The Apple Throne (30 page)

I whisper,
I know. I know the answer.
My vision darkens, and I shake my head. I try to grab at anyone.

And that is all I know.

I
dream of Soren’s body, laid out on a stone altar, dead and waiting to be burned. Panic grips me in a tight skin, and I thrust awake. But his arm is under my head, my nose pressed to his shoulder. Blankets cover us, but Soren is as hot as ever, a constant heat on my cheek, under my hand. Breathing slowly.

The fear melts against him. I press nearer. He is alive and in my arms. I
will
keep him that way; I have Eirfinna’s word she’ll let him go since I know the cause of the plague.

But the dream.

His dead body, laid out for a funeral pyre.
Four days and Soren Bearstar will join me in Hel.
Today is the fourth day, I think.

My chest constricts again. I press my face against his collarbone and breathe him in: his smell that is impossible to describe, except that it’s always savory. I’ve never known him to buy his own shampoo or soap, preferring whatever was available at school or in hotel rooms, borrowing from travel companions or me, or just grabbing a handful of baking soda when he has to.

Opening eyes suddenly tacky with tears, I touch my hand lightly to his sternum. There, just under his left pectoral, curves a blotting bruise. It’s already yellowing and deep, less visceral red than yesterday. He heals so fast when he’s not poisoned. His hand, splayed loose at the edge of the blanket pulled up to his waist, is scabbed at the knuckles, but not raw. As if he were destroying himself last week, not hours ago.

His fingers twitch, and he rather suddenly stops my progress tracing his bruised ribs by capturing my wrist. I catch my breath in an echo of fear and tilt up to see his eyes are open, surprised, curious, warm.

“Astrid?” he says.

“Soren.” A smile cracks my dry lips, but I don’t care. I lean up to kiss him, but his hand finds my mouth and he holds me away.

“I…” He makes some effort to swallow. “I am…fire and air.”

I laugh brightly and answer, “My other elements I give to mortal life.”

The poetry hangs between us, proving to each other we are who we seem to be. The line is from
Antony and Cleopatra
, from the
Entire Works of Shakespeare
. We opened the book three months ago, just before he left the orchard, and flipped to a random page. The line is our code, our secret language of reassurance that we’ve needed since the day Loki Changer came pretending to be Soren.

Soren’s arm under me tightens. I squeeze him back, despite his injuries. “I read it, after you left,” I say.

Soren shakes his head. He’s never read it.

“It’s about a queen who kills herself when her lover is murdered. I wished we’d chosen a different one.”

“They’re…probably all like that.” Soren’s voice is calm, so quiet and controlled.

I nod against his warm chest. I want to remain here forever, trying to match my breathing to his. As always his rhythm is too slow and deep and I feel like I’m drowning. But I don’t want this moment to end. I don’t want to talk about murder and elves and plagues. I just want this.

“I feel shattered,” he says, breath blowing the curls atop my head.

“You were…poisoned,” I whisper.

“Bearbane? I’m under a mountain?”

“The elves took you.”

He blinks slowly, but shows no other surprise. “I killed one of them, didn’t I?”

I touch his stomach. “What happened?”

“I remember so…little.” After another moment, he says, “My mouth tastes like trash.”

“Mine, too.”

We slowly stand up from the stone bed. This crystal room is doorless; we are still Eirfinna’s prisoners, though this rest together was a kindness I did not expect. Our prison is small and bare but for the heavy blankets on the bed, two chairs carved of stone, and a stone table inlaid with silver. It holds a pitcher and bowl, some thin towels, a platter of bread and a square of butter. There’s a pair of folded silk pants like mine that should fit Soren. He tugs them on.

Bumping shoulders, we rinse our mouths and drink and break the bread into pieces. I pick at mine; it’s thick with seeds and olives, and the butter is too cold to spread easily. Soren makes a giant butter sandwich and eats it so quickly I regret having any.

I ask, “What
do
you remember? We only know you sent Pilot to Signy in Philadelphia and then were arrested for killing Evan Bell.”

“Did Pilot make it? He’s safe?”

“Yes. I saw Signy a few days ago.”

