The Weight of Stars

by Tessa Gratton

  Her hand slams the table. “There’s never been anything in history, recorded or oral, to suggest it’s a natural phenomenon, Amon. Trolls don’t just turn to stone and die forever.”

  It’s true, what she’s saying. Around this past midsummer, trolls just began calcifying, even at nighttime. Huge greater mountain trolls, hill trolls, vicious prairie trolls, and even the tiny, pretty harmless iron wights that live under bridges. It’s sad for them, seeing as they’ll go extinct soon, and frustrating for me because I can’t make as much selling their parts when those parts are as easy to get as walking outside your house. But if the plague were a weapon, I think the gods would have used it before, and besides…” Thor wouldn’t do it,” I say. “Not underhanded like that.”

  “So you do have faith,” she says.

  “It isn’t…exactly faith.”

  “You love him?”

  “He loves me, at least,” I mutter.

  “The gods don’t love us, Amon.”

  “Some of them love some of us,” I say, thinking of Eirfinna suddenly, her black-diamond eyes and crystal teeth, telling me, The gods don’t love the elves, Amon, it’s why we hide and slowly die.

  Kasja blows out a harsh sigh. “You think you know Thor so well? You’re not like him.”

  Not on the outside, for sure. I don’t look anything like him except for the storm of my eyes. I’m broad and strong, sure, but my black skin, wire hair, flat nose—they all tell a very different story. Especially to a white girl. When Kasja looks at me, she can’t see any of Dad.

  It galls me to realize I might want her to. I say, “That’s how I know he wouldn’t do something like this to the trolls. He wants them gone, sure, but fairly. Honorably.”

  She nods, like she’s awarding me something. “But he’s not fixing it either. They’re not even trying.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I asked them. Last night at their party.”

  I stare at her, forcing myself to take a sip of my fruity drink.

  “I asked Tyr,” she says, “because I thought the god of laws and fair shots might tell me. And he did. The answer is no: they’re not trying to save the trolls.”

  “Why do you care so much?” I turn the stem of the glass in my fingers, worried Kasja is actually off her rocks.

  She leans back in her chair, watching me with her arms crossed, that wildness in her eyes ready to strike at whatever I say. I like it more than I should. “Why don’t you?” she asks back.

  I say, “I try not to care about things I can’t change.”

  Kasja reaches across the table for my hand and winds her fingers in mine. My pulse feels strong in the tips of my fingers, and she touches them one at a time, as if tracing the beat of my heart. I like the anger, too, as much as I like her wildness. “And I can’t stop caring,” she says, almost viciously.

  “You’ll need to eat to keep up the energy for it,” I tease, because I see our server coming with platters of food.

  She smiles at me, slanted and sexy as if she knows I’m just avoiding an answer, but lets it go.

  • • •

  The rain clouds have lifted, along with Kasja’s spirits. She dances from café to van as if she has wings on her feet, her smile bright and shoulders loose. I open the passenger door for her, but she tilts her head toward the sky and stands there, blinking up at the blue with wonder clear in her eyes. I think What if someone looked at me like that? and the longing catches me off guard, so when she glances my way, I’m scowling.

  “Amon.” She puts her hands on my face like a child would, to tug at my attention. My cheeks warm under her palms.

  She tilts onto her toes and kisses me. It’s gentle, more like a sip of wine or the taste of a sugar petal melting on your tongue. Then she’s finished and her fingers slide down my jaw. She climbs into the passenger seat and pushes me away in order to swing the door shut.

  I’m gutted. The echo of her kiss tingles on my mouth, and it’s my turn to just stand there. How can a girl I just met make me feel such a riot of changing emotions?

  Kasja touches the window from inside, splaying out her fingers. Her face is expectant. Shaking myself, I go around the front and climb in behind the wheel. To avoid saying anything or even looking at her, I reach into the Velcro pocket under my seat for my cell phone. I turn it on, and three messages pop up. Two from my friend Britta and one from Mom. I don’t listen, instead offering the phone to Kasja. “You should make sure somebody knows you’re alive.”

  Her grin is dangerous. “I’d rather they all think I’m not.”

