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.
It isn’t a time to be informal. His voice and my name hum along my spine, setting the frenzy to spin. “My lord Baldur.”
His gaze does not falter. “What is the boon you would ask of my father?”
“That he strip the berserking power out of my chest,” I say quietly.
Baldur nods, and the heat of his gaze cools. “Thank you for telling me.”
He already guessed. He guessed because he’s known men for hundreds of years, and the knowledge of our motivations resides in his heart, if not in his memory.
My god of light continues: “When you’re no longer one of Odin’s crazy warriors, Soren, will you serve me instead?”
A rock drops into my stomach. “As a priest? One of your sun priests?”
Baldur laughs. “The sunburst tattoo wouldn’t work with your spear.”
I rub the tattoo with my thumb. Even if Odin can still remove the frenzy, I’ll always have this. “What would you have of me, then—how would I serve?”
“As my friend.”
Picturing Baldur as I’m used to seeing him—as a god with sparkling women and dashing men at his side, surfing in Baja California or dining at fancy clubs in Chicagland, always with a happy grin, often with sword in hand and occasionally covered in goblin gore—I find it impossible to think he wants for friends. But instead of wondering aloud or disagreeing, I calmly say, “Friends don’t serve. They just are.”
His smile turns sly. “You serve Astrid.”
I open my mouth to deny it, but can’t. Even now, with my father’s prophecy hanging between us, I won’t leave her side. When I lower my head in surrender, Baldur laughs again. “So, Bearskin, son of Styrr, that is what I want from you.”
“You won’t have to ask,” I promise, setting my loose fist against his knee. Baldur spreads his hand over my fist, but not before I see something uncertain, something slick and worried, pass through his storming eyes. “Baldur? What is it? What is it you’re afraid of? That we won’t get you to the orchard? That we’ll fail?”
“No,” he says firmly, gripping my hand. “I never doubt that.” Baldur leans forward and I see a curl of lightning in his left eye. “Nothing could stop you, Soren.”
I place my remaining hand over his, so that our hands are stacked in a solid pile, and try to ignore fear that thickens in my blood at his certainty. The commit will break. She is not long for this world. He doesn’t know what our success may cost us.
“Soren, I’m afraid of …” He’s whispering, and I hear the rush of a semitrailer barreling past, and then, beyond it, a far rumble of thunder. I wait, proud of him that he does not shut his eyes, that he holds close and confesses. “I am afraid that I will eat this apple and everything will change.”
“It won’t matter.” I tighten my fingers so they don’t shake while I reassure a god with what may very well be a lie. “I’ll still be your friend, and so will Astrid and Vider.”
I see the girls, as though summoned, exit through the glass doors carrying greasy bags and a twelve-pack of honey soda. Baldur sees them as well, and pushes up to his feet. He casts one look over his shoulder at me. “It’s possible, when my immortality and memories return me to my better self, that you won’t want to.”
I take over driving, because I’m in the mood to maneuver through a storm.
My instinct is to tell Astrid what Baldur said. To share the burden of it with her. He and Vider are playing a license plate game in the backseat, though Vider is winning by several letters because Baldur obviously doesn’t enjoy looking outside. His eyes are pale gray. The underside of the cloud sheet rolls in bulbous waves, and the wind picks up from the northeast, batting at the side of the Spark.
As I drive under the grave clouds, I can’t shake Baldur’s fear. Yet the more I think on it, the more certain I am that we know his essential self. All that’s been torn away are the extraneous things. When the layers of Baldur the Beautiful are returned, we’ll still recognize him as ours.
Astrid turns on the radio, and Ardo Vassing is speaking, filling the space with his deep, scratchy voice. She says, “I met him once,” and twists the volume louder. He’s got an accent from the Gulf, thick and soothing. He leads a meditation before his wife starts a choir singing.
Exactly then the rain begins, splashing against the windshield all at once, blinding me. Astrid reaches across to turn on the spindly old wipers.
For half an hour, I drive through the spill. Then with a hard crack the world is lit with eerie light. Thunder and lightning so close together they must be on top of us.
