Glory leads me to the edge of the forest, where a highway cuts through the abruptly flat grassland toward the northwest. A motorcycle tilts on the steep shoulder, looking like it will topple over at any moment. Starlight shines darkly off its body. She lets go of me and walks straight for it, lifts it in one hand, and straddles it. Her skirt rides up her thighs and she pats the seat just behind her. “Hop on.”
I do, scooting up against her. My boots fit on thin metal bars protruding from either side of the engine. Glory wiggles her butt between my thighs and I close my eyes tight. My hands are fists against my jeans, and Glory laughs as she takes them and puts them on her hips. “Don’t be a baby, Soren.”
“You aren’t making it easy.” It sounds like I’m strangling.
“I don’t like things easy.” To highlight her statement, she revs her engine. “Don’t fall off.”
The motorcycle jerks forward, leaping onto the highway. I clutch at Glory as her peal of laughter is snatched away by the wind. Cold air bites at my face and I tuck closer, my nose in her hair. The smell of bubble gum and old blood washes over me. With my eyes shut and my body tight to hers, it’s almost like flying. The roar of wind, the feel of it pricking through my torn T-shirt, ripping at my hair, as if it’s trying to pry me away from her, off the bike and back into the wild frenzy.
We stop in a town large enough for a handful of fast-food joints. Glory drags me inside the Jarl Burger and orders three meals for me and a cherry soda for herself. I try to protest, especially when the clerk gives my tattoo a dirty look. I tell Glory I’m more nauseated than hungry. She brushes me away, pays, and sits me down on a metal stool anchored to the floor.
We’re alone in the fluorescent-lit dining hall. Behind Glory’s head is a blurry pastel watercolor by some Frankish painter. In the stark lighting, her green eye shadow looks like giant bruises. With my darker skin and dirty orange shirt, I must stand out against the room’s muted colors like a gratuitous Hallowblot decoration.
The first potato wedge I taste transforms my nausea into starvation, and before I know it, I’m halfway through the second burger. Glory watches me with a cocky smile, leaning back against the wall. I think of being in the diner in Nebrasge with Astrid, and wish it were her instead of Glory across from me. Except then she would know I’d frenzied.
My gaze slides to the big black windows. The edge of the town is alive and brightly lit with gas stops, more fast-food places, and a long windowless warehouse I suspect is a strip club. How far did Astrid and Baldur make it? Did they pass through here? I draw a breath as if I’ll be able to taste them in the air.
It’s so dark now, Astrid must be awake alone. Baldur would have passed out, no matter where they were. I imagine her sitting beside him, arms around her knees, cold and fighting sleep.
“You have quite the brooding expression,” Glory says.
To avoid answering, I take another bite of the burger. A dollop of ketchup smacks down against the crinkled paper on the table.
“Thinking about your girlfriend?”
“She’s not—”
Glory grins. “Right.”
I stare at her as I chew. Nothing about her suggests immortality or great wisdom or explosive violence. None of the things I associate with Fenris Wolf. She’s a teenager, overdressed—or dressed for that strip club—and impatient. Her painted fingernails tap against the side of her cardboard cup.
But she doesn’t look away. Her eyes are dark green, almost black in this light, and something in them makes me uncomfortable. I feel the pinch of my power again, sharp in my chest, as she stares back. She never blinks. As if she doesn’t have to.
I swallow and put the last hunk of my burger down. “You, ah, said you’ve known other berserkers.”
Her eyebrow cocks up as if to remind me I’m being an idiot.
“Do you know if we always pass out the first time?”
Glory pinches her lips together, and I see laughter in the way her eyes narrow.
Grinding my teeth, I clarify, “The first time we go berserk.”
“No.”
The answer is so quick and so calm, I grip the table. “Are you sure?”
“I’ve heard of some of you entering such a deep fugue state you black out, but usually a berserker doesn’t go through it alone. Usually you have a father or uncle or commit-brother, and usually the frenzy is brought forth purposefully, in circumstances as controlled as possible.”
I know these things. I’ve read all the literature. Seen the made-for-TV movies. It wasn’t something Dad ever talked about, and when he was alive, I never thought to ask. It hadn’t mattered. I knew I’d grow up to be a berserker, and when the time came he’d take me through it. He’d be there.