  The Dragon National Monument is about ten minutes outside town, along a gorgeous two-lane highway surrounded by painted desert. Rivers cut through the layers of orange and red and ivory earth, creating amazing canyon vistas. The jagged buttes and cliff surround us like a herd of giant rock turtles, with prickly Joshua trees, junipers, and dark pines shading their edges. It’s not easy keeping my eyes on the road, even though I’ve driven this land over and over again. There’s something raw about it, like the earth shifts and changes in ways it doesn’t anyplace else. Trees don’t grow taller than a giant here, because they don’t have time before the ground trembles and turns over, before the wind and rain scour loose soil away.

  We roll down the windows. Wind blasts inside, filling up all the empty space between us. Kasja says something, but it’s torn away and flung out the van. She hooks her elbow over the window ledge and puts her cheek down. Hair drags free of her braids, flailing out like thin red tentacles. Her coloring matches the desert beyond.

  I hop out at the visitor center for a pass to drive up to the Dragon Quarry. A half-ten other cars are parked before the large glass building that shelters the quarry from the elements. Inside is cool and climate controlled, crowded with scientific displays and a walkway alongside the main attraction, a wall of stone that used to be the bottom of an ancient riverbed. Hundreds of dragon remains were washed here and buried and fossilized, and eventually the mountains shifted the bed into this nearly vertical display. Over time, erosion exposed the bones.

  Kasja rushes along the walkway and leans into the railing. The dragon wall is like an overturned box of pieces from a monochrome puzzle. Femurs and skulls and ribcages peek haphazardly out of the sandstone. It takes the eyes awhile to understand and adjust.

  The first time I came here, it was with Mom. I spent the visit explaining to anybody who’d listen how my dad had defeated all the dead dragons here, that it was a monument to his strength and skill. My audience was probably just very patient and amused. Even if they’d believed the Thunderer was my father, they knew these dragons had died before gods and men existed.

  I join Kasja, standing with my arm against hers. We’re dwarfed by the dragon wall, and just near enough I could reach out to touch the dark fan of a shoulder blade. She says, “Can you believe how old they are? Millions of years. Before anything else. Before the mountains and even Old Asgard or Alfheim. It makes me feel so small.” Her voice is hushed, surrounding us in a cocoon. The awe falls dead against me, though.

  “I like the feeling,” I say. “It’s easier to matter less. To just be what you are—one tiny person who doesn’t really affect huge things like this.”

  “You don’t think one person matters?”

  I tentatively slide my hand down her spine to settle against her hip. “Maybe everybody can matter that much to at least one other person.”

  Kasja laughs softly, just a low chuffing sound, and leans in.

  We stand there staring up at the wall of dragon fossils instead of looking at each other. “It’s so sad,” she says.

  “The fossils?”

  “That’s what we could all be one day—and it’s all the trolls are becoming. Going the way of extinction.”

  I think of Eirfinna and the elves, hiding under their mountains. “The ultimate destiny of monsters: turning to rock and being put in a museum.”

  “Monsters, were they?”

  “Sure.”

/>   “Are you a monster, Amon?”

  I pinch her hip. “Skit, yes.”

  “Am I?”

  “If you are, you’re a beautiful one.”

  Her lips spread out over her teeth in a smile that lifts her eyes and proves my point. But it fades as quick as it arrived. “You’re maybe going to destroy me and all my plans,” she says.

  I don’t ask what those plans are. I don’t like plans. They get in the way of everything else.

  • • •

  We wander out onto the quarry. The weather is perfect, warm for this time of year but windy, with the sort of cloudless blue skies that tug the red right out of the desert for contrast. Kasja wants to see the petroglyphs, but there’s not enough daylight hours left this time of year, so we buy a camping pass and make friends with everyone else staying on the grounds: a professional poet from Sealth; two journeymen students from Nuevo Spain, Jared and Addy, vacationing from their rigorous lawspeaking projects; a small family that visits yearly, an artist here to draw the petroglyphs, a couple on their honeymoon. We share roast sausages and down beer to laughter and singing led mostly by Kasja, who knows an endless supply of rounds and kids’ tunes. I tend the fire and smoke my cloves, just listening and relaxed.

