TWO

TODAY IS THE last day of winter, and across the country, people turn off televisions and the interweave. They hang lanterns in order to wrap hope and light around their homes and loved ones. They wait quietly for the sun to return, in order to welcome Baldur the Beautiful back to life with joy.

I usually spend holidays alone. But even for me, Baldur holds some appeal. There’s a chorus of gods in the USA, brought over from Scandia by our founding fathers: Odin Alfather, the mad one, the god of war and poetry. Thor Thunderer, the sky god, who defends us against our enemies. Freyr the Satisfied, god of wealth and prosperity. His sister Freya, the Feather-Flying Goddess of magic. Frigg, Queen of Heaven. Tyr the Just. Loki Shapeshifter, who never stops moving or changing.

When we become citizens, we all dedicate ourselves to one, based on family tradition or personal preference. Or, as in my case, destiny of birth.

My dad used to tell me that Loki sometimes drove an ice cream truck in the town where he grew up. I’ve seen photos in Os Weekly of Freyr walking down a red carpet with a starlet on his arm, and of Thor Thunderer standing over the body of a slain mountain troll that ventured into a Montania town and slaughtered a family in their sleep. Odin regularly visits the House of Congress to give his approval to a new law. Frigg cuts the ribbon at a new hospital. Tyr oversees his system of dedicated lawspeakers. And through her seethers, Freya gives us the magic to seek our destinies.

Our gods are scattered throughout our lives, even when we live in a place as remote as Sanctus Sigurd’s. But none of them is so well loved as Baldur the Beautiful.

He’s the god of light, and is handsome and golden, strong and funny. At the end of every summer, he dies and his body is consumed in a great bonfire, only to rise again at winter’s end. He gives himself to Hel for six months of every year, but lives harder and more brightly in the time he has with us on earth.

He is the only god who dies at all.

And that makes him the one most like us.

At school we prepare for the equinox by folding paper lanterns and baking fortunes into clove-cakes. The lanterns will be strung, ready for the ceremony at dawn, and the cakes will harden overnight so that at breakfast we can each choose one to crack open and discover our future.

I’m with my schoolmates in the dining hall, at a table of my own, peeling apples and gathering the long spiral strips of skin for the girls to throw at sunrise. The shapes that the strips form on the ground will spell out the next year of the girls’ love lives. Taffy asked me with a hard smile if I would cut the skins. “It’s always better if a boy does it, Soren, but not one any of us wants.”

Instead of rising to her bait, I took the basket and pulled a sharp knife from my boot. The only time she and London fight, it’s over how mean she can be, but I tell him it’s her way of including me. “Blow that!” he says. “You’re my friend.” But then he goes and sits with them and knows I won’t follow.

As I lift a particularly red apple from the basket, I feel the fever spread in my chest, as though I’ve swallowed hot cider. The warmth spreads up my neck and flushes across my face. I hold tightly to the apple, staring at the pale glow of the TV reflected in its waxy skin. Then I close my eyes and a rush of empty blackness fills my head. There’s a distant roar, and I wish I were only going to pass out.

The apple falls from my suddenly shaking fingers. I push my palms against the smooth table. All around me, students laugh and chatter, oblivious to the chaos swimming inside me, to the danger here. I have to get out. I have to be free of the hall before this power claims me and I destroy everyone.

But as quickly as it flooded through me, the fever trickles away. I’m left, gasping, in the center of all that noise and crowd, a husk of what I was only moments before. I abandon the basket of apples and even the knife, and push outside.

The fever has never come on so suddenly. I need to get to Master Pirro, because he’ll know what to do. He’s supposed to help me when it happens. That’s why I’m here at Sanctus Sigurd’s—to be near a man who can control me, because my dad isn’t available. But he’s out at the perimeter of the school grounds, resetting the troll wards as he does at every change of season.

Panic stretches across my chest.

I need to calm down.

