The Apple Throne (31 page)

“I did this,” he breathes. “I remember.”

“I chose to go in there with you. I’m fine, Soren,” I add impatiently and tug away from him.

He’s frozen, his hand a claw in the air where my shoulder was.

“Stop,” I say. “It’s over and done and nothing can change it. You were poisoned and I was desperate to break you free, and it happened.”

He doesn’t move but to close his eyes. I grab his face. “I’m not broken. I’m not fragile, stop thinking it. Blame
them,
Soren. They poisoned you and hurt you, they imprisoned you, not…”

I trail away because he’s nodding, eyes squeezed shut. I loosen my grip, gently running my thumbs against his temples.

Soren takes my waist and pulls me closer. He buries his face in the crook of my neck. I hold him, cheek on his hair, hands making spirals on his back, and have the shocking thought that we hardly know each other sometimes. But his fears are the same; it’s mine that are changed. Mine I’m only now discovering.

• • •

Like the suite, this room has a toilet alcove disguised along the wall, the recess hidden unless you stand just before it. There’s a bathtub and sink, though it takes me several minutes to discover how to turn on the water and more to warm it. I wash, and while Soren takes his turn, an elf opens the invisible door. It’s Neri, the one who healed my shoulder, with his long curls of amethyst whiskers arcing up from his cheeks. In his arms he holds clothing and boots, my battered coat, and Sleipnir’s Tooth.

“Come,” he says very softly, like water poured into a crystal glass, “I will take you to Eir.” His teeth are sharp purple amethyst, too.

I accept the stack of belongings, and he bows, edging out to wait in the corridor. They’ve laundered pieces of Gunn-Elin’s dress for me and replaced what was too torn or bloody with their own elfin silk. I take soft leather pants and a large tunic to Soren. The pants fit remarkably well, and I help him wrap the tunic, lacing it at his wrists. There’s something soothing about dressing him, as he allows me to maneuver under his arm or holds his hand up for me so I can tie the leather pants closed and tuck the hems into the boots. I comb his hair with my fingers, standing on tiptoe, and back up to take him all in. Sweet gods, he’s handsome in this fawn and cream leather, like a hero from a viker movie. Even if he won’t smile.

In turn, he ties up my bodice. His fingers hesitate over the horn bead necklace he gave me, and then he kisses me, warm and deep. We go to the stone table where I put the sword. I lift the blade by the sheath and offer it to him, hilt-first. His lips part, and he takes it, almost desperately.

The sight of him, holding the sword in both hands against the new creamy leather strikes me like a blow: this is what he wore in my dream of his funeral pyre.

I cannot move, staring in horror. Soren doesn’t notice as he slides his father’s sword free of the scabbard with a settling sigh. Eirfinna has promised Soren will be safe from her once I give her my seething answers, but how can I know that is the danger all Freya saw?

Neri leans into the doorway, his white hair loose like a veil sliding over his shoulder. “Come,” he repeats.

I hold my hand out and say without shaking, “One more moment.”

I take up my coat and dig for the two remaining apples of immortality. “Soren,” I whisper. He joins me, hovering near with his shoulders hunched to keep the elf at the door from seeing. There’s no way Soren knows what I’m about to do, but he can tell I want privacy for it. I hold up one wrinkled yellow apple. “Eat this.”

“Astrid,” he says, shock lowering his tone nearly sub-sonic.

“I want you to have it now.”

“Those are for the gods.” He stares earnestly, with a tiny line between his brows.

“These—” I hold it near his mouth. “—are for me to gift. An apple freely given, from the lady of the orchard.”

His head shakes almost imperceptibly.

I touch the fruit to his bottom lip. “For me.”

Soren opens his mouth, and I slip it in. He bites down, and winces. I lift my eyebrows in a question. “Powdery,” he mutters after he swallows it.

I slide my arms around his ribs. He settles his hand on the back of my head.

It feels like the last moments before he leaves at every quarter holiday—when there’s nothing left to say, we’ve kissed each other raw, we’ve told all the stories there are to tell in such a brief span. My heart thuds slowly in my chest, and I can hear his with my ear pressed to him. But we’re not parting today. He’s coming with me; it’s not an ending. I don’t know why it feels so final.

I pull away, and together we follow Neri back into the mountain.

