The Beholder

by Anna Bright

The kiss.

  Lang shook his head. “Selah, they set you up to fall for him. The entire court spent two weeks pretending. Like I said, it was an incredibly elaborate lie.” He paused, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “You may have broken the rules, but they fixed the whole game. What a stupid gamble.”

  I didn’t respond. I remembered Bear touching my face, sitting in his study in front of the fire, coming to my door at dawn.

  I’d known my courtship was a farce. I just hadn’t realized I was the one being played.

  And now, I had one fewer buffer between me and the Imperiya.

  Lang’s brow furrowed. His eyes were soft. “You’re going to be all right,” he said.

  He offered me my godmother’s book. I cleared my throat and accepted it, dropping it on my bed and flipping quickly past the English fairy tales.

  Something crackled, and I froze. I stared up at Lang, wide-eyed. “What was that?”

  And then I heard her. My godmother.

  “Selah.” The voice was muffled, but it was unmistakably hers. “Selah, if you can hear me, I’m here.”

  “What is that?” I scrambled backward, sitting upright in bed.

  “Selah, it’s been over six weeks, so you must be through your first visit by now. I don’t know if you can hear me.” I clapped a hand to my mouth. Lang seized the book and flipped swiftly through its pages, jewel-bright illuminations blurring past.

  The back endpaper was covered with the story of the Beauty and the Beast. A calligraphed poem filled its center.

  Welcome, Beauty, banish fear,

  You are queen and mistress here;

  Speak your wishes, speak your will,

  Swift obedience meets them still.

  I froze as Lang took a knife and deftly pried the endpaper from beneath the thick green cover. “What are you—”

  But there, buried inside the binding, was a small black box.

  My godmother was still speaking from its mouth.

  “I’ve mostly tried to talk to you at night, when I thought you’d be alone. But I hope you can hear this, sweet girl, and I hope you’re on your way again. I hope your first visit is over, wherever it was. And I want you to know that everything is all right here. Your father is fine. Alessandra hasn’t made any moves. Everything is fine.”

  I turned the box over in my hands, clumsy and desperate. “Godmother?” I blurted. “Godmother Althea?” Tears pricked at my eyes. My heart was a stampede. But she didn’t answer.

  “She won’t be able to hear you.” Lang’s dark gaze was careful beneath his lashes.

  I wiped my cheeks. “How do you know?”

  “It’s too small to be a transmitter. Without a tower to send out a signal, it’s a receiver only.” He paused. “It’s called a radio.”

  A radio. I swallowed. “How do you know?”

  Lang studied me. “The same way I knew that cover was thick enough to smuggle you something.” He eyed a dial on the radio, then pointed to the bottom corner of the endpaper. “Do you see this number, three-point-four-four?”

  I frowned, then flipped a page back. “It’s the wrong page number. And anyway, an endpaper wouldn’t be numbered.”

  Lang nodded. “Because this isn’t a page number. It’s the frequency your godmother’s using.”

  What is Lang, I wondered, besides a sailor?

  He studied me. “You haven’t been communicating with her. You had no idea this was here.”

  I shook my head.

  Everything is all right here. Your father is fine. . . . Everything is fine.

  “I’ve been so worried,” I whispered.

  “I know. This is good.” Lang smiled and passed a hand over my hair. I stilled at the feel of his palm against my neck. His lean fingers ran down a stray lock and tucked it behind my ear.

  “Will you help me find a—” I broke off. “What did you call it?”

  “A transmitter?” Lang asked. I nodded. He frowned, thinking. “I’ve seen only two in my life—both in Zhōng Guó.”

  “They’re rare?”

  He nodded. “This radio is powered by a battery; I’m not even sure where your godmother would have found one. The transmitters are much larger, and require much more power. The kind of power we hardly even have on our side of the Atlantic. I’d guess it’s rare in Europe.”

  Maybe whoever helped her smuggle the radio to me had helped her first lay hands on it.

  I wouldn’t know. Nobody told me anything.

  I chewed my lip, running my fingers over the leather I knew so well and the black box so unfamiliar to me. “I want to talk to her,” I whispered. “I have to.”

