The Lost Sun (2 page)

But the next afternoon she walks into our history classroom and stops beside me. She looks less glossy in real life, with messier hair. But the black pearls are the same. I stop breathing as her eyes level on the spear tattoo cutting down my left cheek. She might stare forever, and I might let her, if not for her roommate Taffy, who tugs Astrid into a desk.

All through Mr. Heaney’s lecture I feel her watching me, feel the fever churning in my chest. It’s good I’ve done my own reading on the Montreal Troll Wars so I don’t have to worry about missing anything vital for the test.

When class ends I wait, as I usually do, for all the other students to file out so I can slip through the narrow aisle by myself. But Astrid remains, pushing Taffy on with a silent wave.

Even Mr. Heaney leaves us alone. He pulls a black cigarette from his pocket and marches outside to indulge in that particularly Freyan habit.

I slowly stand. Astrid’s eyes are washed brown, the color of very old paper. She reaches toward me, her finger aiming for my tattoo. I don’t move. If she touches me, I’ll let her. I even want her to—a thought that makes me hot all over and tell myself it’s only the berserking fever, not hormones or wanting.

But she doesn’t. Astrid only holds her arm out and turns her eyes to mine. “I dreamed of you,” she says in a voice
as distant as clouds. Then she spins and is gone from the classroom.

The words sink down through my skin and embed themselves in my bones.

It’s the end of my Thorsday morning run, and I’m coming into the courtyard in the center of campus, where a statue of Sanctus Sigurd himself rises out of a fountain. My eyes are on Sigurd’s spear, which he lifts in a stone hand to defeat his dragon. Directly behind him the sun rises, split in two by the shaft of the weapon. I’m already slowing on the cobbles when I realize Astrid is there.

She sits on the marble rim, trailing her fingers over the thin layer of ice.

“Soren,” she says without looking up.

“Astrid.” I pause a few steps away. My breath hangs white in the air before me.

“Everyone here is afraid of you.”

My stomach tightens, and I’m glad she doesn’t follow the seethers’ tendency of being long-winded. “Yes.”

“Because of your father.”

There’s no reason not to be honest. I know who her mother was; of course she knows of my father by now. “And because of my tattoo and what it means.”

Her gaze narrows to the rune she draws over and over again on the ice. She begins to smile, then stops, leaving only the promise of it in the corners of her lips. I wish suddenly that she
would give that smile to me. “Doesn’t it mean you’ll be a great warrior, strong and sworn to protect New Asgard against her enemies?”

I could say,
That’s what my father was, and it didn’t stop him from murdering thirteen people and only falling when the SWAT team shot him
. Instead I roll my shoulders.

She looks up at me with the same mysterious not-quite-smile. It throws me off guard, not knowing what to expect. Which, I suppose, is exactly what I should have expected. If Astrid is a seethkona like her mother, she’s devoted to Freya, the goddess of magic and fate, and of course she’s so mysterious. So beautiful and alluring. It’s in their nature.

“The seethers say,” Astrid tells me, “that before the world existed there was only darkness and ice, and cold nothing waits for us when we leave behind the sun and stars to venture into death. That there is no light, and all is chaos. And a slice of that cold chaos is what lives inside berserkers. Lives in you, as it lived in your father, his father, and his father’s father, all the way back to the times when Odin Alfather, King of the Gods, gave a bear spirit into a man that he might become a perfect warrior.”

She speaks in a hushed tone, too intimate for two people who’ve only just met. I shut my eyes. For six months I’ve felt the frenzy burning, cutting up against my heart and keeping me from sleep, making my skin hot to touch. For six months I’ve struggled to lock it away. Yet here is Astrid Glyn summoning it with a few words—pulling on me. I don’t know what to tell her, how to protest, and when she’s next to me I’m unsure
that I even want her to stop. “It doesn’t feel like cold nothing in my chest.”

Behind me, the dormitory doors open and footsteps tap lightly down the sandstone stairs. Astrid stands, ignoring the students who slow nearby, as if she knows they won’t interrupt us. She says, “Tell me what it feels like, then.”