E
irfinna and a handful of her people await us in a throne room, a chamber of quartz built smooth and sleek in a pyramid. Chandeliers of glowing amethyst dangle at its pinnacle. The angled walls are hung with silk tapestries depicting trees and flowering vines. They sway softly though I feel no breeze. In the center of the milky quartz floor, a throne rises on a narrow stage. It is formed of solid gold, and I hear the hum of it the moment I step foot inside. It buzzes in my ears and reaches tingling fingers for my heart. My golden shoulder heats in a flash. I cup my right hand to my breast.

Sune and Amon are there as well. Amon waits with his arms crossed disconsolately over his chest, glowering with his lightning eyes and a gray hoodie pulled up over his head. Sune appears calmer, his uniform clean and sharp, the high collar buttoned under his chin, gloves on as he stands with hands folded in front of him and those double axes gleaming over his shoulders. His scalp is freshly shaved, and in the shadowed glow of crystal, the curling horn tattoos make him almost seem one of the goblins.

Eirfinna herself stands atop the dais, before the golden throne, in a formal black dress that falls from her shoulders and puddles around her feet. Her black diamond cheeks and her abyss-black eyes erase every human-seeming thing about her, and the moon-glow of her marble skin makes her the perfect ancient statue: elegant and cold, untouchable. There are white-gold rings at her fingers and a diamond circlet holding back her gleaming hair.

This is a goddess,
I think as I stop below her, Soren a warm presence at my back.

“Teach us the answer you dreamed, Idun the Young.” Eirfinna’s voice rings like the long tolling of funeral bells.

I glance about the hall, meeting the gazes of various elves and goblins. Loudly I say, “The Stone Plague was caused when the trolls lost the first heart, the heart of fire Freya the Witch put into the original mother.”

Eirfinna’s little black teeth gleam. Around us the elves and goblins shift and hiss and blink their solid eyes.

“The heart,” says one crouched near the foot of the dais, all bent limbs like a spider.

“The Mother died and so they all die?” hisses another, her arms out plaintively, dripping silk from her wrists and elbows like wings.

Soren puts his hand on my shoulder. It is no heavier than the gold embedded in my bones. I touch his fingers with mine as Eirfinna slinks down the dais toward me, black eyes narrow, miraculously not tripping on the layers of skirt at her feet. She carefully cups my face with her hands. Her thumbs graze my cheeks, where my crystal ridges would run if I were an elf like her.

She says, “That heart was a story my grandmother told me. Meant to be comforting in that it united the trolls, it made them one family, connected in destiny by that center point. Gave them strength in each other, a shared vitality. But you make it into their greatest vulnerability, not a strength.”

Her skin is cold on my jaw, and I feel a vibration in the gold scar that ripples down to the golden ring on my finger. I say, “Often our strengths and vulnerabilities are born together.”

“And so when the Mother died—when the Valkyrie killed her—the heart was destroyed and the trolls languish without it.” She sighs so softly, so sadly. Her breath smells like spring flowers.

“Eirfinna,” I say quietly. “I did not say the heart was destroyed.”

The elf stops breathing.

I gently touch her elbows to transform her gesture into an embrace.

“The Valkyrie has it?” Eirfinna hisses. “Or did she give it to her god of sacrifices?”

Leaning in, so near her black eyes encompass my whole vision, I whisper back, “She has it still.”

Her fingers tighten on my face.

Soren says, “Mind yourself.”

“You would do better to be silent, etin-killer,” Eirfinna says, never looking away from me.

The crowd ripples uncomfortably.

“Eirfinna,” I say. Her liquid black eyes are impossible, chilling to stare into, for there is no center, no pupil to indicate whether she sees me or is blind. It is so hard to read her emotions without the window of her eyes. “The Valkyrie wears the heart on a pendant, and it lives, Eirfinna, it hurts her. Burns her and is…”

Soren says darkly, “Trying to make her into a monster.”

Eirfinna’s claws dig into my skin. “It wants to make her into the new mother.”

Blood seeps from the tiny cuts. Soren makes a dark noise, and Amon says, “
Fin
.”

She lets me go.

I swallow the stinging pain as she walks away. The small crowd shifts for her, but five androgynous elves wearing similar willowy pale clothes stick close to her. They carry elegant spears with long, sharp blades. Eirfinna whirls back to face me and nods to her guard once.

