The Apple Throne (13 page)

The sparse case file fans open before me. Pictures of Soren and of this man Evan Bell who he supposedly murdered. Notes from the scene of the crime. Pictures of the house and driveway.

Bell was a guest lecturer on etin physiology at a local community college, just arrived this term from a university out east. No wife or children, no local family, and so far no one had come forward to claim his belongings, though there’d been an outpouring of support from the college. His neighbors to the south had been having a Yule party, hence the plentiful witnesses who claimed Soren had walked up to Bell’s car and ripped the driver’s door free. The two men had fought until Soren flung Bell away, breaking his neck. Then, apparently Soren had just knelt to wait for the authorities. So many corroborated those facts, it’s difficult not to believe them basically accurate. It might have been an accident, but Soren didn’t deny that he killed Bell.

He was no man
, is the only thing Soren had said when taken into custody except,
I’m not supposed to be here tonight.
He asked for a tyr, and one was promised after the Yule holiday, by which time he’d broken out. No mention of his going berserk except a few witness statements on the night of the murder itself. It hadn’t happened yet, then. But any time now, he might be flung into that frenzy.

I read his recorded words again and again.

I stare at the booking picture of him—his deep, warm eyes; his severe black hair, so stark against the militia backdrop. There’s a note in the file that Soren continued to cooperate. They said he meditated, practiced his sword forms, did hundreds of push-ups.

I clench my hands, then drag my fingers through my damp curls. I want to set out the moment the Thunderer’s hunter arrives. But set out where? I’ve no idea where to begin, despite the vision of the cave. Maybe I can identify the type of stone, but I also do not know exactly
when
the vision will take place. Right now or days from now. I have to seeth again, keep pushing myself to gather more information.

A boot scuffs purposefully at the rough edge of the cell. My head snaps up.

A slender young Asgardian man stands as straight as the gold-stitched rank insignia on his blue Army coat. His shaved head is covered in dark tattoos, his face sharp and eyes hooded. A gun holstered under his arm presses wrinkles into the uniform, and he also wears a baldric, with double-bladed battle-axes showing like wings over both shoulders. The bald head, hawkish face, and implied wings make me think of a vulture. The way he scans me with those light eyes, as if waiting for me to die or make some mistake, doesn’t help me like him.

To my surprise, he kneels. “Lady Idun,” he says in a low voice thick with southerly accent. “My lord said you would be waiting here.”

I scramble to my feet, brushing concrete dust from my skirt. “You must be the Thunderer’s hunter. Please stand, and you needn’t call me lady.”

He springs up, closer to me than I expected. He’s tall, and now studies me, gaze flicking from my disastrous hair, down my coat, to the rips and tears in my entire outfit. The scatter of official reports spread behind me like a rainbow. Light pours through the broken cell wall, illuminating the fierce tattoo covering his scalp: giant black ram horns that seem to grow from his temples and spiral inward behind his ears. Iron nails pierce both ears, and this near, I see the paleness of his eyes is the clear gray of winter clouds.

“Sune Rask,” he says, bowing sharply, smoothly avoiding bashing his forehead into mine.

“Sune.” I take a step back and see him note it, as he notes everything. He turns in a slow circle, taking in the cell, then faces me again.

“This was no breakout, the militia is correct. The destruction came from the outside.” He crouches. “See the pattern of detritus? It’s been jostled and ruined by the militia, but originally it blew inward, not outward into the yard.” The sharp double-blades of his axes catch the sun as he moves. I squint against the glare.

I hug myself. “Somebody broke him out.”

Sune slowly stretches to his feet, trailing gentle fingers along the edge of the hole in the wall. “Something did.” He steps outside into the training ground, sniffing, using the toe of his army boots to nudge aside a few chunks of cinderblock and twisted steel. He avoids the small stain of my bile, but glances briefly at me.

“There’re no obvious sign of explosives, but I’ll ask the lieutenant to have her dogs double-check. This edge is too smooth though, as if something melted it. I don’t know many explosives that hot that don’t leave traces.”

“You can tell that so quickly?”

“That is all fairly obvious. Not enough to impress you,” he says dryly.

“Maybe it was something other than explosives?”

