The Apple Throne

by Tessa Gratton

  “The berserker broke your collarbone and shattered your shoulder blade,” Eirfinna says. “Neri and I wove them together again with crystal and gold.”

  I close my eyes. He’ll never forgive himself.

  “You’ll be scarred, but they’re lovely scars, if you ask me.” Eirfinna helps me slide my bare feet to the floor and drapes the sheet around me like a towel. I drag myself with her as she guides me to a silver mirror.

  Bloodless and exhausted, I blend into the white room but for my tangled hair and the holes that are my dark eyes. I lean in nearer, ignoring the shadows under my eyes, the marks on my arms where his fingers were too hard, the days-old bruises from frenzied seething, the thin cuts on my cheek from Eirfinna’s claws. There, above my right breast, is a spidery scar made of gold melted into my skin. It is rather impressive. I skim my fingers over the reflection.

  “Where is Soren now?”

  “Sleeping off his drugs in one of our more comfortable chambers, but under lock and key no man or woman can open. When you seeth for me, when you give me an answer to the Stone Plague, I will let you have him.”

  I meet her reflected black eyes. “When the moon rises, I will seeth.”

  • • •

  I’m given soft silk pants and a tunic with a wide belt, supple leather boots with thin soles that form to my feet. Eirfinna returns my rings and horn necklace to me, gleaming and polished. My hair is tangled but clean, and I braid it into a loose crown before briefly discussing with Eirfinna what I need to properly seeth. She writes some of it down, then sends me with the amethyst elf Neri to the crystal suite where Sune and Amon wait.

  The door flows open in the way of the elves, and Amon is there before I can do more than step inside. He crows and lifts me off my feet, half-tossing me over his shoulder so I clutch his neck and back, grunting at the numb ache in my head and recently ruined shoulder.

  “Put her down,” Sune snaps, and Amon laughs, spins us in a circle, and none-too-gently plops me onto a low divan. I touch my temple as the room sways. Sune crouches at my knee while Amon drifts away. “He’s drunk,” Sune mutters, his fingers hesitant as they skim my knee.

  “Drunk?” I put my hand over his. He slumps down to sit on the floor, shoulder against my knee.

  “It’s the elf liquor. He won’t stop drinking it, says it’s magic.”

  I look at Amon, who’s over at a long, intricately carved, dark wood table pouring the stuff from another crystal decanter into glasses. He looks up suddenly, crackling blue eyes on me.

  “Did you know, Astrid,” he says in an exaggerated whisper, “that I am a happy drunk?”

  Sune sighs.

  The suite around us is warm and richly appointed: all dark wood and velvety wall-hangings, thick woven carpets and plush upholstery as if they decorated based on old Frankish fairy tales. It disguises the cold crystal and granite walls, even as the sharp stalactites glow with gentle light. Amon lifts a glass to me, but I shake my head, and he downs it, taking his other glass to a massive armchair covered in bearskin. He collapses into it. Beside him is a hearth carved into the wall, with red, pink, and orange crystals glowing smoothly instead of fire.

  “I’m starving,” I say quietly.

  Sune hops up and goes to the same table with the liquor. Three silver domes cover serving trays, and he lifts them all to pile meat and cheese and bread onto a plate for me. He keeps his back turned to Amon, though Amon’s eyes are all for Sune, steady and hot and staring.

  The hunter returns and sets the food beside me on the divan. As I pick through, I tell them how the sal volatile worked and ask how long I was gone. Sune supposes it’s been six hours nearly. He points to a long, red velvet sofa where my coat and Sleipnir’s Tooth wait for me. I get up and check the pockets of the coat for the two remaining apples of immortality and the glass apple from Soren’s truck. Everything is in place, even the orchard key, cell phone, and two valley-finding charms.

  When I say that Soren broke my collar and arm, Amon throws his glass into the hearth, where the thin crystal shatters against its larger, sharper brothers. He joins us, eyes sparked with lightning, off-balance. He says, “Let me see.”

  I push the tunic off my shoulder, and Amon’s eyes narrow. He nods. “Like mine. It’ll keep you strong,” he says, then stumbles to the armchair, wraps the bearskin over his shoulders, and goes to sleep.

  Sune’s jaw clenches. “I hope he sleeps it off quick.”

