The Apple Throne

by Tessa Gratton

  And I tell Amon Thorson about the past two years—of serving with gods, of tending the apple trees.

  He listens and drives, through a haze of new snow that blows like silver ribbons over the highway. It’s my voice and the gentle clinking of the nails that hang from the roof, chattering together as the van sways.

  When I finish, Amon says I should get a bottle of water and protein bar from the cooler. I unbuckle and climb back into the warm, dim interior. I find the water and drink. The memory of Soren screaming seems to echo in my own throat, as if I’d been the one screaming. I hope my vision of his frenzy is not going to happen soon. I should hate to think of him berserk in a prison cell, making himself a danger to the militia.

  Then, there is this part of me so incredibly relieved, so happy, because it worked. I seethed. I dreamed.

  What changed?

  Freya told me I could not dream, could not seeth. She said I am not part of the destiny of the Middle World, so I can’t see its strands.

  But I stepped back into the world, stole a van, and altered a godling’s destiny. Maybe Soren’s now, too.

  Fate sees me again.

  • • •

  We come out of the mountains, traveling south through Ouragon kingstate. At some point, we’ll turn west to cut over more mountains, and find ourselves at the Pacific Ocean. For now, we sail through sweeping grassland. The golden hills are shaded by delicate snowfall, and ice clings to the evergreen needles in the valleys; they shine like magic in the pale sunlight. Twice we fill the tank at gas stops. Both times I duck against the old troll wall and seeth while Amon buys gas and snacks and the bundle of red yarn I ask for. I can’t help myself. I want to know I can do it again and again, that it was no fluke.

  The first dance I spin and spin but only touch blackness. There’s no fury—just aching dark and nothing. It is a true vision, though; I can tell by the burning edges, by the way I wake up. The second dance the frenzy finds me again, grabs me and flings me into madness.

  When I come to my cheek is raw, my fingernails bloody. My body is trapped between the ground and Amon’s. I struggle to gasp breath and say his name so he knows I’ve returned.

  “I think you shouldn’t do that again,” he mutters into my ear.

  “I have to. It’s wrong,” I whisper. “I shouldn’t be so vulnerable to the vision. I should see him berserking, not be caught it in myself. That is a beginner’s mistake. I’m too weak, or…or my body’s forgotten. I don’t know. I have to practice.”

  I pass out until we’re through Portland, and Amon insists on a large dinner. He won’t let us leave the diner until I’ve eaten meat and potatoes, and when I bristle, he asks what I’ll do for Soren if I can’t walk. It takes longer than I like, but I eat.

  Whenever I close my eyes, I remember the pull and tearing frenzy.

  As Amon drives south toward Alta California, playing through a revolution of folk rock tapes, I weave an intricate net from the red yarn. It should help me tie myself to my body and this world when I seeth next.

  I’m grateful for the rough ride of the van, for the way the wind rams against us as it flies across the flat plains. The sky now is steel gray with low-hanging clouds. I pull my legs up and weave red into my lap, eyes down, fingers working quick and sure.

  Snow begins to fall at sunset, and Amon grumbles, but nothing sticks. There’s only thin white flakes that hit the windshield and melt, and a shimmer of snow clings to the edges of trees and roofs. We’re alone in the world on a two-lane highway surrounded by black trees. The headlamps cut a bright swathe of light before us, illuminating only blacktop and tiny flecks of ice.

  Amon shuts off the radio, and I finish my web. We watch outside together, the heater spitting warmth at us, covering the noise of our breath. The sign for Alta California kingstate is electric blue and declares, Welcome to the Thunder State!

  My ears pop, and I pinch my nose shut to gently blow them out. Amon notices and says we’re leaving the mountains and are nearly to the coast. We’ll stop for the night just past Crescent City. It’s an hour and a half north of Eureka. I protest, but he points out we can’t get into the militia station overnight and he knows a good place to camp in the Jotunwood.

  “It is safe?” I ask, thinking of trolls. It’s said that Thor Thunderer has held his favorite kingstate free of trollkin for three generations.

  Amon snorts. “Sure, as long as I don’t drive off a cliff or into a giant ragging tree. We’ll get up at first light and be at the station when it opens, shine?”

