The Apple Throne

by Tessa Gratton

  Gunn-Elin returns with a bowl of water and a washcloth just as we’ve got him undressed and the quilt pulled up to his stomach. She kneels and gently washes Sune’s face, neck, and chest.

  Weary, I study this girl godling. Her hair is a puff of black halo around her face since she removed the handkerchief at some point. She’s only slightly taller than me, a relief after two days with Amon and Sune and the Valkyrie. Her brown cheeks are broad and round, like her mother’s, eyebrows thin and elegant as spread wings, her lashes short and curled so they seem only like thick liner deepening the rich brown of her eyes. That gleaming silver ring at her left brow adds a spark of humor. She must be a year or two younger than me, but exudes a sense of comfort.

  Amon stares blankly at her progress from the foot of the bed. His hands are limp on his thighs. From the little wooden chair, I ask him, “Why do you think the bearbane took so long to affect him? Does he have berserking in his family history? Would that matter?”

  Amon slowly shakes his head. “I don’t know. I’ve seen it take days to work through a man, though. It’s meant to be burned up by the frenzy, not to languish and swim around in the blood of regular men. I wish I’d had some of my smelling salts on hand to knock him out of it. But he must not have had too much.”

  I frown. I know a berserker can use it to make the frenzy last longer or be more under their control, but I’ve only ever personally seen it kill the frenzy. I saw that happen to Soren, a long time ago, when the Bears murdered Baldur and they’d wanted to control Soren’s reaction. They’d forced it on him, and he’d dropped like a stone.

  My head swims as a thought occurs, and I touch my temples. “What happens if a berserker takes too much? Does it kill them, too?”

  Amon’s mouth stretches into displeasure. “The frenzy itself does that. A berserker ODing on bearbane will be caught in a loop of frenzy. Unable to break free, just trapped.”

  I say, “In my dream last night, in all my dreams, Soren is so enraged he bashes himself into the granite walls. Freya said it’s one of the ways he could die.”

  “Rag me,” Amon says. “You think whomever chained him up is poisoning him with bearbane?”

  Gunn-Elin shoots a shocked look between us. She dips her cloth again, then smoothes it down Sune’s arm, taking up his hand and washing his fingers gently.

  I push to my feet. “Gods, we have to find Soren. He has less than three days.”

  Amon shakes his head. “He’s strong, surely.”

  “We have to go, Amon.”

  “But go where?”

  “Sune needs to sleep this off,” Gunn-Elin says, turning sorry eyes to me.

  I put my hands on my head, tugging at my hair. “I just… I need…” My hands flutter as if they’ll find an answer in the air. “To think.”

  “A bath and food,” Gunn-Elin corrects me, standing as well.

  I hesitate, and she smiles encouragingly under my gaze. A lazy zigzag of lightning crawls around the edge of her dark iris

  “Come on, lady of apples,” she says quietly. “My brother will watch the major.”

  I allow her to lead me down the hall to a bathroom.

  I soak and scrub in a porcelain dragonfoot tub, wracking my mind for some idea. A way I can change the path we’re on to leap us closer to Soren in one bold move. Sune’s plan was to find the local supplier and through him or her find whatever elf is turning out the gold. He and Amon agreed yesterday that there must be an elf at the center. We could find this elf and make them take us to Soren.

  But it will take hours at least, and without Sune, Amon and I will be less efficient.

  I need a faster way.

  The hunter will follow the gold to your heart’s desire.

  I told Signy I would find a thousand ways to make certain Sune succeeds. Her eyes flash before me now: sharp ocean-green, narrow and piercing as she sings her poem about me and chaos. Ace up the sleeve. Secret weapon.

  I have to be the secret weapon. But how?

  When Gunn-Elin returns with a pile of clean clothes, I try to appear calm, to seem a goddess for her. She doesn’t need to see my terror or desperation. For distraction as I lather soap in my hair, I ask what she was doing with the bones in the ossuary.

  From the other side of a privacy screen hand-painted with a mountain-scape, she says, “Most of the skeletons in our catacombs are disarticulated jumbles, brought from old family homesteads in the east over a century ago or from southern graveyards after the Thrall’s War. I’m looking for any identifying features that my friend in the Salt City History and Legends Society can match up to local records.”

