The Weight of Stars

by Tessa Gratton

  “Sure,” I whisper, surprised.

  I take him back to my tent.

  Plopping onto the cot, I set the cowboy hat aside and tilt my head up to watch him as I wait. He’s looking around at my lack of possessions, which makes the tent seem even bigger. Soren’s shoulders press at the sleeves of his red T-shirt; he wears nothing to mark him as a berserker other than the spear tattoo, with its strange blade shape, on his cheek. There’s the outline of a beautiful tree tattoo on his right forearm. An apple tree, I think. For his goddess of youth, Idun, whose apples Loki keeps trying to foist on me.

  “You don’t have your mentor with you,” he says finally.

  “I’m a full berserker, Soren.” I touch the iron collar around my neck. Water’s caught under it, which will make the weight rub me raw, but sweat’ll do the same. Soon I’ll have the ring-scar so many berserkers have, so you can tell we’re part of a band no matter if we’re wearing the collar or not. Soren never has been in a band, officially.

  I wonder if I should take mine off, since I left the Devil Bears to meet this dragon.

  Soren hunkers down to balance on his toes, arms against his knees, and now his face is just lower than mine. Polite of him. A familiar feeling of longing drains my frown away. I’d thought we understood each other so well, when we rescued Baldur together, when I saved them by spending the night in a den of cat wights, when Soren saved me by fighting ritual combat against the berserker who murdered Baldur. Then at Bright Home, the palace of the gods here in the middle world, after I got my tattoo, Soren stopped smiling at me. He flinched when I touched his hand and struggled to tell our simple story to the TV cameras, to the gods, to everybody in the country who mattered at all.

  “I know you’re a full berserker,” Soren says. “I only expected them to send somebody with you, like Henry.”

  I wince. “They didn’t send me.”

  His dark eyes widen. “They don’t know where you are?”

  “Oh, they know. They just…well, you know how good I am at getting in or out of prisons.” I shrug.

  Soren rocks back onto his heels. “You’re wulfheart?”

  “I imagine so, unless I bag a dragon, which will probably convince the Hangadrottin to give me a medal and my own band.”

  “They could lock you up in a deep hole for that, Vider, or put you down.” His frown is immense.

  I stand up. “Is this what you wanted? To come in here and tell me what I already know? If you were worried about me, why didn’t you ask to be my mentor? Why didn’t you let me go with you instead of with Henry?”

  “I follow Baldur, not Odin.”

  “I’m just a berserker, not a ragging Odinist!”

  “That’s what it means to be a berserker, Vider,” he says, still crouched on the floor of the tent.

  “Is it?” I lean over him, letting my power grow again. “I thought being a berserker was about being the mountain, about holding this massive, dangerous fever inside my chest, and nothing else.”

  “Odin created the berserkers; he has power over that fever.”

  “You left him.”

  “But you haven’t.” He stands, too, close enough our frenzies tease and spike around each other. Soren used to be scared of nothing so much as his own frenzy. I think of Loki, of his shifty energy, of wrestling with him and being free, not having to worry about keeping the madness inside my chest.

  “I never belonged to him,” I say. “I haven’t belonged to a god since I was thirteen years old and the one I loved let my mom and my sister die in front of me. Odin made me a berserker and took my motherhood away, but he did not ask for my dedication. He did not ask for anything. In fact, Odin pointed at Loki and said, That will be your burden, too.”

  Soren’s jaw muscles flex and he studies me under a glower. “Is that why you were battling with him last night?”

  “I fought Loki because I could!” I smile. “You don’t see at all, do you, even after all you’ve been through, that berserking is amazing. It means I can hit Loki in the face and let loose, I can fly and be free, because he is a god and I can’t hurt him. And nobody less than Loki ragging Changer can hurt me.”

  “It’s so dangerous.”

  “Life is dangerous, Soren! Did you forget the dragon, did you forget the trolls? And skit, people are dangerous, driving cars is dangerous, there is so much power all around us all the time. I’m part of the power now, and I know it’s dangerous. I am dangerous. I’ll die or get hurt or a million things, but that’s not any different from before I had this frenzy in me—I’m only playing on a different field now. I leveled up!” I grasp his face, unable to contain the fizzing energy crackling in my bones. I leveled up, and the level is frenetic.

