He charms little grandmothers and speaks to them in their native tongues. I rip into the words, too, making them my own. I drink the sweet mint cocktails and shoot rum with three men who, by their dark brows and ready smiles and thick, curling black hair, must be related. I get a little drunk, which pleases me and makes me kiss all three of those brothers or cousins or uncles and sons—I neither know nor care, and Tyr the Just watches me. They know him here, call him Tio or Mars. He leans back with his elbows on the bar, discussing some local Freyan politician with the owner, light blue eyes on me on me on me.
They call me Glorious.
When finally he takes me home, I am spilling and hot, thrilled and spinning to a dance in my mind. I am sloppy and hungry, and we go straight to the kitchen, where I eat pickles and pulled pork we brought with us in Styrofoam, until Tyr touches my hair and I kiss him.
His kiss is like everything he does: welcome and certain and slow. He supports my weight easily as I climb on him, my legs around his solid waist, my arms twined about his neck and head. But that’s all the action Tyr takes. He holds me and lets me kiss him. Lets me suck and bite and take, lets me reach deep, lick his teeth instead of my own.
Though his jaw moves and his tongue and his lips, too, though he embraces me strongly, you could not quite say that he kisses me back.
• • •
I smell my sister’s breath in the wind on Tyrsday afternoon: halitosis extraordinaire.
For months and months, she has remained on the ocean floor, breath held and burning fat for energy. It makes her smell terrible when she finally surfaces for a few days, until she’s eaten enough to smell like dead fish again.
She wakes me from a doze, scent tickling my senses and making me smile. The sun has set, the moon is half awake, and the glitter of the Miami cityscape across the bay is all the light I have. I’ve been lounging on this pool chair for hours. I rise and walk down the long yard to the dock.
Tyr’s long-nosed yacht bobs slowly in the shallow waves. Moonlight brings the black windows to life and dances over the black ocean. I stand with my toes at the concrete edge of the seawall, staring out for some other sign of her. Behind me, Tyr’s house is dark and silent. The god traveled today to Sun Valley to sit judgment, and I do not know if he’ll return tonight or in the morning.
“Sister?” I call softly.
The sharp, unpleasant scent of her breath strengthens.
Silently, I pad barefoot, in only my bikini, down the warm wooden slats of the dock. It shifts under my weight. I crouch at the edge, balanced right before tipping into the sea. I stare, allowing my eyes to adjust to the black, changing water.
There: a solid darkness, unmoving.
“I see you,” I whisper.
Inches from my toes, her tail rises. She is a long, strong wyrm, a sea snake of polished black skin that glints blue and purple if you see her under the sun, but in moonlight is cold obsidian and smooth as a dolphin. I step out onto her, sinking down to press flat against her body, and she moves out again with me.
Cold water laps at my arms and legs. Surf sprays my upturned face.
She pulls me out into the night. I smile, then grin, then laugh at the harsh wind that smells of nothing but ocean and my sister. Still, I have not seen her head, will not until we are far out to sea and under such a spill of stars you cannot make out individual points of light. Until the sky is one solid caress of starlight smeared around an oblong yellow moon.
My sister slows, swimming in a lazy loop for nearly an hour, until she’s made a circle of herself, threading up and down through the water. Here I am, at her tail, as her head lifts out of the dark ocean.
Her eye is black and spiked with green, the same green as mine, but that eye is larger than my head and hooded along her beautiful thick skull.
My sister, the world snake, does not speak: Her fangs are too long, her lips too thin, her tongue too narrow. She can hum, though, a tune more tragic and echoing than the saddest of the great whales’ songs, a hum that vibrates through the ocean or high enough to make the stars tremble. It shakes my ribcage and steadies my pinched, starving heart.
I touch my lips to her salty, smooth skin and sing with her.
She is so magnificent, so giant and monstrous. My hunger could fit inside her.
If it were not for this collar and these manacles, I might be as large as she is—a wolf with a head like a tank and teeth as tall as a grown woman. Capable of eating whales or elephants in a single bite. Of leaping mountains.
The sun would be no match for me then.