“Like sheer berserker strength? I doubt it. Berserkers don’t melt stone. You’d need etin-folk for that.”

“Giants? Giants are extinct.”

“They say that about many things, don’t they?” he mutters.

Despite being a girl transformed into a piece of an intricate magic spell thousands of years old, it is rough for me to imagine giants or elves or goblins coming here to break Soren free. Even if they still existed outside of stories, what would they want with him?

Sune turns fast to me. He tilts his head and narrows his eyes. “Was it you?”

“
Me
?”

“You’re anxious and hardly a goddess.”

Shock drives me back another step. He was so fast to discover it and bolder to say it.

He presses. “Are you playing some game with my god, purporting to be the Lady of Apples? A game with this Soren Bearstar?” His low accent drips off Soren’s name, infuriating me.

“Not a goddess?” I smile a scornful smile I remember from my days at school. “If you say that again, I’ll call a holmgang down upon you that you cannot hope to win.”

That flick of speculation fills his face again as he eyes me up and down. “I think I could defeat you in three moves.”

“Not if I stand in her place,” Amon rumbles from the inside of the prison.

Surprise and uncertainty sprawl across Sune’s expressive eyes before he whirls around. “Amon.”

The godling hulks in the doorframe, a torpid smile strung on his mouth. “You know clear and well you can’t beat
me
, Sune Rask.”

“I can fight my own battles, Amon,” I snap.

“Oh, but Sune likes it when I beat his face into the ground.”

Sune’s face stretches with what I can only read as a flash of hurt. He recovers by sneering, “You’re so considerate of my needs, Thorson, as always.”

The two young men stare at each other. Amon’s eyes crack with lightning, and the muscles in Sune’s jaw work. I can trace them across his skull, making the lines of his tattoo wiggle. I’m desperate to know what it is that’s been between them.

Finally, Sune nods. “I will not say it again, lady.”

Guilt quickens in my stomach. “You were right,” I say. He jerks his head up, and I clarify. “I am anxious. I care about Soren Bearstar a great deal, and he is my priority. He did not murder Evan Bell, he did not plot an escape, and he never hurts people. Do you understand?”

Sune waits—not hesitating, but weighing my words. “Yes, Idun, I understand. I will find him, and that does not require me to believe in anything other than that he exists to be found. Do you understand?”

“I do. Let’s get started.” I hold out my hand to the Thunderer’s hunter, and he bows over it.

A
fter gathering Soren’s scant belongings from Grid, I follow Sune and Amon to the exit. In my hands, I hold his clothes, boots, wallet with only a few cash notes and his ID, and a key ring with the make of his truck. No phone. I wish I could sense something of him in these things, and though the worn old boots do make me smile a little sadly, there’s nothing of Soren himself here. What mattered to him was his father’s sword, his tattoos, and his friends. The fact that his sword is missing worries me, but the militia swear they do not have it.

The reporters have remained along their line, guarded by the militia men, and the moment I break out into the sunlight, they’re calling questions at us:
What’s your business with Soren Bearstar? Why send for the Thunderer? Is Soren Bearstar innocent? Why did he kill Evan Bell?

I push through, ignoring it all, making a beeline for the van. The hunter, Sune Rask, has convinced me that we should follow him to Evan Bell’s house because the militia and Army are canvassing the woods and doing what they can to track Soren on foot and with dogs. We won’t add anything there.
We’ll leave them to the how and where and try to understand the who and the why,
he said
.
Perhaps we’ll find Soren’s motivation and some information to point us in the direction of whoever broke him out of prison. It’s likely that whoever did it was involved in the crime somehow.

Though I’d like to stop and seeth, I accept his logic. Better to find more clues about what really happened and why Soren was there, and the more I know, the better I should be able to focus my seething.

We drive to the southern edge of Eureka, along the coast, to Evan Bell’s former residence. Amon parks at the top of the paved driveway behind Sune’s blue Jeep. There are few homes here, all separated by wide yards and hanging onto the narrow coast between the highway and the ocean. Windswept trees shelter Bell’s house, and a rickety old staircase leads down the slope to the glassy beach. Despite the sunlight, it’s freezing outside the van. I rub my hands together and hurry after Sune. The house is built in the old Queen style, with bright purple gingerbread trim and tall, narrow windows. A turret at the northern corner is capped by a lovely peaked roof. It’s all too charming for the scrawl of glaring yellow crime scene tape slicing across the front door.

