Vider tells the story of the first berserker, for my benefit, I’m sure, though Sam clutches my shoulders and is riveted to each word that falls off her tongue. Her version says that the first warrior was eaten slowly and painfully by the bear the Alfather chose, and the warrior screamed and cried but did not run away even as his flesh and bones were torn apart and his soul destroyed and consumed by the bear.
It sounds terrifying to me, and Sam hides his face in my shirt. But Vider is calm and certain, as if she knows the painful sacrifice was worth it.
When she’s finished, I say, “You should go to Poets’ School.”
She eyes my tattoo again. “I’d rather be a berserker.”
“Why?”
“No one can hurt you,” she says, as if it’s the only answer.
Sam squirms down from my lap and dashes back over to the snakes. “I want my bear ride!” He begins closing up the tanks.
But I keep my gaze focused on Vider. There’s brightness in her green eyes, almost like a fever. If she were a boy, I would wonder if her father had been a berserker and the frenzy huddled under her ribs. But girls are not born to berserking, so it must be something else that causes the anger in her heart to mirror mine. “A berserker can hurt himself.”
Her look is scathing.
“Or hurt others easily,” I add.
She juts out her chin. “That’s better still.”
It’s my turn to level her with my most fearsome scowl, which always cleared the hall at Sanctus Sigurd’s. Vider Lokisdottir doesn’t shrink back or cower, but she does lower her eyes and say, “The price for strength like that is worth it. And better than the deals of some other gods.”
I want to laugh and tell her I never made any deal with Odin. That we are taking Baldur the Beautiful home, and I will ask my god to strip away his so-named gift. “I had no choice in this.” I flick my thumb down my tattoo.
“I know.” She shrugs, and when she lifts her head there’s a teeth-baring smile. “We never do.”
Sam jerks on my arm, throwing all his weight onto me to get my attention. I put my wide hand across his face and remain focused on Vider. Because I suspect that this girl doesn’t need Odin to hand her the strength she thinks she’s missing, I make an offer I’ve never considered before. “I can show you what gives a berserker strength.”
Surprised, her smile falters. “Thank you,” she manages.
I heave Sam onto my back and tell him to not let go of my shoulders. His small hands clutch at my neck and his toes knock against my ribs. But he clings well.
We come upon Baldur stretched shirtless beside Astrid’s circle, hands beneath his head and eyes shut behind his sunglasses. The sun shines off his hair and body as if he’s made of silver. I can see a wicked purple bruise like a splattered plum streaking across his ribs on the left side. Where I slammed him with the butt of my spear. When we approach, he cracks open an eye. “Sun’s warm if you care to join me.”
“You’re not exactly blending in,” I mutter. Sam squirms and I lower him. He scrambles to Baldur and climbs directly onto his stomach.
“Oof,” Baldur gasps, laughing and pulling the boy onto his chest.
“You’re hot!” Sam declares, smacking his hands together.
I grab the back of Sam’s shirt in my fist and lift him off the god. “And he’s boring. You’re better off with us.”
“And what are you all off to do?” Baldur asks.
Vider says, quietly but firmly, “Soren is going to teach me where a berserker gets his strength.”
Baldur raises his eyes to mine, lifting the glasses to see me clearly. Despite the sun behind me, glaring directly into his face, he doesn’t wince or blink. His eyes are hot, and golden-white. “Are you,” he murmurs.
Sam begins kicking his stubby little legs in the air, and I suddenly remember I’m holding him aloft. He grins, and flaps his arms like a bird. “Caw, caw!” he cries.
Sitting up, Baldur takes Sam from me, then sets him on the grass. “Look over there at what Astrid’s doing.” Sam twists his neck and his eyes light up. “I bet she’ll let you help.”
Sam dashes off. I glance around to see Astrid weaving strands of red yarn, looping them around and setting the edges of a web under loose rocks. Sam bends to try to pick up a stone that probably weighs half as much as he does.
“What is she doing?” Vider asks.
“Setting up to seeth. I’m sure she’ll read your future if you like.” To Baldur I say, “Enjoy the sun.” He grins at me and flicks a thumbs-up before resettling his sunglasses and reclining again.
