The Lost Sun

ONE
My mom USED to say that in the United States of Asgard, you can feel the moments when the threads of destiny knot together, to push you or pull you or crush you. But only if you're paying attention.
It was a game we played during long afternoons in the van, distracting ourselves from Dad's empty seat. Mom would point out a sign as we drove past--WELCOME TO COLORADA, THE CENTENNIAL KINGSTATE, bright green against a gray backdrop of mountains--and she'd ask, "Here, Soren? Do you feel the threads tightening around you?" I would put my fingers to my chest where Dad used to say the berserking fever stirred. "No," I'd say, "nothing yet."
And Mom always replied, "Good."
We both dreaded the day Dad's curse would flicker to life in me.
LEAVING WESTPORT CITY--COME AGAIN! "I hope it wasn't back there, my little man!" "No, Mom, I doubt it." CANTUCKEE: HOME OF BLUEGRASS. "Soren, do you hear the clacking loom of fate?" "I couldn't hear anything over the banjos."
But I have felt it, four times now.
When I was eight years old, standing in a neon-lit shopping mall, and my ears began to ring. My breath thinned out and I ran.
Again five years later, when Mom stopped the van for gas and we happened to be across the road from a militia station. The sun was just barely too bright, cutting across my cheek. I knew what I was supposed to do.
Six months ago, I was in the dining hall about to take a long drink of honey soda when the air around me turned cold. I had time to get to my bedroom before this jagged hot fever began to burn.
And today.
It's Tyrsday afternoon, and so I'm in the library reading the thickest section of the Lays of Thomas Jefferson for my poetry and legends class, trying to ignore my excited classmates as they whisper back and forth about the famous new student arriving any moment now at Sanctus Sigurd's.
Perrie Swanson and her roommate huddle over a copy of the winter issue of Teen Seer, which isn't the sort of magazine I normally pay attention to. The headlines tend toward fashion and boy hunting: "Top Ten Ways to Make Runes Sexy" and "Dating and Prophecy: Things He Doesn't Want to Hear."
I definitely don't want to hear. But the cover features a girl my age against a shocking orange background, her eyes sad. Curls like licorice twists surround her face, and there's a necklace of large black pearls at her throat. Her hands are up, gripping ropes as if she's been caught on a swing.
The headline reads: "Astrid Glyn--Seventeen and Ready to Change Your World."
I stare back at her, as if she can see out from the glossy cover. I hear my mom's voice echoing against the metal roof of that old Veedub, Is this the sound a knot in fate makes, little man?
A commotion at the library window has Perrie on her feet, and she races over with her roommate stepping at her heels. I slowly stand, waiting until I'll be the last to arrive. Over the bobbing heads, I look through the panes of glass toward the front gate of the school as a silver town car pulls through, its windows tinted so dark the sunlight vanishes against them. The girl in front of me holds up her cell phone to take a picture, and on the ground outside, students pause on their way between classes to stare.
It isn't that Astrid has done anything remarkable on her own, but we all know of her mother. Astrid grew up traveling the country, like me, but she wasn't living in trailers and the backs of old vans. Astrid is the daughter of the most famous seethkona in a generation--a prophetess who read the fate of the president himself, and had private rooms in the White Hall in Philadelphia. But Jenna Glyn vanished one night about five years ago from the South Lakota plains, setting off a days-long search that eventually recovered her body. Astrid was on TV at the time, small and sunken and alone, and I'd wanted to send her a letter because I knew what it felt like when your parent died in front of the world.
I turn away from the library window and go back to the Lays. It will not be me who makes her feel like a specimen on her first day at a new school, no matter how my blood is rushing in my ears.
But the next afternoon she walks into our history classroom and stops beside me. She looks less glossy in real life, with messier hair. But the black pearls are the same. I stop breathing as her eyes level on the spear tattoo cutting down my left cheek. She might stare forever, and I might let her, if not for her roommate Taffy, who tugs Astrid into a desk.
