The Apple Throne (17 page)

I open my eyes, and his face is before mine, wrenched with pain, but his eyes are black holes. He bares his teeth and grabs my face, shoving me back so my head slams against the side of the van. “Soren!” I scream, and he’s gone.

I’m spread wide across the floor of Amon’s van, blankets trapping my legs, sweat ruining my hair. A cottony ache presses behind my eyes, and my mouth is tacky. The van is shut up, but bright sunlight pours through the windshield, glinting on the hanging nails. My breath puffs visibly in the cold air. Struggling up, I grab one of the water bottles scattered behind the passenger seat, unscrew the top, and gulp the entire thing down. Water trickles from my mouth. I wipe it off my chin, then lower my head and let it hang from my shoulders.

The only rings on my fingers are the lovely, delicate gifts from the gods. I glance at the underside of the driver’s seat where Amon tucked the elf gold. Did it seep into my dreams?

The hunter will follow the gold to your heart’s desire.

My hands are shaking again.

Four days and Soren Bearstar will join me in Hel. But get the Valkyrie’s heart for me, and I will save him
.

I clench my fists against my stomach and stumble on my knees to the sliding door. I drag it open. Amon and Signy look abruptly at me from the fire circle. Signy caps a flask and hands it back to Amon as he gets to his feet. “Are you all right?” he asks quietly.

I nod, setting shaky feet on the ground. I’ve only got on socks. Without my having to ask, Amon gestures with his chin to my boots, slumped beside the front wheel. As I put them on, Signy saunters over. “Well?” she says. “It’s a good thing I convinced that family to move campsites. You were pretty strapped last night.”

“I can tell,” I manage. My voice cracks. I rub my throat, but the memory of the itch in my dream freezes my fingers.
Get the Valkyrie’s heart for me, and I will save him
. I stare at Signy’s green eyes, knowing I can’t kill her and take her heart, knowing Soren wouldn’t want it, knowing that what Freya said was impossible, or a prophecy with a secret meaning.

Soren only has four days, and we have to follow the gold to get to him. My heart’s desire.

“Where’s Sune?” I ask. His Jeep is gone.

“He went for some extra supplies about two hours ago.” Amon silently hands me the Walton’s bag with my toothbrush and gel inside, and a roll of toilet paper. I take them and hike the narrow trail to the facilities, stopping every few paces to catch myself against a tree trunk. The bark is silver with ice, and my hand melts the thin layer of frost. I try not to think, only focus on the tasks ahead. By the time I return, Amon has a mug of tea for me and is making oatmeal. “Come eat,” the godling says, dropping in dried cranberries.

Signy digs into the earth with a stick. “You were seething until past midnight. At least five hours. You spun and then stopped with the sword held up. You screamed something. Your fingers were rigid, and the air around you…rippled.” She shudders visibly. “I saw runes crawling down your neck in red lines. Then you just passed out.” She screws her face and says, “Then the worst part came. You didn’t move for hours, but every ten or fifteen minutes you said something. Like you were having this long conversation with the universe.”

Amon scrapes his spoon against the bottom of the pot as he stirs. “I was gonna climb up there and snap you out of it, but this one said it’d be bad.”

Signy shrugs. “I didn’t like what was going on, but you seemed to be…tapped into something. I thought it might hurt you.”

“Thanks,” I say, eyes drawn to her chest. She grips that pendant, just over her heart, as if she somehow knows what I’m thinking.

I walk to Soren’s truck and lean across the tailgate to grab his greatcoat. I shrug it on and wrap it as tight around me as I can. It’s made of bearskin and too long and too wide for me. The leather is stiff, doubled over the shoulders and heavy with buckles and pockets, but inside the fur is soft and warm. It smells like sword oil. We have to go, soon, fast. I need to spill the story of my seething so that when Sune returns we leave.

But my body aches. The dreams I had after the seething compounded my weariness. I remember I used to dream wild and far the mornings after a deep seething. My mom did, too. Residuals, she called them. Fears and unaddressed questions. I remember, too, three days ago—or four now?—when I longed for any dream at all. This is not what I had in mind. Soren’s face like a mask. Scaring me.