  “And trolls?”

  He gives me an odd glance. “We definitely don’t have to worry about trolls.”

  The crunch of gravel alerts me that we’ve turned off the highway. Amon’s driving us into deeper darkness along a cracked road. The headlamps flash off wide, reddish tree trunks. I peer out my window, but everything is black. The moon won’t rise for hours.

  We turn onto a dirt road this time, and I’m grateful there’s no sign of snow here. A high wooden gate blocks our way. Amon pulls up to it, illuminating the sign: Welcome to Jotunwood National Park. Closed for the winter.

  Before I can comment, Amon swings open his door and is out. I watch him press both hands against the thick wood, plant his feet, and shove. Nothing happens immediately, but soon I notice the gate shifting. Though it must weigh a tonne in solid wood, Amon slowly pushes it open. He follows its path until the gate arcs wide enough for the van to pass through.

  When he climbs back inside the cab, I say, “It’s closed. Doesn’t that make this trespassing on national property?”

  Amon puts the van into drive. “Dad’s the patron of this park. We won’t be kicked out. If anybody even notices we’re here. It’s only two kilometers to the first campsite, where there’s one of those compost toilets, so we don’t have to worry about plumbing being turned off. We’ll make a nice little fire and be off first thing.”

  “You do this often.”

  “Often enough.”

  We stop in a wider circle of darkness. I can just make out a shadowy clearing full of picnic tables and parking spaces. I take my yarn web and ask for a candle and lighter. Amon digs one out of a crate in the back and hands it to me. While he continues rummaging in the rear of his van, I roll down my window and use it as a step to climb up onto the roof. The van will act as a stage, an altar, raising me closer to the stars.

  The pale metal is freezing. I light the candle, holding it in both hands long enough to drip wax onto the van’s roof so I can stick the candle upright. There’s little wind here, thanks to the heavy forest, so the flame is steady. The web is a tangled ball in my hands. I kneel before the candle.

  “Freya,” I whisper, “my lady of magic, please watch out for him tonight. Hold him to his fate, keep him to the strength path, for he is strong.”

  My whisper makes the flame flicker, and I lift my eyes as the nearly invisible smoke drifts up. It’s too dark to see the pattern of clouds, and all I know is there are stars there somewhere. Will she hear me? Will she listen? It has been so long since I prayed. I promised to guard the orchard, to be the Lady of Apples, but here I am rushing toward the unknown and Soren. Freya may cut me loose. I shut my eyes tight and pray harder against a sudden pinch of panic.

  Amon thumps his hand at the edge of the roof. Hiking himself up, he sticks his head over. “Can we join you?”

  “We?” I cup my fingers around the candle flame as he sets a squat fire bowl beside me, then pulls himself up, too, and adds the Thrym’s Wife nodder. I huff a laugh and scoot around to one side of the candle, picking it off the roof while Amon unloads a tiny insta-flame log from his backpack and sets it into the fire bowl. I offer the candle, and before long, we’ve a merry blaze.

  Amon’s also brought up skewers and hotpigs, which we roast slowly. He has a bottle of mead and some water. With the fire, it’s not so freezing up here. I’m glad of my coat and boots, though, and wish we had beer instead.

  “Are you seriously gonna seeth again no
w?” he asks.

  “I might see if I dream tonight instead. I know where Soren is, and the web will keep.”

  Amon gnaws on his hotpig, studying me. It’s disconcerting to be stared at by a man with lightning eyes. As if he’s one of them, one of the ancient gods. I bear under his gaze, knowing he leads to something.

  “Did it always affect you so violently?” he asks.

  “No, never.” I glance down into the low fire. “The thing that made me a prophet, made my mother one, was an awareness of our connection to fate, enough so that our minds access it while we’re sleeping, giving us prophetic dreams. Things like corrberries and alcohol or hunger and sleep deprivation help us leave our bodies, which are…our connection to individuality, to our own specific fate. A crowd of dancers or drummers, many individuals with their own specific fates, helps me focus outside myself, so when I seeth, I’m essentially flinging myself into what we call the dark between stars, the cold chaos where wisdom lives. Many poetic things. My mother called the darkness ‘cracks between the Nine Worlds’ and said it’s supposed to be mysterious. I was very good at it, Amon.”