There’s one place I won’t be disturbed: the combat arena. Tucked back at the edge of the burial hills, up against the woods, it’s where they teach us fighting, preparing us for the day we might be called to ritual combat in response to a lawsuit or claim of honor against us. But it’s a formality these days, or a game. Most lawsuits don’t end this way anymore—and the vast majority of people hire a professional to represent them in holmcourt, either a fighter or a lawspeaker. But the arena is where I spend my free time.

I stop beside the gate to tear off my shirt and kick away my boots. I shouldn’t work out in my school pants, but I can’t return to the dorms, whose common rooms are crushed full with students excited and babbling about the holiday.

And so I do what I do best: lose myself in exercise.

First I choose the slow, focused stretching program Master Pirro and I developed last year. He isn’t happy with my decision to fight the frenzy, says it will bite me in the ass someday, but I can’t do anything else. My father was a full berserker by the time he was thirteen, and I hoped when I turned sixteen and it still hadn’t come that maybe it never would. But since I turned seventeen I’ve been sleeping less and less and I’m constantly plagued by these low-grade fevers. All I can do is train my muscles for skill and calm, prepare my mind to contain the wildness. Isolate myself, keep tight control, be ready.

When I’m warm and loose despite the chill air on my back, I grab a dull practice spear from the storage trunk and get set in the center of the arena. It’s ringed by a plain fence, hung with round shields that we use to determine who wins. I haven’t practiced with a partner other than Pirro since last fall because the school doesn’t want me to harm anybody accidentally. But it would be such a relief to slam my spear against another’s.

I dig my toes into the dirt and ground into a mountain stance. Deep breaths lead me into the routine: thrusting with my spear, turning, cutting, blocking against an invisible opponent. Always knowing where I am, how my body fits into the eddies of air, aware of the wind on my face and through the leaves of the trees behind me. The ground holds me secure, and I lift each foot as though I stretch roots connecting my soles to the earth. I’m between earth and sky, in a fluid dance of battle melding all things into one. I am in control. I am warm and calm, not feverish. I am Soren Bearskin.

Five repetitions later and I’m moving carefully through a serpent routine, my eyes closed and the spear horizontal to the earth. All I’m aware of is the air moving in and out of my lungs, the next step, and the smooth but rapid beat of my heart.

I feel her coming through the strands of wind.

I stop, and the earth and sky whirl without me until I suck in a deep breath and push the energy down through my feet, my roots, and back into the dusty arena floor. I open my eyes.

Astrid watches me from the fence. The wind ruffles the hem of her skirt. She should be freezing, but this is what she’s worn both times I’ve seen her out of uniform: flimsy dress and thin sweater, with that circle of black pearls around her neck. As though she exists in a world that’s always summer.

“Astrid,” I say, not moving from the center of the combat arena.

Again she doesn’t bother with small talk, or even with complaining that I left her room so suddenly two nights ago. Leaning her arms on the top rail of the fence, she just says, “Every year on Baldur’s Night, I try to find my mother.”

I don’t know what to say. Her mother is dead.

“I chew corrberries and breathe yew smoke, Soren, and I dance a seething dance to search for her. For anything that will help me find her.” Astrid’s voice is smooth and unconcerned, but there’s something in the tension of her fingers where she grips the fence. This feels like a challenge. Like she’s daring me to say it. But, Astrid, your mother is dead.

She lifts her hands, palms up, as if releasing some invisible balloon into the sky. “But every year I only see apples.”

I frown. There isn’t a single reason I can come up with for her to tell me this. “Apples?”

“Apples!” she laughs. The edge of her smile catches me, and I put down my spear. I walk to the fence and rest my hands on the gatepost near hers. Elf-kisses trail around her wrists: she’s cold; she just doesn’t care. “I was thinking, though.” She tilts her head up, and the laughter falls away. I wait, still unsure what she wants from me. The fever sleeps in my chest, but restlessly.

