What The Apple-Maiden Told Me

This is the story that the Apple-Maiden told me.

The very first Apple in the Nine Worlds was the Crabapple, and it grew in Vanaheim, alongside many other fruits that the Vanir were breeding and cultivating. Few fruits grew in Asgard at this time, as the climate and land did not suit them, and few had the skill and talent to speak to greenwights as the Vanir did. Yet one day, not long after the war had come to an end and the hostages were exchanged, a former Valkyrie came ragged and hungry into Vanaheim, and asked for sanctuary on her way through to Asgard.

While the Vanir had no love, at this time, for Asgard or anyone who had come of those folk, the woman’s story was piteous enough that they allowed her to stay for a few nights. She had been captured and imprisoned by Ivaldi, the Emperor of the Duergar, and been forced to bear children to him until he finally tired of her. She had only just been released, and held her two small daughters by the hand, equally tired and hungry. Her eyes were reddened from weeping; her sons had chosen to stay behind with their father. The hearts of the Vanir were moved to pity and they bade the Asa-woman and her daughters to rest and eat, although Nerthus commanded them to take nothing of Vanaheim with them to Asgard. Enough of Vanaheim’s riches, she said, had gone to the White Realm already; no more would be given to them for free.

Yet while they waited on the shore, days later, for the ship of Njord’s fleet that would take them to Asgard, the elder daughter of the Valkyrie broke an Apple-laden branch from a Crabapple tree and hid it under her clothing, and brought it with her across the ocean. She was a maiden so young that her breasts had only started to grow, and as she had spent her life in a cave, her marveling at the beauty of the red fruits, and her subsequent theft, might be sympathized with if not excused.

Once in Asgard she planted the seeds and sang to them, and so charmed the Apple-Maiden that she came forth and spoke to the young half-breed girl. Aye, the Apple-Maiden, with her round face and hair of scarlet and gold, with her skin as white as blossom, with the wafting of scent about her, with a smile so sweet that only the hardest of hearts would not fall in love. The Apple-Maiden, dressed in a gown of Apple-green and holding many secrets within her, who under her fair exterior is friend to the Norns, who understands Fate, who punishes with all the harshness of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, who is one of the oldest and most sacred of the greenwights. “If you will take it on yourself to devote your life to me, I will give you Apples such as no one has ever seen,” the Apple-Maiden said, and the young girl agreed.

Thus the trees that sprouted were not Crabapples at all, but great golden creatures, and the Apple-Maiden taught the young girl how to enchant them in such a way that they would bring temporary immortality, health, and radiance to all who ate them. The girl begged that these Apples would grow only in her garden, and that for their lack of generosity to her family the Vanir should never have their secret, and nor should anyone else, and the Apple-Maiden granted this wish. So it is that the Apples grown in Vanaheim, for all their fineness and sweetness and sharpness and healing ability, are never the great golden cultivated Apples that keep the Aesir immortal. And so it is that Iduna came to be the keeper of the Apples of immortality, and the only one in the Nine Worlds to know that secret. Or so the Apple-Maiden told me, with beauty and danger in her green-gold eyes.