The Lost Sun

by Tessa Gratton

  “Soren.” Astrid dashes across the lawn to me, making Taffy’s and the other girls’ eyes go wide.

  I wait for her, unable to turn away when my name hangs between us.

  “Do you ever come in?” Instead of reaching for me, she folds her hands together before her stomach.

  I focus on them, on her small wrists. If I lost control here, with her, it would be so easy to break her. “Praying won’t make my life better.”

  “That isn’t what praying is for.”

  Because we have an audience, I don’t ask what she thinks it is for.

  Astrid goes on when I don’t. “Your berserking is a gift. We need your strength to protect the people of New Asgard. To defend our values, our freedom against our nation’s enemies.”

  It sounds as though she’s been reading pamphlets from the Hangadrottin War College. Why is she challenging me like this? Why does she care that I don’t join in evening devotions? Can’t she see the fear and mistrust engendered by this tattoo on my face? With half our year slinking out of the chapel to watch our encounter—some excited, some hostile, and one dashing off, probably to get a teacher—it should be impossible to miss.

  “That is what they say,” Taffy adds, coming up behind Astrid to take her elbow. “But not all the Alfather’s berserkers can keep themselves from brutal murder.”

  Astrid, instead of shaking Taffy off as I suddenly want her to do, turns to go with her roommate, saying only, “Soren, you should come to my room tonight. I’m throwing runes, and I want to see what future is in yours.”

  I stand there, gutted, colder than I’ve been in a half year, as Astrid goes inside with the others, as the crowd melts away.

  I tell myself I don’t need to know my future. I won’t go. I can’t go.

  I know exactly what she’ll see.

  My room is sparse: the walls empty, the floor bare, with only a trunk of clothes and a desk that should have pictures and mementos but doesn’t. My father’s sword, sheathed and silent, leans against a corner. The second bed was removed last year along with London, so I have space for indoor exercise. It’s what I usually do, and will all day Sunsday, too, as it’s our break day from classes.

  But tonight I only lie on the hardwood, staring up at the ceiling, thinking about Astrid and my mom’s destiny game, about how angry I was when I realized we’d been running away from the world ever since my dad died. Mom wasn’t helping me listen for my destiny so that I could find it, but so that she’d know how to steer me away. I left her because I refused to run anymore.

  If Astrid can read my future in her runes, how is it brave to ignore her? She might tell me the berserking is inevitable. But there’s the outside chance I’m right, that I can fight it, and maybe Astrid will confirm that. She’ll see me grown and free, living my life apart from the berserking bands, liberated from battle and killing and this always-present fever. Then I’d know I’m on the right path, that I’m doing what I need to.

  I get to my feet and pull a school hoodie on, scrubbing a hand through my short hair. It’s been about a month since London buzzed it, and it feels shaggy. The second I notice I’m worried about how I look, I frown. Astrid is making me crazy.

  It’s a quick walk between dorms, and early enough that I can walk straight past their RA’s open door without checking in. Thanks to London, I know Taffy’s on the third floor in a corner room, and I take the stairs three at a time, in large, slow steps.

  The hall is brightly lit, with fewer scuffs on the walls than in the boys’ dorm, and a newer carpet. All the doors hang open, but I don’t glance in. At the far end, students overflow from Taffy and Astrid’s room, their backs to me as they peer inside. I smell honey and candles, and am vaguely surprised at the hushed atmosphere.

  A small girl leaning on the doorjamb, probably a second-year, notices me first; her shoulders jerk in surprise. She knocks into her neighbor, whose painted mouth makes a wide O. I keep my face solidly expressionless and stand in the doorway so I’m clearly visible.

  At least twelve people are crammed inside, all on the floor but for Astrid, who’s on the center of her bed like a queen, and Taffy, who’s perched right on the corner. Taffy purses her lips, but Astrid smiles. “You came.”