  When we curl up in the van to sleep under quilts, with the sliding door open to the night, she lies in my arms and talks out to the stars, but all the words are for me. She tells me old stories about elf maidens and dragons—some I think I’ve heard before, others she must be making up on the spot. She has three versions of how such a great number of dragons died on this ancient river so that we could stare at their bones.

  It’s easy for me to listen, to stare at her mouth and the flash of her teeth in the moonlight. I don’t tell any stories; she never asks it, only that I laugh or snort or frown when appropriate. I do, waiting for the right moment to kiss her quiet and see about getting into those pants. There’s an easy elegance in the way one story tumbles into another, a litany of images that coalesce before me, making up a world I’ve never known quite so well before. She sees everything differently. I put my lips against her shoulder and her neck and feel the buzz of her voice under my mouth until I fall asleep.

  First thing in the morning, we head out to the rock-art trail. The petroglyphs are hundreds of years old, chipped directly into the red rock faces. They’re abstract lizards and hexagonal men-figures, spirals and antelope. Near enough most paths to touch, though we aren’t supposed to. We climb a kilometer-long trail that scissors up a cliff side to get closer to a spread of petroglyphs of a man wearing an elaborate headdress. I’ve never been out to this one and have my head craned up to study it. Sweat trickles down my back. Kasja toes off her scuffed shoes and climbs over the wooden fence. Before I can react, she’s scaling the cliff wall.

  She moves slowly but surely, finding tiny handholds and placing her toes carefully. It should make her look odd, gangly or monkey-like, but she’s too graceful for that. Her shoulders bunch and her thighs are like rocks. Then her face is just beside the nearest petroglyph. She stares at it, not quite touching. Her breath must be hitting the red stone. Does it smell different up there?

  I wish her hair was loose. It’s the exact color of desert mud, a dark red like rust and sequoia bark.

  Before coming down, she turns to smile at me. A smear of dirt across her forehead is like war paint. I think I could fall for her completely, and slick behind it, Thank god she’s a girl.

  High up on the cliff, she sees the snarl of panic twist my face and calls down, “What’s wrong?”

  I just shake my head, say, “I thought I saw you falling.”

  On our way back, we race down the path, and Kasja slips easily in front of me because I’m not trying. She cusses back at me for it, skids around a corner, and shrieks. I run and she falls back toward me, hitting her ass on the ground. She scrambles for me, and I grab her into my arms, searching for danger.

  There’s nothing but boulders and the gentle slope of the canyon. In the quiet, her breath gasps harshly, ruining any chance for me to hear if something is fleeing through the low, scraggly desert brush. A skink flickers away over an orange boulder that looms slightly over the path. The green of its tail vanishes as I think Surely that isn’t what scared Kasja. Not a little lizard.

  “Kasja?” I ask, holding her gently as my adrenaline quiets.

  She pushes away but not out of my arms, and twists to look behind. “That boulder. Oh, skit, Amon.”

  I stand up, lifting her with ease. She returns to the cluster of boulders, and I follow. My boots crunch against the dirt, and I begin to hear the normal desert sounds again: wind through the stiff yucca leaves and rattling the dry Joshua branches, the scatter of pebbles, the distant scream of a hawk.

  The boulders that scared her are taller than me, leaning in against each other unnaturally. Kasja places a reverent hand on one. “A troll,” she whispers. “Lost and sleeping because of the plague.”

  “Are you sure?” Eying it, I can’t see any evidence of it being anything but a chunk of desert. There are troll-warning signs surrounding the campground, and last night Kasja stood in front of one for a long time. I waited behind her, reading the long list of rules for not attracting them. Keep within the ward boundaries. Tie up your food. Have a UV torch on hand. It’s all irrelevant now. Four whole months since the plague struck. I haven’t seen a decent internal organ on the market since summer.

  Now Kasja flicks an irritated glare at me, and I hardly believe the gleam of tears in her eyes can be real. She’s crying for the dead beasts. “What is that?” I say.

  “I pity them,” she whispers, leaning her temple against the stone. “Poor beasts, who did nothing to deserve it.”

  “We don’t deserve most things that happen to us.” I turn and go.

  It’s only a few moments before I hear her jogging behind me and she scrapes her nails down my back. I open up my arm, and we walk back to the van pressed together.

