The Lost Sun (28 page)

In the rearview, I catch Baldur staring intently at the dial of the radio. I click it off. His startled glance turns into a frown, and instead of engaging me, he looks out the window.

For lunch we stop in an Idahow town called Peccadillo. The welcome sign proclaims it the Smile Capital of the World, but the Spark is so full of tension none of us is laughing. I know it’s
my fault. I’m feeling wound tight and the sparks I’m used to holding under my skin are flaring up.

Astrid will go into the gas stop for food while Baldur remains hidden in the car. I don’t think I should go anywhere, either, because of my tattoo, but when Vider jerks open the driver’s side door and says “I need shoes,” I share a quick look with Astrid and follow after.

We walk through the downtown with its red brick buildings, its striped awnings and green streetlamps. I stand glowering against the brick wall of a pawnshop as Vider darts in to trade a small copper medallion I think she may have pulled out of the air for boots and a pair of jeans.

As we return to the gas stop, the sun is behind us, casting our shadows ahead. We’ve been silent the whole time, but finally Vider says, “What’s your problem?”

I grind my teeth and don’t answer.

“Was it your father?” She flicks a glance at me. “I’d be upset if I had to see mine again.”

As we walk, Vider skims through the crowd quickly, never touching, always avoiding notice. She pulls me along in her wake, so that even a bear of a man like me can slip through. I watch the side of her face as I consider my answer. The bruise has darkened. Did her father have something to do with giving her the crazed bravery to spend the night in a den of trolls and steal one of their eyes?

“Yeah,” I admit. “I didn’t really want to talk to him. And what he said was … bad.”

Her eyebrows wing up. “If they’re nacks in life, they’re nacks in death.”

“My dad wasn’t like that.… I loved him.”

“Lucky. Mine was.”

“Is that how you ended up with the caravan?”

“Nope.” Vider rubs the heel of her hand against her ribs. “I was born into that, but Dad wasn’t. He was opposed to the whole caravan philosophy and took me away. Several times. You remember Sam? It was his mom who took me back, though she wasn’t responsible for me.”

In the caravans, Vider would have been raised by an extended family. Mother, father, aunts and uncles, anyone in the family by blood or bond. It’s a wide-thrown support system, and it’s one of the reasons the caravans have survived economically even into this century. “It must have been good then, having the Lokiskin to rely on.”

She slides a look at me, her eyelashes low. “Sometimes, Soren, having more people watching out for you only means more chances to get hurt.”

There isn’t anything I can say to that.

We find Astrid and Baldur seated together at a wooden picnic table in the yard behind the gas stop. Snow-capped mountains rise in the distance behind them, the tips shining like glass as the sun heats the sky. A bucket of chicken waits, and bottles of honey soda weigh down napkins and paper plates. Baldur talks,
using his hands to describe something. His fingers fan out like sunbeams.

I hold back to watch them, my friends.

I never thought of this as a commit before Dad said it would break.

There are several different sorts of commit rituals. Commitments can be made under nearly any god, though usually with Thor or Freyr, the gods of loyalty and strength, family and wealth. The most common are the commits of couples, and commits between battle-brothers or business partners. There are commits assumed between parents and children, and you never have to hold a ritual before a tyr for a family commitment unless you’re stepping out of blood bounds.

And at the bare minimum, you only need to speak out loud that you are forming a commit with another, and it is so. The word is the bond.

Vider climbs up to sit her butt on the table and her feet on the bench, and pulls the bucket to her. She eats ravenously. Astrid wrinkles her nose and hands Vider a napkin before more delicately picking the skin off a drumstick. Baldur fishes through the pieces, discarding dark meat in favor of a breast. These are such little things, but they overwhelm me as I carefully sit down. Astrid pushes the chicken at me, but I shake my head. I’ll eat it cold, when this feeling settles. My ribs are tight and it isn’t the frenzy pushing out, but something from around me pressing in. From these people.

I cannot let us fail. We are bound together.

For the night, we stop in a small city along the Face of Montania called Mimirsey. It’s Vider we send in to get the room, for although she’s young and hasn’t passed her citizenship exam, Loki insists that a girl is grown as soon as she can be a mother. We hope Vider’s adult status in the caravans will hold with the manager of a roadside motel.

When she comes out, she’s excitedly twirling the key around her finger. “The guy told me Baldur’s been confirmed all the way down in New Spain, by Fenris herself.” She smiles and flashes change we didn’t expect. “I convinced him a ten percent discount was in order.”

“Enough for breakfast tomorrow,” Astrid says, and Baldur tousles Vider’s hair. She smacks his hand away with a sneer.

We pile into the double room just in time for Baldur to pass out. He does so, but first stands at the edge of the bed, staring through the western window to see the moment the sun slides past the horizon. Then his knees buckle and he sprawls onto the mattress. It’s a melodramatic gesture, with his limp arms flung up over his head, and it makes Vider laugh. But by then the god of light is unconscious.

Astrid opens her bag, fishing through her clothes with a small frown. It’s Moonsday, nearly a week since we left Sanctus Sigurd’s. All my clothes, too, are filthy. I hold my hand out. “Give it here. I’ll find an all-night Laundromat.”

She hesitates, and I add, “I’m not tired.”

With a little sigh, Astrid hands it over. I shoulder my backpack and, after a brief moment of inner debate, strap on Dad’s sword, too.