Vider and I walk a bit away through dry, knee-high grass. The air coming off the distant mountains smells of pine and snow. I show her how to ground herself; how to imagine she’s part of the mountains, that she is a mountain. I show her how to breathe so the air scours emotions from deep in your guts.
“This is the secret of the berserkers?” she whispers, eyes closed and face turned up.
“It’s the first secret. Always know what you are, because with knowledge comes control.”
“And breathing teaches me what I am?”
“It calms your emotions, your anger and fear. It draws the world inside your chest to balance out the rage,” I say. “You are the rock, and the wind batters at you, flows around you and within you. But you are the rock. The mountain. You stand.”
“I stand.” She draws in another long breath. Wind ruffles her thin blond hair.
I try to breathe myself calm, too. But people are gathering outside Astrid’s circle, watching her, watching us, and I open my eyes. Astrid slowly stands. Her back is to me, and she strips off her sweater so she’s only in the pleated skirt and a tank top. She unbinds her curls and spreads her hands out. Thin catskin gloves, the mark of the seethkona, cover her hands. The sun caresses the muscles of her back. Suddenly my breathing is not calm. I am not peaceful or anything like a solid mountain.
I am fire.
I long to step close to her, but she would ignite me, and how could I ever control something like that?
She calls out, “I am Astrid Jennasdottir, child of the Feather-Flying Goddess.” Her voice rings high. “I dance the paths of the past, the present, and the future. I see the strands of fate and understand the language of bones. I am here for seething, and will answer all questions as my lady deems fit.”
Vider touches my hand, freeing me from Astrid, and we move closer to where folk gather in a wide circle, calling their friends, holding hands and putting shoulders together to create a wall of people. Baldur, joining us, lifts Sam up onto his shoulders.
“We have honey mead, seethkona,” Jon says, flourishing a clear bottle of swirling yellow alcohol. A charm is tied to the neck with silver wire.
Astrid accepts it. “Thus is the first exchange, given and received. Who will step into my circle?” Her eyes scan the crowd and she turns slowly, mead bottle cradled in her arms.
A teenage girl speaks up, but not to volunteer. “You’re Astrid Glyn, Jenna Glyn’s daughter.”
Astrid nods. Smiles and whispers shoot around the gathering, but before Astrid says anything, the same girl says, “I saw you on galdralag-dot-com. Fighting that dick in Nebrasge.”
“I fought holmgang, yes.”
“I saw your mother once,” says another onlooker, a woman with huge gold earrings that dazzle in the afternoon sun.
A man in heavy eyeliner says, “The Seether of All Dreams would have known how to find Baldur.”
Astrid’s fingers go rigid. A snap of quiet surrounds her, and she manages to say, “I’m sure my mother would have been doing everything in her power to return him to us.”
I glance at Baldur, who’s edged to the back of the crowd, sunglasses still shielding his eyes.
“Why aren’t you seething for him?” “Why are you here?” There’s more than one of them crying these questions out now. I can feel the frenzy tingling in the palms of my hands, and I breathe down into the earth. Astrid can handle this crowd, but
I am ready.
“I am here, to seeth for you,” she calls, spreading her arms out like wings. “To be with you and to pray, to offer you the visions I can see in your dreams. Not just my own. Baldur is a part of all of us! Who will let me look into your dreams for him?”
Someone must help her recapture the focus of the crowd on the magic, and I owe her a fortune-telling. Before I can reconsider, I step into the circle.
She whirls to face me. Her expression is all smooth confidence, but I can just barely see the strain at the corners of her smile.
I stand across from her, the blood-red web pinned between us. “You’ve always promised to read my future, lady.”
My voice seems to relax her, and she gazes at me as though she already knows everything my bones will say. “Welcome my friend Soren, daughter of Rebecca but son of Styrr.” Astrid raises the mead and takes a long pull while her naming of me spins off into the crowd. They know who I am, too, especially if they’ve seen that video of the holmgang. Especially if they remember the day my father died.