  I take too deep a breath, and all I smell is hotpig. My stomach turns. “I could go deep enough to summon the spirits of the dead, though I only did that once and it almost killed me. But only because it’s unnatural for the living to fall into Hel, not because I lost control. I don’t know if being two years out of practice has made me so bad at it, or if it’s because I don’t have my own thread of fate anymore, linking me to the fate of the worlds.”

  He doesn’t speak again until his hotpig is gone. I hold mine out, but he gives me a look that clearly says, Eat your own ragging food. I take a bite of the salty sausage, recalling the last time I ate one, on a seething trip with my uncle the summer before I attended Sanctus Sigurd Academy and met Soren.

  Amon waits until I’ve had half, then prods, “You said you stopped dreaming and seething when you became Idun because Freya took you out of fate, severed the connection. What got it back?” He reaches across the fire bowl and lifts my skewer back to my face.

  Scowling, I set it down. I won’t be constantly babied. “I changed your destiny. I stepped back into the world.”

  “You’re welcome,” he says with heavy sarcasm.

  “It gave me a connection back to fate, to seething, but maybe not a strong enough to keep me safe, to keep me focused. I don’t know. I’ve never heard anything about this kind of thing. There aren’t stories about it, and I don’t even know if any Iduns before me were seethers. Or if it would matter at all.” I think of the apples of immortality in my coat pocket. “I don’t know if I’m Idun anymore. If I can be, outside the orchard.”

  Amon twists the iron ring in his eyebrow. The skin pulls and I wonder that it doesn’t ache. He says, “Godhood—even partial, skitting godhood—isn’t that easy to give up. You said they created you from a girl into a goddess, and isn’t that what they did with Pol Darrathr?”

  It was Baldur the Beautiful’s name when he was a mortal prince. “I don’t think so. They only changed my name and took my story out of history. They didn’t change me that I know of. I am a goddess in name—in position—only. And Baldur was always Odin’s son, a godling-born, like you. I have no godlike gifts, as he had his beauty and light, as you have strength.”

  “And a convenient resistance to alcohol poisoning,” he adds with a twisting grin. The fire casts a shifting orange glow across his face and hair, glinting against the iron in his brow and ears. “You felt nothing change when you were made Idun?”

  I let my eyes fall closed and remember that awful, glorious moment in the orchard as Soren stared at me, sorrow and permission alive in his dark eyes. We stood in a pentagram: he and I, Vider and Freya, my mother who was Idun before. I said yes, knowing Soren would forget me, and couldn’t think past it.

  Was that the moment? Did I miss feeling a change because I needed him?

  Or was it the moment I gave an apple of immortality to Baldur, and he smiled at me in recognition? It had drawn a returning smile from me, despite everything. He believed I was Idun, and did that make it so?

  “Astrid,” Amon interrupts my thoughts.

  I breathe in frozen air. It’s a punch in the throat. “I don’t feel different. I didn’t. I don’t remember. There was so much happening. I was upset and desperate and focused on other things.” I shake my head. “Except…I didn’t dream anymore. I lost that connection. Lost my dreams.”

  “It sounds like you did change, then.”

  “What if I changed for the lesser?” I whisper.

  “If becoming a goddess lessened you?” He laughs low, humorlessly. “I wouldn’t put it past them.”

  My stomach churns. I’d like to take back every bite of hotpig I ate.

  But I dreamed today. I seethed.

  What if I can take it back with me when I return to my apples? Can’t I be a dying girl and a dreamer? Once Freya removed the memory of me from the world, can’t I put new memories into it?

  Soren embraced his frenzy after a lifetime of hating it, fearing it. He took it in both hands and carved himself a new way. He’s the first berserker to serve a god other than Odin in all of New Asgard’s history. He chose and chose again. Not between the options he was given, but by forcing new options, creating brand-new strands of fate.

  Could I do the same?