  “I’ll help you,” Lang said. “I promise.”

  Even with the weight of the radio in my hand, I felt lighter. Bear had ripped me apart, but Godmother Althea—just her voice, spirited to me by magic and machine—had pieced me back together.

  I sat forward on the bed, cross-legged. “Thank you for last night,” I said. “You and Cobie and Skop and Yu—you stood with me.”

  “That’s our place,” Lang said, voice quiet and tight. His knee bumped mine; he didn’t move it. “That’s where we belong. Between you and everyone else.”

  I glanced up. Beneath his arching eyebrows and heavy lashes, I read not quite an apology but a ceasefire. And when I said thank you again, Lang understood, too: I’d accept his truce and let him keep his secrets.

  After all, I had mine.

  After that, Godmother Althea spoke to me every night. Lang showed me how to adjust the radio’s volume and frequency, how to angle its antenna to hear her more clearly, how to replace it within the book’s thick binding to hide it when I was done.

  Night after night. Story after story. Five marks on the back endpaper, each little scratch a step closer to Norge.

  Their prince was my last best chance. The only one not bound permanently to his home by the responsibilities of a firstborn son.

  If I could persuade him to propose, I could be mere weeks away from home. From Daddy.

  If I couldn’t, the Imperiya fürst was waiting.

  I tried to forget about all of them. The ones ahead, and the one behind.

  Ne pisses pas dans un violon, Jeanne had told me in indignation when the crew heard what had happened at court.

  Don’t . . . urinate in a violin? I’d asked, confused.

  Her amber eyes had flashed as she’d shaken her head. Do not waste your efforts on good-for-nothing boys. Do not cast your pearls before swine.

  I’d tried to laugh. I wanted not to believe Bear’s eyes and hands and heart had left their marks on me for good.

  I tried not to fear I would never make it home at all.

  When I wasn’t falling asleep reading fairy tales, waiting for the sound of my godmother’s voice, I was working in the galley, gardening on deck. Will had cared for my plants as best he could, but they’d withered a little while I was away. I dug into them now, softening up the earth around their tender shoots, watering them carefully. Within a day or two, life came back into their leaves, green and full as they ever were. I plucked sprigs of rosemary and put them under my pillow, hoping their scent would ease my sleep.

  And the crew filled my head with words, drawing me into their circles and their stories. We sat side by side on deck late into the night all that week, Skop and Yu at my sides, Lang at the helm, or sketching, if Homer or one of the others was steering. Perrault stayed in his quarters, but even Cobie kept company with us, in her own way. She sat in the crow’s nest overhead, her black clothes flapping in the wind like a pirate’s flag beneath Potomac’s blue-and-gold standard.

  We were a mere day from Norge the night I turned to Yu, my voice quiet beneath the sailors’ voices and the waves washing over the hull.

  Lang had told me their place was between me and everyone else.

  I wondered if that applied to Alessandra and the ones who’d forced me away from home. If the crew would stand by my father, as well as by me.

  I believed they would.


  “Yu,” I whispered, “you’re a doctor. Can I ask you a question?”

  He nodded, looking concerned. “Of course. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said quickly. “But—if someone lost a lot of weight in a short time—someone who wasn’t trying to, they just didn’t have any appetite—what would you suspect was wrong?”

  Yu frowned. “Well, weight loss can be symptomatic of many conditions, but without more information, it would be difficult to say.”

  I thought of my father, of how weak he’d looked before I left. “Sleeplessness. Tremors. Says he has pins and needles in his hands. I think his vision’s getting worse, too.” I shook my head. “He’s just not himself lately.”

  “Who are we talking about?” Yu’s broad forehead creased.

  I studied my hands, picking at a cuticle. “My father.”

  How I wanted to get home to him.

  For a brief moment, I wondered if accepting Bear would have saved us. If returning home right away with a fiancé at my side and the English crown behind me would have put an end to all our problems.

  The question had risen in my mind again and again, threatening to follow me around like a shadow through my days aboard ship, to stand at the foot of my bed at night. I cast it away once more and turned back to Yu.

