The Apple Throne (20 page)

I can see Amon’s hands tremble. He reaches for Sune’s chest as if he’d grab him up by the shirt—if Sune were wearing one—and ends up with his fists under Sune’s face. “Leave my skit alone.”

“Stop,” I say, sliding between them. I put a hand on Sune’s chest and push, angling him back toward the bathroom.

Amon pulls his glare off Sune and settles it on me. “Which one of the gods taught you to pick locks?” he says meanly.

Sune grins at Amon over my head, almost viciously, and says, “I didn’t
have
to pick it. I cracked your password in two attempts.
Me
, not her. Don’t be angry at her.” Then the hunter disappears into the bathroom.

I let out a slow, controlled breath.

Amon lifts out a beer from the eight-pack, uncaps it, and I reach for it. Laughing a little, he hands it to me and opens another. We clink the bottles together and drink long. I sit on one of the two lumpy beds.

“I’ll share with Sune,” I tell Amon, so he doesn’t have to worry about it, if he
was
worrying about it. The godling pushes away from the rickety TV stand and grabs the photo album off the floor where I dropped it. Setting it on the bed, he flicks to the back, beer loose in his free hand, and draws out a battered photo and holds it out.

The picture is mostly shadowed, but in a sharp cut of light from a stone window, there’s a thin, shining woman. Her face and one bare shoulder gleam like porcelain, and flares of light mottle the air around her like double-exposure. I can see her eyes, full black and empty, and the ridge of black crystals that grows out of her prominent cheekbones. Her lips are barely distinguished, but parted slightly.

“Amazing,” I breathe. Amon nods, takes the picture back, and slides it into his jeans pocket.

I
dream of trees made of crystal—long, elegant trunks of amethyst and emerald leaves sliced so thin light shines through. The leaves quake and shiver because of a roar as loud as an avalanche. Soren, chained, screams wordlessly over and over again. He slams into the smooth stone walls of his prison, blood smearing his fists. I dream of a mountain lake, the water creamy orange with dawn sunlight. I dream of a bathtub, pink-tinged water swirling down the rusty drain, Soren’s body drooped against the porcelain. I dream of my hands crusted with thick yellow gold.

I wake, gasping, before the sun. Sune is a warm presence at my back, and I’m sweating.

“Lady?” Sune says thickly.

“It’s time to go,” I whisper, climbing out of bed. I pull on my mostly dry clothes, boots, and Soren’s sword before snagging a key card from the bedside table and slipping outside. The air is clear and cold; jagged pink and orange draws me east. My throat is raw as if I’d been screaming, my skin tacky with sweat. I run through the parking lot, down the cracked sidewalk. Soren should be out here with me, going through his meditations and his weapons dance, doing a million push-ups or squats while he holds me over his shoulder.

At the crossroads of two double-lane highways lined with metal warehouses and dusty junkyards, I kneel. I clasp my hands together, rings cold and pinching, and pray to Baldur the Beautiful for hope. I know better than any that the prayers cannot reach the ears of our gods without some magic involved, especially a god like Baldur and especially when he’s dead in Hel. But praying calms me.

In three months, Baldur will rise from the dead. Soren and I
will
be there for it—to greet him, to give him his apple. Together. Reaching into my coat pocket, I pull out the three apples of immortality and Soren’s yellow glass apple. The latter is heavy and cool on my palm, but the magical apples barely seem to sit against my skin, light as the air around them. I brought them for trade, for leverage, and maybe, I think now, for reassurance. What superstitious thinking, to believe having them here connects me to the orchard. But like memory charms or these black beads at my neck, they
remind
me.

Early morning cars begin to drift past, and I stand. I make my way back to the hotel where the men are ready—Amon returning from a donut run in track pants and a hoodie and Sune checking the pressure in his Jeep’s rear driver’s-side tire. I go directly to the van, slide the door open, and stand there, staring at the back of the driver’s seat where Amon hid the elf gold. I’d like to take it out. It is so easy to imagine a chunky golden ring on my forefinger.

Amon hands me a bag with grease stains at the bottom. “Maybe you should ride with the hunter again today.”

Sune rises from his crouch, a slight sheen of sweat on his brow despite the cool morning. “Need some alone time, Amon?” he says crossly.

I frown. “Is the gold calling you, as well?”

The hunter swivels to me, mouth open, but stops himself from speaking right away. He just shakes his head. “It’s fine. Come on.”