I press my cheek to my sister and the ocean waxes around us, tugged by the moon above. I tell her what I think and feel; I dig my nails into her skin, though the outer layer is so thick, I would have to transform into that wolf to harm her at all. She hums and listens, blinks and rolls her eyes and squints; I know what she wants me to know. If I choose to eat him, she won’t mind.
• • •
Eight days later, it’s Baldur’s Day.
The autumnal equinox. Midway between the longest day of the year and the shortest. Baldur’s last day of life. As long as I don’t eat him, don’t set off the chain reaction of Ragnarok, he’ll be reborn again in the springtime.
I go with Tyr to the celebration at Bright Home. There will be afternoon dancing and an early feast, and then, just as the sun sets, this year’s chosen hero will throw a special silver bolt into Baldur’s heart. The god will die. We will burn his body on a grand funeral pyre as all the country looks on through the blank, black eyes of video cameras.
As is my habit, I go as the wolf. I am rough and beautiful, my shoulders as high as his hips. My green eyes are wicked, my teeth bright, my hunger desperate and sharp. We enter the gilded feasting hall with Tyr’s fingers dug into my dark auburn ruff.
Bright Home is as massive a place as Bliss Church, but built of great stones and redwood trunks after the old ways, lined with benches and lit with torches. Banners hang, always, and tonight they are full of sunbursts and silver for Baldur the Beautiful.
Many of the gods proceed grandly in, but not Tyr. My god prefers a subtler entrance, though he is too broad, and too handsome in his grim way, not to attract attention. Especially with a striking beast like me at his side, tongue lolling out, claws clicking on the polished stone floor.
He takes his throne, one of nine on the wide dais where the most revered gods of Asgard sit for the feast. I crouch at his side, loyal as a dog, and put my head down on my paws.
This place smells of evergreen and fire, ashes and smoke and honey. It smells of fur and velvet and sword oil. Succulent roasted boar, candied fruit, potatoes and butter and every kind of apple you can imagine, in Baldur’s honor. For tonight, they are fried and boiled and roasted and baked into tarts. They are eaten fresh or peeled for divination. They are carved into flowers and suns and starbursts, into faces and letters that spell out blessings. They hang from the rafters, from the sconces and banners. They are painted every color of the rainbow, stamped with stripes or smiles or paisley or plaid.
I shut my eyes and listen to the conversation and laughter, the trumpets and fiddles, to the procession of Valkyrie with their ceremonial goblets, to the godlings at their banished table. I listen to my mother Loki arrive, arguing with his favorite cousin, Thor, about love, of all things. The twins Freya and Freyr enter in a whisper of velvet, murmuring quietly to each other as they sit in thrones pushed closer together than the rest. My lips curl when the Alfather sweeps past in scuffed black boots. His wife, Frig, bends beside me to touch my ear. I flick it back, then forward again, and do not open my eyes even when she says, “Thank you,” for what I am not sure. Perhaps she heard I’ve been volunteering on her day of charity. She smells of petunias and antiseptic and hair powder.
North, god of winter and the only one older than Tyr, comes trailing a ragged hem, in leather-wrapped boots melting ice in the warmth of Bright Home. He pauses to lean on Tyr’s throne and speak, but I snap my teeth at him. We have n
ever been friends, since he hates my father for being my mother. The bent old god frowns at me, his silver-white hair falling in gnarled waves down his chest. And Tyr fists his hand in my fur.
I close my eyes again and wait for Baldur.
The god of light comes striding in to a swell of cheering and welcome. I am on my feet, leaning forward, and Tyr wraps his hand around the thin, braided chain of impossible things around my throat.
Baldur glows.
He is stunning.
Like the richest, reddest steak, a dripping chocolate tart, a honey cake with eyes that mirror the exact purple of the twilight sky outside. My stomach lurches and growls. It purrs through my bones and screams in my blood. They will never allow the Fenris Wolf near him.
“Hush, Glory,” a sweet, soft voice says, and the goddess Idun appears at my side. She kneels at my shoulder, one pale, bare arm wrapping over my ruff. She hugs me, pretty brown eyes on mine, face right at my starving, sharp mouth.
