The Apple Throne Read Online Free PDF

Crouched, he fiddles with a stick in the grass, scraping the end against the earth in senseless patterns. He’s lost the summer jacket and wears only the T-shirt and jeans, loose and casual and already barefoot. He must have caught a ride with another god to beat me back. I barely can see him, only his shape. Just like the mountains. He looks up when he hears me, and a smile breaks across his face.
    He stands and I fling myself against him; he catches me up off my feet. I squeeze so tightly, but I know he won’t break, I can’t hurt him, I can press and hug and do my worst and Soren will be strong enough to let me. He cups the back of my head, wraps one arm around my ribs. He smells like Bright Home smoke.
    “Astrid,” he whispers. “I missed you.”
    I push back so he drops me, then I pull him inside the cottage. His boots are beside the front door, and I leave them there, dragging at his hand. I kick off my fancy sandals to climb onto the narrow bed. I stand on the quilt, and he stands on the floor, his face level with my collar. I put my hands on his shoulders for balance.
    “Keep saying my name,” I whisper, and I run my fingers through his buzzed-short hair. I kiss his forehead, his temple.
    “Astrid,” he says, hands on my elbows. I kiss his cheek, touch my lips to the vertical spear tattoo that marks him a berserker. “Astrid.” His hands slide up my bare arms to my shoulders, to my neck, and he places his thumbs under my jaw, his fingers spread around my skull. “Astrid.”
    I kiss his mouth and he doesn’t say anything else.
    For hours and hours, I am everything I used to be. A girl in love, with friends and a place and a future. When he’s touching me, that’s the only future I know. When I tell him about the gods I’ve met, the pie I’ll bake for dinner, those are the only dreams I need. He tells me in his slow way what he’s been doing with Baldur, the travels of three short months, and it’s like we were only apart for some minor inconvenience. That Valkyrie I met on Disir Day was his friend, Signy Valborn, who as of only yesterday has become the Ninth Valkyrie, and, Soren says, she appreciated my counsel. He speaks of her with conviction. He believes in her. He tells me of fighting trolls at the sides of berserker brothers, of riddles and Freyan preachers and Port Orleans, and it shocks me to realize he might have died for the Valkyrie, fighting for her cause. That troll mother might have crushed him, and I didn’t dream of it.
    I’ll never know when he’s in danger. If he needs me.
    That is the true price of my dreamlessness, of my inability to seeth.
    Now that I am Idun, I am more like a regular girl than I ever was, a girl who cannot read fate or seeth into the future, a girl who can rely on nothing but prayer and her own plain senses.
    I close my eyes and flatten myself against Soren, listening and not listening, desperate that he not recognize the anxiety swimming in my blood.
    But he does, of course. Hiding myself from him is like hiding the sky from a bird. He says, “What’s wrong?” and I shake my head. He pushes me onto my back and says, “You tell me, Astrid. Tell me now.”
    I touch his bottom lip. “You might have died. And how would I know? Who would tell me? You might die, and I wouldn’t know for
weeks
until you didn’t arrive on our day.”
    “You’ll know.”
    My gaze slicks away from his face. Soren climbs out of the bed. He pulls on jeans and pads barefoot to the front door that hangs wide open to the summery orchard. The muscles shift along his broad back as he puts a hand on either side of the frame and leans in, stretching, pushing away again with his head hung low.
    “Something could happen to you, too,” he mutters. “And how would
I
know?”
    Drawing the sheet with me, I go after him. I touch my forehead to his spine, between his shoulder blades. “Do you remember that night in the barn in Cheyenne when I asked you if you could imagine me without my