  “Why?” The shampoo smells like orange blossoms as the foam slides down my forehead and the back of my neck.

  “So we know their names when we pray, to give them proper acknowledgement.”

  “You don’t think your father can call them when the time comes if their bones aren’t intact?” I’ve heard it before, but children of Freya know the body and spirit are separate. What fate attends to the flesh, the soul can defeat when it passes out of the Middle World. If someone remembers your name, your bones don’t matter. It’s why seethkonas can call the dead.

  I wish I trusted myself to be able to summon Evan Bell’s spirit, but even at my full strength, when I was with Soren and Baldur, it nearly killed me. Now, I have no idea what would happen. I don’t have my own thread of fate to follow back from Hel. And dead, I’m no good to Soren at all.

  Frustrated, I duck under the water to rinse. When I finish, water sloshing everywhere as I stand, Gunn-Elin steps around the screen with a fluffy towel. I wrap it around myself, drying my face, and she finally answers my question, “Our bones are the connection to our family here in the Middle World, not the gods. The dead may do what they will in the Other Worlds, but here we the living need physical objects to hold, to remind us of our losses.”

  I think of Sleipnir’s Tooth that I clutched so tightly, of the yellow glass apple Soren kept hanging in his truck. “I see,” I say. And I do: I relinquished everything solid when I agreed to be Idun. There was no piece of my life to cling to but the useless seething kit. I had Soren four days a year, but when he was gone, there was nothing physical to link us until he gave me this horn necklace. I’m going to change that, too, the moment I can. A ring. A commit. We used to talk like we were a true commit when we traveled with Baldur, but since then, we’ve never spoken it out loud. I was afraid to tie him to me, but I need it.

  Gunn-Elin helps me into borrowed clothes: stockings and wool socks, a soft undershirt, and a dress that has a heavy layered skirt falling just past my knees and a bodice embroidered with tiny blue and yellow flowers that buttons up the center. Very sweet, very old-fashioned. It comes with a half-jacket of dark blue velvet and a high collar. There are laces in the back of the bodice to tighten it, and Gunn-Elin says, “I chose this because it can be tied to fit you without alterations. Most of my clothes wouldn’t work so well.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I say, smoothing my hands down the skirt, tugging gently at the velvet cuffs of the jacket. She gathers my rings in her cupped palms, and I put them on one at a time, except for a single silver knotwork ring, inlaid with three tiny blue topaz. A gift from Frigg. “Keep that one, please, Gunn-Elin.”

  Her fingers curl around it, and she smiles. “If you’ll let me dry your hair?”

  She does, as I sit on a padded stool with my eyes closed, trying not to fret over Soren. Impatience will win me nothing, and I must always be kind. I remember Uncle Richard saying it, when I was upset over the questions people asked of him, of us. Shallow, selfish things that didn’t matter to fate—about missed deadlines or homework or how to get ahead of colleagues, or what teams would win the National Series. Be kind, Astrid, Richard said. Remember what your mama used to say about our place in fate: We are its conduit, the voice of the future, and we don’t control it, we don’t change it. We only communicate it.

  I’d always hated that, preferring to take matters into my o
wn hands: calling that town in Tejas when I dreamed of the tornado, challenging those troll-warts to holmgang before they could attack Soren, going to Sanctus Sigurd in the first place. It’s what I loved about Soren before anything else—that he refused to stop fighting his destiny, even though I believed he needed to embrace it. I remember saying to my mom, Soren will not bend. He will stand in the way of fate until fate bends around him.

  I’ve always had the seething as a tool, as a guide, but used it to fight toward a purpose. Not having dreams for these two years seems to have stripped me of all my action. And I let it.

  Until fate bends around him.

  It doesn’t matter what Freya the Witch told me in my dream. It doesn’t matter if the hunter will find what he seeks or that Idun has left her orchard or what I thought my destiny was or even what my destiny is now. What matters is that I find a way to bend fate, to return me to Soren and then my orchard. Both. I will be both Idun and Astrid. The secret weapon.

  I stand up. Gunn-Elin drops my hair in surprise. “I need the keys to Sune’s Jeep, your papers or maps about the elf gold trade, and a place to study.”