I shiver and breathe deeply. Like all of them, she smells of apples, but for Idun the Young it is her calling, not her blood, that is the reason. Though she tends the orchard far in the north where the apples of immortality grow, she was born to womankind. She is young and precious to the gods, the key ingredient in their eternal life. The thing that makes her apples magical.
Tyr says, “Idun,” quite formally, and I sense him bow to her, all respect.
She smiles a sweet bow of a smile. “Lord Justice.”
What a flatterer. His hand relaxes in my fur as he responds with pleasure. Should I be jealous?
Idun tucks her diaphanous white skirt over her knees as she settles against me. “Soren told me you’ve been feeling poorly,” she murmurs in my ear fluff. “And I would extend the same offer he did: Come to my orchard if ever you need respite or solace or sanctuary.”
“She might devour all your apples,” Tyr says.
“They grow back,” Idun teases. “And you would fit in with my other monsters.”
Her breath is touched with honey mead and apple pie.
A thin whine slips through my teeth. I hunger. I want more. I search for Baldur in the crowd, but there are too many folk here: gods and godlings, Valkyrie and Lonely Warriors, mortal politicians and celebrities and stars. Caterers and valets and cooks and servers. There are too many golden heads and white or silver clothing worn in his honor.
Idun strokes my cheek, and Tyr does the same.
Eventually, the feasting table is set before us and piled with food. Tyr feeds me from his own hand, and Idun vanishes into the crowd. The tastes are slight but delicious, and I enjoy chomping and chewing with my great maw visible to the media, to the humans who likely forget who I am when I seem so like Tyr’s loyal hound.
After I’ve eaten, I bite Tyr’s hand gently, lovingly, sliding my tongue against his palm, pressing my fangs to his wrist without breaking the skin. And I slip away. It is our way at such events. I eat, and I go; I was present, now I am not. Usually it is to run through the mountains and work off my hunger, or to speed away on my motorcycle for hunting or dancing or ragging.
Tonight I slink through the shadows and into the twilight of the great mountain. I transform myself into Glory, into this pretty, dangerous girl in tight pants and tighter green sequined shirt and emerald spike heels. My father would be proud I know well how to use what he taught me.
And I skulk about outside Bright Home, along walking trails and around verandas and the private homes certain gods keep here. I track specific smells and play games to distract myself as the sun sinks.
When I can no longer see it for all the thick lodgepole pine trees and the steep, craggy slope of the mountain, I return to the hall. I do not become the wolf again but go in as a girl, a hungry, hazardous girl.
Baldur is a blaze of joy and terror in the center of it all.
The crowd, pressing and sad, eager and anxious, overwhelms the space of Bright Home with nervous sweat and hot breath, alcoholic fumbling for cameras and the hands of their companions. The gods gather around Baldur and the large pyre built of evergreen and ash wood, their special guests just behind.
The god of light stands bare but for loose white pants, somber as he rarely is, and alone before the pyre. Another god speaks—Odin, I think, but my hunger roars in my ears. The noises are a distant murmur, the touch of shoulders to mine, the drag of energy and reluctant fingers, as if some know they should try to stop me. It all swirls around, but I am focused; I have my target, and there is a thin arrow of crystal desperation between us.
Baldur sees me. His eyes widen, but he does not cry out or show fear. He only tracks me as I move nearer, as I weave through celebrities and godlings and journalists and politicians.
Every step rings through my starving heart.
At the edge of the crowd, Soren stands beside Idun the Young; one large and dark, one small and pale.
My lips draw away from my teeth.
My tongue dries as I pant, as I gasp.
The collar and manacles tighten and twist, cold as ice, but I am too hungry, too strong. They can contain my size, not my actions. I cannot swallow the sun whole; I can only tear him into tiny bite-sized fleshy pieces with my hands and claws and teeth.
Sweat drips along my spine. I tremble. The entire crowd, the feast hall, the mountain beneath me trembles.
In the spotlight, Baldur’s lips form my name.
I cannot speak through the fangs and heavy tongue in my mouth.
