The Apple Throne Read Online Free Page B

blood rushes into my face. I break fingernails against their bark and get my hair tangled in their leaves. The trees are all heavy with fruit. It’s so hot my hair hangs in limp, frizzy curls.
    When I’m alone, I read novels and newspapers or watch old movies or television. I enjoy marathons of old crime shows and the bizarre
Star Trek
, fantasy stories and historicals rich in detail.
    When I’m alone, I paint my fingernails and learn new techniques for shading my eyes with makeup the goddesses of beauty send. I teach myself to braid my hair into a nine-strand rope. I read magazines and cut out the most vibrant colors. I avoid my old favorites though—
Disir Life
and
Teen Seer
—because they’re so full of dreams and prophecy.
    When I’m alone, I never unroll my seething kit. I cannot dream, Freya said, because I was torn out of fate. I do not want to know what it feels like to try seething only to fail.
    Some days I take off my slippers and put on my fight pants and sports bra and run around the entire orchard. It’s exhilarating to see everything that’s mine, the colors and pounding energy that grabs at my skin. I’ve nearly managed a pull-up, but don’t use the wooden sword or practice holmgang techniques anymore; they remind me too viscerally of Soren.
    I tell stories to the apples of immortality: my favorite comedies and sweeping tragic tales of the Icelanders or Volsungs. I tell the tree about the creation of the world; of the women who built our great families; of the founding of the United States, the Covenant and the New World Tree; stories of the Thrall’s War; the final native tribes and their lost gods; Sleipnir’s birth and the famous loves between gods and mortals.
    The tree does not applaud, but I imagine the caress of its leaves against my cheek to be like a kiss.
    I sleep.
    I wake up.
    There’s nothing in between.
    Occasionally, I lie down in a patch of sun between bending apple branches and nap away an afternoon. There’s only darkness behind my eyelids, the emptiness of a life outside fate. Even when I pluck a ripe red apple and eat the sweet or sharp or sour fruit that should feed my imagination, I do not dream.
    Though the parade of gods continues, the small gray cat is my only permanent company. He steals bangles, but returns with feathers. He climbs the trees with me and occasionally sleeps in a ball against my stomach. When he dreams, his whiskers twitch and so do his tiny round toes. I press my face to his back and imagine I can see the images, borrow those dreams out of his little head.
    Once a week, I walk to the tall iron gates that mark the edge of my orchard and look out at Bear Vale, the halcyon valley where the Idun’s Bears berserker band lives and works and trains. They guard the orchard against…what? Accidental discovery or tourists or trolls? I bring them a bushel of regular apples, half red and the rest green or golden or in-between, and they hand me back groceries or a jug of cider. I know their names, though they blush when I speak, as if I never were a seventeen-year-old girl who brought Baldur the Beautiful into their midst and wanted them all to die because they killed him.
    Gods come and gods go, and if it weren’t for the lack of dreams, if it weren’t for the lack of Soren Bearskin, I might be content. This is who I was meant to be.
    I tell myself:
This is who I was meant to be.

Eight-four nights
.
    Tonight.
    Tonight I’ll see him.
    For the first time since our spring bargaining, Soren will be here with me. I hardly can think what I’ll say first. I pluck at my hair and change my dress three times, until finally Freya arrives to take me to Bright Home for the Summer Solstice celebration.
    She thrusts a new dress into my arms. It’s long and formal, a strapless white that falls to my ankles. Delicate sandals to go with it. I wear my mother’s black pearls and push rings from the gods onto my fingers. Freya helps me paint my eyes and cheeks and mouth, vibrant