“Maybe …,” she continues, lowering her eyes. She begins to reach for my hand, but doesn’t. When she looks back up at me, she’s determined. “Maybe you can help me go farther. You can help me find her.”

“Me? Help you go farther where?” I’m trapped between wishing she would touch my hand and wanting to get away before my fever wakes again.

“Into the seething. Across the river of stars and through the roots of the New World Tree, into death.” She counters the drama of her words with a wry smile. “Where all the wisdom of the world resides, you know.”

“I didn’t.”

Her smile softens again and her hand shifts closer to mine. “Will you anchor me, Soren?” It’s strangely formal, as a request from one warrior to another.

I focus on her fingers, wanting rather desperately to say yes without thinking. But my best defense is caution. “I’m not safe.”

“You’re the only person at this school with Freya’s wild magic inside you, too.”

“It’s not her magic in me. It’s Odin’s.” I take my hands off the fence. I’ve never had a conversation like this before, never said so many true, raw things.

“Soren.” Astrid becomes as still as stone. With one finger she touches my face. As she traces the spear tattoo cleaving my left cheek, I nearly flinch away. “I am not afraid of Odin’s berserk warriors. Especially a boy who has yet to raise his spear for battle.”

Now I do withdraw a few inches. But no one has said they aren’t afraid of me before. None of the students here, none of the teachers, not my mom, not even Master Pirro. Just this girl I barely know. “Why not?” I ask, unsure I want to hear the answer.

“You stand between the earth and the sky,” she says, echoing my own thoughts. “So do I.”

That feeling of knotting fate my mom told me about is hot around me, and Astrid presents such a certainty, as if she knows all the possible outcomes. As if she’s really not afraid. I want to be unafraid, too. I want to, but I can’t. I remember what happened to my dad. I say, “It’s a dangerous place to be.”

“Which is why I want help. Why I need you.” Astrid takes my wrists, curls her fingers around them. Her skin seems to send ropes of cold up through my bones. The frenzy leaps in my chest, or I tell myself that’s what it is: only the frenzy reacting to a seether, and not just me wanting this girl to keep talking to me. To keep holding my hands.

“Soren.” She squeezes her fingers against my pulse. “Tonight will you help me build my fire, and stand ready while I dance?” Her voice is a whisper, mingling with the wind through the valley meadow.

I nod, unable to speak the words pressing against my teeth.

As the sun sets, Astrid and I sneak out of our dorm rooms and meet at Sigurd’s fountain. She carries a leather bag strapped over her shoulder and I have my own sharp spear. Together we walk into the darkness, toward the academy burial hill. As we climb the barrow, a slice of moon teases us with scant light, and the buildings of the academy below us are like dollhouses.

I stand, watching the shadows that press toward the campus. Every window blazes. It’s a separate world in those school buildings, shallow and easy and full of hope. Normal. Nothing like the chaos out here.

Unrolling the leather seething kit, Astrid removes two thin vials and a pouch of seeds. One vial contains lighter fluid, with which she lights a small fire made of yew branches swiped from the Great Hall. Their acrid scent sharpens the night for me. Astrid spills the oily contents of the second vial onto her fingers. She draws runes on her forehead and in the palms of her hands. I smell something heady and sweet like honey soda.

“Be ready to catch me, Soren,” she says, and reaches into the small pouch of tiny red seeds. She tosses three into the fire and puts one more on her tongue. As she chews, she closes her eyes.

I’ve seen seethers on TV. Usually there’s a grand display: drummers and attendants helping the seethkona up onto a chair raised high over her audience. She wears elaborate clothing: calfskin boots, a necklace of boar’s teeth, gloves from the skin of a cat. A feast is prepared, from the hearts of native animals. These things are to anchor her in the world, to firmly remind her physical body that she is of the animals, of the earth. When she’s ready, she begins her song, and her attendants pick up the tune, singing it in rounds while the seethkona dances. Seekers bring their questions and needs to her, crying them out from beside the high chair, and the seethkona answers as she can, or as she pleases.