Amon shrugs at me. I get in the Jeep, wondering if Sune had bad dreams all night, too.

• • •

Most of the six-hour drive is through gleaming, flat desert, with scrubby bushes and the occasional snowy ridge or vast mesa cutting up from the land. Sune is in no mood to chat, even by the time we cross into the Uto kingstate and I am awed by the raw, white salt flats. They’re an impossible stretch of nothing but salt-crusted cracks and the glare of sunlight that wavers in the distance in every direction. It is desolate but beautiful, as I imagine some of the underworlds must be. Sune doesn’t seem to appreciate it, cussing in his soft accent at nearly every car we pass, for little reason I can see. His hands flex constantly on the steering wheel, and a thin layer of sweat glistening over his ram horn tattoo. When I offer him water, he snatches it and gulps it all down. Then he apologizes, but tersely.

I touch the window and try not to let his mood trigger a spiral of my own.

Salt City is a bright town cradled in a bowl of purple mountains and laid out in a perfect grid. Besides numbered north-south streets, the east-west roads are named alphabetically after saints of the Thunderer. We follow Amon to a gas stop though we don’t need gas yet. He hops out of his van with a bag over his shoulder, lifts a hand to us, and disappears inside. Sune pinches his mouth as he climbs out and comes around the nose of the Jeep to open my door for me. I stretch my legs, welcoming the sunlight that warms the air so it’s just bearable without my coat. I reach for the clouds and watch the light catch on my rings.

Amon emerges from the convenience store in crisp white slacks and a silky gray shirt, white vest hugging his torso. His shoes are polished to a shine, and flashy gemstones instead of steel run up his earlobes.

Sune says, “Hiding your true colors from Gunn-Elin?” There are two bright pink blotches on his narrow cheeks, as if he has a fever.

“Respecting the sacred space,” Amon replies, just as sharply. He’s beautiful. Dark and gleaming against the bright desert.

I glance between the two of them, then gesture at Sune’s fine-cut uniform. “Are we going somewhere I need to be less, ah, raggedy?”

Amon says, “The Rock Cathedral.”

Sune dismisses my worry. “The Thunderer doesn’t care whether you enter his house in fine clothes.”

The Rock Cathedral rises from the center of town, built square and tall of white sandstone and whiter marble, with four spires that cut up against the brilliant blue sky. A garden of volcanic rocks and elegantly shaped evergreen bushes swirls around it. We park in the full lot and Amon mutters he always arrives during services, but at least it’s not Thorsday. Sune leaves his axes in the van, but buttons up his uniform coat before sliding his shoulder holster in place.

White salt-gravel paves the path to the wide-open double doors, and it’s a shock to step into the shaded atrium. A shallow golden bowl waits with clear water, and both Sune and Amon dip their fingers into it, then flick the water onto their faces as they murmur a prayer. Sune makes the hammer sign over his chest, but Amon leans back to take my elbow to lead us into the grand sanctuary.

One thing I do know is that every rock cathedral is shaped like a hammer, and we enter at the base, looking up the grand nave of a handle toward the arms that spread perpendicular from the altar to form the head. Stone pews line the way, filled with worshippers. The great slab altar stone holds a cup and a large hammer, and a priest in sky blue and yellow vestments calls out a chant of strength that the congregation repeats like a war cry. The sound echoes up the stone pillars to the soaring ceiling and its arched rafters. Sune joins the responses loud and clearly, though Amon keeps his lips shut. Behind the priest is a semi-circle of statues of heroes and, rising over them, a great, blue stained-glass window. One jagged lightning strike cuts white down the center so it appears to aim directly at the altar.

Amon leads us down the dim right-side aisle, past candle-lit prayer stations and saint statues. Sune breaks away and joins the congregation in the nave, sliding into the line forming in the center aisle. The worshippers approach the altar put a hand on this temple’s blessed hammer while the priest holds it and softly pray.

I wish I knew what was appropriate. The religious rituals I’m used to involve drums and laughter and loud ecstasy. The hunter reaches the priest, whose eyes widen in surprise. Sune bows, touches the hammer reverently, and Amon murmurs the appropriate prayer into my ear: “
As the hammer returns to Thor, so may I
.”