  He remains still under my onslaught, under my touch. His skin is cold in my frenzy-spiked hands.

  “You don’t have to like it,” I say. “I like it.”

  “I just don’t see it,” he says quietly. “What you see. What everyone sees in this berserker fire.”

  I slide my hands off his face, and they fall hard against my thighs. “I don’t know how you can’t, how it can be in you and you don’t love it.”

  “Fire isn’t meant to be loved, Vider. That’s what people are for.”

  “You love people?” I ask softly.

  “Very much, some of them.”

  “Baldur and Idun the Young aren’t people.”

  Soren shrugs. “Do you want a list? I could give you one, of the friends I’ve come to love in the last two years. Some of them are even berserkers,” he adds almost sourly.

  “Oh.” I back away, recalling the lonely ache I felt last night, before I found the apple on my pillow, how I relished it, how I told myself I liked being alone.

  Vider No-Name.

  “I’m glad for you,” I say abruptly. I give Soren a smile. “You deserve it, and…and I loved you, even though I only knew you for a week.”

  “But not anymore?” he says in a teasing way.

  The tone is a welcome surprise. I sniff. “I’m sure I still do, somewhere deep down, where I’m not thinking about how you made me pass out twice in less than three hours last night.”

  His laugh sounds distinctly embarrassed. “There were ants in my boots this morning, and all my underwear was shredded inside my backpack, if it makes you feel better.”

  Loki. I wrinkle my nose, try to screw my expression away from pleased. But it does delight me.

  Soren holds out his hand. “I’ll stop trying to babysit you. You’re not a kid; I keep forgetting it’s been two years since you hitched along that week with us and—with us. You’re as old as I was then, and just because I still had to learn who I really was, it’s not fair to assume you didn’t figure it out for yourself a long time ago.”

  I take a deep breath and put my hand in his. “I’ll call off my god if I see him again.”

  The Sun’s Berserk lifts his eyebrows. “If?” He clearly has my number.

  But it isn’t the if that worries me. It’s the possessive ragging pronoun.

  FIVE.

  I’m assigned to an off-road truck with Lydia Wolfdottir and Sune Rask. Sean, Visby, and Soren go in another. They’re keeping us berserkers separated just in case, and I was right that Soren didn’t sign their ragging model-release form. If Soren and I ride together, the third in our party won’t have anybody to talk to onscreen for the journalists with us. It delights me to be such a thorn, but I can tell Soren almost regrets causing the organizers to rethink anything for even two minutes.

  We’ll always have several support trucks full of gear and weapons and water and snacks with us, plus camera crews, while the rest of the procession keeps back a few miles. Sune points out how inefficient this entire hunt will be with such a massive entourage. He had me plug a massive antenna onto the hood of our truck; it supposedly has a satellite link, so he can download real-time footage to his laptop in the passenger seat. I lounge behind him and roll my window down, preferring to hang half out like a dog, even though it
lets the sticky wind inside. Lydia is driving, and our camera guy sits next to me, fiddling with his microphone.

  The Flint Hills take up like a fourth of the entire landmass of the kingstate of Kansa, and Lydia tells us Kansa has the largest tallgrass prairie surviving in the country. Sune asks her a string of questions about bison and cattle ranches and visible effects on blah blah blah, and I tune them out. There are bigger items on my mind.

  This morning on my way to the trucks, fifteen minutes before the hunt officially got under way, I’d seen Sean Hardy with his daughter back by the mess tent, tucked around the corner where few could see them. He’d been on the grass with his legs crossed into a basket for her to sit inside while he braided her hair. Her little pink mouth had been chattering fast, and every once in a while Sean nodded and replied, concentrating too hard on keeping his thick fingers slotted through the right strands in the braid to speak in complete sentences. I’d stared and stared, frozen in place, because I remembered my dad pulling all my hair back into a tail, and it being full of bumps and tangles.

  I should have saved that apple of immortality for Sean ragging Hardy.

  The monumental nature of my disrespect hit me beneath the frenzy, low in my guts where shame lives. I threw away a precious thing that people have been murdered for. Stories have been sung for centuries about those apples, about stealing Idun the Young, about giants and gods and war over the orchard. I even stood beneath those trees myself, I smelled the honey-scent of their fruit, and still I’d been so stupid and selfish.