Fear and anticipation hang in the air, like an acidic wind. There is Jon Shandrasdottir moving about, offering drums of all sizes. Some that fit in the palm of one’s hand, some wide as tambourines, and some only half spheres covered over with painted skin, which cup perfectly in a person’s lap. Vider accepts a bone-rattle.
I hear words fall out of the humming conversation: “berserker” and “danger” and “Styrr-Styrr-Styrr.” We certainly have pulled their attention off Baldur completely.
Astrid holds the mead out to me in one hand. I accept, and drink the cool, sweet alcohol. We sit, and the circle of observers slowly follows suit. Then Astrid gathers the bones from a deep pocket in her seething kit and cages them in her fingers. Her runes are pieces of stone and wood, finger bones, and a rainbow shell. All carved by her own hand with the language of wisdom.
Standing, she shakes the rune bones. Eyes down, she begins to walk around the web counterclockwise. The drumming begins in rhythm with her footsteps. Her lips move rapidly. I step back so I’m not in her path. Around she goes, and after a full revolution she returns to me. Pausing, she lifts the runes to my mouth. “Breathe, Soren,” she murmurs, eyes on my lips.
My throat catches and I cannot breathe as she instructs. I feel her magic, like a frenetic dance, shaking toward me.
The drums pound with my heart and Astrid laughs a breathy laugh. “Soren.” She shakes the bones in her hands, and it also shakes loose my breath.
I sigh over her fingers, over the bones.
Astrid continues on with the whisper of a smile, until she’s walked around the circle three times. Then she walks faster, three more times. The drumbeats speed with her. Little Sam claps his hands, and I’m surprised that he’s perfectly in rhythm, but then, Loki’s children love drums. It seems as though my breath and heart match the fast pulse, too, and I feel the fever of my frenzy rise. My face flushes, and sweat breaks out along my spine. Yet my rage does not flare; it only simmers, bubbling in time to the cadence of Astrid’s dance.
She turns in place and continues to circle, like the earth around the sun, orbiting and rotating at once. I don’t know how she doesn’t fall, but her feet are sure. Her curls bounce over her bare shoulders and her eyes flicker beneath closed lids. Her lips keep moving, faster and faster as she whirls, and her cheeks are pink.
I’ve lost count of her spinning, of her revolutions, when suddenly she stops. The drums stop, too, and Astrid casts the bones away from her, tossing them onto the scarlet web.
They slap the dusty ground, tumbling into clumps and spreading patterns.
Astrid crouches, hands out over the web, fingers splayed. She peers down, head swaying as if she’s finally dizzy. Everyone is silent. I hear only a strain of distant tin whistle and stifled bazaar conversation, the wind in the field and everyone’s breathing.
“There,” Astrid points at one bone. “Torch! The burning ulcer. That is you.”
I kneel across from her. I feel alight, feverish, as though something inside is truly burning.
“It kills you, as it kills all children.” Her face lifts to mine, but Astrid is not in her own eyes. They are dull and reflective circles. “But it does not kill men.” She nods decisively. “It does not kill men. This!” Her finger moves to point at a rune on the opposite edge of the web. “Ash tree. The sacrificial tree. You do not hang upon it; it hangs upon you.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I say.
“I do.” She nods again and waves her hand over the runes. “It means that you …” The lilt of her voice shifts, and it is more the Astrid I know. “You …” Her pause is long now, as she stares at one single rune: the symbol means journey, and is carved onto a curved yellow tooth. A dark frown ripples across her face as she contemplates it. One finger hovers in the air a mere centimeter above.
“Astrid?” I keep my voice gentle, unsure how far into seething she remains.
She blinks and shivers as though shaking off the dread. Her smile appears, small but true. “You’re on a journey,” she says, tapping the rune.
I laugh, just once. Out of disbelief. Even I know that much about the rune. But Astrid looks me in the eye and tilts her head to the left. All the people around us—I don’t think she wants to say anything about this rune in front of them.
“A journey that will lead you to make a choice.” It’s a simple prophecy she offers me, and I wonder if just because it isn’t the complete meaning of what she sees in the bones, it can’t also be true. “Between two parts of yourself.” Astrid touches my chest, just over my heart, and skims her fingers up to the strap holding Father’s sword to my shoulders. I take her fingers in mine, drawing them away from the sword.