  I tuck my hands into the front pockets of my hoodie and wish I hadn’t. Light flickers on the ceiling from the candles stuck to the windowsills and desktop, overpowering the dim lamps. A bottle of honey mead is being passed around, and it occurs to me that I’m the only boy here. The other guests are in pajamas, sitting on their own pillows or wrapped in blankets. I tower over them all, and can’t see a path I could pick my way through in order to get to Astrid. I study her, seated with her legs up in the middle of a web of red yarn and dark scattered runes made from sticks and bones and rock. She’s got dark writing on her palms, and she’s staring back at me.

  For just a moment, we’re alone. It’s only the two of us, and in my mind I can hear her whisper, You’re a berserker, Soren. Fate is inexorable. That’s all she’ll read in my future.

  Several girls shift away from the door, away from me. They don’t want me to brush past them, as if even that quick exposure might be deadly.

  “I shouldn’t have,” I say, and Astrid’s smile fades. Like I’m a child who’s done something disappointing. A sick feeling sinks down through my stomach. I gesture toward her company, wanting to say I can’t let this happen with so many witnesses. But it’s a ragged motion. Astrid nods sadly and I leave as quickly as I can.

  It doesn’t matter what she might see in her runes. My fate is sealed.

  TWO

  TODAY IS THE last day of winter, and across the country, people turn off televisions and the interweave. They hang lanterns in order to wrap hope and light around their homes and loved ones. They wait quietly for the sun to return, in order to welcome Baldur the Beautiful back to life with joy.

  I usually spend holidays alone. But even for me, Baldur holds some appeal. There’s a chorus of gods in the USA, brought over from Scandia by our founding fathers: Odin Alfather, the mad one, the god of war and poetry. Thor Thunderer, the sky god, who defends us against our enemies. Freyr the Satisfied, god of wealth and prosperity. His sister Freya, the Feather-Flying Goddess of magic. Frigg, Queen of Heaven. Tyr the Just. Loki Shapeshifter, who never stops moving or changing.

  When we become citizens, we all dedicate ourselves to one, based on family tradition or personal preference. Or, as in my case, destiny of birth.

  My dad used to tell me that Loki sometimes drove an ice cream truck in the town where he grew up. I’ve seen photos in Os Weekly of Freyr walking down a red carpet with a starlet on his arm, and of Thor Thunderer standing over the body of a slain mountain troll that ventured into a Montania town and slaughtered a family in their sleep. Odin regularly visits the House of Congress to give his approval to a new law. Frigg cuts the ribbon at a new hospital. Tyr oversees his system of dedicated lawspeakers. And through her seethers, Freya gives us the magic to seek our destinies.

  Our gods are scattered throughout our lives, even when we live in a place as remote as Sanctus Sigurd’s. But none of them is so well loved as Baldur the Beautiful.

  He’s the god of light, and is handsome and golden, strong and funny. At the end of every summer, he dies and his body is consumed in a great bonfire, only to rise again at winter’s end. He gives himself to Hel for six months of every year, but lives harder and more brightly in the time he has with us on earth.

  He is the only god who dies at all.

  And that makes him the one most like us.

  At school we prepare for the equinox by folding paper lanterns and baking fortunes into clove-cakes. The lanterns will be strung, ready for the ceremony at dawn, and the cakes will harden overnight so that at breakfast we can each choose one to crack open and discover our future.

  I’m with my schoolmates in the dining hall, at a table of my own, peeling apples and gathering the long spiral strips of skin for the girls to throw at sunrise. The
shapes that the strips form on the ground will spell out the next year of the girls’ love lives. Taffy asked me with a hard smile if I would cut the skins. “It’s always better if a boy does it, Soren, but not one any of us wants.”

  Instead of rising to her bait, I took the basket and pulled a sharp knife from my boot. The only time she and London fight, it’s over how mean she can be, but I tell him it’s her way of including me. “Blow that!” he says. “You’re my friend.” But then he goes and sits with them and knows I won’t follow.

  As I lift a particularly red apple from the basket, I feel the fever spread in my chest, as though I’ve swallowed hot cider. The warmth spreads up my neck and flushes across my face. I hold tightly to the apple, staring at the pale glow of the TV reflected in its waxy skin. Then I close my eyes and a rush of empty blackness fills my head. There’s a distant roar, and I wish I were only going to pass out.

