The Apple Throne (26 page)

Sune moves, striding confidently toward the opposite wall. The doorway is just a blank spot of darkness amidst the crystal veins. Amon and I follow.

This corridor is smooth and arched overhead, not remotely natural, either, with a swirling line of crystal that brightens as we pass and dims behind us. The way branches twice, and Sune glances back at me, shaking his head. I shrug, and he chooses the right turn first and left second. He’s re-sheathed one of his axes, but holds the other ready.

Suddenly Sune stops, one hand flying back to steady me, head cocked to listen.

I try not to make a noise, biting my lip as if I could stop the loud beating of my heart.

“What?” Amon rumbles.

Sune shakes his head once. He closes his eyes, still listening.

I hear it: a long sigh.

It might be wind, singing down through a small break in the mountain, except as we stand silently, it pauses, then sucks back. The sigh comes again, long and low.

Breath.

There’s a strange catch in it, too, and I tighten my grip on Sleipnir’s Tooth.

Sune turns to face Amon and me. He holds up one finger, then adds a second and third.

Three of them?
I mouth at him.

At least
. He shrugs slowly.
Big. Very big
.

Amon pushes through us and into the next chamber. Sune spits a curse, and I hurry after. The godling stands in the center of a vaulted room at least five stories tall with rough pillars of quartzite glowing softly pink so the light is blood-tinged.

We’re surrounded by calcified trolls.

Many are broken in pieces, like those in the basement of Evan Bell’s house, but at least five huge, bulbous forms appear complete: troll-mothers reclined on the stone floor, leaning against pillars, crouched and bent over as if in pain.

They’re moon-white and mottled gray like marble or sparking gray granite. One has sharp daggers of obsidian like birthmarks cutting down her shoulders and chest. She’s human-shaped, but huge and broad and muscled as a gorilla, with naked breasts and belts of iron and messy, magical charms. My throat is tight; my palm sweats against the soft shark-leather of the sword grip. Amon’s breath is harsh, too, though Sune stands light on his feet, moving around us constantly as if he doesn’t know from where the first danger will come.

The long sighing breath of the troll-mothers surrounds us, rhythmic and raw.

Calcified trolls do not breathe.

My panic tightens, but none of these beasts move at all. They’re alive, living and breathing, but seem trapped in some half-stone existence.

One slumps near the center with a meaty fist against the ground, and another curls around the broken, fully-calcified torso of a smaller beast, her eyes open. They’re dawn-blue and watching at me with obvious awareness. I step toward her, and both Amon and Sune startle. My lips part in horror as I stare at her leaden, but living, gaze.

“She can’t move,” I whisper. “It must be the plague, but they’re strong enough it hasn’t outright killed them. Yet.”

Amon hefts his hammer. “Should put them out of their misery.”

“No!” I fling my hand out. The collective sigh of the troll-mothers hitches. I say to the one staring at me, “We’re looking for Eirfinna, one of the elves here under the mountain. We won’t harm you.”

Sune says softly, “Look at all the dead ones. Smaller and shattered and crystallized even though there’s no sunlight.”

My voice is thick with sympathy as I say, “Their children. All their children are dead.”

“Do you think they came here for shelter?” Sune asks, almost reverent.

“Or to see if the elves had some cure?” I offer.

“Let’s keep going,” Amon says, carelessly shoving a broken head aside with his boot and heading for the next exit.

I follow, casting a sorrowful glance back at the poor beasts. I wish there was a thing to do for them, a way to cure the plague. Never have I considered myself a trollkin sympathizer, but no one deserves such an existence, especially to watch their sons crumble and die in their arms.

Sune cups my elbow, his mouth drawn down. Amon stomps ahead, making his discomfort loud and clear.

We go through a handful of chambers and three passages, all lit with crystal veins, all rough and empty but for pillars and the occasional lintel stone carved with ancient-styled runes I cannot read. The doors are often guarded by elegant statues carved straight into the mountain: small trolls or hairy giants, wolves and pigmy mammoths, women with sad smiles, grimacing warriors. Goblins with sharp teeth and real gemstones piercing through their cheekbones. Elves as they’re supposed to be from the old stories, recognizable by their height and willowy bodies, their perfect features and shining eyes.