Shuddering into his greatcoat, I slowly return to the fire and huddle on the log bench. I pick my tea up off the ground, accept the oatmeal, and eat it carefully as Amon pretends not to stare at me and Signy does so openly. She’s got on fingerless gloves that look like somebody just cut off the fingers and let them unravel. It adds another layer of disrepute to her entire self. It’s difficult to imagine she represents Odin Alfather and the New World Tree for anything.

In a stroke of timing, Sune pulls up as I finish eating. He swings out of the Jeep and approaches immediately. His scalp is in need of a shave, though the stubble adds a dark shadow to his skull that balances out those hooded eyes. He notices my glance and runs his hand against the fuzz. “You’re awake,” he says with relief.

“Nice observation, hunter,” Amon says.

Sune ignores him and settles back on his heels, tails of his blue coat spread around him.

I swallow the last of my tea. “Thank you all for standing with me last night. I didn’t lose myself into the seething this time, but flew into a true dream where I spoke with the goddess of dreams. She sees Soren in the strands of fate and said,
The hunter will follow the gold to your heart’s desire
. That’s you, Sune.”

“And the elf gold,” Sune says, nodding as if he’s been proven correct.

“Freya said Soren has four days to live before he joins her in Hel.” My voice drops off with the final few words.

Sune’s satisfaction wipes away, and Amon stops eating.

“Wait,
Freya told you
?” Signy says, thrusting to her feet.

I nod, leaning my neck back to meet her suddenly angry gaze.

“Freya can’t be trusted, especially not where Soren is concerned.”

I frown. “What do you think seething is, Valkyrie, but a seethkona’s prayer to the goddess of dreams?”

She works her mouth, then throws up her hands. “Of course she wouldn’t tell you where he is! She hates Soren. Rag me, Astrid, you should know that! He said you were stubborn! Freya hasn’t gotten what she wanted from him at least twice, and he keeps ruining her plans. If she says to follow the gold, you should do
the opposite
.”

“What are you talking about?”

Her lips tighten, and then she glances at Sune and Amon.

“You can speak in front of them. In fact, I insist.” I grip at Soren’s coat, holding it tight across my chest.

“She wanted him to forget you, first of all. It was only his boon that let him remember your name.”

I remain still. “That isn’t accurate. Freya wanted me to become Idun, and Idun’s identity is always erased from the memory of Asgard. It had nothing to do with Soren. That was a side effect that we happily found a way around.”

Signy looks at me with pity. “Soren was supposed to be my consort,” she says harshly.

“What makes you think that?”

“I just know. Your goddess manipulates us to get the future she wants. She plays with lives—and deaths, too. She set those trolls on my family two years ago. She’s responsible for so many deaths.”

Amon actually laughs. “Says a daughter of Odin.”

“Yes, a daughter of Odin,” Signy repeats. “I’m no stranger to loss and madness and death, Thorson. I’ve fought some desperate battles, and I know things Freya has done. She is no friend to me or to Soren Bearstar.”

“Stop!” I jerk to my feet. “I will not listen to you malign Freya this way. She does what she does because of the futures she sees—that is what I do, that is what we all do! We fight for the world we want, for the people we love. Why condemn a goddess for it when that’s exactly what all of us do?”

Signy slashes her hand down. “I don’t manipulate. I don’t lie or trick others.”

“She told me if I give her your heart, she’ll save Soren herself.”

She steps back, startled. “My heart.”

“Would you die in his place?” I demand, furious at her.

Signy’s hand goes to her chest, where she clutches her pendant through the hoodie. “Yes,” she says in a harsh whisper. “But that isn’t what she means.”

“It’s the pendant,” Sune says quietly.

She releases it like it’s on fire and glares at Sune.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Nothing I’ll give the Witch. Soren would understand that. He’d
agree
with me.”

I shove my hands into the large pockets of his greatcoat. “Then what do you think we should do, Signy Valborn? What is the opposite of what Freya suggests?”

“I don’t know! Ask another god—can’t you do that?”

“Can’t you?”

She hisses through her teeth and stomps away.

I sink down onto the log again. Amon knocks his shoulder into mine. “There
are
other gods who might help, too.”

I close my eyes, thinking of the cell phone in my coat. I just bargained with Freya to keep my absence from the orchard secret as long as possible. It would not do to tell another god now, especially Loki who has his own agendas. “This is the way. The more gods who know I’m not in the orchard, the worse that is. Freya told me what I needed: follow the gold. We just need to do it fast. Four days.”