  Yu was from Zhōng Guó. I’d heard medicine there was more advanced than it was at home. Surely Yu could help me. Surely he would have the answers I needed.

  He rubbed his forehead. “Let me think on that,” he said slowly. “I want to consult a few texts before I wor—” Yu broke off. “Before I weigh in.”

  Before I worry you, he was going to say.

  I walked the deck that night before I went to bed, savoring the feel of the wood against the soles of my feet, walking heel-toe, quiet beneath the dark sky full of stars. As I crossed the forecastle, the breeze ruffling my hair, I caught sight of the figurehead at the prow.

  The ocean had washed away the hideous wine stain Alessandra had smashed across her chest. Her bloodied body had healed, scrubbed clean by salt water and time.

  When I crawled into bed, I studied the tick marks I’d made at the back of my book.

  Time was passing, and time would heal my hurt.

  But time was running out for me.

  And time was running out for Daddy.

  Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,

  þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,

  hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

  —Bēoƿulf

  Lo! the Spear-Danes’ glory through splendid achievements

  The folk-kings’ former fame we have heard of,

  How princes displayed then their prowess-in-battle.

  —Beowulf

  36

  LYSEFJORD, NORGE: ASGARD FORTRESS

  Five days after departing Winchester, we sailed into the Lysefjord.

  I sat cross-legged against the foremast of the creaking ship, arms wrapped around my knees, wonderstruck beneath the cliffs towering to our left and right. Though the day was cloudy, the hulking walls of stone on either side of the fjord gleamed with an otherworldly light, ethereal and substantial all at once. Veins of greenery running down the pale rock were the only hint that summer was coming.

  This would be a forbidding place in winter, but even in early June, the fjord was ancient and weather-worn, sparse and lonely in a way that Winchester and Potomac were not.

  Homer summoned me from the helm, pointing with a chapped hand at the cliffs. “The northern edge of Mount Kjerag, Your Grace, and the home of Asgard Fortress.”

  I squinted at the summit. “I don’t see a fortress. All I see is a grove of—” But my own gasp cut me off.

  From the cliff top grew what must have been a hundred trees grown into one, mountainous in size, its branches spreading wide enough to obscure the stronghold behind it. What I had taken for an irregularity in the rock face were its knotted trunk and curling maze of roots grasping at the fjord. The oaks and maples that twisted through Arbor Hall were saplings, by comparison.

  The tree felt like an omen, though whether good or evil I couldn’t say.

  A faint gleam in Homer’s gray eyes was his only acknowledgment of the wonder in mine. “The great ash tree, Yggdrasil. Those are its roots in the Bilröst—that’s what they call this fjord.”

  I swallowed. “What do you know about this place?”

  “I’ve never been here,” Vishnu offered wryly, rubbing at the back of his neck, “but I’ll tell you this: from what I hear, if they throw you a tournament, the king won’t be watching from a throne.”

  Below the cliffs and the great ash tree, Lysefjord’s harbor was a menagerie of ships. Bright rowboats bobbed like golden finches and bluebirds alongside huge vessels whose swooping prows and sterns were carved like horses and sea snakes. As Homer called out orders and the crew brought the Beholder to port among them, Andersen pressed my hand between his. “Good luck, girl. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  I smiled at his kindness, at his soft Savannah accent that so reminded me of my mother and Godmother Althea. “You, too.” I paused, laughing. “I mean, thank you.”

  Andersen gave me a funny look, pushing his graying blond hair out of his eyes, and nodded. “I knew what you meant.”

  The crew carried our bags down the gangplank and onto a wagon. I waved feverishly back at Vishnu and Homer and Basile and Yu and the others as huge golden horses drew our cart away, up a road carved into the cliffside that led us past wide fields of grain and a village of long, low homes. Tall, broad-shouldered people wiped their hands on rough-knit sweaters and paused in their work as we rattled by.

  Sitting between Captain Lang and me, J.J. shrank from their stares, biting his nails and jiggling his leg.