“You look disappointed,” Glory says. She doesn’t sound sympathetic.
“I thought maybe you might know something to help me.”
“Why haven’t you sought out a commit? There are several well-known berserk bands that would take you in, despite your father’s rather spectacular ending.”
“I don’t want to be a berserker.”
“Much choice you have.” Her upper lip wrinkles into half a snarl.
“You fight your destiny, don’t you? You don’t want to swallow the sun.” I’m desperate for her to say it’s true. That the bindings on her throat and wrists aren’t the only things keeping the world from ending. There are no such bindings for me.
“Ha.” Glory leans in, her mouth open in a wide smile so I can see all her teeth and her tongue. “What do you know about these bindings and how they stopped me from eating the sun, Soren Bearskin?”
“I know …” I take a breath and gather my thoughts. “I know you were brought to Bright Home as a wolf-child, and that you kept growing and growing, so the gods feared you would grow large enough to swallow the sun whole. They sought to bind you with chains, but you broke free. They commissioned ropes of goblin magic and you agreed to let them put the ropes around you only if they proved they meant you no harm. So, to prove it, Tyr the Just put his hand in your mouth. As they tied you up, you bit off his hand.”
Her smile widens impossibly, until I think my eyes have unfocused. The strangeness of it on her human face turns my stomach. When she speaks, her voice reverberates in my skull with the edge of a growl. “This is what it was really like, Bearskin: There was my father, Loki, the boy-god everyone loved and hated in equal measure. He carried me over the Rainbow Bridge to Asgard and put me into the gods’ bower. They raised me on the mountain with kindness, though most feared the sharp fangs appearing where my baby teeth had been. Only Tyr brought me meat instead of fruit, and when I was my wolf-self, starving and running wild, only he brought me flowers instead of whips. He sang me songs to help me learn control, and taught me the language of peace.
“It was my own fault they remembered the prophecy that I would swallow the sun: I ate a feast’s worth of sacrificial horses and pigs. I did it because they were meant for Freyr, who had kicked me and called me Loki’s bitch. But all the gods saw then was my never-ending hunger. I was brought to the Shining Hall, where Odin and his brothers sat waiting. The gods of Asgard encircled me, made me gag on the sour and sweet and bitter smell of apples. ‘We shall subdue her,’ Odin said. ‘With impossible things to keep the impossible at bay.’
“ ‘Wait,’ Tyr said. He stood before me, sword at his hip. He is one of the elder gods, and if he has not the sharp wit of Odin, the loudness of Thor, or the richness of Freyr, it isn’t because he is not strong. It isn’t because he is not beautiful. He said, ‘This wolf-girl is one of us. A child of Asgard. Shall we treat her so poorly?’
“I held my head high for him, the hunger gnawing inside my chest for bones to crunch between my teeth, or for one of his songs. I growled my starvation.
“ ‘Show us, brother,’ Odin said. ‘Show us that she can control herself. That she can resist the sun-sized need.’
“I thought, No! I cannot do it! But Tyr walked to me. I backed away, my body ripping and cracking. He
was not safe from me! The transformation to wolf broke my bones and reshaped my teeth. It changed my tongue until I could not speak. But he was calm. He did not shake. My back bowed and he put out a hand. ‘She will not attack,’ he said to them. ‘My word shall bind her.’ And to me he lowered his voice: ‘My flesh shall sate your hunger.’
“I opened my mouth to howl and he slipped his fingers past my teeth, sliding them along my tongue. I held my jaw open, my entire body trembling, and breathed in the apple-smell of him. I sucked it down my throat and into the hollow of my stomach. Until it was all I knew, all I wanted and needed in the universe.
“I bit down. The gods cried out in fury and horror as I drank Tyr’s blood and crunched the delicate bones of his hand. He himself stumbled back, lips white, bleeding wrist spilling apple-sweet blood onto the floor of the Shining Hall. I swallowed his hand, Soren Bearskin.”