  I say, “I should sleep, too, if I’m to seeth for Eirfinna soon.”

  “Do you think you can find the cause of the plague?”

  “I have to, or they’ll put him back on the drug and kill him. And I have a direction to look,” I add, shrugging back into my tunic.

  Sune only lifts his brows in a question.

  “Signy Valborn. Eirfinna was right about the timing,” I say, yawning. “That it struck when Signy became the Valkyrie.”

  “But that has little to do with the trolls, surely?” He narrows his eyes and talks as though working things out for himself. “The trolls were restless because of Baldur’s disappearance. The greater mothers especially were riled up and upset, and they began attacking down the coast. Lesser trolls appeared everywhere, and soon after Disir Day—when the Valkyrie solved her riddle at that ball, I believe—the plague hit. It was a week after that night. A week after she saved the injured troll from sacrifice.” Sune’s frown deepens. “I don’t see how it directly connects.”

  “She killed a greater troll mother, one who’d been stalking her from Vinland. She gave that heart to the Alfather to solve her riddle. Soren was there. They let everyone believe she solved it at the ball, but it wasn’t the complete story.”

  Sune’s face pulls into something nearly tragic. “Do you think they tell us anything that is true?”

  I nod. “I do, Sune.” Though I was unconscious for a few hours, the pull of sleep drags at my eyes. My golden shoulder aches with a dull weight.

  “I’ll stay awake while you two sleep,” Sune says.

  He helps me to the sofa, and I curl up. The hunter stands over me, a blanket in one hand. He offers it and says, “Does it hurt? The gold?”

  “No.” My fingers find the scar through the thin tunic. “There’s a gentle ache all over and an alienness. It feels different, but not painful. Heavy.”

  Sune glances back at Amon. “I wonder if he still feels it.”

  “Ask.”

  “He doesn’t like me to ask him anything.”

  Sleep whispers against my skin, and I let my eyes close. “Sune, he cares about you.”

  “Not the way I want,” the hunter grumbles.

  As I fade away, I think about wanting and how it almost never matters.

  NINETEEN

  I stand, arms spread, under the glass pinnacle of Etintooth Peak. Moonlight reaches down through the shards and facets, gleaming in a hundred directions, catching the edges of gold-leafed trees and crystal flowers, turning this underground river to silver. The cavern is a kaleidoscope of pastel light, and the jeweled eyes of the giant faces carved into the walls flicker and burn. Marble-skinned elves surround me, staring and swaying to the slow rhythm of tin and copper drums. They line the banks of the river, spread over checkerboard ground, and peer between the golden trees. I am alone on the wildflower island, feet bare, head buzzing from the swallow of Eirfinna’s airy liquor, from the tight-wrapped joint she lit and handed me because she could not find corrberries so quickly. Sune and Amon wait with her on the arching bridge, between rows of elves and goblins crouched with their drums, tapping, scratching, stomping as a whole, filling this cavern with the heart-rhythm.

  My fingers play in the wind, grasping at the music, and I stretch my toes. I let my head fall back. I sway, I turn, and I call out the names of my grandmothers as far back as I know: Jenna and Ariel and Judith, Selene, Jenna-Lynn, Miranda and Bryn and Freya and Alina, on and on through seventeen generations of women who have served and seethed, who have dreamed and walked the slick scarle
t threads of destiny.

  Their names echo on the tongues of goblins, the elf-voices who lived when they lived, who have seen human lives rise and fall, and the names become a song, a line of nonsensical syllables bouncing off each other but with a through-line pulse: the mountain’s heartbeat; my heartbeat; the dance-step I take and take again, turning against the turn of the world.

  The scar on my shoulder burns and pulls, the elf-gold on my finger squeezes, connecting me to the roots and veins of magic here, and I lose my voice, the feel of my skin, the impact of feet on cold stone, the wind in my hair. There is no hair, no skin, no feet or bones or song. I am only a heartbeat, only a spinning star high in the gold-tinged firmament.

  From my navel stretches the entirety of fate.