I stop in a room the size of my cottage in the orchard. This one has nine statues, one to represent each of the Nine Worlds: Tyr the Just of Asgard; a troll; an elf; a dragon; a snake; a wolf; a giant; and a human child. All are beautiful, and they watch us with their stone eyes. Their blank, smooth stone eyes. It feels as though nothing in these caves is alive but for the troll mothers.

My skin is clammy, and the deeper into the mountain we go, the harder it is to breathe. Where are the goblins or elves who guard these passages? Struck down, too, by this Stone Plague? Is it possible Eirfinna was the last? Or Evan Bell himself? Hiding as a man to escape the Plague?

The elf ring is hot on my middle right finger, pressing against Soren’s sword.

We could wander here forever and die lost and starving. I wonder if that’s what the elves want. If they’re tricking us, letting us lose ourselves in the mountain.

I call, “My name is Idun the Young, and I come into the mountain halls looking for Eirfinna Grimlakinder, friend to Amon Thorson.”

My words dance and echo through the chamber, spreading out and fading.

“I am Idun! I want Eirfinna Grimlakinder! Show yourself!” I demand.

I spin and dash for a doorway, stumbling on the rough ground. I fling myself into the next room. “I am Idun the Young, and I search for Eirfinna!”

My name, her name—they repeat against the vast cavern here and entwine.

“Eirfinna Grimlakinder!”

I go to another room and another, vision awash with crystal veins and pillars of quartzite and luminous marble, with the silver shadows and brilliant cut gemstones embedded in the walls to sparkle like strings of elf-lights.

It’s a ghost town under here. Abandoned. Lonely.

Amon and Sune trail behind me, never joining in my cries, but not stopping me either. My chest heaves, and I’m suddenly furious. “Eirfinna, Lady of the Mountains! I demand you speak with me. I demand you let me in. I have bargaining to do with you! How dare you ignore the summons of the Lady of Apples!”

Amon grabs my shoulders from behind. I quiet.

My scream is a snake sliding away from us, a living thing, searching out ears to hear it. But it leaves me empty. It leaves us alone in a darkened chamber.

I slump to my knees, hands on my face. Sleipnir’s Tooth presses across my lap, cutting into the thick fabric of Gunn-Elin’s dress. Amon touches my head, offering comfort.

“We’ve been here before,” Sune says.

I look at him. He stands a breath away from a door-guard statue of a Valkyrie. Her marble eyes are a hand higher than his, her braids thick down her neck and woven with flowers made out of pink rubies.

“This statue is the same, but that one—” He turns and points directly across from him to a matching Valkyrie. “—has moved.”

Amon helps me to my feet, and we both stare. The Valkyrie looks the same as the one across the room to me, the same as every other Valkyrie statue we’ve seen: wearing a corselet and long skirt, a sword at her waist, braids with ruby flowers. I don’t know how Sune has noticed a difference.

Sune says, “She’s looking toward the door we just returned through. She stared across the room at her sister before.”

My heart goes cold.

“Are you sure it’s the same room?” Amon asks.

Sune doesn’t bother answering. He only says, “This way.”

I follow Sune as he moves boldly from one room to the next, only pausing once or twice to take a double-look at a statue, leading us based on the direction of certain statues’ eyes into a massive room we certainly haven’t seen before. Tall as the sanctuary of the Salt City Rock Cathedral, it burns with rainbows of light from the rubies and amethysts, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires and garnets and topaz, and I couldn’t even begin to say what else that glow in the walls. Jewels that do not belong in the mountains of Colorada.

There are no statues in this room. It’s only colored lights and layered shadows. The walls and ceiling are sharper and rougher than others, with crags and stalactites like chandeliers. Sune stands still, studying everything. I crane my neck up, Amon at my side. The points of colored light dazzle me, and I wince but don’t look away.

Sune says very quietly, “There,” and points at one of the deeper shadows in the corner. I look, but see only glowing pink stars staring out of the darkness.

Staring.
Oh my
.

The shadow moves, and the two pink eyes blink. I gasp and Amon curses.