  “I’ll take you,” she reassures me.

  “Now, please.”

  • • •

  I settle with all Soren’s files in a dining area with five plain wooden tables. Simple flower arrangements decorate each, and ruffled curtains dress the windows that open onto the Rock Church’s volcanic garden. The setting sun casts weak orange light, but there are bright floor lamps in the corners. Gunn-Elin explains the color-coding on her maps to me and the patterns of elf gold traffic, then goes into the adjoining kitchen to make a pot of soup. I can see her through the open doorway, stirring and humming.

  Her records show that nearly all the elf gold she’s received in the past twelve months has come from Eureka, and the rest seems to have originated here. There’s a list of names of people arrested or suspected of passing the gold, too many to easily question. Three are from the Cheyenne kingstate, and Amon mentioned that he used to meet Eirfinna at either an old rock church near Bright Home or near the Yellowstone super volcano in Cheyenne, so maybe those are the three to begin with? It seems like grasping at straws. How does one find elves in a modern city when they mean to remain hidden?

  As the dining area fills with the scent of caramelizing onions, I pull out Soren’s statement again and the news-clippings in his file. The only thing that sticks out is the statement they recorded from Soren: He was no man. I’m not supposed to be here tonight.

  I know where he was supposed to be.

  But he was no man is very specific. It reminds me of the ritual holmgang words. You are not a man’s equal and not a man at heart is the challenging call. The reply: I am as much a man as you.

  Did Soren mean that he had challenged Evan Bell to holmgang? That would make it possibly not murder, but a fair death. I put my head on my hands. Except there is no reason Soren wouldn’t have been explicit about that in custody. Soren is not coy.

  I see him in the dark, shivering against the rough rock wall, naked and sweating as he trembles, eyes shut tight. He claws at his head, dragging rough fingers down his face, bearing his teeth like a wild dog.

  “Lady.”

  I snap awake, knocking my shins against the table leg.

  Groggy, my eyes take a moment to clear up the blurry vision before me: Amon looming and Sune slouched in the chair across from mine.

  “Sune!” I get up and go around to him, leaning on the table. I take his hand as Amon heads into the kitchen and his sister.

  Sune makes a grim line with his mouth. He’s only in his uniform pants and the white undershirt, his nail-cross hanging outside, black over his heart. Shadows cup his eyes and strain stretches across his brow.

  I pet his bare skull, smoothing my palm around to the back of his neck. “Are you feeling better?” I murmur.

  “Amon explained what a terrible ass I was,” he replies hoarsely. “I am so sorry, lady.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “I should have recognized my…” He shifts uncomfortably. “My strange mood. I thought it was only…Amon.”

  I slide my gaze to the kitchen, where Amon reaches over his smaller sister to get bowls out of a cabinet. They speak softly together. “He brings it out in you on purpose.”

  “I should know better.”

  The bitterness in his voice stings my eyes. I sink into the chair beside him. “I’ve been going over everything Gunn-Elin has, but something else is bothering me. Soren’s words when he was taken into custody. He said, ‘He was no man.’ I think that is important because Soren is nothing if not deliberate.” I wait, letting Sune chew on the problem.

  The hunter says slowly, “You are not a man’s equal and not a man at heart. You think he might have been trying to tell the militia he’d called Bell to holmgang?”

  “It occurred to me, but no. There’s no reason to hide that.”

  “Has Soren called holmgang before?” Sune asks.

  “Yes, at least once I know of. It was a matter of life and honor. He’d have to have had an incredible reason. But it doesn’t…feel right.”

  Sune doesn’t respond except with an eloquent tightening of his hand on the arm of the chair. “What else could it mean? Maybe nothing official, but Soren’s way of defending himself? That it was a righteous death?”

  “Soren would never call any death righteous.”

  In the kitchen, Gunn-Elin dishes a thick orange soup into the bowls.

  Sune reaches across the table to tap a long finger on the picture of Bell that came with the militia file, dragging the image nearer. “No man,” he murmurs to himself.

  Amon and Gunn-Elin bring soup out to us. She sets one down before me and says, “Chicken and red lentil. I’ve water or soda or beer if you prefer.”