I’d rather hunt for a Laundromat than show myself to the motel clerk for a recommendation, and I only have to walk about seven blocks to find what I’m looking for. It’s empty but for a harried-looking woman who keeps stopping her folding to sing to a baby in a rickety car seat that’s propped on top of a dryer. I get our load started and drop to the sticky tile floor to do push-ups.

After the woman leaves, I run small laps around the inside of the Laundromat, creating my own obstacle course. The rhythm of the machines is a good counter beat, and I measure my progress against it.

By the time I get back to the motel room, Astrid and Vider are asleep. I’m even less tired than I was before. I haven’t slept for two days, and should try while I’m not feverish, but instead I sit on the thin carpet and eat the sandwich they left out for me. The TV is turned so low I can barely hear the canned laughter in the background of the comedy they left on.

That’s why I notice Astrid’s nightmare, an hour past midnight. The blankets of the bed she shares with Vider shuffle, and her breathing grows weighted and harsh. I glance around at her, from the foot of Baldur’s bed. Her eyes flash wild under her lids and her lips are stretched thin. There’s just enough white light from the television for me to watch a tear track down her temple.

I stand up. Baldur, too, is dreaming. His expression is steady but serious, and his eyelashes twitch.

Astrid whispers something. One word again and again.

Leaning down, I put my ear closer to her mouth.

“Soren.”

My head cracks back hard enough to make me dizzy. “Astrid,” I whisper, putting my hands on her shoulders. “Wake up.”

I shake her, pressing my fingers into her bare skin.

Her eyes fly open and she sucks in a huge breath. I stumble back as she throws off the thin quilt and flees into the bathroom. The light flashes on and she shuts the door.

My heart beats fast as I sit on my heels in the dark motel room. Vider rolls over, tugging her pillow over her face, and behind me Baldur’s breathing evens out.

A faucet turns on in the bathroom. I try to settle in front of the television again but can’t even look at the bickering family and their illusory problems.

I go to the bathroom and tentatively knock.

Nothing.

After a moment, I push the door open.

Astrid huddles on the cold blue tiles with her back against the sink cabinet. When I enter, she shakes her head. “It was just a nightmare, Soren. I’m fine.”

I crouch in front of her but don’t move to touch. Her curls are frayed around her cheeks, her lips pale. “About what’s to come?”

Her hesitation is a moment too long. “About death and
resurrections. It’s to be expected. I did huge, dark magic yesterday, and there wasn’t any good way to process it.”

I can’t believe she’s lying to me.

I leave her there on the bathroom floor, and go outside with my sword. I spend the night cutting at shadows.

EIGHTEEN

IN THE MORNING, bright sunlight makes my eyes burn, and Baldur volunteers for the first shift behind the wheel. Astrid and I aren’t talking, so I’m in the back with Vider. She plays with one of the same copper medallions she traded back in Peccadillo, walking it across her fingers and making it disappear, only to pull it out of my nose. Despite the childish nature of the game, I play along with a plastered smile until Vider stops, narrows her eyes at me as if studying something beyond my expression, and suddenly claps. The medallion vanishes. Vider strips off the cardigan she’s been wearing, pulls out her pockets, points to the empty carpet at her feet, the too-tight crease of the leather seats, and tells me I’ll never find it.

I know it’s a trick, but my shoulder blades prickle uncomfortably.

Within the first hour, we see dark clouds blowing over the low mountains to the north, directly before us. I’m glad of them, for the way the world seems to be echoing my own fear and anger. Then Astrid notices that Baldur has slowed our pace
by ten miles an hour. She suggests a breakfast stop where we can trade drivers.

Baldur pulls into a twenty-four-hour truck stop with a star logo, claiming it’s a good omen, and the girls go in for doughnuts. Baldur and I mind the Spark. Vider suggests disguises if we’re so worried, but both of us recoil. Me because it’s illegal, and Baldur because, he says, pretending to be something he isn’t is dishonorable. I’m not sure either of the girls agrees, but they go, murmuring to each other.

I begin a set of push-ups against the trunk. Baldur crosses his arms over his chest and watches me. Occasionally his eyes flicker east. The sun shines freely on his face now, but it won’t be long before we’re entirely beneath the storm clouds.

With a heavy sigh, Baldur sinks down to sit on the dirt with his back against the rear wheel. He unzips his hoodie halfway down his chest and leans his head against the bumper. Every time I push away from the trunk, the car shakes slightly, making his head knock as if he’s agreeing with my silence.

I slow my push-ups. I’ve lost count anyway, and I did somewhere around a thousand of them throughout the lonely night. Bringing my feet under me one at a time, I crouch next to him. Maybe my prickly mood is seeping into him, but maybe there’s been something new in his dreams, too. “Baldur? Are you all right?”

He pops open one eye. It’s a darkening blue, and gray swirls around his iris. “I don’t think I like rain.”

“We’ll get through it.”

Baldur shudders.

“Is there something else bothering you?” I stare at the shine of sunlight making his hair so vibrant it seems plucked from a cartoon. Yet with his eyes tightly closed and his hands tense against the earth, he’s more like a man than a god now. He said it himself: he’s stripped down to his core. I wonder what it’s like for him, to have no memories of being a figure of power and light, to have us and the radio and everyone insisting that he’s the hope of the world, when all he remembers is being a man alone in the desert. When all he has is a passionate seethkona and an uncertain, angry berserker.

“Soren.” He pins me with a gaze gone more gray in only this short moment.