There’s a long pause as Soren takes another bite of bread. “Vider asked me to look into a disappearance on behalf of the matria of Half-Serpent caravan. Do you remember him? The caravan where we picked her up?” When I nod, he continues. “One of his people went missing, and the militia didn’t seem to be doing anything about it. It was a man named Andre who Vider was close with a long time ago, and so the matria was begging Vider to help, but she’s still too heavy in training and can’t leave her band yet for any reason short of family death. So she asked me to do it for her.”

Soren closes his eyes, slumping in the chair like he’s exhausted. “He was a gold junkie, which I didn’t even know was a thing. He’d last been seen in Eureka, and I asked around until I heard Bell was the man to see if you wanted elf gold.” Soren takes a deep breath. “I’d heard about the dangers of gold, so I left my sword in the truck to impress the fact that I just went to talk to him. But when he saw me he just… it’s like his face rippled. I asked if he knew Andre, even though Bell was…rippling. I thought I was getting sick and my vision was blurred? He hissed at me suddenly, and I know I saw fangs. I reached for him, and he lashed out. His face changed, and I saw black eyes, sharp teeth…horns or something coming out of his cheeks. I just reacted, grabbed his neck, and flung him away.” He shudders, but I notice the glint of sweat at his temples. “His neck broke—ah gods.”

Soren pushes to his feet, gripping his hips tightly. He sways a little. “I let them arrest me. It was the right thing. I killed him.”

“You defended yourself,” I insist. It had been a shock to me to stand face-to-face with an elf, and I’d been expecting it.

“I wanted to call you,” he mutters, “but I didn’t know how, and I had to go with them—I had to. I killed him.” He sways again and sits heavily onto the bed. The skin around his mouth is tight, grayish.

“Soren?” I stand before him, nudging his knees apart so I can lean his forehead against my chest. It’s burning.

“I can feel it all sinking down.” His hands find my hips as he talks to my stomach. I run fingers through his longish hair, bend over him as much as I can.

“You’ve been ill, weakened from bearbane.”

“The frenzy is spinning inside, and I’m worried I’m too tired to control it. I’m… I think you need to go.”

“Never.”

“Astrid.”

I scrape my nails down his neck, wrap my arms around him. “I am not leaving. There’s no door even if I wished to. I will not leave you to this. You know how to calm yourself. You control it. Stop being terrified.”

His skin is oh-so-hot, and sweat beads on his forehead, around his lips. He pants like a wild dog, his shoulders shudder, and elf-kisses break out along his arms.

“Soren.”

He shakes his head, pulls away from me.

I let go and calm myself, long breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth—warrior breathing. Soren wraps his arms around himself, leans over his knees, shivering. Slick sweat drips down his spine.

This isn’t working, but I know he can stop the frenzy. Me getting upset doesn’t help.

I slowly move in again and touch his shoulders. Murmuring his name, tiny tut-tuts, and nonsense syllables, I push him back onto the bed. His hands fly to his face, grinding into his eyes. His mouth is a grimace, and his teeth gleam as he clenches them.

“Soren, listen to me,” I say gently. “Listen to my voice. You can do this, you can relax. Shift the energy, channel it, my bear.” I climb on top of him, straddling his hips, and brush my hands down his chest, his arms, as soothing as I can. “My hands, Soren, my voice. My mouth.” I hunch over and kiss a trail up his stomach to his chest. I press my cheek over his frantic heartbeat. He groans and tears at his hair, all his muscles twitching and hard. I refuse to think of his rage, his spitting fury when he devastated my mouth and shattered my shoulder. I refuse.

“The poison is gone,” I murmur instead. “Ride this tide and wash it away.” I let my mouth caress his skin as I speak. My own body is flushed, and I struggle to remain gentle, wanting to press myself into him, kiss him like my life depends on it as much as his does.

It’s working. He’s just shivering now, with his hands fisted in his hair. I slide up and kiss his elbow. I kiss the backs of his hands and curl my fingers around his wrists. I pull on them, and he lets me touch his knuckles to my head instead. He twists those strong fingers into my hair, tight enough my scalp burns, and I kiss him hard.

Soren sits up under me, tumbling me into his lap with his fists buried painfully in my hair. I wind my arms around his neck for leverage and don’t stop kissing him. Never stop. He’s fevered but not lost, and his hands flatten against my skull, thumbs at my ears, holding me against him firmly but not hurting me anymore. Tears fall down my cheeks, and a desire heavy as melted gold slides down my spine.

