The Apple Throne (11 page)

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.

E
very 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.

“You can get us inside?” I’ve thought of what to say to the militia lieutenant in order to get to see Soren, but I don’t know how to pass this first obstacle.

“Yeah, if you don’t mind being on camera. They must be here because of him.” Amon shakes his head as he climbs out. I flip down the visor to check my face in the narrow mirror. Strained eyes, a spread of pink scabbing across my cheek, dull but clean-looking curls. There’s no sign of a goddess here, even if anyone were likely to recognize me.

I smooth my hands down my ruffled skirt and follow Amon. We walk shoulder to shoulder, though I fall a step behind as he reaches the reporters. I keep my eyes on the double doors that are our goal. In my experience, looking at somebody draws their attention. Amon calls out to the nearest militiaman, a young man with ruddy skin who almost smiles when he sees Amon, but fast reapplies his severe expression as he strides toward us.

That attracts notice, and a man with a camera settled over his shoulder says Amon’s full name.

I tuck against Amon’s back, looping one finger around his belt. The militiaman leans in, and Amon talks in his ear. I can’t hear Amon or his friend’s response over the questions hitting us like confetti.
Who’s your friend? Are you here for Bearstar? Do you know him? Did your mother call you in? Did you know the Bell family? Amon!

Confusion makes me listen harder: What has Amon’s mother to do with anything? Why do they think he knows the family of the dead man? I twist my neck to study the reporters, and their collective frenetic energy hits me full in the face.

Astrid Glyn would’ve had this crowd eating from her palm.

Amon takes my elbow and leads me around the barricade. We push through the doors into a warm entryway buzzing with ringing phones and conversation. There’s a counter and bulletproof glass separating us from the rest of the room, but we turn hard right and go through a door that’s guarded by another militiaman holding a rifle. Amon leads me up a flight of stairs and onto a quieter level, with wooden desks and several men and woman in suits instead of uniforms bustling around. A few glance at us; most ignore us as we make our way straight up the aisle to an office with wide windows that takes up an entire corner.

Through the windows, I see a woman as iron-dark as Amon half-standing behind a massive desk, talking on the phone. She wears a brown uniform with double chevrons embroidered on the sleeve and a golden stripe down the side of her pants. As we approach, she lifts her eyes and pins Amon, but he doesn’t falter. The intensity of the glare might’ve stopped me in my tracks.

Amon’s friend darts forward to pull open the door for us, and we’re shut in with the officer. She straightens, slams down the phone, and puts her hands behind her back as she regards us.

Amon says, “Heya, Mom,” and I’m not as surprised as I would have been five minutes ago.

His mother is beautiful. I remember thinking how she’d have to be, to attract one of our gods. Her black hair is braided in seven lightning rows, then falls in thick beaded snakes down her back. Her form is graceful, neck long and shoulders elegantly squared. Her round eyes are dark as her hair.

“I should slap that smile off your face, but I know it’d do no good,” she says to him calmly before sliding her appraisal my way. “You are?”

“This is Astrid,” Amon says. “Astrid, Lieutenant Grid Davuson.”

I say, “I’m a seether from Idun the Young’s orchard, where Soren Bearstar was a regular visitor, where your own son Amon comes to drink and trade and be honored. I am here on Idun’s behalf. Amon was good enough to escort me.”

That last reignites suspicion in Lieutenant Grid’s face. “I can’t find much welcome for you, prophetess. There’s been no official request through the Rock Church, nor Alta temple, nor even the Army chaplain for a seether from Bright Home to have access to my prisoner.”

I touch my fingertips to the edge of her desk. She’s nearly a foot taller than me, but I’m used to tipping my head back and maintaining confidence. Soren is someplace below, and this is the final barrier between us. “There was no time for official channels, and Idun believed her word alone should suffice for me to see him.”

Some subtle shift in her mouth sends a sharp chill across my scalp.

I lean urgently in. “What happened?”

The lieutenant slowly sits. “The situation is fraught, maidling, and I cannot just grant access to him on your word. You can’t know everything that’s transpired, besides which it’s a bad precedent to let seethers into my prisoners without a god’s seal.”