  That night, we lay together inside Sky, the sliding door wide open again so the stars gape down from their milky scatter. It’s too late in the year for meteors, but we still watch for them. My head is propped on a clothes-filled duffle bag, and Kasja’s back tucks against my chest. I drape my arm over her ribs, and she toys with my fingers. It feels so great, relaxed and not as urgent as I usually get, laying with somebody I want to rut like this. Honestly, I’m stuck in this moment, letting it linger as long as possible.

  She says, “When you said some of the gods love some of us, what did you mean, Amon?”

  I’d been listening to her heartbeat during the long pause before she asked. The only other noises come in on the wind from the lawspeaker students’ camp. They’re laughing and smoking by their low fire. “Uh,” I say in my rough, unused voice, and reach up to brush her hair away from my mouth. “The gods.”

  I’m stalling for time, but Kasja doesn’t call me on it.

  “I meant…they’re more like us than not.” I pause. There are things I know I shouldn’t, things I’ve gleaned from the high table, things Eirfinna has confided in secret moments. “They’re not omniscient, despite their other powers. They can love the idea of us, they can love humanity, just like we can love ideas, love humanity. But they can’t love us the way we pretend they can, love us all at the same time. Love doesn’t really work like that, does it? We have to know somebody to love them, so I guess I think it’s naïve to think the gods could love you just because you worship them.”

  “Naïve.”

  “We can’t love everybody, especially people we don’t know. Why do you expect them to?”

  It’s a long while before she reacts. Her shoulders move with her breathing, and her eyelashes twitch as she blinks, as she stares outside the van. Just before I turn her around to face me and start backpedaling like a madman, she sighs. “Unrequited love.”

  “The curse that starts most tragedies, and probably all serial killers,” I joke.

  She turns in my arms and kisses me.


  I hold her closer, returning the kiss, and she curves into me, spreading her body against mine. Her cold fingers dive under my shirt. I’m gonna eat her alive. I smile against her teeth, but she moves her hands up to my shoulders, turning the kiss gentle, until her hands are on my jaw, her thumbs replace her lips, and we’re staring at each other across a hand-span of darkness. “There’s lightning in there tonight,” she whispers.

  With this groan under my skin, I barely remember what my eyes look like. I used to know, used to spend hours before a mirror, hunting for magic in them, for the crackle that calls storms. Mom would squish her face against mine and ask what I was looking for. Lightning! I’d whisper. With a knowing, taut smile, she’d part my hair for braiding. The whole while I searched, her fingers would weave tiny, tight zigzag rows, oiling as she went, until my scalp tingled just enough to distract me. There, she’d say, how about lightning on your head, tanna?

  “They’re like a monster’s eyes,” Kasja murmurs.

  I cringe, and a loud yell of laugher from the lawspeaker camp shoves the real world back into the van. I climb roughly over her. “Gotta piss,” I say. She scrambles after me.

  “Amon. I’m sorry.”

  She darts around me, bare feet sure on the dirt. She touches my stomach and pushes so I stop. I look past her head, toward the orange glow of our neighbors’ camp, at the spill of stars. It’s so dark, and the moon is behind me, a thick sliver just rising.

  “I’ve seen magic eyes, and gods’ eyes,” she says quietly. “They hurt with how lovely they are, and yours aren’t that, but—no, wait.” A hint of pleading checks me as I start to move off, wanting to demand what the point is, where the gods-cursed ragging rut she’s going with it. I should demand she tell me more of herself: where she gets these ideas, why she was really at Bright Home, what her plans are that I’m supposedly going to ruin.

  But I’m afraid of the answers. I grind my teeth, trapped in this glass cage.

  The moonlight soaks into her fair skin, and she’s the brightest thing in the desert. She says, “Yours are such a surprise. They’re so strange in a face like yours.” Her own eyes widen as she realizes she’s digging a deeper hole. “I mean, yes, you’re so dark and your hair is even blacker, and that little nail stud in your brow, the iron piercing all the way up your ears, and then there are these pools of…pastel. Of lake water. Or snow-melt rivers. They’re devastating, Amon.” Kasja lowers her voice. “They are a glint of opal trace in the darkest corner of a cave, a lost pool of jewel-perfect hot springs. Like this perfect shock that hits me all the way down to my bones.”