Glory Lokisdottir snatches my hands where they grip the table. I can feel her hunger, can see the want in her eyes. Her teeth grow sharp—sharp enough to eat me. And she wants to. She lets me see it, lets me feel the churning hunger that is so like rage. It gasps and begs in her stomach, the way my frenzy cuts and spirals in my chest.
And then she closes her eyes, releases me, and sits back.
The Jarl Burger dining hall is silent. I hear sizzling meat, smell layers of grease and tomato ketchup. Fenris Wolf is a teenage girl, sitting across from me with her hands folded loosely on the table, her expression slack, with glitter decorating her eyelids and falling down her cheeks like dry tears.
When she opens her eyes again, I am struck by how weary she looks. This light finds the hollows under her cheekbones and makes the skin over her clavicle appear more delicate than spiderweb.
“Did you see, Soren?” she asks.
I nod. Her hunger is like my frenzy.
She says, touching her neck, “It isn’t the binding that stops me from starving. These”—she turns over her wrists and the scars there shimmer like the rainbow in spilled oil—“these only keep me from becoming a giant wolf-monster.”
“You control it,” I say.
Her smile is back, but only half as bright. “I have help. I need help.”
“From whom?”
“Tyr the Just. Weren’t you listening? He gave me something to fill the void. He offered me something more potent and delicious than the sun. Himself.”
“The memory of his blood keeps your hunger at bay?”
Now she grins again. “Oh no. I need reminders.” Glory licks her teeth. “When I am too hungry, when I am too desperate to live so bound, when I would like to rend and tear and eat my fill of the world, I find him.” She slides off her stool and stands beside me, hands on her hips, spike-heel boots tapping against the tiled floor. “I find him, and I kiss him.” Glory presses close, her hand squeezing my thigh. “And those kisses are the only things keeping the sun in the sky.”
I spend the rest of the ride with my cheek against the back of Glory’s hair, my eyes wide open to watch the black lines of Cheyenne at night.
It’s better I can’t talk to Glory while we ride. I also can’t tell how much time passes, and it’s difficult to believe I’m huddled up against Fenris Wolf. That she seems to have decided helping us is in her best interest.
Finally, Glory slows her motorcycle in the middle of the highway. There aren’t any cars, and I look out in every direction to see nothing but blackness and stars. The sky gapes overhead; the grassland appears at first to be a solid flat surface of sagebrush and sand. But as my eyes adjust to the stillness and shadows, I see the land rolls very gently, in wide plateaus and valleys. There could be houses or whole towns tucked away.
Glory says, “Hold on,” and just as I do, she turns the bike in a quick U and drives slowly back the way we’ve come. Her head tilts up. She’s smelling the wind.
All I smell is grass, exhaust, and bubble gum. But Glory finds an invisible turnoff, only a dirt road next to a green mile-marker sign. She kicks off again, but keeps our speed low. The engine putters and we rile up the dust. I want to bury my face in her hair so it doesn’t get in my eyes, but I keep my gaze ahead. There in the distance is a small orange flicker of light.
A minute later she stops. She puts a foot down and says, “Get off. This is it.”
I don’t react. In the starlight I can only barely see her impatient expression. “That’s where they are? That light?”
“It’s a barn, I believe. And yes. I smell pine smoke and ash. Gasoline and old horseshit.” She sniffs long, probably for my benefit. “Also Baldur. He’s there. With two other girls. One with cotton candy shampoo and the other smelling of snakes.” Glory grins. “A cousin of mine.”
“Vider,” I say, glancing off at the distant fire. Part of me is relieved she went with Astrid and Baldur, part of me unsure what I’ll say to her.
“Mmm. Well, be nice to her, or I’ll snap your fingers off one by one.”
I remain on the bike, hands loose on my thighs.
Glory twists all the way around. “Off you go!”
“You aren’t coming?”
Her smile is small and flirtatious. “I have to get my ass down to New Spain and pretend to smell Baldur there. Get them off your tail after today’s fiasco.”
I grimace.
“Yeah, it’s all over the news, big boy. Baldur the Beautiful in the Cheyenne kingstate. Burn some pig fat in thanks that nobody recognized you.”
