The Lost Sun (32 page)

He barks a laugh. “To settle this the berserkers’ way,” he says, “there is only death to choose.”

It is good, for I would not have let him walk away.

His eyes slide down my sword. “And I look forward to battling against Styrr’s blade.”

“So be it,” I say, my voice quieter than I’d have liked.

The words are echoed by all the warriors in the circle.
“So be it.”

The holmgang is set for one hour later, at midnight. A berserker with short hair like mine suggests waiting for dawn, but I tell him I’d rather cut Alwulf down where he stands than wait for the sun. Alwulf says he’ll humor my eagerness, since we all know how lack of control runs in my family.

It takes every ounce of will and knowing Astrid watches from the orchard gate to prove him wrong and walk away.

Henry Halson appears before me and offers to hold my shields. I grind my teeth and look toward where Astrid stands as still as a statue. “Yes,” I say to him, and he leads me into the fitness center where I can borrow his holmgang pants and take time to stretch. The garish white light makes my head throb, and we use the locker room between the weights and pool as a
place for me to change. It smells of chlorine and wet shoes, and the concrete is rough under my bare feet.

“May I?” Henry asks, his hand hovering over my sword as I strip. I pause with my T-shirt balled in my hand and study his expression. It’s clear and slightly deferential. I nod and he whips the blade free with a relish that reminds me of Baldur.

I turn away as I remove my jeans, not from modesty, but to hide the sorrow I find impossible to keep off my face. The troll eye gets tucked into the toe of my discarded boot.

“This is an amazing weapon,” he says in the wolf tongue.

When I’ve tied on the thin holmgang pants, I look back, searching my memory for the right words of response. It’s been too many years since I’ve spoken like a berserker. Pirro rarely bothered, for it’s meant as a way to let us communicate war plans and secrets. Just another thing to set berserkers apart.

But I turn to find Henry balancing my sword like a circus performer, with the pommel in his palm and the tip straight up. It barely wavers and he adjusts his arm only minutely to accommodate.

“That’s how you judge?” I say in Anglish, low and threatening, thinking of all the death this sword has seen.

With a flick of his wrist, he’s got it held properly by the grip, and I barely saw the motion. He smiles as if he can’t help it. “I can feel its … flavor and poise.”

I only stare until he flips it around and offers me the hilt. As I take it, he says, “Thank you. I’ve wanted to hold it since I was twelve.”

“Why?”

“I came here to replace your dad.”

“What?” I sit on the long bench between rows of lockers. We have a few minutes.

Henry straddles the same bench several paces off from me. “After he was made
wulfheart
, the Bears were down a man. I had just come into my power and so was directed here from Tejas.”

I realize I’m shaking my head.
Wulfheart
means Dad wasn’t reassigned or released—he broke commit.

“You didn’t know?” Henry frowns. “I’m sorry. I assumed …”

“I was only a kid. They didn’t tell me.”

He pulls a grimace. “And you haven’t joined a band, so who would have since then? I see.”

There are jagged pieces of confusion trying to connect in my mind, but I can’t fit them together. “How is it possible?” I say. “You can’t be that much older than me. When he left to commit with my mom, that was over eighteen years ago.”

“Oh, no.” Henry puts his hands on his knees as if he’s holding himself back. “He was a Bear until that summer, only nine years ago, just before he killed all those people.”

“No.”

He only nods.

“Why, then?” I ask. “Why was he cast out if it wasn’t for leaving to be with my mom?”

“Idun ordered that he return. That he leave his family and his wandering ways and return to the valley to be her captain.” Henry’s eyes flick down, and he’s tugging the end of his braid again. I want to swipe with my sword and hack the braid off so
that he stops revealing his nerves. “Your father refused to leave you. And Alwulf, who was Idun’s second choice for captain, banished him for denying her.”

I think of my dad the way I’ve seen him most recently: dead, with coals for eyes. He chose us over his goddess.

“It’s why Alwulf won’t back down about—about Baldur,” Henry rushes on. “When we learned who it was he killed, the rest of us, or most of the rest of us, wanted to call the Alfather here, to ask him to come. But Alwulf ruined your father for not obeying Idun, and so he will only say, ‘This is the will of Idun, and we do not thwart her will.’ ”

I can barely breathe, and cannot speak. Air rushes harsh and hard in and out of me. I should be glad I’ve been hollowed out already tonight, so this information can’t bowl me over.