I read about Evan Bell to Amon on the way, though none of it suggested an obvious connection to Soren. But here in the now-empty driveway, Soren supposedly broke his neck. I hope inside I’ll discover a reason why.

The hunter stares at the house from the porch steps for a few minutes, holding me back with a gloved hand. “There’s the neighboring house where the witnesses were.” He points to the distant yellow ranch, then shades his eyes with that same hand. “They weren’t close enough to hear the altercation, but most reported that Bearstar did not seem berserk and stopped the car…” He swivels around to the drive. “…there, jerked open the door, and dragged Bell out.”

“Some say he
was
berserk,” I say as Amon joins us. The godling sits on the steps at my feet, pulling a box of clove cigarettes out of his back pocket.

Sune snaps his head down almost immediately. “That will ruin my sense of smell.”

Dark cigarette hanging from his bottom lip as if in disbelief, Amon glances slowly up, in a way that might almost be called flirtatious. He fingers the cigarette before flicking it, unused, into the lava rock garden beside the porch.

Sune gently removes the crime tape from the doorframe and opens the front door. To me, he says, “I prioritized the witness statements based on drunkenness and presence of prejudice, and I lean toward believing the ones who said Bearstar was not, in fact, berserk at the time. Especially as he sat down afterward and waited for the militia.”

With that, the hunter heads through the door. I follow.

Inside is gloomy, despite the rays of sunlight pressing in through the tall windows. It alights upon disused furniture and few personal touches, illuminating motes of dust that drift calmly in the air. Our feet creak against the hardwood floor. All the doorways are tall arches, the ceilings high, with large-bladed fans shifting in the breeze that follows us in. A bookshelf and coffee table are made of faded driftwood.

“Look around,” Sune says, “but if you find anything suspicious, don’t touch it. Call for me. I want to see it unaltered.”

I nod absently and wander toward the kitchen through a wide-open dining room. There’s a long island full of drawers, and all the cabinetry is sandblasted wood, rough but elegant-looking. Through the bay window over the stove, I see the undulating ocean, with cargo ships silhouetted against the horizon. Everything here is unused, though it’s been only three days. I swipe a finger through a thin layer of dust on the tea kettle balanced over the gas burner. Beside me the refrigerator shines with modernity. Only a handful of items are stuck to its face with uninteresting black magnets: an unused postcard of Old Faithful, two movie ticket stubs to what sound like horror films, and a news article from over a year ago about a thing called the Stone Plague. I lean in to catch a few lines.
String of troll deaths in Alta California… characterized by perfect calcification… no cure
. Frowning, I remember the odd look Amon gave me when I was concerned about trolls in the Jotunwood.

I catch my eye on an oddly posed family portrait of Evan Bell and two young women with blond hair as pale as his. There was no mention of sisters in his file. Perhaps they’re cousins. Could Bell’s family somehow have gotten a hold of Soren, to exact a blood price instead of going through the court system? They might legally call holmgang-to-the-death for this, and any lawspeaker or tyr would grant it.

It doesn’t make sense they’d break him out and imprison him in a cave.

I skim along to the pantry door and open it easily. But it’s no pantry. A narrow stairway leads down to a basement, smelling of damp stone and saltwater. Leaving the door wide open, I make my way down into the darkness, barely touching the rail. A cool, damp draft curls about my ankles like fingers.

“Hello?” I call, shivering as I step onto the uneven concrete floor. Man-sized shadows hang tight in the corners, huge and black like furniture covered by sheets. I reach to the sides, fumbling for a light switch along the dank wooden wall. I find one and flick it on.

Trolls loom around me.

I scream, stumble back onto the steps, and reach for a weapon, but I’ve nothing! Whirling, I scramble up two steps before I realize the trolls aren’t moving. They’re calcified, thank Freya. My pulse is wild, breath harsh, as I collapse back onto the staircase, elbows and knees splayed and ridiculous.