This—this is a way to channel the frenzy, to transform the mad berserking into passion.

I twist enough to untie my wide belt, drag off the tunic and let it fall away. In my mind’s eye, I see a pulsing red heart. I remember the skirt of destiny woven around me, and as I touch him, as I kiss him and bring him inside me, I imagine scarlet trails, cords and knots, binding us together in this madness.

• • •

Soren sleeps brief and deeply. I don’t. I sprawl half on top of him, hands folded on his chest and my chin on my hands, staring up at his neck and jaw, his nostrils and long cheeks, his short, thick lashes. His face is become a mountain range, and I cannot see his spear tattoo from this angle. I wish I had the leisure to burrow down and wake him in a fashion that would cause his eyes widen in that blushing way, to learn everything I want to know about his body and my body. We’ve loved each other for almost two years but never had the time to study. I think of Amon’s word—
buzzer
—and how I can’t know if I prefer sex with a berserker because I’ve never been with anyone else like this, and never want to be.

I shift sideways to lie against Soren’s left shoulder. He is so warm against my bare skin—sticky in some places, sleek in others—and I close my eyes.

At any time Eirfinna will come in, demanding the answer I promised her. And the answer is that she was right: It was Signy becoming the Ninth Valkyrie that triggered the plague. Signy won her title by killing that troll mother and taking her heart. Taking the heart broke some magic between all the trolls, those red lines of fate I saw in my seething, causing them all to calcify and die.

Signy still has the heart: her pendant. It’s the thing Freya wanted in return for saving Soren. And certainly when I tell Eirfinna, the elf will want it, too, for it is the key to the plague.

Soren moves his head, looks down at me. “You’re still here.”

“I’m still here.” I flatten my hand over his heart. “Tell me about the heart Signy took from the troll mother.”

He goes quiet and still. I glance up to see his frown, which is more confused than angry. “Why?”

“It caused, or is connected to the cause of, the Stone Plague, and I promised Eirfinna to tell her how to end the plague in return for your freedom.” I sit up, letting the blanket fall away. “Tell me.”

Scooting up to prop against the wall, Soren looks away from me. “It was the…original troll mother’s heart. Do you know the story?”

Sharp in my mind is the seething image of Freya blowing fire into a black stone, pressing it into a woman’s chest. “Yes. That Freya and the elves created the trolls by putting the power of the earth’s fire into a woman.”

“It was true—or, at least, enough true that when Signy killed her troll mother and took the heart, the loss affected the trolls everywhere.”

“You knew? They’re all dying because of it. Not
affected
. Dead.”

Soren faces me and flinches. “Don’t look at me like that, Astrid.”

“Like what?” I whisper, though I feel it. I feel the disgust wrinkling my brow, pursing my lips.

He gets up, leaving me on the hard bed, and snatches his pants. “They’re trolls. They’re dangerous. They
eat people
. They’ve been our enemies since they were created.”

I draw the blankets up against my chest like a shield. “So they deserve to die? Wiped out with a plague? Without a chance to defend themselves? Without a chance for honor?”

We stare at each other. I twist the top of the blanket the way my heart is twisting.

“It isn’t fair,” Soren admits softly, “but I doubt it can be stopped.”

I recall my seething visions of Signy struggling with the heart somehow, growing older, her hands turning to black stone. “Is it still alive? The heart?”

“I think so. I think it calls to Signy to let it consume her, to let it make
her
into a new troll mother.”

“If she did, maybe the plague would end.”

Soren stops moving. “That didn’t occur to me.”

“Maybe…” I chew my lip. “Maybe without actually
being
a heart or part of a living heart, its power is weak and so the troll mothers are weak.”

“If she consumes it, she’ll turn into a monster, though. That’s what it does to human women, even Valkyrie. It’s how that very first troll mother was created.”

I nod slowly, rolling my heavy, gold-laden shoulder. The bones move smoothly; the skin is only a little bit tight. Here’s an answer I can give Eirfinna, that someone needs to swallow the heart.

“What’s that?” he says suddenly, then takes two long steps to me, fingers hovering over the spidery golden scar lining my collarbone.

“It’s…” I take his hand and touch it to my bare shoulder, to the heavy, strange gold threads. His fingers creep over to my back, and he nudges me so he can have access to my shoulder blade.