  The apple falls from my suddenly shaking fingers. I push my palms against the smooth table. All around me, students laugh and chatter, oblivious to the chaos swimming inside me, to the danger here. I have to get out. I have to be free of the hall before this power claims me and I destroy everyone.

  But as quickly as it flooded through me, the fever trickles away. I’m left, gasping, in the center of all that noise and crowd, a husk of what I was only moments before. I abandon the basket of apples and even the knife, and push outside.

  The fever has never come on so suddenly. I need to get to Master Pirro, because he’ll know what to do. He’s supposed to help me when it happens. That’s why I’m here at Sanctus Sigurd’s—to be near a man who can control me, because my dad isn’t available. But he’s out at the perimeter of the school grounds, resetting the troll wards as he does at every change of season.

  Panic stretches across my chest.

  I need to calm down.

  There’s one place I won’t be disturbed: the combat arena. Tucked back at the edge of the burial hills, up against the woods, it’s where they teach us fighting, preparing us for the day we might be called to ritual combat in response to a lawsuit or claim of honor against us. But it’s a formality these days, or a game. Most lawsuits don’t end this way anymore—and the vast majority of people hire a professional to represent them in holmcourt, either a fighter or a lawspeaker. But the arena is where I spend my free time.

  I stop beside the gate to tear off my shirt and kick away my boots. I shouldn’t work out in my school pants, but I can’t return to the dorms, whose common rooms are crushed full with students excited and babbling about the holiday.

  And so I do what I do best: lose myself in exercise.

  First I choose the slow, focused stretching program Master Pirro and I developed last year. He isn’t happy with my decision to fight the frenzy, says it will bite me in the ass someday, but I can’t do anything else. My father was a full berserker by the time he was thirteen, and I hoped when I turned sixteen and it still hadn’t come that maybe it never would. But since I turned seventeen I’ve been sleeping less and less and I’m constantly plagued by these low-grade fevers. All I can do is train my muscles for skill and calm, prepare my mind to contain the wildness. Isolate myself, keep tight control, be ready.

  When I’m warm and loose despite the chill air on my back, I grab a dull practice spear from the storage trunk and get set in the center of the arena. It’s ringed by a plain fence, hung with round shields that we use to determine who wins. I haven’t practiced with a partner other than Pirro since last fall because the school doesn’t want me to harm anybody accidentally. But it would be such a relief to slam my spear against another’s.

  I dig my toes into the dirt and ground into a mountain stance. Deep breaths lead me into the routine: thrusting with my spear, turning, cutting, blocking against an invisible opponent. Always knowing where I am, how my body fits into the eddies of air, aware of the wind on my face and through the leaves of the trees behind me. The ground holds me secure, and I lift each foot as though I stretch roots connecting my soles to the earth. I’m between earth and sky, in a fluid dance of battle melding all things into one. I am in control. I am warm and calm, not feverish. I am Soren Bearskin.

  Five repetitions later and I’m moving carefully through a serpent routine, my eyes closed and the spear horizontal to the earth. All I’m aware of is the air moving in and out of my lungs, the next step, and the smooth but rapid beat of my heart.

  I feel her coming through the strands of wind.

  I stop, and the earth and sky whirl without me until I suck in a deep breath and push the energy down through my feet, my roots, and back into the dusty arena floor. I open my eyes.

  Astrid watches me from the fence. The wind ruffles the hem of her skirt. She should be freezing, but this is what she’s worn both times I’ve seen her out of uniform: flimsy dress and thin sweater, with that circle of black pearls around her neck. As though she exists in a world that’s always summer.

  “Astrid,” I say, not moving from the center of the combat arena.

  Again she doesn’t bother with small talk, or even with complaining that I left her room so suddenly two nights ago. Leaning her arms on the top rail of the fence, she just says, “Every year on Baldur’s Night, I try to find my mother.”

  I don’t know what to say. Her mother is dead.