Then Amon turns away with a little half-hidden twist of distaste on his mouth and leads me through the slowly departing crowd. We tuck into an alcove and wait. Sune hangs near the altar as the priest finishes the service, then has a brief word with him before joining us. The wide hem of his coat snaps against his thighs as he strides over.

“She’s in the ossuary,” he says to Amon.

They take me to a large statue of a saint wearing a white glove. His pedestal reads,
Never forget the stain
. I recognize Sanctus Chambers, a warrior from the Second Eurland War. Amon presses his back to the cathedral wall in order to slip behind the statue. He pushes aside a thick blue curtain, revealing a dark, short corridor cut into the cathedral stone. I follow, with Sune bringing up the rear. Amon unlatches a plain wooden door and takes us down dank, narrow stairs.

“Pull the door shut behind us,” he says. Sune does, and we’re covered in blackness. Then a flick and hiss, and Amon has lit the wick of a fat beeswax candle perched in a tiny alcove. He leaves the lighter.

The walls are narrow and rough. I smell water and moist earth as I carefully make my way over the worn stairs. As we descend, I find my breath growing shallow with anticipation; this is near to the feel and smell of my seething dream, when I saw Soren chained in a cave. I skim my fingers against the stone wall and imagine coming around a corner to find him, here and alive and waiting for me. The tips of my fingers tingle.

But the stairs end in a cool chamber barely big enough for Amon to stand up in. It’s made of dark stone, with only one decoration—a carved lintel above another doorway. Amon lifts the candle so we can read:
Be Wary for You Enter the Mountain of Death
.

“What’s down here?” I whisper, my words hissing through the darkness and fluttering the candlelight.

“The Salt City ossuary,” Amon says quietly.

“Bones of your dead? I thought Thunderers were buried like Freyans. Put into the earth to become a part of it again.” I shiver, and there’s a discomfort in my chest, as if there’s less oxygen down here.

It’s Sune who says from just behind me, “Our bones fortify the mountains here, to wait till Ragnarok or the Thunderer claims us again.”

He sounds angry about it, and I half-turn to reassure him, but Amon adds, “It’s an old tradition. Rarely used any more. We
are
buried in cemeteries or monuments now, in the walls of a church.”

Sune snarls, “Amon used to hide his stash down here.”

Amon lifts the candle nearer to his face, and the light glints off his black cheeks, casts orange fire into his angry eyes.

“You wanna hit me again?” Sune pushes, his chest pressing into my shoulder as I stand between them.

“Nothing’s changed,” Amon says calmly. “You couldn’t defeat me now anymore than the first time.”

I put a palm on each of their chests. Sune’s is hot, like Soren’s sometimes. “I don’t have time for this! What’s wrong with you? Are you feeling well?”

Sune’s teeth gleam white with his lips curled back. “Just remembering old times.”

“This is where he caught you with Eirfinna?” I say to Amon.

The godling nods and turns away so fast the candle sputters out. Blackness hugs us, and I grip my fist against Sune’s chest because his coat is suddenly all I have grounding me. He covers my hand with his—it’s hot and sweaty—just as a sliver of light appears: Amon’s dragging open the door into the ossuary.

Light spills toward us from inside, even, electric light that Amon’s shoulders briefly block as he steps in. I follow, Sune pressing at my heels.

I’m surrounded by bones.

Shelves carved into the walls hold reposing skeletons, their arms crossed over weapons and their heads resting on small round shields. Mounds of disarticulated bones are stacked like puzzles in the recesses between shelves, vertebrae atop vertebrae, femurs patterned into circles and spirals, pelvises and finger bones linked in intricate patterns. I touch my lips in sudden superstition. There is a skeleton seated in a chair and another, both facing the same direction. Shadows reach back toward us, cast in sharp, elongated detail from the electric lamps hanging from a tall iron hook. I can’t see the end of the hall for the blackness outside the light.

A girl is far ahead of us in the pool of light. It’s Amon’s sister, the godling. She kneels on a blue tarp in dusty canvas overalls, bones scattered all around her. A soft sound slinks to my ears: a hymn it seems, with a repeating melody.

“
By bright waters find strength, by gentle mountain home
,” she sings as she studies a yellowing skull with one hand covered in a latex glove. She touches a metal instrument to the jaw, measuring something, and marks in a tiny black notebook in her lap. Then she puts the skull down beside a row of rib bones and sticks a yellow tab with numbers I can’t make out. I don’t understand how she can be so calm down in this tomb, so relaxed.