It drops down to the ground, all spindly limbs and darkness. The pink glint of its—his?—eyes is mirrored by the rubies cutting up in sweeping lines along his cheekbones and the shine of pink in the silver filaments of hair. His face is narrow and sharp, eyes huge in proportion, and when he smiles, his teeth are as sharp as a cat’s. He wears skin-tight gray clothes, a suit of some kind that shifts as he moves the way shadows move. Ruby and gold rings sparkle on each of his long fingers. The goblin—elf?—lifts one hand and beckons to us, then turns and scampers off barefoot; his toes are long, too. The soles of his feet flash as moon-white as the troll-mother’s.

We hurry after.

The goblin leads us on a merry chase through several more chambers and dark hallways. I clumsily sheathe Soren’s sword and pick up my skirts to stop them tangling with my knees. Sune goes silently, and Amon pounds along.

We slide to a halt at the lip of a jagged gorge. I grab Sune’s coat as if my strength could keep him from tumbling off the edge, and Amon grunts in surprise.

The passage ends here in a cave as gaping as the Great Canyon.

Stairs descend in a double-helix from our position, carved into the rock of the mountain itself and lit with flower-shaped quartz and amethyst. Paths spread in either direction around the rim of the cavern. The walls are shaped into massive statues like the Covenant Mount in Lakota kingstate: faces with eyes taller than me watching us with patience and wisdom, a hundred of them, with gemstones in their irises but no other color, like the memories of all etinfolk captured here forever.

A river winds its way through the canyon below, edged with more violet light, and crystal trees grow from the floor as if the valley is a living forest. Their leaves shimmer gold in an unnatural breeze. Like the crystal trees of my dream. The bright river runs slow and smooth, glistening with rainbow colors in the faceted light. Toward the far end of the gorge, the water splits into two streams, and upon a tear-shaped island is a meadow of jeweled flowers surrounding what seems to be a maypole. Ribbons dangle from the top—red, pink, purple, and yellow, fluttering gently. Narrow bridges span the river, and to the left of the island, a white and silver checkered stone floor spreads flat toward the cliffs. A castle is built into the wall, of marble and granite and pink quartzite, with sleek turrets, arched windows, broad balconies.

It’s an Alfheim from fairy stories, here under the mountain.

As I stare, overwhelmed, I start to make out movement. Tiny figures move across the gorge, with more at the bottom of these spiral stairs, and some even tucked against the necks and noses and shoulders of the wall-statues. Watching us. Our guide has vanished.

I start down the stairs. Sune says my name, but by the time I’ve taken five steps, both of them come behind me. I go quickly, one hand against the cool marble rail that twists along with the spiral staircase. Down and down I go, head spinning. The delicate scent of autumn and flowers I recognized earlier grows more pronounced. My boots tap-tap-tap against the perfect stairs, unworn with time, though they must be old. Some magic, perhaps, maintains their shape and cut.

At the base of the stairway, two goblins stand, one white as marble, one black as obsidian, both with red rubies cutting up their cheeks. Or are they elves? Does it matter anymore if the two races married themselves together? These two are perfectly formed, like gods or men, glorious and shining as the elves in old illustrations and stories but for those rubies. They hold tall halberds in the crooks of their arms and wear white-shining leather clothes and silver corselets as fine as woven light. Both settle charcoal black gazes on me, their eyes pools of darkness with no iris or white, nothing but pits beneath their curling lashes. Neither moves, and I hurry past.

The path is gravel of raw-cut crystal, and I crunch hurriedly along the river, focused on the faraway bridge that will take me across to the castle. The gazes of the giant mountain statues weigh down my shoulders. The river runs so clear I only see the surface because of light reflecting against the wave-tips. It draws me, dazzling my eyes, to dip my fingers into it, make a cup in my palm, and drink the pristine water. I fist my right hand with the elf gold ring against the hard bodice of my dress and go faster.

Tiny flecks of dust appear all around me, colored silver, blue, and pink, bobbing and dancing on the currents of air. I glance up—and up and up, for the roof of this cavern rises nearly too high to see, but seems entirely of glass or clear crystal. The blue bright sky winks through. It must be illusion, but I sway with vertigo from the vast space. And here is Amon at my shoulder and Sune at the other. Amon’s eyes are alight with cracking electricity, and Sune is pale to the edges of his lips, looking at everything. The two of them together are like human versions of the black and white guardians from the base of the spiral stairway.

The golden-leafed trees rise around us, trunks slim and pale and flaking like aspen as their thin leaves shudder and shake. No one would believe this if I tried to put it into a tale.