  “I chew corrberries and breathe yew smoke, Soren, and I dance a seething dance to search for her. For anything that will help me find her.” Astrid’s voice is smooth and unconcerned, but there’s something in the tension of her fingers where she grips the fence. This feels like a challenge. Like she’s daring me to say it. But, Astrid, your mother is dead.

  She lifts her hands, palms up, as if releasing some invisible balloon into the sky. “But every year I only see apples.”

  I frown. There isn’t a single reason I can come up with for her to tell me this. “Apples?”

  “Apples!” she laughs. The edge of her smile catches me, and I put down my spear. I walk to the fence and rest my hands on the gatepost near hers. Elf-kisses trail around her wrists: she’s cold; she just doesn’t care. “I was thinking, though.” She tilts her head up, and the laughter falls away. I wait, still unsure what she wants from me. The fever sleeps in my chest, but restlessly.

  “Maybe …,” she continues, lowering her eyes. She begins to reach for my hand, but doesn’t. When she looks back up at me, she’s determined. “Maybe you can help me go farther. You can help me find her.”

  “Me? Help you go farther where?” I’m trapped between wishing she would touch my hand and wanting to get away before my fever wakes again.

  “Into the seething. Across the river of stars and through the roots of the New World Tree, into death.” She counters the drama of her words with a wry smile. “Where all the wisdom of the world resides, you know.”

  “I didn’t.”

  Her smile softens again and her hand shifts closer to mine. “Will you anchor me, Soren?” It’s strangely formal, as a request from one warrior to another.

  I focus on her fingers, wanting rather desperately to say yes without thinking. But my best defense is caution. “I’m not safe.”

  “You’re the only person at this school with Freya’s wild magic inside you, too.”

  “It’s not her magic in me. It’s Odin’s.” I take my hands off the fence. I’ve never had a conversation like this before, never said so many true, raw things.

  “Soren.” Astrid becomes as still as stone. With one finger she touches my face. As she traces the spear tattoo cleaving my left cheek, I nearly flinch away. “I am not afraid of Odin’s berserk warriors. Especially a boy who has yet to raise his spear for battle.”

  Now I do withdraw a few inches. But no one has said they aren’t afraid of me before. None of the students here, none of the teachers, not my mom, not even Master Pirro. Just this girl I barely know. “Why not?” I ask, unsure I want to hear the answer.

  “You stand between the earth and the sky,” she says, echoing my own thoug
hts. “So do I.”

  That feeling of knotting fate my mom told me about is hot around me, and Astrid presents such a certainty, as if she knows all the possible outcomes. As if she’s really not afraid. I want to be unafraid, too. I want to, but I can’t. I remember what happened to my dad. I say, “It’s a dangerous place to be.”

  “Which is why I want help. Why I need you.” Astrid takes my wrists, curls her fingers around them. Her skin seems to send ropes of cold up through my bones. The frenzy leaps in my chest, or I tell myself that’s what it is: only the frenzy reacting to a seether, and not just me wanting this girl to keep talking to me. To keep holding my hands.

  “Soren.” She squeezes her fingers against my pulse. “Tonight will you help me build my fire, and stand ready while I dance?” Her voice is a whisper, mingling with the wind through the valley meadow.

  I nod, unable to speak the words pressing against my teeth.

  As the sun sets, Astrid and I sneak out of our dorm rooms and meet at Sigurd’s fountain. She carries a leather bag strapped over her shoulder and I have my own sharp spear. Together we walk into the darkness, toward the academy burial hill. As we climb the barrow, a slice of moon teases us with scant light, and the buildings of the academy below us are like dollhouses.

  I stand, watching the shadows that press toward the campus. Every window blazes. It’s a separate world in those school buildings, shallow and easy and full of hope. Normal. Nothing like the chaos out here.

  Unrolling the leather seething kit, Astrid removes two thin vials and a pouch of seeds. One vial contains lighter fluid, with which she lights a small fire made of yew branches swiped from the Great Hall. Their acrid scent sharpens the night for me. Astrid spills the oily contents of the second vial onto her fingers. She draws runes on her forehead and in the palms of her hands. I smell something heady and sweet like honey soda.