All through Mr. Heaney's lecture I feel her watching me, feel the fever churning in my chest. It's good I've done my own reading on the Montreal Troll Wars so I don't have to worry about missing anything vital for the test.
When class ends I wait, as I usually do, for all the other students to file out so I can slip through the narrow aisle by myself. But Astrid remains, pushing Taffy on with a silent wave.
Even Mr. Heaney leaves us alone. He pulls a black cigarette from his pocket and marches outside to indulge in that particularly Freyan habit.
I slowly stand. Astrid's eyes are washed brown, the color of very old paper. She reaches toward me, her finger aiming for my tattoo. I don't move. If she touches me, I'll let her. I even want her to--a thought that makes me hot all over and tell myself it's only the berserking fever, not hormones or wanting.
But she doesn't. Astrid only holds her arm out and turns her eyes to mine. "I dreamed of you," she says in a voice as distant as clouds. Then she spins and is gone from the classroom.
The words sink down through my skin and embed themselves in my bones.

It's the end of my Thorsday morning run, and I'm coming into the courtyard in the center of campus, where a statue of Sanctus Sigurd himself rises out of a fountain. My eyes are on Sigurd's spear, which he lifts in a stone hand to defeat his dragon. Directly behind him the sun rises, split in two by the shaft of the weapon. I'm already slowing on the cobbles when I realize Astrid is there.
She sits on the marble rim, trailing her fingers over the thin layer of ice.
"Soren," she says without looking up.
"Astrid." I pause a few steps away. My breath hangs white in the air before me.
"Everyone here is afraid of you."
My stomach tightens, and I'm glad she doesn't follow the seethers' tendency of being long-winded. "Yes."
"Because of your father."
There's no reason not to be honest. I know who her mother was; of course she knows of my father by now. "And because of my tattoo and what it means."
Her gaze narrows to the rune she draws over and over again on the ice. She begins to smile, then stops, leaving only the promise of it in the corners of her lips. I wish suddenly that she would give that smile to me. "Doesn't it mean you'll be a great warrior, strong and sworn to protect New Asgard against her enemies?"
I could say, That's what my father was, and it didn't stop him from murdering thirteen people and only falling when the SWAT team shot him. Instead I roll my shoulders.
She looks up at me with the same mysterious not-quite-smile. It throws me off guard, not knowing what to expect. Which, I suppose, is exactly what I should have expected. If Astrid is a seethkona like her mother, she's devoted to Freya, the goddess of magic and fate, and of course she's so mysterious. So beautiful and alluring. It's in their nature.
"The seethers say," Astrid tells me, "that before the world existed there was only darkness and ice, and cold nothing waits for us when we leave behind the sun and stars to venture into death. That there is no light, and all is chaos. And a slice of that cold chaos is what lives inside berserkers. Lives in you, as it lived in your father, his father, and his father's father, all the way back to the times when Odin Alfather, King of the Gods, gave a bear spirit into a man that he might become a perfect warrior."
She speaks in a hushed tone, too intimate for two people who've only just met. I shut my eyes. For six months I've felt the frenzy burning, cutting up against my heart and keeping me from sleep, making my skin hot to touch. For six months I've struggled to lock it away. Yet here is Astrid Glyn summoning it with a few words--pulling on me. I don't know what to tell her, how to protest, and when she's next to me I'm unsure that I even want her to stop. "It doesn't feel like cold nothing in my chest."
Behind me, the dormitory doors open and footsteps tap lightly down the sandstone stairs. Astrid stands, ignoring the students who slow nearby, as if she knows they won't interrupt us. She says, "Tell me what it feels like, then."
She touches her own chest, low over her diaphragm, which is exactly the place on my body nearest to the fever. As if she knows, as if she feels it herself. And I remember suddenly that Odin stole his mad magic from Freya. If Astrid has the gift for grasping the strands of fate, for dancing in wild circles and asking question after question until the universe talks back, maybe she actually can understand. Maybe that's why I feel this way around her. Maybe it's worth it to tell her. I say, "Most of the time, like a million tiny flames. A fever."
