Excerpt

Today is Baldur's Night, the last day of winter, and across the country, people turn off televisions and the interweave. They hang lanterns in order to wrap hope and light around their homes and loved ones. They wait quietly for the sun to return, in order to welcome Baldur the Beautiful back to life with joy.

For almost five years I've spent holidays alone, having little enough use for my own god, or my peers or parties or community. But Baldur is different, even for me.

There's a chorus of gods in the United States of Asgard, come over from Scandia with our founding fathers: Odin Alfather, the mad one, the god of war and poetry. Thor Thunderer, the sky god, who defends us against our enemies. Freyr the Satisfied, god of wealth and prosperity. His sister Freya, the Feather-Flying Goddess of magic and fate. Frigg, Queen of Heaven. Tyr the Just. Loki Shapeshifter, who never stops moving or changing.

When we become citizens, we all dedicate ourselves to one, based on family tradition or personal preference. Or, as in my case, destiny of birth.

My dad used to tell me that Loki sometimes drove an ice cream truck in the town where he grew up. I've seen photos in Os Weekly of Freyr walking down a red carpet with a starlet on his arm, and of Thor Thunderer standing over the body of a slain mountain troll that ventured into a Montania town and slaughtered a family in their sleep. Odin regularly visits the House of Congress to give his approval to a new law. Frigg cuts the ribbon at a new hospital. Tyr oversees his system of dedicated lawspeakers. And through her seethers, Freya gives us the magic to seek our destinies.

Our gods are scattered throughout our lives, even when we live in a place as remote as Sanctus Sigurd Academy. But none of them is so well and universally loved as Baldur the Beautiful.

He's the god of light: handsome and golden, strong and funny. At the end of every summer, he dies and his body is consumed in a great bonfire, only to rise again now at winter's end. He gives himself to Hel for six months of every year, but lives harder and more brightly in the time he has with us on earth.

He is the only god who dies at all.

And that makes him the one most like us.

At school we prepare for the equinox by folding paper lanterns and baking fortunes into clove-cakes. The lanterns will be strung, ready for the ceremony at dawn, and the cakes will harden overnight so that at breakfast we'll each choose one to crack open and discover our future.

I'm with my schoolmates in the dining hall, required to show up but allowed a table of my own, peeling apples and gathering the long spiral strips of skin for the girls to throw at sunrise. The shapes that the strips form on the ground will spell out the next year of the girls' love lives. Taffy asked me with a hard smile if I would cut the skins. "It's always better if a boy does it, Soren, but not one any of us wants."

Instead of rising to the insult, I pulled a sharp knife from my boot. Now as I lift a particularly red apple from the basket, I feel the fever spread in my chest, as though I've swallowed hot cider. The warmth spreads up my neck and flushes across my face. I hold tightly to the apple, staring at the pale glow of the TV reflected on its waxy skin. Then I close my eyes and a rush of empty blackness fills my head. There's a distant roar, but I wish I were only going to pass out.

The apple falls from my suddenly shaking fingers. I push my palms against the smooth table. All around me, students laugh and chatter, oblivious to the chaos swimming inside me, to the danger here. I have to get out. I have to be free of the hall before this power claims me and I destroy everyone.

But as quickly as it flooded through me, the fever trickles away. I'm left, gasping, in the center of all that noise and crowd, a husk of what I'd been only moments before. I abandon the basket of apples and even the knife, and push outside.

The fever has never come on so suddenly. I need to get to Master Pirro, because he'll know what to do. He's supposed to help me when it happens. That's why I'm here at Sanctus Sigurd's—to be near a berserker who can control me because my dad isn't available. But Pirro's out at the perimeter of the school grounds, resetting the troll wards as he does at every change of season.

Panic stretches across my chest. This could be it. The day the fire finally consumes me. After five years fighting it every day – after my entire life! Today – today! – Baldur's Night, when the sun comes back to the world.

I need to calm down.

There's just one place I won't be disturbed: the holmgang arena. Tucked back to the edge of the low burial hills, up against the barren winter woods, it's where they teach us fighting, preparing for the day we might be called to ritual combat in response to a lawsuit or claim of honor against us. It's a formality these days, or a game. Most lawsuits don't end this way anymore—and the vast majority of people hire a professional to represent them in holmcourt, either a fighter or lawspeaker. But the arena is where I spend my free time. It's not a game to me.

I stop beside the gate to tear off my shirt and kick away my shoes. I shouldn't work out in my school pants, but I can't return to the dorms now. The common rooms are crushed full with students excited about the holiday.

And so I do what I do best: lose myself in exercise.

First I choose the slow, focused stretching program Master Pirro and I developed last year. He isn't happy with my decision to fight the frenzy, says it will bite me in the ass someday, but I can't do anything else. Dad was a full berserker by the time he was thirteen, and I hoped when I turned sixteen and it still hadn't come except in fits and hollow starts, that maybe it never would. Maybe my mom had been right. Maybe I could relax and have a normal life: graduate, apprentice in the army or something I hadn't thought of, find a family and keep it together like my parents couldn't.