Sune says, “I always find what I seek.”

“And what about the Valkyrie?” Amon asks.

I stand. “I’m going to make her go home.”

• • •

Signy is halfway back to her own rental car, standing in front of a lone boulder that leans into the lee of a redwood tree. Her hand is flat against it, her other against her chest where the pendant hangs under her hoodie. She’s breathing hard, like she’s just run a marathon, and her fingers scrape the stone. There are thin black runes painted onto her nails.

It’s a troll stone.

“The plague,” I say quietly as I come up behind her.

“We’re better off without them,” she answers thickly, slapping her palm against it. She runs her fingers down a fold in the stone, and I see how it was a hill troll, head ducked under arms. There are the fingers, there the knee where he half-bent against the redwood. He’s in such a tight ball, as if desperate to calcify into a boulder instead of this statue-perfect rock.

“Don’t tell Amon it’s here, or he’ll come try to harvest its organs.”

Signy blinks rapidly and touches the lump of her pendant again. There’s sweat at her temples. Her cheeks are richly pink, her green eyes feverish.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she mutters.

I say, “You don’t have to trust Freya. You only have to trust me.”

“You trust her. It’s the same thing.”

“Soren would.”

“I’m not him!” Her cry echoes against the massive trees.

Sunlight streams down on us as I study her, as I draw my energy. I imagine the golden light compliments me and ignore the fact that Soren’s coat likely makes me seem an overdressed child. “Signy, I want you to go home.”

“What?”

I don’t repeat myself.

Signy narrows her eyes. “Why?”

“You don’t trust me or my seething. I don’t want a person who doesn’t trust me at my side. Go home, Valkyrie.”

She opens her mouth, stops, then says, “I’m… I owe him”.

“I am going to find him.”

But Signy’s expression doesn’t change. She doesn’t believe I can. “I thought she told you Sune would find him.”

I say, “The goddess of dreams does not see my future, and so she cannot say what I will do, or what I can do. I will find a thousand ways to make certain Sune is successful.”

It’s the first thing that sparks hope in her. “She can’t see you?”

“I am outside of fate, like all the gods, but I can affect it. I can change things, but they can’t be predicted.”

“Chaos,” Signy whispers as if it’s the answer to a riddle. She starts forward suddenly, grabbing my face. I gasp and take her wrists, but she stares into my eyes so intently. Her fingers are cool on my cheeks. “I see it, deep, deep back. And
truth
and
secret
.”

My breath shakes out of me. “Secret?”

“Ace up the sleeve, delicate one-shot pistol in a hidden ankle holster. Secret weapon,” she murmurs, rhythmically, like it’s a poem.

I smile. I like the sound of it.

The Valkyrie releases me. “You’re different.”

“From what?”

“Your runes, the ones in your eyes. They changed from last night and from that night in the garden.”

“What does that mean?” I ask, unsure I want to know.

She shakes her head. “It means the truth of your heart, your spirit, has changed, or that it never was certain in the first place.”

“Do most people’s change?”

“Some. But I think it means you don’t know who you are yet.”

I laugh a little, helplessly.

Signy blows out a long breath, puts her hands on her hips. “We make our own world. That’s what you said to me.”

“I remember. I told you to follow your heart. That’s what I am doing now.”

“You aren’t just doing what she tells you?”

“I’m using her prophecy, Signy. They are not useless.” I say it too fiercely, convincing myself.

She shoves her finger in my face. “Swear you will find him in time.”

I take that finger, firmly and gently move it. I cradle her hand. “I swear I will, Valkyrie of the Tree. You may go home and never worry.”

Weaving our fingers together, she says, “Be careful then, Idun. A lot of other people love him, too.”

It makes me smile sadly. “He’s an important part of the world.”

The Valkyrie leaves me feeling cold, and trapped in shadows.

I
return to Amon and Sune arguing quietly near the van. Signy’s packing up her silver rental, ignoring them.

The godling grimaces at Sune as I approach. “I’m out of the business,” he rumbles.

Sune claps a hand on his shoulder. “You don’t need to pretend on the lady’s account, Amon.”