She touches her own chest, low over her diaphragm, which is exactly the place on my body nearest to the fever. As if she knows, as if she feels it herself. And I remember suddenly that Odin stole his mad magic from Freya. If Astrid has the gift for grasping the strands of fate, for dancing in wild circles and asking question after question until the universe talks back, maybe she actually can understand. Maybe that’s why I feel this way around her. Maybe it’s worth it to tell her. I say, “Most of the time, like a million tiny flames. A fever.”

Astrid smiles very softly and nods as if it’s exactly as she expected. Then she walks around me, just like that, to join the group of girls who’ve been heading for the dining hall and breakfast. She doesn’t look back. After she disappears through the heavy double doors, I have to tear myself away from the fountain, where my feet have frozen to the earth.

The best thing for me to do is go about my routines. To ignore the way I catch my breath when she passes, and the thoughts that shoot up about touching her hand. Nonengagement is the way to avoid getting upset, which can trigger the berserking, and once it finally overtakes me I’m stuck with it forever. I keep
myself out of fighting, out of situations where most boys my age throw punches. I avoid falling for girls—until now they’ve made it easy by avoiding me right back. If I hold the madness off, maybe it’ll fade. Maybe I can squash it, bury it for the rest of my life.

Only that won’t happen so long as Astrid is making me feel this way.

I have Anglish and biology on Freyasdays, and as Astrid comes into biology carrying a brand new elf anatomy textbook, she notices me. She sits only two desks over. I stop breathing.

In lunch period, I glance across the dining hall to see her fingers at her chest, rubbing tiny circles against the button of her cardigan.

And my fever burns hotter.

The bench creaks beside me as my former roommate London slides in and slaps his laden tray onto the table. “You’re staring,” he says, digging into mashed red potatoes. He’s a hand taller than me, and his skin is even darker than mine. I used to think it was the reason we were originally dormed together—Sanctus Sigurd’s two charity cases—but he was quick to tell me his grandfather was the king of Kansa for one term, despite their race and allegiance to Thor Thunderer, the least diplomatic of all our gods.

I look back at Astrid, who’s in the middle of a circle of admirers, with Taffy at her right hand. “Not at your girlfriend,” I say to London as I push ham around on my plate. I stab two chunks at a time and eat them.

“I’m not worried about you and Taffy.”

His mouth is full as he says it, and I make sure to swallow before answering. “What are you worried about?”

He picks up his mug of honey soda in one big hand. London is the only student on campus stronger than me, but we’d still had to quit sparring when the fever started keeping me up at night. He’d thrown a fit worthy of his patron the Thunderer. But it hadn’t done any more good than when his parents requested that he be removed as my roommate. “The match,” he admits.

I clench my teeth against regret. Last year we were co-captains of the school’s battle guild, re-creating famous battles for competition. Next week is a campaign against one of the big Westport City public schools. Very calmly, as if it hardly matters, I ask, “What’s our team’s role?”

“The horde of greater hill trolls that swarmed into Vertmont ninety years ago.”

“The Battle of Morriston.”

“I’d love to go over some tactics with you.”

“You know where I’ll be.”

“Staring at Astrid Glyn?”

I snap my head toward him.

With a great laugh, he says, “Soren, I think you’d blush if you could.”

Swinging my leg over the bench, I stand. “I’ll be in my room after devotions if you want to bring by the tactical map.” And I go, forcing myself to keep my eyes on the path ahead, to not look back at her.

Fortunately, I have private lessons on battlefield history with Master Pirro all Freyrsday. He’s a retired berserker who
served in the president’s personal bodyguard at the White Hall until a wound from the Gulf conflict gave him a limp that relegated him to teaching. Because he’d volunteered to act as my custodian when everyone else refused, the kingstate of Nebrasge agreed to subsidize my tuition here. Sanctus Sigurd’s is a humanities academy, privately owned and meant for the kids of people who can afford to keep them out of apprenticeships while they’re still young. If not for Pirro, I don’t know where I’d be.

Anytime my focus drifts away from the immediate lesson, Pirro slaps a gnarled old hand against the desk between us. The backs of his knuckles are crisscrossed with scars. “Soren,” he says in his gravelly way, “is the fever stronger? Is that what’s distracting you?”

I can’t imagine telling him I’m thinking about a girl, and only stare at the sharp blue of his eyes. They droop at the corners. He should have glasses, but he says that if a berserker can’t do it with his own body, he shouldn’t do it at all.