Soren grips my arm, and Idun, too, leaning up onto her toes to cry in my ear. I do not understand.
The spear wielder is before Baldur: that is his death in the hand of some royal daughter of a southern king. But I want to be his death.
Eat him.
Destroy the world.
I scream; I am so hungry!
And here
Here
Tyr the Just steps in front of me.
I lift my chin to look into his face. His eyes are hard as forever, his jaw stony as the mountains.
Gathering myself to thrust forward, to lunge past him and dart for Baldur, all my muscles bunch; my bones thrum with glee and expectation.
Tyr moves first.
My hunger explodes in ferocious pain.
Pain sharp and hot below my ribs radiates up to my heart.
• • •
I hear it now: gasps and screams from the Bright Home crowd.
Soren Bearstar says my name in horror.
• • •
Tyr studies me, awed and furious and curtained with amazing grief. Even he shakes now, trembles with emotions I cannot read over this starving pain in my heart.
We are connected, he and I.
Not by my hunger.
Not by great bias.
Not by history or destiny.
We are connected by his sleek metal hand, thrust into my chest, curled up under my ribs to get at my heart.
• • •
He tears it free.
• • •
My heart. In his hand.
I open my eyes to clear violet skies.
Like twilight spread from horizon to horizon, no variation, no lightening or darkening from sun or sunset. Wisps of clouds pull in unnatural spirals, like a painting, not the heavens.
The tickle of grass on my cheek alerts me to the tall summer grass all around. Green and elegant, fringed with honey-yellow seeds that bend and bow in a warm breeze. I smell nothing but grass and rich earth. No dead worms or the dust from grasshoppers and beetles. No rotting mice, no skit, no petroleum tingeing the air.
I’m a girl, and naked, but the crushed grass beneath me feels silky and tangled, not prickling and rough. Lifting a hand, I brush the bearded grass and hear a small sound like bells, a tinny rattle that makes me smile despite myself.
I am warm. I am not in pain. The bright sky doesn’t make me wince. The hand I lift is smooth and unlined, entirely lacking any green polish. There is no slow beat of my own heart. There is only a quiet emptiness in the pit
of my chest.
Not discomforting, not gaping or painful. Something has changed.
• • •
I
am
not
hungry.
• • •
Swinging to my bare feet, I stand and stretch. This delightful lack of desire, of need! Here is this beautiful meadow that stretches in every direction, and I don’t want to eat it.
Laughing, I hop up and down, clapping my hands like a little girl. My hair skims my bare back, my toes are warm on the earth, the tall grass brushes my knees and thighs.
I run.
My legs stretch and my lungs fill with this warm honey wind. I spread my arms and grasp the air as I go, then pull them tight against myself and pump hard and harder, running running running, because there is nothing else I need.
The meadow curves with me as I race for the horizon, as if it were its own small world spinning under my feet.
Eventually, a small cabin appears, one room, with a blue gabled roof and a garden of bright summer flowers that are yellow and orange and purple, or huge red eyes surrounded by sunburst petals. The front door is propped open with an old watering can.
As I approach, a man appears in the dim doorframe, wearing frayed old jeans and nothing else. He is beautiful like the sun, formed like the gods are formed, with a spill of golden hair and eyes the exact same gentle purple as the sky. He lounges against the doorframe, propped on his shoulder, hip cocked.
I grin and slow my run so that I stalk toward him, and he sees me. His eyes go wide in surprise and pleasure, and he reaches out a hand.
Taking it, I feel a spread of contentment and the tiny revving of an engine deep inside my gut.
He weaves our fingers together, and we stand there, studying each other. I know him, but I can’t think of his name.
To be honest, I can’t think of my own name, either.
I’m not certain how long we stand there, how long before we wander the garden together. He shows me his favorite flowers, dips a cool drink of water from a well surrounded by green sprouts. His voice is gentle and pretty. He offers me a pair of pants, and a shirt if I like, but also shrugs like he’s not sure why it matters. I tell him I’d like a pair of spike heels, and for a moment, a flicker of understanding wakes in his eyes, but then he only shrugs again and laughs.
The Weight of Stars Page 22