Henry shakes his head. “But if it—if he was Baldur—that cannot be the will of the gods. He—” He steps over the bench and grasps my shoulders. “Alwulf is my captain, but Baldur is—was—my god. The son of my Lord God.” His fingers tremble and press into my bare skin. “We’re berserkers, but we’re not mindless the way others say we are. This is too complicated for unthinking obedience.” A laugh shakes out of him.

I grip his hands, grateful for his grief. Here, maybe, is a berserker I could someday fight beside.

He says, “What else does Odin teach us but never to be blind to consequences, Soren?”

Consequences
. Another word for the threads of fate. The reason I’m here, to claim blood price for Baldur, and maybe—maybe to avenge the wrongs Alwulf did to my father.

Slowly I nod, and he tells me, “Alwulf wants to kill you.”

“I want to kill him, too.” In my sword I see the reflection of my tattoo, and I grip the hilt tighter. I look up at Henry, at his same tattoo, and I say, “One of us will get our wish.”

Dressed in only the loose black pants, and with my father’s sword sheathed again on my bare back, I walk across the cold, dark grass to the orchard gate.

As I approach, Astrid pries her hands off the bars and reaches out, pressing her body into the gate so that I can clasp her fingers as soon as possible. They’re like frozen sticks and she winces as I squeeze them. She shivers in her thin dress and slippers. I wish I had a jacket to offer her.

We say nothing for a long moment, then I step forward to wrap her in my arms as best I can with the iron rods of the gate keeping us apart. My Astrid. I whisper to her that Vider is safe, that I’ll get her out, that I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I didn’t protect him the way I promised. She trembles in the cold, pressing into my fever. I stare beyond her into the orchard. The trees are thick and tangled, not laid out in rows but growing haphazardly and wild in their unnatural summer. Thick branches with bright green leaves twine together so that under them it’s blacker than a cave.

“Soren,” she whispers.

I cup the back of her head in my hand, cradling her face against my neck. “Astrid.”

“It isn’t your fault.”

I’m silent.

“We’re here for a hundred reasons. I can feel them piling up on top of me.”

“I know.”

“It was meant to be.”

My arms go rigid around her.

“It has to be fate.” There is a question in her voice, something I’ve never heard before.

Astrid Glyn, with wavering faith.

“But, Soren,” she says, “every time I think of him, a new cut slashes inside. I don’t know how this could ever be right.”

I twist my fingers into the bottom of her curls. “I’ll start by killing Alwulf Robertson.”

Astrid tilts her face up and the moonlight spreads silver into her hair and eyes. I could almost imagine she mirrors the night sky the way Baldur mirrored the sun. That’s who they are to me: my sun and my moon.

She says, “I never wanted you to have to kill.”

“It’s what I am.”

“But not who you’ve wanted to be.”

“It doesn’t matter now. For Baldur I will do this, and for you.”

“Soren.”

I wait. Her eyes dart everywhere. Up at the stars, to the iron gate between us, to my eyes, to my mouth. “Soren, I dreamed last night that it was you I resurrected. You were dead but I needed you so much I brought you back.”

“Oh.” The single syllable is a world of realization. We both
thought the other would die tonight. We both were so wrong, and now there is guilt weighing on top of our sorrow.

She says, “I’m afraid. I can’t lose both of you.”

“You won’t.”

“Their captain is strong and knows his frenzy so much better than you yours.”

I say, “But he does not have you,” and I kiss her through the orchard gate.

It’s a kiss I have longed to take. A kiss that gently tugs at Astrid’s seething power, at the wildness inside both of us. It’s sweet and feels like a confession: I love her. Knowing that, I can temper my own frenzy; I can see all the sides of it. I sense it whirling, the form it takes and the way it clings to my bones.

Astrid whispers against my mouth, “Make it fast.”

I smile, recalling the holmgang in Bassett, Nebrasge, where I spoke those same words to her. May this one go as much in our favor as that.