Sune tenses beside me. But nothing happens.

“Let us go,” Amon says. “You’ve your answer, and she’s won Soren’s freedom.”

Eirfinna says, lofty and bold, “I shall take the heart from the Valkyrie of the Tree and feed it to one of the last living troll mothers.”

“She won’t give it to you,” I say.

The elf’s eyes sparkle as she tilts her head and shows off her black teeth. “I did not say I would ask.”

I hold out a hand to stop her. “Let me get it for you.”

Soren makes a small noise, and Amon cusses. Sune is unsurprised.

Another rumble shifts through the gathered elf-kin. Eirfinna studies me for a long moment. “Why would you do that for us? For me?”

I think of the dying troll mothers, staring at me sadly, and Signy saying,
We’re better off without them.
It could so easily be said of these elves and their gold. Of berserkers who are half-mad or dragons or saber tigers or even just most humans.
We’re better off without them.
But even if it were true, this isn’t how it should be done. We don’t consign creatures to slow death. This is like a cancer—not the work of heroes, of good women or men. We defeat our enemies in battle; we conquer them. That is the Asgardian way.

But none of that is why I want to go to the New World Tree and claim the heart from Signy Valborn. It’s because the heart is the spark of a spell my lady created long ago. It is ancient magic, alive itself and keeping the trolls immortal.

It is a piece of fate, a seed of life. Like the apples of immortality.

The heart is the knot in a spell of destiny, and I am the knot in a spell of destiny: the unique spark that holds the charm together and makes it thrive.

I say to Eirfinna, “Because I am Idun the Young, and Idun gives life.”

As she silently stares at me, I notice for the first time how little noise is here in the deep mountain—only breathing, the shifting of boots on smooth granite, the tap of a spear butt.

Eirfinna bows to me, shallowly. “You may take your lover and go, then.”

I smile, and Sune’s shoulders relax.

The elf steps up the dais to her golden throne. “There is one other matter,” she begins, holding a long hand out toward one of her guards.

“The gold,” Amon says, starting toward her. “You—”

Eirfinna ignores him and smiles a tight, grim smile in my direction. “Blood price.”

“You have it,” I cry, shocked.

Sune makes a noise I barely hear and shifts away from me.

The guard removes a pistol from his jacket and puts it into Eirfinna’s hand.

“I have it for my cousin, but not for myself,” she says coldly and aims it at Sune.

I throw myself toward him, the memory from my vision flashing: Sune knocked back by a bullet. But Soren is already there.

The shot roars in my ears.

It is Soren who falls, slowly, as if the air embraces him, lowering him gently, and I dive forward, arms out. His knees slam the stone floor, and he tilts sideways. I land hard on my hip, but catch his shoulder against my chest. He knocks my breath away and sinks against me, down and down. Blood pours hot over my hands.

Berserker heat bakes my bare skin, turning it tight.

I see his mouth open, and I see Baldur the Beautiful, crashing to the earth of my orchard valley, a spear in his heart. I felt that blood pour through my fingers, though Soren’s burns and hisses in the cool cave air. My ears are full of roaring.

His head falls against me. Something explodes at my side and it may be my heart it may be the entire mountain. I touch Soren’s face, my entire body trembling with the effort of holding him. I leave bloody prints on him, and he gasps for breath. I press my hands to his chest, smearing blood, and I am scoured empty, unable to breathe or speak, just cling to him.

Soren whispers my name, or I think it is my name. His lips move and I cover them with mine. “Soren,” I murmur, hugging his head to my breast, wiping back his soft hair but only leaving streaks of blood. It pumps slowly now from the wound low on his chest, coursing in a continuous stream down his ribs and stomach, pooling beneath us on the smooth stone floor.

With one hitched attempt at my name, Soren Bearstar stops breathing.

No no no no no
.

My mouth is on his cheek, the dark spear tattoo I love so well like a target for my anguish.

I wail. It is soft but will never end—not until the Nine Worlds end, not until every apple on my tree is a withered husk and the gods are as dead as this, their ruined bones the foundation of the next universe.

Apples on my tree.

He ate an apple.

I remember it between two dull beats of my heart.

He’s dead. But he won’t stay that way.