  Even if I wouldn’t eat it, that didn’t make the apple worthless. But I’d tossed it at Visby Larue, who certainly wouldn’t have eaten such an ugly thing. It probably was rotting inside some industrial garbage bag right now.

  Then Sean Hardy had tied off his daughter’s braid and set her up on her feet. She’d spun gleefully and hugged his thigh. I watched his eyes fall shut and one hand cup her skull as she bounced and talked. And I watched him shudder before lifting her up and walking away.

  I stare out the window of the all-terrain truck, at the massive blue sky and rolling green and yellow hills. I have to find that dragon first, so he doesn’t eat Sean Hardy, who should’ve had immortality in his stomach.

  Too bad nobody knows where the creature is.

  “How are we really going to do this?” I demand, interrupting Lydia and Sune. “What should I be looking for? Are there signs, like for trolls?”

  Lydia Wolfdottir purses her lips, but doesn’t look away from the dirt road. “There would be signs, if this were a normal dragon hunt.”

  “There are normal dragon hunts?”

  “Centuries ago. Elisa of the Prairie has several illuminated manuscripts describing such things, when they involved multiple kingdoms and cavalries and, occasionally, modified siege weapons.”

  Sune pokes his nose over the passenger seat. “Siege weapons, really!”

  The wolf guard inclines her head. “Truthfully, siege weapons were developed from dragon-hunting machines. It was better to attack from a distance, and to be able to shoot toward the sky.”

  I interrupt again. “Great, but what is relevant to us now? You said there would be signs, so what am I looking for?”

  Sune stares at me as if I’m a puzzle, and Lydia spares a disdainful glance from the road. Thank gods the camera guy still has his camera pointed forward, at Sune. I wait, smiling as innocently as I can.

  Finally, Lydia says, “Fire and screaming villagers and piles of skit.”

  “Oh.”

  “This dragon doesn’t want to be found,” Sune says. “Which is why the normal signs are useless, and we have to use satellites and herd tracking and comparative images of the geography.”

  That sounds so boring, I make a face at the camera guy. He automatically starts to swing the camera toward me, but stops with a jerk when he remembers he can’t. The rush of satisfaction buoys me into my next question. “Why do you think Thor or Fenris or somebody hasn’t just located the dragon, in order to airlift Sean Hardy and us there for the final battle?”

  Sune glances at the camera like he knows but won’t say, but in the rear-view mirror, Lydia hits the camera with a scathing look and says, “Money.”

  “Money!”

  Sune reluctantly nods. “Sponsorships, advertisements—the more the government can get out of this adventure, the better.”

  I laugh. For a long time. Longer than it’s funny, really, but the camera guy’s face stretches tighter and tighter, and soon I’m laughing at him, and at myself. If we need satellites and technology and big-picture patterns to find the dragon, there’s not much chance I’ll find it first unless it chooses to dive out of the sky near my tent just for kicks.

  For a while, I try to listen to Sune and Lydia discuss the last ten years of Kansa political history. Sune has some kind of vested interest, because he’s involved with somebody who crosses a lot of kingstate borders for trade and dissemination of a variety of questionably legal substances, and Kansa was a hub of production of troll dust twenty years ago, until a militia crackdown that involved the use of…. I lose focus. I ask what his girlfriend’s name is, and Sune only offers a Mona Lisa smile.

  We stop for lunch. There’s a meeting over cold chicken and yams where we talk about all the nothing we’ve found, and Sune lays out where we are on his map. Sean Hardy narrates a few things for the cameras, about our location and the temperature, and asks the members of our party who did sign the waiver to take a few minutes to talk about how they’re doing. Soren projects intense relief that he won’t have to talk. I imagine him in a silent stare-off with the camera.

  The afternoon is much the same as the morning: a ragging waste dressed up with machinery and talking to make it seem like progress is being made. The landscape is dramatic but pretty much the same hour by hour, as we drive along a predetermined grid. Sune corrects our course a few times, back and forth on the radio with Sean Hardy and some gruff-sounding guy in one of the support trucks behind us. Once Sune veers us off-road to investigate a recent landslide that as far as anybody can tell is evidence of nothing but erosion.