But since last fall and my seventeenth birthday I've been sleeping less and less and I'm constantly plagued by these low-grade, sudden fevers. Definite signs of the fire. It's coming. My future is to graduate, attend the Hangadrottin where all berserkers go, join a berserker band, live and work and serve with those brothers and nobody else until one day I burn up.

All I can do until then is train my muscles for skill and calm, prepare my mind to contain the wildness. Isolate myself, keep tight control, be ready.

When I'm warm and loose despite the chill air on my back, I grab a dull practice spear from the storage trunk and set myself in the center of the arena. It's ringed by a plain fence, hung with round shields that we use to determine who wins. I haven't practiced with a partner other than Pirro since last fall because the school doesn't want me to harm anybody accidentally now that I'm a live wire. But it would be such a relief to slam my spear against another's.

I dig my toes into the dirt and ground into a mountain stance. Deep breaths lead me into the routine: thrusting with my spear, turning, cutting, blocking against an invisible opponent. Always knowing where I am, how my body fits into the eddies of air, aware of the wind on my face and through the leaves of the trees behind me. The ground holds me secure, and I lift each foot as though I stretch roots connecting my soles to the earth. I'm between earth and sky, in a fluid dance of battle melding all things into one. I am in control. I am warm and calm, not feverish. I am Soren Bearskin.

I feel her coming through the strands of wind.

I've been stepping carefully through a serpent routine, my eyes closed and the spear horizontal to the earth. Air moving in and out of my lungs, the smooth but rapid beat of my heart.

I stop, and the earth and sky whirl without me until I suck in a deep breath and push the energy down through my feet, my roots, and back into the dusty arena ground. I open my eyes.

Astrid Glyn watches me from the fence like a ghost. Wind ruffles the hem of her skirt. She should be freezing, but this is what she's worn anytime I've seen her out of uniform: flimsy dress and thin sweater, with that circle of black pearls around her white neck. As though she exists in a world that's always summer.

"Astrid," I say, not moving from the center of the combat arena.

I've avoided her the two weeks she's been at our school. Unlike everybody else, who fell over themselves to be near this daughter of our country's most famous prophetess. They want her to seeth or read their future in bones or cards. But it isn't for wanting to avoid her future-seething that I stay away: it's because the moment I saw her I knew she was too much like me to be safe.

And like me, she doesn't bother with small talk. Leaning her arms on the top rail of the fence, she just says, "Every year on Baldur's Night, I try to find my mother."

I don't know what to say. Her famous mother is dead. Like my famous father.

"I chew corrberries and breathe yew smoke, Soren, and I dance a seething dance to search for her. For anything that will help me find her." Astrid's voice is high and smooth and unconcerned, but there's something in the tension of her fingers where she grips the fence. This feels like a challenge. Like she's daring me to say it. But your mother is dead.

I say nothing, only stare at her. She stands out from the cold winter world like a maiden from an old elf tale, cool herself, lovely, and tempting. While I'm nearly naked, sweat chilling on my chest, bare toes dug into the dusty arena.

Astrid lifts her hands, palms up, as if releasing some invisible balloon into the sky. "Every year I only see apples."

I frown. There isn't a single reason I can come up with for her to tell me this.

"I was thinking," she continues, smile falling away.

I wait, curious despite the fever restless under my heart. This is a risk, when I just calmed it: Astrid Glyn is a risk. Her black licorice curls, her pale lips, and the delicate way they part as she breathes.

"Maybe . . . ," she whispers. Elf-kisses trail around her wrists: she is cold, she just doesn't seem to care. "Maybe you can help me go farther. You can help me find her."

Avoid.

I should say no, right now, and walk away.

"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, if we do not go with Freya. There is no light, and all is chaos. That is where fate is born. 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."

Her hushed tones are too intimate for people who don't know each other, but I feel it. Like Odin is behind me, having personally knifed this spiking hot frenzy through my ribs. To combat it, I glare at her and say, slow and hard, "It doesn't feel like cold nothing in my chest."

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. I know she can't, or she wouldn't be so gentle.

Avoid.

But I answer, "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. The edge of her smile catches in my chest like a fishhook. She reels me to the fence and I lean my spear against a post then rest my hands on the crossbar near hers, cautiously. She looks down at our hands, almost touching like she almost touched me the first day we met. She knows better, I think. She knows what I am. I'm a risk, too.

"Help me go," she says.

"Help you go where?"

"Into the seething. Across the river of stars and into death." She counters the drama of her words with a wry smile. "Where all the wisdom of the world resides, you know."

"I didn't."

Her hand shifts nearer to mine. "Will you anchor me, Soren?" It's strangely formal, like ritual words I don't know. It shifts the fire. Sweat breaks out on my spine. Astrid is beautiful and mysterious and asking me for a gift. I can't, I shouldn't. Avoid.

I focus on her fingers. They're slender and white next to my blunt, dark warrior's hands. I must bring this conversation back to the ground, root it again. We're two teenagers at a boarding school, not players in a cosmic theater. I clear my throat. I say, "I'm not a safe anchor." It still sounds too ceremonial, but it's the best excuse I can think of.

She scoffs. "You're the only person at this school with Freya's wild magic inside you, too."

"It's not hers. It's Odin's." I take my hands off the fence.

