine and whispers, “Wouldn’t you be?”

I can’t even be sure Glory and I are talking about the same things, but I think back over everything she’s said to me and wonder if our meeting was coincidence after all. “Why did Vider make the choice she did?”

Glory’s breath sighs across my mouth and she leans back. “Here is all I may say: My father prefers to be a boy himself, you must know, and often adopts a playmate from among the caravan children. When she was a young girl, Vider was who he loved best. But one day, Vider grew up. It didn’t suit either of them.”

It turns my stomach. The worst part of it is, by choosing Odin, Vider has not found a place any more stable. She’s a berserker now, and it’s the most volatile profession in the world.

“Poor Vider,” I whisper, and Glory laughs.

All I want now is to be away from here, to be with Astrid.

“Let’s go,” I say to Glory, seizing her hand.

Astrid once dreamed of me riding a wolf the size of a bear, but she could not have predicted this.

I spread across the warm, rough back of Fenris Wolf, half god, half giant, and dig my fingers into her thick fur. My eyes are closed and my cheek presses into her. I feel her massive wolf-muscles work as she leaps across the sky.

We’re running so fast, with stars barely overhead and the
earth far below, and the exhilaration draws my frenzy along with a frantic heartbeat. Glory growls, the sound vibrating against my entire body like a cat’s massive purr. This is better than a heliplane, better than an orange ’84 Volundr Spark with tail fins, and I cannot wait to tell Astrid. To describe the stomach-dropping motion of flight and the rich smell of earth and bubble gum coming off Glory’s fur. The pristine chime of silver chains ringing at her neck.

In the end, I’m alone in the dark.

Glory leaves me in the valley beside Jenna Glyn’s pyre. I thank her, and she steals a hair from my head so that, she says, she’ll always be able to find me. I’m both comforted and unsettled by the idea, but I lift a hand in farewell as the giant wolf leaps again into the sky and disappears between the stars.

The feasting hall of Idun’s Bears is alight with noise and fire. Henry Halson and his berserkers must be watching the festivities at Bright Home and sharing in their own feast. All the country is probably doing the same.

I take up a vigil, standing or kneeling or pacing slowly around Astrid’s mother’s pyre. The former Idun, Jenna Glyn, the Seether of All Dreams, is sunk into the bed of wood, and when I catch a glance of her out of the corner of my eye, her licorice curls make me think it’s Astrid.

All night long I watch.

Mostly I stare up at the stars and center myself with long breathing exercises that Master Pirro would be proud of.

As the eastern sky begins to show traces of dawn light, I walk to the Bears’ feast hall and take one of the torches from its sconce. With it I set Jenna’s pyre aflame.

The fire consumes her, warming my face and hands. I think of the Berserker’s Prayer, but can’t sing it for Jenna. Instead I say, “May you find the sun, even in death, Jenna Glyn.”

“Thank you,” Astrid says behind me. She slides her hand into mine.

“Astrid!” I turn, gathering her up off her feet. I brush my cheek along hers. “How did you get here?”

“Got a lift from a wolf. She says if you ever change your mind about me, give her a ring.”

I set Astrid down. She remains in her fancy Idun costume, her curls snaking all around her cheeks. The ankle-length dress leaves her shoulders bare to the cold, and her mother’s plastic pearls cut a line of black across her throat. I kiss her forehead and then her lips. I kiss her closed eyes. In the orange light of her mother’s funeral pyre, her face is shadowed, half-living, half-dying. “You’re mine tonight,” she says. “In the morning I will learn to tend my apples, and count the days until the solstice, when you will come to me again.”

“It isn’t so bad,” I say, encircling her with my arms. “Only three months between. That’s hardly time to do anything of import or have good adventure to tell you.”

“Says the man who rescued a god in the course of eight days.”

I shrug. Astrid traces the line of my spear tattoo. “I love this, have I told you?”

“I knew.” I kiss her softly, reveling in the freedom of it, of touching her how I want, of kissing her and not being afraid. She slides her hands under the bearskin coat. “Will you do something for me tonight?” I ask.

“Anything.”

I skim my hands down her arms until I find her hands. “Dance with me.”

Astrid laughs, throwing her head back until she’s laughing up at the stars. She weaves her fingers into mine.

The sun in my chest ignites.

Her hands tug at me.

We spin.

Our feet stomp the cold earth, and the bones of the world stomp back. Neither of us solid, but both wild and dark and yearning.

Between us is a piece of the sky.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK WOULD not be what it is without the usual suspects: my first readers, Maggie Stiefvater and Brenna Yovanoff; my agent, Laura Rennert; and my editor, Suzy Capozzi. Not to mention everyone at Random House Children’s Books who has supported me through the last year, especially Jim Thomas, Mallory Loehr, Nicole de las Heras, Paul Samuelson, Jenna Lettice, Sonia Nash Gupta, Rachel Feld, Nora McDonald, and Michael Herrod. There are so many more who I haven’t had direct contact with: thank you!

Thanks as well to Kim Welchons, Myra McEntire, and Victoria Schwab for answering my panic and giving me exactly what I needed at the right time.

My Web designer, Chris Kennedy, might possibly be more excited about the United States of Asgard websites than I am. Bless you.

Thanks to La Prima Tazza in Lawrence, Kansas, where I’m sitting right now, drinking all your coffee and taking up an outlet.

I wouldn’t have imagined this world without Professor William Lasher and his Old English classes at the University of Cincinnati. In 2005, everything about academia and politics was depressing me, but translating my own
Beowulf
got me through it.

Will Callahan, thanks for taking those classes with me and passing me notes scrawled in Old English.

Mom and Dad, Sean and Travis, this book is a love letter to our family road trips: rough with camaraderie and American history. Thank you.

And always, Natalie Parker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TESSA GRATTON has wanted to be a paleontologist or a wizard since she was seven. Alas, she turned out to be too impatient to hunt dinosaurs, but is still searching for someone to teach her magic. After traveling the world with her military family, Tessa acquired a BA (and the important parts of an MA) in gender studies. While in school she studied Old English and translated
Beowulf
—leading her on a wonderful journey through the sagas, which in turn inspired her to create the United States of Asgard. Tessa lives in Kansas with her partner, her cats, and her mutant dog. You can visit her online at
tessagratton.com
.

Table of Contents

• Cover
  
• Other Books by This Author
  
• Title Page
  
• Copyright
  
• Dedication
  
• Contents
  
• Epigraph
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Nineteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Chapter Twenty-One
  
• Chapter Twenty-Two
  
• Chapter Twenty-Three
  
• Acknowledgments
  
• About the Author