Authors: Tessa Gratton
Tags: #Love & Romance, #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Legends; Myths; Fables, #Norse
The Lost Sun
BOOKS BY TESSA GRATTON
THE BLOOD JOURNALS
Blood Magic
The Blood Keeper
THE UNITED STATES OF ASGARD
The Lost Sun
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2013 by Tessa Gratton
Jacket art: Photograph of boy © Geber86/Vetta/Getty Images;
photograph of trees © Fuse/Getty Images
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gratton, Tessa.
The lost sun / Tessa Gratton. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (The United States of Asgard; bk. 1)
Summary: “In an alternate U.S.A. (the United States of Asgard), Soren Bearskin, the son of an infamous berserker, and Astrid Glyn, daughter of a renowned seer, embark on a road trip to find Baldur, the missing god whose absence has caused panic throughout the country.” —Provided by publisher.
eISBN: 978-0-307-97748-9
[1. Fate and fatalism—Fiction. 2. Gods and goddesses—Fiction. 3. Prophets—Fiction.
4. Mythology, Norse—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.G77215Los 2013 [Fic]—dc23 2012027695
Random House Children’s Books supports the
First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
For Natalie
,
who taught me everything
I needed to know
to write this book
Contents
And once, you stopped
on a dark desert road
to show me the stars
climbing over each other
riotously
like insects
like an orchestra
thrashing its way
through time itself
I never saw light that way
again.
—Dorothea Grossman
Light up, light up
As if you have a choice.
—Snow Patrol
ONE
MY MOM USED to say that in the United States of Asgard, you can feel the moments when the threads of destiny knot together, to push you or pull you or crush you. But only if you’re paying attention.
It was a game we played during long afternoons in the van, distracting ourselves from Dad’s empty seat. Mom would point out a sign as we drove past—
WELCOME TO COLORADA, THE CENTENNIAL KINGSTATE
, bright green against a gray backdrop of mountains—and she’d ask, “Here, Soren? Do you feel the threads tightening around you?” I would put my fingers to my chest where Dad used to say the berserking fever stirred. “No,” I’d say, “nothing yet.”
And Mom always replied, “Good.”
We both dreaded the day Dad’s curse would flicker to life in me.
LEAVING WESTPORT CITY—COME AGAIN!
“I hope it wasn’t back there, my little man!” “No, Mom, I doubt it.”
CANTUCKEE:
HOME OF BLUEGRASS
. “Soren, do you hear the clacking loom of fate?” “I couldn’t hear anything over the banjos.”
But I have felt it, four times now.
When I was eight years old, standing in a neon-lit shopping mall, and my ears began to ring. My breath thinned out and I ran.
Again five years later, when Mom stopped the van for gas and we happened to be across the road from a militia station. The sun was just barely too bright, cutting across my cheek. I knew what I was supposed to do.
Six months ago, I was in the dining hall about to take a long drink of honey soda when the air around me turned cold. I had time to get to my bedroom before this jagged hot fever began to burn.
And today.
It’s Tyrsday afternoon, and so I’m in the library reading the thickest section of the
Lays of Thomas Jefferson
for my poetry and legends class, trying to ignore my excited classmates as they whisper back and forth about the famous new student arriving any moment now at Sanctus Sigurd’s.
Perrie Swanson and her roommate huddle over a copy of the winter issue of
Teen Seer
, which isn’t the sort of magazine I normally pay attention to. The headlines tend toward fashion and boy hunting: “Top Ten Ways to Make Runes Sexy” and “Dating and Prophecy: Things He Doesn’t Want to Hear.”
I definitely don’t want to hear. But the cover features a girl my age against a shocking orange background, her eyes sad. Curls like licorice twists surround her face, and there’s a
necklace of large black pearls at her throat. Her hands are up, gripping ropes as if she’s been caught on a swing.
The headline reads: “Astrid Glyn—Seventeen and Ready to Change Your World.”
I stare back at her, as if she can see out from the glossy cover. I hear my mom’s voice echoing against the metal roof of that old Veedub,
Is this the sound a knot in fate makes, little man?
A commotion at the library window has Perrie on her feet, and she races over with her roommate stepping at her heels. I slowly stand, waiting until I’ll be the last to arrive. Over the bobbing heads, I look through the panes of glass toward the front gate of the school as a silver town car pulls through, its windows tinted so dark the sunlight vanishes against them. The girl in front of me holds up her cell phone to take a picture, and on the ground outside, students pause on their way between classes to stare.
It isn’t that Astrid has done anything remarkable on her own, but we all know of her mother. Astrid grew up traveling the country, like me, but she wasn’t living in trailers and the backs of old vans. Astrid is the daughter of the most famous seethkona in a generation—a prophetess who read the fate of the president himself, and had private rooms in the White Hall in Philadelphia. But Jenna Glyn vanished one night about five years ago from the South Lakota plains, setting off a days-long search that eventually recovered her body. Astrid was on TV at the time, small and sunken and alone, and I’d wanted to send her a letter because I knew what it felt like when your parent died in front of the world.
I turn away from the library window and go back to the
Lays
. It will not be me who makes her feel like a specimen on her first day at a new school, no matter how my blood is rushing in my ears.