The Apple Throne

by Tessa Gratton

  “For the good of the world,” the girl repeats bitterly and balls her hand into a tight fist. “Does your goddess use women and men to change the course of the world’s fate?”

  “Of course! There is no other way to do it than to use us. She gives us prophecy or dreams for a guide, but we are the actors. The gods may not so directly interfere.” I touch the back of her hand. “What does she want from you?”

  “To kill a troll, I think.”

  “There are worse things she could ask than that.”

  We sit quietly, hands together, listening to the vibrant music from the mansion. I’d like to walk in—even if my sundress is hardly fit for a grand occasion—and find Soren, for surely he is here if the disir brought me to the place Baldur is. Oh, I miss him. The melody in my heart longs for his harmony.

  I try to think instead what this girl needs. She’s confused by her dreams and by something Freya wants of her. Freya wanted me to be Idun, and I did as she wished, but it wasn’t just because she asked it. I did it for the world, too.

  Squeezing her hand, I say, “In the end, it doesn’t matter what Freya wants. Sometimes you must stop thinking about the gods and think about yourself and the people you love. What do you want the world to be like? What can you do to make it that way? You don’t need to know what Freya has done or wants done. You don’t need to know what Loki or the Alfather or Tyr the Just wants. What is in your heart? Let that be your guide, and it will bring you to those moments when you can change fate or the entire world.” I’m quite breathless when I add, “We make our own world.”

  The Valkyrie girl’s thin brows come together with determination. She nods, hard, and stands up. “Thank you for your counsel, lady. Do you have a name? So I may thank you properly at a shrine?”

  My triumph fades in a rush. “I had one once,” I say. “But no one remembers it.”

  “Tell me and I’ll remember,” she insists.

  Sadly, I shake my head.

  Her lips purse, and she’s already distracted, thinking of her own life, her own destiny. She steps away from me, and I’m forgotten like that.

  I have to go, to find the disir and return to my orchard and my destiny without Soren. He and Baldur are in that ball, but I am not part of that life.

  Eighty-two nights.

  Nearly three long months without a dream, but I am determined their loss be my only regret.

  When I’m alone, I climb the apple trees. I swing into them and hang upside down until the blood rushes into my face. I break fingernails against their bark and get my hair tangled in their leaves. The trees are all heavy with fruit. It’s so hot my hair hangs in limp, frizzy curls.

  When I’m alone, I read novels and newspapers or watch old movies or television. I enjoy marathons of old crime shows and the bizarre Star Trek, fantasy stories and historicals rich in detail.

  When I’m alone, I paint my fingernails and learn new techniques for shading my eyes with makeup the goddesses of beauty send. I teach myself to braid my hair into a nine-strand rope. I read magazines and cut out the most vibrant colors. I avoid my old favorites though—Disir Life and Teen Seer—because they’re so full of dreams and prophecy.

  When I’m alone, I never unroll my seething kit. I cannot dream, Freya said, because I was torn out of fate. I do not want to know what it feels like to try seething only to fail.

  Some days I take off my slippers and put on my fight pants and sports bra and run around the entire orchard. It’s exhilarating to see everything that’s mine, the colors and pounding energy that grabs at my skin. I’ve nearly managed a pull-up, but don’t use the wooden sword or practice holmgang techniques anymore; they remind me too viscerally of Soren.

  I tell stories to the apples of immortality: my favorite comedies and sweeping tragic tales of the Icelanders or Volsungs. I tell the tree about the creation of the world; of the women who built our great families; of the founding of the United States, the Covenant and the New World Tree; stories of the Thrall’s War; the final native tribes and their lost gods; Sleipnir’s birth and the famous loves between gods and mortals.

  The tree does not applaud, but I imagine the caress of its leaves against my cheek to be like a kiss.

  I sleep.

  I wake up.

  There’s nothing in between.

  Occasionally, I lie down in a patch of sun between bending apple branches and nap away an afternoon. There’s only darkness behind my eyelids, the emptiness of a life outside fate. Even when I pluck a ripe red apple and eat the sweet or sharp or sour fruit that should feed my imagination, I do not dream.