Astrid has none of these things. She has only her fire, her berries, and me.

I wait, and she starts to sway. There’s no wind to rock her; it’s only the magic. My fever churns, flushing under my skin. Astrid brings it out in me. She’s everything I’ve avoided: desire and wild magic, like the embodiment of frenzy itself. Here in the dark, alone with her as she turns in the firelight, I can easily imagine her an avatar from the Alfather, sent to awaken his wayward berserker.

And so, crouching, I ground myself firmly. She asked me here to catch her, not to dance wildly with her. Not to let go. The fever churns, but I dig my fingers into the frosty grass.

She gives herself over to the wild darkness of the sky, dancing with her arms spread out, twirling and twirling. I remain solid, crouched on the earth with my spear for balance, watching her let go and dance. For the first time ever I wish I could do the same, but promise myself it’s enough to catch her.

The hill below us is used to bury princes and jarls, the illustrious alumni of Sanctus Sigurd Academy. When Astrid stomps on the yellow grass, I imagine I can feel their bones stomping back.

Our small fire flares orange and red. Astrid spins, her eyes blind and mouth open in wonder.

And when her feet stop but her body continues and she topples down—I’m there. I wrap my arms around her and cradle her against the crown of the burial hill. Her heartbeat pounds against her skin, and I feel it. So do the bones below.

I hold her there. The fire grabs at my back.

Her eyes are closed, but shivering with dreams. She curls her fingers into my shirt and a dark twist of hair falls over her face as she turns into me. I hardly remember how to breathe, but her own breath has a slow rhythm, and I match mine to it. All through the night I anchor her in my arms, against the earth, while her spirit flies through death.

The dawning sun paints golden waves into the Missoura River at the edge of Sanctus Sigurd land, and Astrid wakes up. I’ve been waiting, focused on smoothing my thoughts. Her passion and the bright lights of the school and my own fever kept me company all night, but as the sun rises, I’m calm.

“Soren,” she says.

Her open eyes are some sort of trigger, and I release her. She stretches and rolls out of my lap. My legs tingle fiercely as blood rushes into my calves again. “It’s dawn,” I say.

Astrid stands on unsteady legs, scanning the rolling hills, the thin spring woods, us and the silent buildings of the academy. “No movement?”

“Not yet.” My body feels hollow and light without her weight, as if she anchored me as much as I did her. I want to touch her shoulders, grasp her gently against me again.

“Then we have a few minutes.”

Inside the Great Hall, and in the dormitory common rooms, the students and faculty must be gathered in front of televisions to see Baldur rise. Everyone across the United States of Asgard will be watching the ritual in Philadelphia as his priests spread the ashes from his death pyre into the roots of the giant New World Tree. Cameras will flash, the seethers will sing, and everyone will wait as—slowly, slowly—Baldur the Beautiful climbs hale and whole out of his own ashes: new, golden, and alive. He’ll stand, bewildered and smiling, and the crowd will cheer. The gods will sweep their favored son away, until he appears at Bright Home, in Colorada, for a massive feast.

My stomach growls. There will be a feast at the academy, too. Candied plums and turkey and a whole roasted pig. Everyone but me will drink blessed honey mead.

“I didn’t see her,” Astrid says, sinking to sit in front of me, blocking my view of the sunrise so that she’s a silhouette, with the golden aura behind her. It’s the first time her voice sounds like the voice of a girl, not a legend. As if overnight that otherworldly aura popped.

“I’m sorry.” Instead of watching Astrid’s eyes, I focus on her fingers. People give away so much with their hands.

Astrid says, “My uncle went to identify her body, and wouldn’t take me. But I’ve dreamed of her alive, Soren, and that’s all I need. Besides, if she were dead, she would be easy to find.” Astrid’s mouth presses into a thin line. “I could summon her spirit then, as I could summon your father.”