After a moment, he coughs and orders me to write out the best strategy for defending the city of Chicagland against siege.

It’s nearly two hours before he’s satisfied and I’m free. On my way home to my dorm, I hear Astrid call my name.

She stands in the arched doorway of the chapel, one hand on the edge of the heavy wooden door. Beyond her, the glow of candlelight transforms the edges of her hair into a halo. Taffy’s there, hip cocked impatiently, along with two other girls from their year, waiting to begin their evening devotion. Last year Taffy’s parents won a civil suit in the Nebrasge king’s holmcourt
that meant Sanctus Sigurd’s had to put a Biblist cross up in the chapel for her to pray. But I hadn’t heard of Taffy herself ever bothering before.

Astrid gestures for me to go into the chapel with her, and I almost laugh. But it would be a bitter, ugly noise, so I just shake my head and move off on my way. There’s only one thing I’ve ever prayed for: to have this fever pass me by. Every Yule and Hallowblot, and every Disir Day since my father died, I’ve lit candles and made sacrifices to Odin that his particular curse not fall onto my shoulders. But my prayers never mattered. The Alfather didn’t listen, and the madness curled its fingers through my ribs, clutching tight. It will never let me go.

“Soren.” Astrid dashes across the lawn to me, making Taffy’s and the other girls’ eyes go wide.

I wait for her, unable to turn away when my name hangs between us.

“Do you ever come in?” Instead of reaching for me, she folds her hands together before her stomach.

I focus on them, on her small wrists. If I lost control here, with her, it would be so easy to break her. “Praying won’t make my life better.”

“That isn’t what praying is for.”

Because we have an audience, I don’t ask what she thinks it
is
for.

Astrid goes on when I don’t. “Your berserking is a gift. We need your strength to protect the people of New Asgard. To defend our values, our freedom against our nation’s enemies.”

It sounds as though she’s been reading pamphlets from
the Hangadrottin War College. Why is she challenging me like this? Why does she care that I don’t join in evening devotions? Can’t she see the fear and mistrust engendered by this tattoo on my face? With half our year slinking out of the chapel to watch our encounter—some excited, some hostile, and one dashing off, probably to get a teacher—it should be impossible to miss.

“That is what they say,” Taffy adds, coming up behind Astrid to take her elbow. “But not all the Alfather’s berserkers can keep themselves from brutal murder.”

Astrid, instead of shaking Taffy off as I suddenly want her to do, turns to go with her roommate, saying only, “Soren, you should come to my room tonight. I’m throwing runes, and I want to see what future is in yours.”

I stand there, gutted, colder than I’ve been in a half year, as Astrid goes inside with the others, as the crowd melts away.

I tell myself I don’t need to know my future. I won’t go. I can’t go.

I know exactly what she’ll see.

My room is sparse: the walls empty, the floor bare, with only a trunk of clothes and a desk that should have pictures and mementos but doesn’t. My father’s sword, sheathed and silent, leans against a corner. The second bed was removed last year along with London, so I have space for indoor exercise. It’s what I usually do, and will all day Sunsday, too, as it’s our break day from classes.

But tonight I only lie on the hardwood, staring up at the
ceiling, thinking about Astrid and my mom’s destiny game, about how angry I was when I realized we’d been running away from the world ever since my dad died. Mom wasn’t helping me listen for my destiny so that I could find it, but so that she’d know how to steer me away. I left her because I refused to run anymore.

If Astrid can read my future in her runes, how is it brave to ignore her? She might tell me the berserking is inevitable. But there’s the outside chance I’m right, that I can fight it, and maybe Astrid will confirm that. She’ll see me grown and free, living my life apart from the berserking bands, liberated from battle and killing and this always-present fever. Then I’d know I’m on the right path, that I’m doing what I need to.

I get to my feet and pull a school hoodie on, scrubbing a hand through my short hair. It’s been about a month since London buzzed it, and it feels shaggy. The second I notice I’m worried about how I look, I frown. Astrid is making me crazy.

It’s a quick walk between dorms, and early enough that I can walk straight past their RA’s open door without checking in. Thanks to London, I know Taffy’s on the third floor in a corner room, and I take the stairs three at a time, in large, slow steps.