  I thought of asking Lang why he was bringing J.J. ashore instead of Yu. J.J. was barely in his teens, and while he made himself useful aboard ship and made good company in general, I wasn’t sure what he’d do for two weeks at court. But even after several days at sea, my peace with Lang felt tentative—delicate, even. I hesitated to question him, even in this.

  In the meantime, Skop rambled, warm and reassuring, on my left, and Perrault and Cobie bickered quietly in the other cart. But when the fortress came into view over a gargantuan stone wall crowned with iron spikes, none of us could find words.

  Asgard Fortress was a soaring thing built of earth and sky. Massive gray stones were fitted tightly between wall-size windows. Strong iron beams marked its corners and the seams between glass and rock.

  But what took my breath away was the tree. Arbor Hall was a cloistered forest, but Yggdrasil’s trunk was part of the fortress itself, its branches and leaves spreading higher than the highest chimney rising from its slate roof. Fitted snugly between the summit of Mount Kjerag and the great tree, Asgard was a stern, proud thing, both airy and solid on the precipice overlooking the fjord. Guards waved us through the forbidding gates, and I climbed down after my friends, openmouthed and still as they began to unload our carts.

  “Now? Right now?” came Perrault’s voice, irritated. The guard at his side nodded, authoritative.

  “What’s going on?” Lang asked, approaching the guard.

  Cobie hopped down from her wagon to join him, nimble as a cat.

  Lang turned to me. “We’ve been summoned to meet Konge Alfödr in Valaskjálf, the great hall, immediately.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  Perrault pursed his lips, pretty face tense, as if our being beckoned so abruptly had thrown him off-balance.

  I had no time to prepare—and no time to fret over it. “It’s fine.” I nodded tightly at the guard and the fortress’s broad front doors. “Lead on.”

  Loud laughter and boisterous conversation rang down the fortress’s corridors as we followed our guide toward Valaskjálf, dodging and darting out of the paths of large, broad-shouldered strangers. I slid my trembling fingers over the rosary in my pocket and thought of the suitors’ files I’d studied so m
any times.

  Prins Torden of Asgard was the only one not set to inherit his throne, the loophole in Alessandra’s plan.

  He was my only chance if I hoped to meet my stepmother and the Council’s demands and return home with a fiancé.

  He was my only chance if I hoped to avoid the Imperiya.

  I was jostled out of concentration as a half-dozen or so unruly boys and a girl pushed past us. To a one, they were good-looking and tall—I hardly reached the shoulder of the boy with glasses who apologized as he knocked into Perrault—and most of them were broad and blond. But one boy was fine-boned and narrow-shouldered with a shock of dark hair, and another was redheaded with the coppery scruff of a beard on his chin. I squeezed out of the way as they hurried on, feeling my pink cardigan snag on the corridor’s stone wall. But somehow I caught his eye.

  I stopped short, and so did he—the redheaded boy, his jaw tense, raw shock burning in his gaze. The remnants of a greenish-yellow bruise brooded over his left cheekbone.

  I knew him on sight.

  Halfway down the hall, the pack of boys and the girl halted at a word from the black-haired boy. He held up a hand to them, studying me through narrowed eyes.

  “Torden,” called the blond boy with the glasses. “Pappa will be angry if we’re late.”

  I forgot to breathe as the redheaded boy’s brown eyes slid from my face to my sweater to my nervously clasped hands. I watched the space where he’d stood long after he’d cleared his throat and marched off with his friends.

  Torden.

  37

  We caught the rumble of male voices before we even reached the great hall’s entrance.

  Valaskjálf was enormous, imposing as the fortress itself, as unlike Arbor Hall’s quiet, green warmth as possible.

  Three walls were of stone; one was formed entirely by Yggdrasil’s hundred trunks. Huge, roaring fires threw light on men sitting shoulder to shoulder at long wooden tables, on high, vaulted ceilings, on tapestries and weapons and armor and—

  I gripped Skop’s arm. “Why are there dead animals on the walls?” Deer and moose heads and preserved fish leered from on high, bodies still, eyes glassy.