“This is horrible,” mutters Baldur. I glance in the rearview, and he’s paler than usual. His eyes are heavy and black.
I have to watch the road, especially as the wind strengthens again and the car in front of me turns on its flashers. We’re crawling, but steady. Rain blurs everything and the wipers can’t keep up. More thunder, and lightning nearly blinds me.
Vider says, “Maybe we should pull over.”
“On the shoulder, we’d be a hazard to everybody. Better to keep in the slow line,” I answer.
Between cracks of thunder, the rain on the metal roof is loud. Astrid flips off the radio, which I didn’t even notice was still on, and then she reaches across the gears to grip my knee. My whole body shivers, and I squeeze the wheel.
I won’t lose her. I can’t. Fate has always been a thing for me to fight. This tattoo on my cheek is a mark of possibility, and everything I’ve done has been to keep it from coming true. How can I fight any less hard for Astrid’s life?
The storm can rage around us, but I refuse to stop driving.
As the first break in the clouds beckons ahead and the rain fades to gentle but constant, Astrid tells us the story of how Thor Thunderer lost his hammer and Loki Serpent-Mother helped him get it back. Though we’ve all known the story since we were babies, as it’s a very popular one with kindergarten teachers and picture book writers, to Baldur it’s new again. By the time she comes to the part where Loki convinces Thor to dress up like the goddess Freya and go pretend to marry the giant Thrym, the last of the storm has vanished from Baldur’s eyes. Astrid’s impression of the stalwart god simpering for Thrym and attempting to behave as a lovesick wife has Vider in stitches, and even I find a smile when Astrid puts on a crackling voice for Loki to tease his thundering friend.
This is worth sacrifice, too, I realize. Not only Astrid and Baldur, but Vider as well and the easy laughter among the four of us.
I want to point it out to Baldur, that this is who he is, no matter how memories may add layers and history onto him. This, right here, laughing with three friends, this is the meaning of the god of light.
Through the last drops of rain, I drive into the Washington kingstate.
Astrid takes over the wheel once we’re through Lilac, the last big city before the Cascades. We have about three hours to go, and the land around us shows no sign of mountains. It’s so flat and cut-down for farming that the sky overwhelms the horizon, stretching high overhead and all around. There’s more sky than land, and I have a disori
enting sensation that the car is upside-down and any moment real gravity will kick back in and we’ll fall up off the road and into the deep sky.
Baldur says, only half joking, that he’d like to spend the remainder of the drive strapped to the roof where he can properly soak up the sun.
As we approach the mountains, whatever brief release of tension the end of the storm gave us begins to recede. We sit in silence but for the roar of wind from the open windows. Baldur has his arm dangling out into the sun, but his fingers are still.
Evergreen trees sprout up here and there, only to vanish again, giving us back to the vast, flat spread of grassland. There are only three colors: black highway, golden land, and blue sky.
We cut south and my ears begin to pop. It’s just after noon, and when we fill up the gas tank at the start of the foothills, the attendant confirms we’re less than an hour out from Leavenworth.
Less than an hour away from the end.
At first the mountains just seem like piles of dirt, so worn with erosion, and so lacking in trees. There’s nothing but rock and round, tangled bushes. The highway follows a river for a while, and Baldur trades seats with Vider so he’s on that side, where he can watch the sun reflect against the water.
Slowly the mountains grow, and we see signs for Leavenworth. As we pass through a town so small it has no fast food, Astrid sucks in a sudden, hissing breath. She points ahead to a bright red sign: APPLES AND CIDER, BY THE BUCKET OR JUG.
It’s only the first.
Between us and Leavenworth are three dozen orchards. Apparently, apples are one of Washington’s most prized resources.
The frenzy churns in my chest like an ulcer.
Astrid’s knuckles are white on the wheel.
There are apples and orchards everywhere, and we have no idea how to find the one we’re looking for in all the hundreds of valleys and gorges the foothills create.
After a few moments of anxious conversation, we decide to drive to the middle of Leavenworth, find a quiet place, and Astrid will cast her bones.