Astrid smiles very softly and nods as if it's exactly as she expected. Then she walks around me, just like that, to join the group of girls who've been heading for the dining hall and breakfast. She doesn't look back. After she disappears through the heavy double doors, I have to tear myself away from the fountain, where my feet have frozen to the earth.

The best thing for me to do is go about my routines. To ignore the way I catch my breath when she passes, and the thoughts that shoot up about touching her hand. Nonengagement is the way to avoid getting upset, which can trigger the berserking, and once it finally overtakes me I'm stuck with it forever. I keep myself out of fighting, out of situations where most boys my age throw punches. I avoid falling for girls--until now they've made it easy by avoiding me right back. If I hold the madness off, maybe it'll fade. Maybe I can squash it, bury it for the rest of my life.
Only that won't happen so long as Astrid is making me feel this way.
I have Anglish and biology on Freyasdays, and as Astrid comes into biology carrying a brand new elf anatomy textbook, she notices me. She sits only two desks over. I stop breathing.
In lunch period, I glance across the dining hall to see her fingers at her chest, rubbing tiny circles against the button of her cardigan.
And my fever burns hotter.
The bench creaks beside me as my former roommate London slides in and slaps his laden tray onto the table. "You're staring," he says, digging into mashed red potatoes. He's a hand taller than me, and his skin is even darker than mine. I used to think it was the reason we were originally dormed together--Sanctus Sigurd's two charity cases--but he was quick to tell me his grandfather was the king of Kansa for one term, despite their race and allegiance to Thor Thunderer, the least diplomatic of all our gods.
I look back at Astrid, who's in the middle of a circle of admirers, with Taffy at her right hand. "Not at your girlfriend," I say to London as I push ham around on my plate. I stab two chunks at a time and eat them.
"I'm not worried about you and Taffy."
His mouth is full as he says it, and I make sure to swallow before answering. "What are you worried about?"
He picks up his mug of honey soda in one big hand. London is the only student on campus stronger than me, but we'd still had to quit sparring when the fever started keeping me up at night. He'd thrown a fit worthy of his patron the Thunderer. But it hadn't done any more good than when his parents requested that he be removed as my roommate. "The match," he admits.
I clench my teeth against regret. Last year we were co-captains of the school's battle guild, re-creating famous battles for competition. Next week is a campaign against one of the big Westport City public schools. Very calmly, as if it hardly matters, I ask, "What's our team's role?"
"The horde of greater hill trolls that swarmed into Vertmont ninety years ago."
"The Battle of Morriston."
"I'd love to go over some tactics with you."
"You know where I'll be."
"Staring at Astrid Glyn?"
I snap my head toward him.
With a great laugh, he says, "Soren, I think you'd blush if you could."
Swinging my leg over the bench, I stand. "I'll be in my room after devotions if you want to bring by the tactical map." And I go, forcing myself to keep my eyes on the path ahead, to not look back at her.
Fortunately, I have private lessons on battlefield history with Master Pirro all Freyrsday. He's a retired berserker who served in the president's personal bodyguard at the White Hall until a wound from the Gulf conflict gave him a limp that relegated him to teaching. Because he'd volunteered to act as my custodian when everyone else refused, the kingstate of Nebrasge agreed to subsidize my tuition here. Sanctus Sigurd's is a humanities academy, privately owned and meant for the kids of people who can afford to keep them out of apprenticeships while they're still young. If not for Pirro, I don't know where I'd be.
Anytime my focus drifts away from the immediate lesson, Pirro slaps a gnarled old hand against the desk between us. The backs of his knuckles are crisscrossed with scars. "Soren," he says in his gravelly way, "is the fever stronger? Is that what's distracting you?"