I don’t need the reminder that my father is definitely dead, shot twenty-three times by police bullets. I watched his body burn.

Astrid seems to regret her words immediately, and scoots closer to me. “This is what I saw tonight: Baldur sitting in a desert. Faraway cities and people with mournful faces. I saw the New World Tree with ashes at its base, and the ashes blew away in a violent burst of wind. They scattered and became hundreds of people reaching out toward me. I saw an orchard of apple trees, stretching to the horizon, as far as I could ever run or fly. The apples were every color of the rainbow and together they made a bridge leading away from the Middle World and into Old Asgard, where the gods feast and fight and laugh. I saw the tent revivals my mother loved and the White Hall in Philly when the president’s personal seethkona invoked Freya’s blessing upon my family nine months and a day after Mom disappeared. I saw the people’s tears and I saw endless streams of mourners on every TV in the States. But I didn’t see my mother.”

We sit in silence while the sky changes from indigo to pink and then to gruesome orange in the east.

“Maybe,” I say, “you should look on a different night, when there is not so much of Baldur in the air, and the expectations of the world.”

“This was her favorite holiday, though. Because of the hope, she said. She never worked on it, though she should have, and never tried to do anything but be my mom. Not a seer or prophetess or holy woman. We would curl up in her bed with a tiny TV stacked between us on books, eating bacon and roasted apples.”

It’s the most normal thing she’s ever told me. I say, “My father liked the Hallowblot, for the humor of it. He used to take me to sacrifice mice to the goblins and trolls, and said, ‘This mouse lives only for a single moment: his death. Just like us, my bear-son.’ ”

“Bear-son. I like it. I was Mom’s little cat.”

It wasn’t clever of either of our parents. Cats are Freya’s favored beast, and all berserkers are known as bears. Instead it was a promise to both of us, a naming of our fates.

“Astrid—” I begin, intending to ask her if she ever thinks of not becoming a seethkona like her mother.

She lifts her head suddenly. “Do you hear that?”

Before she finishes, I do: a wail crawling up toward the clouds.

It comes from the academy, where all the lights continue to blaze even as the sky turns blue. The wail is joined by another voice, then another, in a keening that raises the hairs on my neck.

“They’re all crying,” Astrid whispers.

The windows and doors of the dorms and class buildings leak with pain. I stand and Astrid does, too. But neither of us moves. The wailing is such a contrast to the bright morning, to the rippling clouds blowing from the south. The Missoura River is a blue ribbon sliding through the prairie, dragging streaks of sunlight toward us.

I run, and under my feet the frosted yellow grass crunches. Astrid is behind me, so I pause and hold out my hand for her to take. We fly together away from the barrow.

As we careen into the courtyard, even the spill of water from the fountain statue of Sigurd Dragonslayer is overwhelmed by the keening. It’s all around us, as though the air itself screams. I remember what it was like to be surrounded by mournful wails and the smell of blood, in that candy-colored shopping mall, and I suddenly can’t move.

“The dorm.” Astrid jerks my hand, breaking me from my memory. We run across the courtyard and up the three sandstone steps to burst through the front door of the girls’ dormitory. The crying splits my head. In the dark wooden common room, two dozen girls clutch pillows and blankets, lips parted to wail through their teeth. The cries layer over and over and I cannot stand it. I back away.

Astrid falls to her knees, pointing at the projection screen.

The New World Tree is there, towering seven stories high and shading the entire park. Valkyrie in their corselets and feather cloaks push back a mob of men and women. The angry crowd raises fists and yells, but I cannot hear anything over the awful noise that presses into my eyeballs. A reporter stands in front of the camera, microphone shaking. Her words are drowned out, but a message scrolls across the bottom of the screen in bright yellow letters: THE SUN IS RISEN BUT BALDUR THE BEAUTIFUL REMAINS IN ASHES.