  It smells earthy and delicious, and I accept the spoon, though my stomach is a tight knot. “Sune should stick to water,” Amon says, eyeing him, and the hunter rather meekly obeys.

  We sit at two tables, spread out because of my scatter of maps and information. I stare idly at the map of the Rock Mountains, forcing myself to take small bites of the hot soup. He was no man. If Soren said it, he meant it literally. For all his imagination, for his attraction to the metaphors he loves that make his life smoother and force the chaos of the world into simple truths, my Soren doesn’t talk like a poet.

  I set the spoon down. “He wasn’t a man at all,” I say quietly. I lean toward Amon. “What if Evan Bell was the elf we’ve been looking for all along?”

  “What?” Gunn-Elin breathes. “Like…” She flicks a glance at her brother.

  “They don’t have the mask anymore,” Sune says. “I recovered it.”

  Amon says, hard and straight, “But she did have it, for nearly a week. She could have figured out how to replicate it. It was originally elf-made.”

  Sune strikes through the air with his hand. “There’s no evidence for any of this.”

  I push my soup entirely aside. “What if that’s how they put the gold back out? They wanted to directly trade, and how simple would that be? If Soren killed an elf, they’d want their blood price and take him! Hold him in a cave until he dies of bearbane poison!”

  “You are jumping to fast conclusions.”

  “Fast is all I have time for.” I get up. “We have to contact Eirfinna.”

  Amon shrugs. “I can’t. We traded at Bright Home and the Caldera, but only every six weeks. I had no way to contact her.”

  “There must be a way,” I insist.

  Sune says, “I’ve never heard of one, and officially the elves are extinct. I have no channels to request access to them, and I doubt any of my superiors would grant it anyway. Lady Idun, I’m sorry, but without calling Bright Home and asking Thor directly, there is no faster way for us to find an elf than going through these lists and finding the source here in Salt City.”

  I open my mouth. I close it. There is a way. I’ve had a secret weapon all alo
ng. I shove my chair back and go to where I folded my coat on the table nearest the door. Inside the front left pocket is Loki’s cell phone. I dig it out and turn it on, though it’s never been charged. It doesn’t need to be.

  “There is a way,” I say. “It’s time. It’s time to do this because I know exactly, exactly, what I need.”

  The small phone flickers to life. All that shows on the screen is a glowing green snake, eating its own tail.

  “Who are you calling?” Sune asks.

  All three of them watch me, Sune with his sharp jaw clenched, Amon with his hands caught in his hair, and Gunn-Elin concerned, her hands in her lap. I lift the phone and hit Call.

  Silence reigns in the dining room as the other end rings once, twice, and then a smooth young voice says, “Well hallo, darling.”

  “Hello, Loki,” I say and watch my friends’ faces go slack with shock. “I’m collecting on that debt.”

  FOURTEEN

  I shudder and tuck my hands into the fur-lined pockets of my coat as wind drags thick cloud-fingers across the moon. Silver and black shadows play over the lava garden where I stand, the rear of the Rock Cathedral rising white at my back like a shield. Its twisted spires glow a gentle blue from lights hidden behind the limestone and crystal spirals. I stand in the center of a raked yard of red lava rocks, surrounded by black and red air-pocked boulders, waiting for the god of mischief.

  For seven months, I haven’t seen him, though he used to come frequently to bargain or trick or threaten. Until the last time, and the most recent trick he played that earned me this single favor. I told him not to return except for the once-yearly apple I owed.

  It surprised me at first how much I missed his lively visits. We’d played a game sometimes where he transformed into famous players of history or legend as I told their stories. I made my descriptions as outlandish as I could, just to challenge him, and Loki liked honing his gifts. I remember him transitioning from boy to old man as he spoke, every word the passing of a year, or growing his hair longer like slithering snakes, changing from strawberry blond to orange to red to deep, vibrant scarlet, or his features softening into a pretty pink smile until you notice his jawline shading with new stubble. Some say Loki doesn’t know what he truly looks like anymore. Others say he’s afraid of holding to one shape or that he’s too fickle to choose. But maybe he’s only lazy. I think it’s all a game, and none but he know the rules.