  Though the parade of gods continues, the small gray cat is my only permanent company. He steals bangles, but returns with feathers. He climbs the trees with me and occasionally sleeps in a ball against my stomach. When he dreams, his whiskers twitch and so do his tiny round toes. I press my face to his back and imagine I can see the images, borrow those dreams out of his little head.

  Once a week, I walk to the tall iron gates that mark the edge of my orchard and look out at Bear Vale, the halcyon valley where the Idun’s Bears berserker band lives and works and trains. They guard the orchard against…what? Accidental discovery or tourists or trolls? I bring them a bushel of regular apples, half red and the rest green or golden or in-between, and they hand me back groceries or a jug of cider. I know their names, though they blush when I speak, as if I never were a seventeen-year-old girl who brought Baldur the Beautiful into their midst and wanted them all to die because they killed him.

  Gods come and gods go, and if it weren’t for the lack of dreams, if it weren’t for the lack of Soren Bearskin, I might be content. This is who I was meant to be.

  I tell myself: This is who I was meant to be.

  Eight-four nights.

  Tonight.

  Tonight I’ll see him.

  For the first time since our spring bargaining, Soren will be here with me. I hardly can think what I’ll say first. I pluck at my hair and change my dress three times, until finally Freya arrives to take me to Bright Home for the Summer Solstice celebration.

  She thrusts a new dress into my arms. It’s long and formal, a strapless white that falls to my ankles. Delicate sandals to go with it. I wear my mother’s black pearls and push rings from the gods onto my fingers. Freya helps me paint my eyes and cheeks and mouth, vibrant with glittering pinks and frosty cream. She says the makeup will help with her shine—that magic she fixes around me so that nobody remembers my face, even when the cameras catch Idun at the high table or record her dancing tonight with Thor and Baldur and, if I’m lucky, my own Soren. I’m bouncing and reckless with his name as Freya weaves her spell. She swallows her sighs.

  “I advise you to stay away from him at the feast,” my goddess says.

  I deflate. “Why?”

  “You are Idun the Young, and he is a mortal boy, sworn to Baldur. What have you to do with each other in the eyes of the world? This is simpler.”

  “But our bargain…”

  “Soren will be delivered to you here at dawn for your time together, Idun. We do not break such promises.”

  Nodding, I spread my hands down the silky dress as I wonder if he’ll even be there to see me in it and what he will think.

  Freya presses into my hand a coin of copper. “This,” she murmurs, “is the first of the finding charms I’ll give you. Put it into Soren’s hand and he’ll always find his way to this orchard. You control which mortals know it now, my love. When you return tonight, a small chest of them will wait on the hearth.”

  I throw my arms around her cool neck, breathing in the light candle scent of her: juniper and summer grass today.

  My fingers tingle, and my toes, too; my heart thuds incomparably.

  Bright Home is alive with sunlight and drums, for this is the longest day, Thor’s own holiday, and the battle games are just drawing to a close as we arrive at the mountain. There’s feasting and awards for the greatest warriors, contests of strength and speed, and finall
y a sacrifice of two goats that represent the eternal loyalty the Thunderer bears to his flock. I look for Soren while attempting to seem as though I am not. The crush of people is too great to pick him out, even though Soren usually is very poor at blending in.

  Baldur comes to me after the feast, after the awards are handed out and all the company has scattered to mingle. He surprises me with a hand at my waist and a sparkling grin. “Idun, good to see you.”

  I lean into the warm press of his hand. There are a million things I might say, but I only relax against him for a moment. Those indigo eyes of his, shifting with the orange-purple hint of sunset, narrow and wrinkle when I kiss his jaw.

  He grins a flirtatious grin, and my heart lights up with gladness that he is here and not some dead, silent star. “My lord Baldur,” I breathe, for I do not know how to call him anything else, even if I am supposed to be playing his equal, a god myself. Baldur says, “My friend Bearstar waits outside the hall because he’s so nervous he can barely speak.”