The berserkers call me with pounding shields to return to the circle of torches. I avoid staring at Baldur’s body, and instead look toward the shadows of the buildings ahead. I know I won’t see Vider; she’ll be too good at hiding for that. But it’s better than looking at the grayness on his cheeks.

When this is over, if I live, I’ll see him. I’ll approach him with news that his blood price, at least, is paid.

Alwulf waits as nearly naked as I, with two berserkers at his shoulders. One is as old as he, the other in his prime. Each
holds a set of circle shields. Hawthorn poles have been erected to mark the quarters. In the torchlight everything is riddled with shadows and orange stripes.

The remaining four berserkers stand at the corners, and two step closer to Henry and me as we reach the edge of the torch circle.

“Who challenges?” calls the last berserker, who remains evenly placed between Alwulf and me.

“I do,” I say. “I am Soren Bearskin, son of Styrr, son of Jul, and brother of Baldur the Beautiful, the god of light.”

There are murmurs at his name, and even Henry is surprised: they expected me to say I was a son of Odin.

The berserker directly across from the first speaker, who resembles him too much to be anything but a brother, says, “And who answers the challenge?”

Alwulf stands forward. The sword in his hand catches firelight and throws it at me. Scars hook down his chest in a pattern of thorns, and his left shoulder is covered in mottled burn marks. “I am Alwulf Goodspear, son of Robert, son of Jerome. All of us sons of Odin, the god of madness.”

Madness
. Only another name for the battle-rage. I take deep breaths, pulling energy from the ground, and imagine it spilling down from the stars overhead. My bare feet are planted. I am the mountain, between the earth and the sky.

As Henry offers me my first shield, he puts his hand in the center of my back, and touches my frenzy. I shudder and lean into his hand as the connection snaps alive between us.

“Use it, Soren Bearskin,” he whispers. “All of us will be with you, and all of us will be with him. So it is when berserkers battle in the ring. It is not only a battle of skill, but of power.”

All our frenzies unite in a lightning web. I feel them individually: Henry, his rage so full of joy; the brothers, who push and pull like the moon and the tide; one who is hollow with fear; one with a center of peace; one and then another whose powers divide themselves again and again as they struggle between me and their warlord. One who grieves. And finally Alwulf, alive with strength and desperation.

Is he afraid of me?

I hold my sword aloft and yell.

All of them join me, in a growing roar, and I look beyond to Astrid, distant and small. She watches through the iron gate, one hand in constant motion as she draws a rune again and again in the air. The same one my dead father drew.

And then the berserkers yell
“Hear!”
and I leap into the holmgang ring.

When I battled Baldur, it was a dance. I held back; I tried to fight him with only skill and muscles.

This is different. I reach in and unlock that iron star.

Power rips through me, but I am a vessel for it, created to channel every bit of it, created to burn and exist.

It moves with me—I move with it—and when Alwulf and
I come together we explode. Our swords clash, ringing through my bones. I swing again and he blocks, both of us roaring, because we cannot hold in the energy.

I focus through it, drawing it with me as I draw my sword. As I draw my arms and legs, as I know the motions of the dance, the rhythm of attack and defend, the jar of swords and the pain of sudden bruises. His blade cuts against my ribs and the heat of blood only gathers more power to me. I knock him back with my shield, and we catch together, chests heaving, blood and sweat in our eyes. He’s tied back his long braids but the iron collar marks his neck.

We fight, and we fight. All around the holmgang ring. My shield cracks in two, but we do not stop for a new one. Alwulf throws his away, and we meet again, swords ringing together like bells.

This dance is hard and pounding, and the weight of an entire berserk band’s frenzy presses at me. My body is clear, though, and my every motion sharp. I’m certain of my rightness, that this battle is mine to be won. He killed my lord. He destroyed my father. He imprisoned Astrid. All these are his crimes, and I am here to cleave them away, to set his blood free into the ground and release him, release myself of the responsibility. That is the blood price.

My frenzy is Odin’s hand, his own madness inhabiting me, guiding my sword. I bare my teeth as I fight, and my vision darkens. I am dizzy and burning and so near to losing my hold on what is happening.

The frenzy pushes at me, and I let go.

It courses through me in a rush again, sudden and fast, and I’m a tunnel for it. My ears go deaf from the roar of a hundred furious screams, and Alwulf falters.