  If there weren’t a dragon at the end of the rainbow, I’d be completely regretting my life choices. As it is, I can’t wait for sunset. Surely they won’t let us wander aimlessly for too many days before stirring up the dragon. And by they, I suppose I mean Fate and the television networks.

  I was never bored before I became a berserker, which seems like it should be the opposite of truth. But in the caravans, there were always chores and games, whether we were on the move or camped for weeks to trade or celebrate festivals. Here, I have nothing to do, and these people don’t have answers for me. There aren’t any billboards out here to base games on, or license plates to count. We have no music, and the only radios are the the truck transceivers.

  I poke at Sune and Lydia a few times, asking about their families and their lives. They answer some questions, asking me in turn, but the camera keeps both of them distant. The third time I go after Sune’s girlfriend’s name, in a roundabout way, he point-blank asks me if I’d started the fight with Loki Changer or the god had.

  It shuts me up well enough, and then I’ve only got my thoughts. Which circle around and around the god of mischief, the apple he brought me, the way I felt when I let go of my frenzy and we battled. I know I’ll see him again, and soon, know I want to, and know that it isn’t only because I can hit him in the face or lose control or spin and spin with my frenzy and never hurt him. I miss him. I wonder if I never hated him at all, even when I thought I did, or if this frenzy changed me so much when it made me strong that I accidentally forgave him.

  The last couple of hours are tragically long. The rumble of the engine, the rough bounce of the shocks on rutted gravel and wild prairie hills, the thick air crawling along my skin, the relentless yellow sunlight—all of it enough to make me feel trapped in a cocoon. And feeling trapped angers my frenzy, which heats up the whole truck until the camera guy, Simon from Westpo
rt City, is sweating. I shut my eyes and practice the breathing techniques Henry Halson taught me, the kind that are quiet, that you can practice in a dark movie theater or the dingy bathroom of a bar, when you don’t want anybody to be worried you’re about to lose control and massacre them. Sune notices, but instead of saying anything, he tells Simon to dig out a water bottle from the bottom of the cooler bag for me.

  When we stop to camp for the night, I spill out before the truck has completely halted, leaving the door thrown open. This prairie is all gold and green and hills and rocks no matter where you turn during the day, but twilight sets the entire place on fire.

  Standing under a sky like this feels like being in the hugest fish tank the middle world has ever seen. The sky’s a dome of endless blue, but in the west where the sun is tarnished silver fire, broad strips of brutal pink and pulpy orange tear across the horizon.

  A good sky to die under.

  Especially if you have an apple of immortality. Which I no longer do. I glance toward the rest of the convoy and spy Visby Larue stripping off his shirt, right where the sunset can caress his muscles to best advantage. It’s funny how finding ourselves humor allies makes me so much more tolerant of his preening. Could I ask after the apple without explaining why?

  I laugh at the thought, and Lydia Wolfdottir shoots me a frown from where she’s unloading equipment from our truck. I suppose it seems like I’m laughing at the sunset.

  The convoy of trucks has nearly encircled me and everybody’s unloading, listening to a man with a curly beard I was introduced to but don’t remember, except that he’s the technical director and camp manager. He lumbers through the tall grass, pointing at spots to place various equipment, and I consider marching over to offer my services, or joining Lydia or Sune or Soren. Instead, I take off along the crest of this massive hill toward the sun, letting my legs stretch.

  I jog easily. My hair, mostly loosened from the pins that held it back this morning, flops around my face. The wind blows even and strong, pushing me gently south. The sun is hot, near blinding me with great bloody spots blinking in my eyes. At the top of the hill, the grass is shorter. There are tiny cliffs of limestone and chert, so many flat stones, and the soil is thin and pale. I skid down the slope toward a long valley, at the end of which are actual trees. Down here, the grass scrapes up to my knees; tiny seeds scatter or cling to my pants. Grasshoppers flash across my path when I startle them. There are clumps of orange flowers with ugly dark leaves, spiky thistles, and spindly bushes with miniscule white blossoms, crazy ragging sunflowers with droopy pink petals and orange eyes that press up to the light. The hills block the setting sun itself, but all that fuchsia bleeds across the sky. And the trees tucked in the joints of the hills ahead ripple in the wind, tall and stately, with thousands of leaves flickering emerald and gray-green.