  Despite Freya’s advice, I slip through the crowd, unrecognized by mortals, unremarkable to the media, and out onto one of the myriad porches where the shadows creep heavy and slow. Sword-like pine trees surround the buildings, black in the evening, and there’s Soren in a T-shirt and jeans and boots, plus a white, tailored summer jacket sharpening the shape of his shoulders-to-hips. The pale clothing darkens his skin, highlights his difference from all the gods of Asgard and most of their famous followers.

  Soren doesn’t see me, and he’s frowning. His hands hang at his sides. I thought I would want to kiss him immediately, press against him, breathe his breath and swallow that hot energy he carries around him like a second skin. But I can’t seem to move.

  His name is called; a crowd of godlings wave at him from the corner. It makes him half-turn, and he sees me.

  Astrid, his mouth shapes the name, and I force a smile because people are watching. I am Idun. I am Idun.

  I let the crowd pull him away.

  Eighty-five nights.

  The eastern sky is silver when Freya returns me to my orchard. The mountain silhouettes are harsh and black.

  Soren waits for me in the empty lawn between my cottage and the apples of immortality. Crouched, he fiddles with a stick in the grass, scraping the end against the earth in senseless patterns. He’s lost the summer jacket and wears only the T-shirt and jeans, loose and casual and already barefoot. He must have caught a ride with another god to beat me back. I barely can see him, only his shape. Just like the mountains. He looks up when he hears me, and a smile breaks across his face.

  He stands and I fling myself against him; he catches me up off my feet. I squeeze so tightly, but I know he won’t break, I can’t hurt him, I can press and hug and do my worst and Soren will be strong enough to let me. He cups the back of my head, wraps one arm around my ribs. He smells like Bright Home smoke.

  “Astrid,” he whispers. “I missed you.”

  I push back so he drops me, then I pull him inside the cottage. His boots are beside the front door, and I leave them there, dragging at his hand. I kick off my fancy sandals to climb onto the narrow bed. I stand on the quilt, and he stands on the floor, his face level with my collar. I put my hands on his shoulders for balance.

  “Keep saying my name,” I whisper, and I run my fingers through his buzzed-short hair. I kiss his forehead, his temple.

  “Astrid,” he says, hands on my elbows. I kiss his cheek, touch my lips to the vertical spear tattoo that marks him a berserker. “Astrid.” His hands slide up my bare arms to my shoulders, to my neck, and he places his thumbs under my jaw, his fingers spread around my skull. “Astrid.”

  I kiss his mouth and he doesn’t say anything else.

  For hours and hours, I am everything I used to be. A girl in love, with friends and a place and a future. When he’s touching me, that’s the only future I know. When I tell him about the gods I’ve met, the pie I’ll bake for dinner, those are the only dreams I need. He tells me in his slow way what he’s been doing with Baldur, the travels of three short months, and it’s like we were only apart for some minor inconvenience. That Valkyrie I met on Disir Day was his friend, Signy Valborn, who as of only yesterday has become the Ninth Valkyrie, and, Soren says, she appreciated my counsel. He speaks of her with conviction. He believes in her. He tells me of fighting trolls at the sides of berserker brothers, of riddles and Freyan preachers and Port Orleans, and it shocks me to realize he might have died for the Valkyrie, fighting for her cause. That troll mother might have crushed him, and I didn’t dream of it.

  I’ll never know when he’s in danger. If he needs me.

  That is the true price of my dreamlessness, of my inability to seeth.

  Now that I am Idun, I am more like a regular girl than I ever was, a girl who cannot read fate or seeth into the future, a girl who can rely on nothing but prayer and her own plain senses.

  I close my eyes and flatten myself against Soren, listening and not listening, desperate that he not recognize the anxiety swimming in my blood.

  But he does, of course. Hiding myself from him is like hiding the sky from a bird. He says, “What’s wrong?” and I shake my head. He pushes me onto my back and says, “You tell me, Astrid. Tell me now.”

  I touch his bottom lip. “You might have died. And how would I know? Who would tell me? You might die, and I wouldn’t know for weeks until you didn’t arrive on our day.”

  “You’ll know.”

  My gaze slicks away from his face. Soren climbs out of the bed. He pulls on jeans and pads barefoot to the front door that hangs wide open to the summery orchard. The muscles shift along his broad back as he puts a hand on either side of the frame and leans in, stretching, pushing away again with his head hung low.