  Like layers of skirt, it swirls and spins all around me. I reach for a thin strand, pulsing lips forming, Stone Plague, curse, Signy Valborn, my lady Freya show me. I see hands covered in fluid gold like melting gloves. I see Sune fall back under the crack of a gunshot, and Amon lean wearily against the wall of a bathroom. I see Soren on a bed, sunlight spearing his chest. I see Eirfinna and Signy the Valkyrie facing each other across the ashes of a funeral pyre.

  And there! A troll mother with cloudy eyes falls to her knees and her stone-skin cracks. A wave of iron-wights tumble off the Brooklyn Bridge and plummet into the water. And a prairie hardens into stone as an entire pack of prairie trolls dies under the sun. Each of them burns with a bright red light in their center, each of them connected by thin lines of red fate. As they die, those hearts fade, those lines snap and pull. The troll mothers groan and hide in the mountains, pleading, begging, curling onto themselves as the red centers slowly flicker.

  I follow the light. I see it begin: In the cupped palms of Freya the Witch’s hands is a tiny black rock into which she breathes fire. She pushes it into a woman’s breast, a woman who transforms into a terrible monster. A thousand years later, a troll-mother rips the head off her sister, only to find that black rock burning hotter than the sun. This new mother takes the rock and swallows it, and from her chest, the strength of an entire species blooms.

  Again and again it happens, the heart traded or stolen, gifted or torn away—always swallowed, always strong.

  I see a troll mother as white as the moon fall under a berserker’s sword—Soren, Soren!—and a Valkyrie beside him. She digs into the crumbling, dead breast of the troll-mother and steals the prize, but she does not swallow it.

  Here is the same Valkyrie again, older, sitting on a throne carved into a massive tree, both hands clutching at her chest, a great grimace on her handsome face. She grinds her teeth, her breath hisses and spits.

  Here again, and older still, she stops mid-step and falls to her knees. A man bends with her, arguing fiercely. He gestures at her chest, and the Valkyrie makes a fist around the pendant. She shakes her head, says no no no.

  Again: Signy the Valkyrie stumbles into the garden of the New World Tree, red-faced and crying. My mother’s age now, Signy leans over a winding root and vomits. She rolls, presses her cheek to the rough wood, and cups the pulsing heart that hangs from the chain around her neck.

  It glows through her fingers, showing me her bones, and her back arches. She screams. Those fingers blacken, and scaly burned flesh bleeds up her arms. When she grimaces now, her teeth crack into tusks.

  The last thing I see are knotted scarlet strands of destiny tightening around me.

  TWENTY

  The island is blackened—crystal flowers turned smoky and dark, like light bulbs burned out. Overhead the pinnacle of the mountain is dark, too, moonlight gone. Silence surrounds me in a muffled wave of noise so uniform it’s the roar of blood inside my own skull.

  Amon is there, saying something, and Eirfinna Grimlakinder digs her obsidian nails into his shoulder. She leans in and hisses a question at me. I cannot move. My bones are fused together, my eyelids stuck open. But I shift my tongue. I swallow. A hand is on my forehead, warm and friendly, but I can’t see whose it is. Eirfinna grips my chin; Amon knocks her back. I manage a moan, and they all stop.

  I whisper, I know. I know the answer. My vision darkens, and I shake my head. I try to grab at anyone.

  And that is all I know.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I dream of Soren’s body, laid out on a stone altar, dead and waiting to be burned. Panic grips me in a tight skin, and I thrust awake. But his arm is under my head, my nose pressed to his shoulder. Blankets cover us, but Soren is as hot as ever, a constant heat on my cheek, under my hand. Breathing slowly.

  The fear melts against him. I press nearer. He is alive and in my arms. I will keep him that way; I have Eirfinna’s word she’ll let him go since I know the cause of the plague.

  But the dream.

  His dead body, laid out for a funeral pyre. Four days and Soren Bearstar will join me in Hel. Today is the fourth day, I think.

  My chest constricts again. I press my face against his collarbone and breathe him in: his smell that is impossible to describe, except that it’s always savory. I’ve never known him to buy his own shampoo or soap, preferring whatever was available at school or in hotel rooms, borrowing from travel companions or me, or just grabbing a handful of baking soda when he has to.