  I grab the ball of red yarn I spent so much time weaving this afternoon. I spread it out in front of me, eyeing the ropes in the flickering firelight. They seem to bleed, to twist and bend like living worms. Can I find one thread of fate to choose? Create my own path?

  All I see is a snarl of impossibilities.

  SIX

  Every time I drift to sleep in the belly of the van, I shock awake from the explosion of images. They echo when I blink; they flit in my peripheral vision like skittering rats. Out of my reach. Out of my memory. The heavy railroad nails tied to the ceiling of the van sway ever so slightly, in harmony, but there’s no wind or rocking to have begun it. Amon sleeps sound under a mound of blankets nearby.

  I lay in the darkness and think, Zero nights since my last dream.

  As dawn finally reaches in through the front windshield, I use the spare light to creep to the side door and slide into the weak morning. Cold air finds every slit and opening in my clothes.

  I dreamed. Even though I cannot remember what I saw, I know the dreams were there. The skill will return to me.

  My breath appears before my face. I lick my cracked lips and gently finger the scrape pulling tight down my right cheek. It must look horrible.

  The Jotunwood wakes with me, but softly.

  Frost glints across the top of picnic tables, highlights the graceful line of the ferns, and decorates split logs settled purposefully for seating. Tall redwoods rise straight and firm, keeping their branches to themselves until several meters above my reach. A bird calls, and another answers; sweet two-note harmonies. The sky is pale blue, rather like the flaking paint on Amon’s van.

  The beauty stirs a small ache in my chest. I miss the color of morning light in my orchard and the scent of apples.

  Amon groans as he clambers out onto his feet, boots hitting the ground hard. Ignoring me, he goes for the toilet first. We’re both fed and ready to go a few minutes later, and as I climb into the passenger seat, Amon puts a hand against the bark of the nearest redwood. He pats it twice. It strikes me as a rather proprietary gesture. I understand that well. When he gets in and starts up the van, I say, “You love it here.”

  Amon maneuvers a three-point turn to take us out of the campsite before answering. “It’s big,” is all he says.

  We get back onto the highway, and now I can see the ocean out my window, flashing dark blue and sudden streaks of reflected sunlight. The road winds through trees and out of them, spilling us suddenly along the edge of a sea cliff, then swallowing us into the woods again. For all my traveling with Mom and then Uncle Richard, I haven’t seen the north Pacific before,
this rough stretch of coastline where the land cuts away in rubble of black and gray boulders, glassy beaches, and the dark, crystal ocean spreading out to a curved horizon. After last night’s brief snow, the sky is cloudless blue, and there’s little I want more than to emerge from the van and stand at the threshold, nothing but waves unfurling below me, scattered gulls tossing in the wind, and let the salty air press through my curls, spit at my cheeks.

  But that thing I want more is Soren.

  Before we come into Eureka, there are signs for Fort Brannan, the largest army base in Alta California, equipped with heavy-duty armored cars and those so-named volcano tanks for invading the hot strongholds of the goblins. We haven’t needed them in decades, not since the Thunderer defeated the last of them at Sanctus Helen’s.

  Eureka itself begins as a build up of log cabin residential neighborhoods and trading outposts with claims of genuine elf-gold and train tours and free gold pans for the kidlets, as well as dig for your own plague rock, which is a thing I’ve never heard of. Around the curve of the cliffs, the city proper is alive with red roofs and a busy port full of loading cranes and tugboats. Amon turns inland before we’re too near, scooping around to the east side of town.

  My stomach ties itself in knots as we approach the militia station. It’s a two-story, dark wood building with tiny windows and a roof walk. The practice yard is enclosed by a cinderblock wall topped with coiled barb wire. Beside a flagpole, which flies both the kingstate flag and the US flag with its circle of valknots, is a statue of Tyr the Just. The god holds a scale in his golden hand.

  Unfortunately, there’s also a circle of television vans, and a crowd of reporters pushing against a temporary barrier before the front doors. Militiamen in their dark brown uniforms keep the line, swords sheathed and rifles at their shoulders. They’re not in combat armor—the only good sign.

  Amon parks his van in the rear of the lot and turns it off. “Skit,” he mutters.