“My turn!” cries Sam. Astrid and I both jump. We were quiet too long, kneeling together in the web, its scarlet strings tangled with our feet and spreading out from us like a pool of bloody water.
The little boy’s dash across the circle breaks the spell settled on the crowd, too, and many of them laugh or at least smile. Some hold up money, others clap relieved hands on their neighbors’ shoulders. They eye me warily, but as I back away, a few nod. Most can’t take their attention off the seether.
I join Baldur as Astrid gathers the mood of the crowd into her hands again, sweeping the people in the direction she wishes with Sam’s enthusiastic help. Her smile and the graceful motions of her fingers as she plucks bones from red thread convince them she is a girl on the edge of wisdom again. She uses little tricks to flip her bones from hand to hand, and closes her eyes as she chooses her next seeker by spelling out his name in the air with a long bone of polished yew. A man in jeans and a Stetson steps forward, and the drums begin again.
For nearly two hours Astrid spins and dances, throwing her bones and calling out answers to questions of love and death. She translates messages from the grave, and offers riddles to all who ask. Sweat glistens on her forehead and upper lip. It trickles down between her shoulder blades, and when the mountain wind blows, elf-kisses raise the hair on her arms. She shivers.
The bottle of mead is passed around to all the seekers who ask a question, and when it’s empty, coins and notes are dropped or stuffed inside. We’ll have to break the glass to get them out.
The crowd belongs to her. She connects them with her words and dance as if literally tying them together with red thread. They are a single creature, birthing out seekers one at a time, then sucking them back in. They move in perfect rhythm, feet stomping the heartbeat of the seeth.
I sit on the ground several feet back, where I can see Astrid but not be in the way. This is her element, her power.
Although at first Vider holds close and watches the seething with livid attention, she eventually creeps to me and settles near. On her other side, Baldur sits with his knees curled up and arms around them like a little boy. The sun shines on him and I can feel the warmth from where I sit. The energy of the seething seeps through the air, electric as a lightning storm. W
ith Baldur the Beautiful so near, Astrid dancing her circle, and even Vider who does not fear the berserking, I am suddenly relaxed as I haven’t been in ages. I belong.
It makes me careless. “Baldur,” I say quietly, to point out the red-tailed hawk that perches on top of the nearest pole holding up the green snake flag.
He glances at me, loose and easy, but Vider freezes and her teeth snap together. “Baldur?”
And suddenly it’s everywhere.
“Baldur.” “Baldur the Beautiful.”
The whisper weaves through the crowd and faces turn toward us. The moment people see him, thinking his name, they know. With the suspicion rooted, there is no other thing he could be.
I’m on my feet, dragging him up. “Astrid,” I say as calmly as I can. She whirls around, confusion painted across her face as the attention of the crowd diverts to us.
Baldur puts his hands out. “Kind folk—” he says, trying to deter them, hand them back to Astrid.
“Are you Baldur, the missing god?” calls a woman with turquoise hanging from her ears and neck.
“Yes, are you?” Someone else echoes her cry. “Baldur!”
Jon pushes through a family with heavy hemp bags in their hands. “You said your name was Paul.” His voice is quiet, like he wants to believe we did not lie. His green jewels flicker with their own life.
Others are faster to condemn us. “He said his name was Paul! It’s Pol Darrathr!” The crowd presses forward in a wave.
Baldur blanches; he takes his sunglasses off. “I call on your honor, Lokiskin: hold back.”
I glimpse Astrid ducking low to gather her seething bones, barely visible through all the brilliant colors of the caravan. Her hands flutter fast as bumblebees as she packs her things.
My spear is dug into the earth four meters back, but Father’s sword remains strapped over my shoulder. I’m loath to draw it, but plant my feet. I am the mountain. I drag a huge breath. “Stop!”
The crowd falters, but then hands flail and voices rise again. No one yet breaks apart to approach him alone. Prayers sing out, and curses, too, hope and anger. Their collective voice turns the wind into heat. They’re between us and the Spark. If we run, they’ll overtake us. Baldur they’ll hold safe, but Astrid—