  Opening eyes suddenly tacky with tears, I touch my hand lightly to his sternum. There, just under his left pectoral, curves a blotting bruise. It’s already yellowing and deep, less visceral red than yesterday. He heals so fast when he’s not poisoned. His hand, splayed loose at the edge of the blanket pulled up to his waist, is scabbed at the knuckles, but not raw. As if he were destroying himself last week, not hours ago.

  His fingers twitch, and he rather suddenly stops my progress tracing his bruised ribs by capturing my wrist. I catch my breath in an echo of fear and tilt up to see his eyes are open, surprised, curious, warm.

  “Astrid?” he says.

  “Soren.” A smile cracks my dry lips, but I don’t care. I lean up to kiss him, but his hand finds my mouth and he holds me away.

  “I…” He makes some effort to swallow. “I am…fire and air.”

  I laugh brightly and answer, “My other elements I give to mortal life.”

  The poetry hangs between us, proving to each other we are who we seem to be. The line is from Antony and Cleopatra, from the Entire Works of Shakespeare. We opened the book three months ago, just before he left the orchard, and flipped to a random page. The line is our code, our secret language of reassurance that we’ve needed since the day Loki Changer came pretending to be Soren.

  Soren’s arm under me tightens. I squeeze him back, despite his injuries. “I read it, after you left,” I say.

  Soren shakes his head. He’s never read it.

  “It’s about a queen who kills herself when her lover is murdered. I wished we’d chosen a different one.”

  “They’re…probably all like that.” Soren’s voice is calm, so quiet and controlled.

  I nod against his warm chest. I want to remain here forever, trying to match my breathing to his. As always his rhythm is too slow and deep and I feel like I’m drowning. But I don’t want this moment to end. I don’t want to talk about murder and elves and plagues. I just want this.

  “I feel shattered,” he says, breath blowing the curls atop my head.

  “You were…poisoned,” I whisper.

  “Bearbane? I’m under a mountain?”

  “The elves took you.”

  He blinks slowly, but shows no other surprise. “I killed one of them, didn’t I?”

  I touch his stomach. “What happened?”

  “I remember so…little.” After another moment, he says, “My mouth tastes like trash.”

  “Mine, too.”

  We slowly stand up from the stone bed. This crystal room is doorless; we are still Eirfinna’s prisoners, though this rest together was a kindness I did not expect. Our prison is small and bare but for the heavy blankets on the bed, two chairs carved of stone, and a stone table inlaid with silver.
It holds a pitcher and bowl, some thin towels, a platter of bread and a square of butter. There’s a pair of folded silk pants like mine that should fit Soren. He tugs them on.

  Bumping shoulders, we rinse our mouths and drink and break the bread into pieces. I pick at mine; it’s thick with seeds and olives, and the butter is too cold to spread easily. Soren makes a giant butter sandwich and eats it so quickly I regret having any.

  I ask, “What do you remember? We only know you sent Pilot to Signy in Philadelphia and then were arrested for killing Evan Bell.”

  “Did Pilot make it? He’s safe?”

  “Yes. I saw Signy a few days ago.”

  There’s a long pause as Soren takes another bite of bread. “Vider asked me to look into a disappearance on behalf of the matria of Half-Serpent caravan. Do you remember him? The caravan where we picked her up?” When I nod, he continues. “One of his people went missing, and the militia didn’t seem to be doing anything about it. It was a man named Andre who Vider was close with a long time ago, and so the matria was begging Vider to help, but she’s still too heavy in training and can’t leave her band yet for any reason short of family death. So she asked me to do it for her.”

  Soren closes his eyes, slumping in the chair like he’s exhausted. “He was a gold junkie, which I didn’t even know was a thing. He’d last been seen in Eureka, and I asked around until I heard Bell was the man to see if you wanted elf gold.” Soren takes a deep breath. “I’d heard about the dangers of gold, so I left my sword in the truck to impress the fact that I just went to talk to him. But when he saw me he just… it’s like his face rippled. I asked if he knew Andre, even though Bell was…rippling. I thought I was getting sick and my vision was blurred? He hissed at me suddenly, and I know I saw fangs. I reached for him, and he lashed out. His face changed, and I saw black eyes, sharp teeth…horns or something coming out of his cheeks. I just reacted, grabbed his neck, and flung him away.” He shudders, but I notice the glint of sweat at his temples. “His neck broke—ah gods.”