"Soren." Astrid becomes as still as stone. With one finger she reaches out and touches my face. I flinch but she traces the spear tattoo cleaving my left cheek.

I'm grounded now, but not to the earth; I'm grounded to that tiny line of my berserker mark and her cool touch.

"I am not afraid of Odin's berserk warriors," she says.

"You should be."

"You stand between the earth and the sky," she says lightly, echoing my own meditations. "So do I." She shrugs a little, as if it's only that simple.

The fever is a hard knot inside me: I wish I could untangle the promise of the frenzy and her talk of magic and dreams from the problem of being just a guy who suddenly wants this girl to keep touching him.

Astrid takes my wrists, curls her fingers around them. Her skin seems to send ropes of cold up my arms. I fight to swallow a childlike gasp. What is she doing? Is this magic? Freya's seething magic?

"Soren." She squeezes her fingers against my pulse. "Tonight will you help me build my fire, and stand ready while I dance?" Her voice is a whisper, mingling with the wind through the valley meadow.

I nod, unable to speak.

As the sun sets, Astrid and I sneak out of our dorm rooms and meet at the fountain of Sigurd Dragon Slayer in the stone courtyard between. She carries a long, narrow leather bag strapped over her shoulder and I have my own sharp spear. Together we walk into the darkness, across a wide and trim yard toward the academy burial hill. As we climb the grassy barrow, a slice of moon teases us with scant light, and the buildings of the academy are below us like dollhouses.

I watch the evening shadows that press toward campus. Every window blazes. It's a separate world in those school buildings, safe and normal and full of hope. Nothing like the chaos tempting me out here.

Unrolling the leather seething kit, Astrid removes two thin vials and a pouch of seeds. One vial contains lighter fluid, with which she makes a small fire of yew branches swiped from the Great Hall. Their acrid scent sharpens the night. Astrid spills the oily contents of the second vial onto her fingers. She draws runes on her forehead and in the palms of her hands. I smell something heady and sweet like honey soda.

"Be ready to catch me, Soren," she says, and reaches into the small pouch of tiny red seeds. She tosses three into the fire and puts a few more on her tongue. As she chews, she closes her eyes.

I've seen seethers on TV. Usually there's a grand display: drummers and attendants helping the seethkona up onto a chair raised high over her audience. She wears elaborate clothing: calfskin boots, a necklace of boars' teeth, gloves from the skin of a cat. A feast is prepared from the hearts of native animals. These things are to anchor her in the world, to firmly remind her physical body that she is of the animals, of the earth. When she's ready, she begins her song, and her attendants pick up the tune, singing it in rounds while the seethkona dances. Seekers bring their questions and needs to her, crying them out from beside the high chair, and the seethkona answers as she can, or as she pleases.

Astrid has none of these things. She has only her fire, her berries, and me.

I shouldn't be here. I couldn't have stayed away.

Conflict is terrible for me, itching at my skin, poking the frenzy – especially internal conflict.

But I chose, I'm here, and so I wait. Astrid starts to sway. There's no wind to rock her, it's only the magic. My fever churns, flushing under my skin. She's everything I've ignored and pushed away for nearly five years: desire and wild magic, like the embodiment of frenzy itself. Here in the dark, alone with her as she turns in the firelight, I can easily imagine her an avatar from the Alfather, sent to awaken his wayward berserker.

And so, crouching, I ground myself firmly. She asked me here to catch her, not to dance wildly with her. Not to let go. The fever churns, but I dig my fingers into the frosty grass.

She gives herself over to the wild darkness of the sky, dancing with her arms spread out, twirling and twirling. Free. I remain solid, crouched on the earth with my spear for balance, watching her let go and dance. For the first time ever I imagine doing the same; letting the frenzy go spinning outward, losing myself in it. But her dance is beautiful and free, drawing her spirit nearer to fate, and mine would end in her broken body, in blood and fear.

I wish it were different, as I stare at the bounce of her black curls, the flush of her neck, her parted lips, the flash of her bare feet and her reaching, rigid fingers, splayed to catch the wind.

She is so beautiful.

The hill below us is used to bury princes and jarls, the illustrious alumni of Sanctus Sigurd Academy. When Astrid stomps on the yellow grass, I imagine I can feel their bones stomping back.

Our small fire flares orange and red. Astrid spins, her eyes blind and mouth open in wonder.

And when her feet suddenly stop but her body continues and she topples down—I'm there. I catch her against me, wrapping my arms around her. I kneel to cradle her against the crown of the burial hill. Her heartbeat pounds against her skin, like the dance is still happening inside her.

I wait, grounded, breathing careful and steady. The fire grabs at my back.

Her eyes are closed, but shivering with dreams. She curls her fingers into my shirt and a dark twist of hair falls over her face as she turns into me. Her breath has a slow rhythm, and I match mine to it. All through the night I anchor her in my arms, against the earth, while her spirit flies through death. I doze, I listen to her heart, I listen to the prairie wind blowing hard from the west and north, and cutting into this pocket of hills. The school lights snap off, the stars turn; clouds wrap and unwrap the moon until it sets and everything is perfectly, naturally black for hours.