Slowly I swing my leg off the motorcycle. I stand, swaying slightly as I adjust to being on solid ground. It isn’t as though I’ve been sailing the ocean, but the day was so rough, the food not enough to refuel my losses. I wish I had my spear to use for balance, but it’s long gone. At least it was only a practice weapon from Sanctus Sigurd’s. “Thank you,” I say to Glory.
She tilts her head and eyes me. “If you get Baldur safely to the orchard, you’ll owe me nothing.”
I put my fists against my heart. “I have sworn to Baldur, Lady Fenris, under the sun and to the edges of the world. Everything I do will be to serve him.”
The corners of her mouth turn up mischievously. “A berserker sworn to the sun god? What fantastic gossip. Perhaps it will cheer my father.”
Bowing, I give her my permission to tell Loki, though I cannot imagine she would care if I didn’t. The idea of the god of fire and lies knowing my intimate business is so distant and far outside my purview that it rolls off my shoulders like rain.
Glory walks her bike around and makes to remount.
“Glory,” I say, the false name falling out of me more naturally than her title.
She glances over her shoulder. In the darkness, she’s only a shadow with green glitter at her eyes. “Soren.”
“Tell me why they need me. Why me? Why can’t they find the orchard alone?”
“Because you know where it is.”
“But I don’t!”
Glory shrugs. “Then you’re all doomed.”
I call out again, but she ignores me and climbs onto her bike. She leans over it, back arched provocatively and elbows out. The engine rumbles and she growls, too, as if in conversation with it. Then she’s gone in an instant, leaving only a wake of dust and the smell of exhaust.
TWELVE
DAD’S SWORD CHAFES my shoulder as I walk toward the firelight. I can’t wait to remove the sheath, to rub out my sore muscles and change into a shirt that isn’t caked with sweat and dirt. My boots are the only things that aren’t the worse for wear.
My pace picks up as I near the barn, eyes on that pinprick of light. I am so near to her. To Astrid. After being afraid I wouldn’t see her again for weeks or months, if ever, knowing now how close I am makes me ignore the aches woven through my body.
Could wanting Astrid be enough to hold my frenzy in check? After today the madness has become my burden, my responsibility. A curse that I must tame again and again, every day.
Surely it can’t be controlled the way Fenris Wolf keeps her hunger in check, with a need stron
ger than starvation.
With love.
I pause and close my eyes to trade the world’s darkness for my own.
It’s a thrilling possibility, but I don’t know if I can embrace it. No matter how much of a relief it might be to think I only have to find something I need more than the rage, if it’s true, and love can hold back the rage, doesn’t that mean my father didn’t love us enough?
Either Glory’s solution doesn’t work for berserkers, or Dad’s need for us wasn’t strong.
The barn is closer than I thought. It looms on the grassland, heaving to one side where the roof collapsed. Several of the windows are unbroken, and though dusty, the glass gleams dully back at the sky. The tiny fire is burned down to embers but still glowing like a dragon’s eye, casting light at the Spark. There’s a ripple from a nearby creek stirring the silence.
I approach quietly, but nobody curls inside the Spark, and there’s no sign of any of the three near the fire. The barn doors hang intact, and the one I pull slowly outward hardly creaks at all. Inside is black, with thin shafts of starlight like ghosts in the rafters. Waiting for my eyes to adjust, I hear the flutter of wings overhead. The entire place smells of hay and must, and entering is like pushing into a deep, black sea.
Something shifts dryly to my left, where a mound of old hay rises gray and dark. I see their sleeping forms, and walk carefully closer as relief warms my skin. Vider has climbed to the top of the pile and splayed herself on her back with her face tilted up toward the windows. Her white-blond hair catches the starlight. Lower, where hay spills down across the dirt floor, are Baldur and Astrid beside each other. Her back is against his shoulder, and she curls tightly in upon herself. She must be cold. It’s chilly even with the walls of the barn cutting the wind, and Baldur doesn’t give off heat the way I do. It should be me there with her.
For a moment I bend down, as if to take my place at Astrid’s side.
But my flushed skin reminds me the fever is alive. I could warm her nightmares, but at what price? The memory of the iron star tearing at my ribs from the inside holds me in place. I’m a berserker. A danger to all around me.