“There’s no precedent for this,” I insist. “Soren has no precedent—he’s Baldur’s berserk, and Baldur is dead. In the winter, let Idun claim him as any god has the right to do.” I struggle to come up with examples of gods interfering in the militia so directly, without an invitation.

The lieutenant says, “Do you have identification? Your citizen card or a letter from Idun?”

Oh goddess tits.

“This is
the gods’ business
, Mom.” Amon flings himself down into one of the short armchairs against the wall. “You don’t want a part of it.”

“Don’t I know it,” she drawls, her mouth exactly like his.

“Why aren’t you making a statement or letting in some reporters?” he asks. “Why the secrecy if you’ve had no word from Bright Home? If the king isn’t trying to interfere, or the Army?”

Lieutenant Grid taps her fingers against the knife sheath strapped to her thigh. “The Bearstar killed someone in cold blood, and I’m restricting his visitors.”

“Soren is not a murderer,” I insist. “If he killed that man, there was a reason.”

She looks sharply up at me. “There’s no ‘if’ here, maidling. Soren himself admitted to the deed.”

My heartbeat is wild. “I must see him.”

Amon shoves to his feet again. “If you won’t do it on her word, do it on mine. For me.

I’m speaking for her, Mom. You
know
who I am, who my father is, and I speak for Astrid.”

Regarding her son fiercely, Grid stands, too. Their eyes are level. “You’re claiming your father for this,” she says evenly. It’s not a question. There’s some deep, old thing hanging between them.

“Yep.” By contrast, Amon sounds flippant, as if wanting to make it sound less serious than it is.

“It’s the gods’ business,” Grid murmurs. “I’ll send to him. You know I will.”

“I know.”

“I’ve waited for this, and yet it might be for nothing, Amon.” She glances again to me. “I’m sorry you’re going to be disappointed, Astrid… What did you say your family name is?”

My mouth goes dry. “I…I didn’t. What’s wrong? What happened?”

Instead of answering, Lieutenant Grid ushers us out of her office. She leads us at a swift pace through the back of the militia station to the yard, across the stamped-grass training ground with all its weight machines and oval track, to the prison. This is a squat, stone and concrete building with barred windows and a lock she needs her ID card to open. I keep at her heels like an eager puppy, wanting to run. Amon puts a heavy hand on my shoulder, and my stomach sinks lower and lower as we go through the dim corridor, past a checkpoint, and into the cellblock. There are only seven cells with orange-painted bars, and we pass them all. They’re empty, and I can’t help assuming that’s unusual, though I’ve no practical idea.

Through a final checkpoint—this one with a double lock, keycode, and two men with rifles—and we reach a prison made from massive stone posts and lintels that must’ve been dragged here by giants or tanks. The door to the cell waits open, and I can see a pulley system they must need three men to operate. A berserker’s prison or a holding cell for trolls out of the Jotunwood.

Every speculation evaporates when I realize the reason the cell is so bright with sun: there’s a gaping hole in the opposite wall.

Soren is not here.

I
nside the cell, I lean against the ragged edge of the stone wall and stare out across a hundred meters of flat grass toward the high, barbed wire fence and the dark Jotunwood behind. The stone is smooth beneath my fingers and cold. I stroke it. In some places, it doesn’t appear shattered or broken, but melted.

Did he lose himself to the frenzy? Could Soren have freed himself from this prison? Bashed his berserking body through the stone? I remember his scream in my own throat, ringing in my ears, alive against my skin.

“Astrid,” Amon says into my ear.

I snap to and shake my head vigorously. “It makes no sense. He would have to be completely consumed by the madness to break through this, and that would leave a trail. He’d have broken through that fence, too, and knocked over trees. Left a very obvious path. And…blood.”

“We agree,” Grid says, joining us. “This is like nothing I’ve seen. We’ve had dogs out to track him, and there’s a search the Army is helping us with. That—” She points sharply northeast. “—is their land. The base stretches this far south.”