  “Something could happen to you, too,” he mutters. “And how would I know?”

  Drawing the sheet with me, I go after him. I touch my forehead to his spine, between his shoulder blades. “Do you remember that night in the barn in Cheyenne when I asked you if you could imagine me without my seething? Because I told you I couldn’t imagine you without your berserking?”

  He only grunts his acknowledgement.

  “You retained your power, Soren,” I whisper. “But I have lost mine.”

  “What?” He turns around against me, cups my elbows. “What do you mean?”

  I cannot meet his eyes and stare at his smooth chest. A small skid of scars glints at his collarbone. I’ve no idea how he received it, though they look like claw marks. Claws I should have seen. “It’s been eighty-five nights since I’ve dreamed of anything.”

  Silence is the only response, but his fingers tighten on my arms.

  “I am not what I once was,” I continue, trying to sound stronger and more certain than I feel. “I am barren of my power. No dreams, no seething, because I am Idun.”

  “But why?” he says, voice scoured dry as a desert. “Why would she do that to you?”

  I shake my head. “She did not do it. It’s a consequence of being forgotten, of being pulled out of the fate of the Nine Worlds. I am not connected to it, and so I cannot connect. It is simple.” My voice is terribly thin.

  “No.” Soren transfers his hands to my face. “Astrid, I remember you. You affect my destiny and are connected to it. You must be.”

  “If I was, I would dream of you. I’m not part of the world.”

  He kisses me. Not soft or kind, but to prove something. I hang from it, from his kiss. He wrenches away and sinks to his knees, burying his face against my belly. “Astrid, you’re a part of my world,” he says, so low, so embarrassed as he always sounds when he says something romantic.

  I bend over his head, nuzzling the soft buzzed hair. I’m sure of nothing, except this.

  Eighty-six nights.

  He leaves at dawn, twenty-four hours after he came, but not before taking my fingers and tracing them along the apple tree tattoo partially inked onto his right forearm. The roots bind his wrist, the trunk follows
his veins, and the apples dot his skin like blood. I refuse to cling, but tears fall from my eyes and I scrape them away.

  There are tears in his eyes, too. “Only three months,” he says casually, as if it’s nothing.

  “Only three months,” I repeat, hating to be reduced to this.

  He nods, those full, soft lips of his forced into a smile. He drops my hand to walk to the gate. “Dream of me,” he says, as if it’s a promise that he’ll make it happen.

  Sorrow worms its way through my bones, and also a bright desire to return that impossible pledge.

  Soren touches his chest, just over his heart, before finally turning to go.

  Eighty-nine nights.

  The moment Soren left my orchard, I began gathering all I would need for a grand seething circle.

  If he is right and my fate remains connected to his, I want to prove it. I must prove it.

  Fallen apple wood and twigs, dry leaves and used paper for the fire; fresh mead from the Bears; a jar of red lipcolor the goddess Volla gave me when she came last month; and I beg Lofn to bring me a cat’s heart or the heart of a chicken or turkey if its all she can manage. The heart will be my seething supper, to ground me here in the living world.

  It takes three days to be ready, after eighty-nine dreamless nights.

  My mom taught me that dusk is the best time for seething, when shadows press between day and night, when the light is diffused and there is no point of reference for the time, no sun and no moon if it can be managed. It would be best to have a crowd, some to drum a heartbeat rhythm for me, some to sing, some merely to stomp and dance and raise energy. It would be best if Soren were here, to focus me and to catch me when I fall.

  I will fall.

  It is the nature of seething.

  I light my fire, which will shoot taller than me for a time. I unroll my seething kit, the smooth leather covered with pouches of herbs and medicines, charms, runes, drugs and poisons to evoke the proper response in my body. I remove the small store of corrberries—tiny, dried-out, rusty things—and my yew wand. I draw the rune death on my left palm and the rune life onto my right. I dot red over my eyes and paint it across my mouth. I pull worn catskin gloves over my marked hands and lift the small chicken heart I roasted with salt and rosemary the way my mother prepared such things a long while ago. It’s gamey and bland, but easy to swallow.