by Anna Bright
I squirmed and looked away.
Aleksei sighed, abruptly serious. “You ought to know what things are really like in Asgard, Selah. Don’t let squeamishness get in the way.”
When I turned back to Aleksei, his expression was still sour, but he suddenly looked tired, and very young. I studied him, torn between suspicion and sympathy. “I think I like it here,” I said tentatively.
“Of course you do,” Aleksei said, smiling bitterly. “Because you haven’t made a mistake yet and been forced to taste the consequences.”
Alfödr had thrown Aleksei out of dinner in front of everyone for what could’ve been an honest mistake, or—more likely—a joke in poor taste. I’d been publicly humiliated often enough lately to imagine quite clearly what it must have felt like.
I chose to let sympathy win.
“You sound like you’re having a bad night.” I smiled and put a hand on his shoulder. “Maybe things will look brighter in the morning.”
“Maybe the sun will rise in the west.” Aleksei rolled his eyes as I left him.
Wincing, I hurried to the fireplace where Torden stood talking with Fredrik. They stopped speaking as I approached, but their faces were pained.
Fredrik furrowed his brow at me. “You look like someone just told you a dirty joke and then explained the ending when you didn’t get it.”
Torden grimaced and nodded back at their brother, who was busy now with a trio of pretty girls. “She looks like she’s been talking to Aleksei.”
“Or that.” Fredrik bobbed his head.
I rubbed my eyes, abruptly weary. “His, uh, party tactics are something.”
“Aleksei loves to stir the pot.” Torden sighed, rubbing his neck. “Let me walk you back to your room.”
He wrapped a heavy arm around me as we walked out Valaskjálf’s doors. “You look beautiful tonight.”
I smiled, grateful for his warmth; my shoulders were bare, and the corridor was chilly. “Thank you. You look nice, too.” I paused, studying his downturned mouth, his tired eyes. “Is something on your mind?”
“What do you mean?” he asked, suddenly guarded.
I hesitated. “You look . . . troubled. You said I could trust you. I don’t want to pry, but you can trust me, too.”
Torden paused, considering, cautious longing in his face. “If I tell you, will you tell your companions?”
“No,” I said quietly. “Your secrets are yours. But if they’re heavy, I’ll help you carry them awhile.” I put an arm around his waist, my blood surging. This close, I could hear his heartbeat through his jacket.
Torden’s answering smile was a sunrise.
He shook his head, beard scuffing my temple, apparently uncertain where to begin. “I love my brothers and my sister, but sometimes I do not understand them. I would trust Anya with my life, but she . . . complicates things,” he said vaguely.
Aleksei had said as much. I nodded.
“And I would die for Aleksei, but trouble follows him.”
“Trouble like—his showing up in an Imperiya uniform to dinner?” I suggested gently.
“Among . . . other things. This year has been too much.” Torden passed a hand over this forehead. “I don’t know what he could have been thinking. Another bid for attention, I imagine.” He frowned. “He’s determined to shock, if that’s what it takes to get Pappa to notice him.”
I squeezed Torden’s side. Aleksei’s behavior—his prurient comments, his determination to instigate conflict—suddenly made more sense.
What had made him this way?
“But things are hardest between my oldest brothers and Dronning Rihttá,” Torden said. “She is the only mother I have ever known. But Týr’s mother and Váli and Vidarr’s mother are still living, and my brothers are old enough to remember Pappa choosing Rihttá over them.
“When her sons, Baldr and Hodr, were small, my brothers tried to understand. But now they are gone, and Týr and the twins resent her marriage to my father. And Rihttá’s pain makes her fragile.”
Her sons. Torden had mentioned them at dinner the night before. Did the bonfires bring Baldr or Hodr any luck last year?
“Your toast earlier, to your stepmother,” I said. “What did that mean?”
“Minni,” he said softly. “When we drink, I always drink to Baldr’s memory. He was just twelve. My mother suffers.”
My heart ached as I suddenly realized why the queen watched J.J. so wistfully. “That’s terrible.”
“My father is at his wits’ end. Sometimes I think I’m holding this house together with my bare hands.” Torden shook his head.
I couldn’t imagine Alfödr frustrated. He seemed so controlled—so powerful. As unlike my last memories of Daddy as possible. But Torden’s sigh rustled past my ears and settled in my hair, his breath heavy with doubt.
I’d wanted to comfort him. Had I merely opened old wounds instead?
When we rounded the final corner to Anya’s room, a sudden chill bit my skin as he took his arm from my shoulders.
Anya was leaning against her doorframe, face tipped up toward Skop, who stood much closer than seemed friendly. They flew apart at our approach.
I stopped short, feeling like an intruder. Torden’s jaw worked. He faced me, then leaned toward my ear. “Remember—you promised.” And he strode off into the dark.
I got ready for bed and lay thinking silently until Anya bid Skop good night and burrowed beneath her covers. The moon colored her pale blond hair almost white across her dark red blanket knitted with stars.
My godmother’s book was only a few feet away, fresh with another tick mark; but I didn’t reach for it. I didn’t want to read; I wanted her company and her comfort.
Worry pooled in my chest so deep I thought it would overflow, run down my ribs and over my collarbone. Worry about Aleksei and the Imperiya. About Daddy, about myself. About Torden. His reaction to Skop and Anya in the hallway had surprised me.
Skop. Now I was worried for him, too.
Anya lets Alfödr’s drengs chase her hem and tortures Bragi endlessly.
“Don’t break his heart, Anya,” I said softly.
She took in a sharp breath. “I could say the same to you.”
“You could, but I have no idea what I’m doing,” I said hollowly.
Boys like Peter. Boys like Torden.
Alessandra had sized me up so unsentimentally at the council meeting that night. If she weren’t practically his sister, Anya—gracious prinsessa, mead-bearer, tall and lithe—was the kind of girl I would expect to see with a boy like Torden.
“Skop’s my friend,” I finally said. “And you’re really beautiful. So just—be careful, okay?”
I felt, rather than heard, her assent as her nod rustled against her pillow and the blanket. “God natt, Selah.”
“Good night.”
43
Wondering and worry stole my sleep, but I was at least better off than Fredrik. As the Asgard boys set us up for archery practice on the edge of the woods, checking the targets fixed at the tree line and stringing their bows, Fredrik lay flat on the grass and closed his bloodshot eyes.
He’d rubbed his temples all through breakfast, gagging as his brothers passed around smoked salmon. He’d looked near tears at J.J.’s too-loud good morning when I’d flagged him and Cobie down in Valaskjálf and asked them to join us. J.J. had said yes, but Cobie declined, rolling her eyes in Perrault’s general direction.
While Anya and Skop helped J.J., Torden held out a single arrow and the bow he’d strung for me. It looked absurdly small in his hands. “How should you hold this?” he asked, testing me, just as he had the day before.
I glanced over at Hermódr, the most deliberate of his brothers, and tried to notch the arrow as he had, feeling the string wobble beneath my fingers as I drew it back toward my cheek. I looked to Torden for his review.
He grinned. “Not bad. Ah, let’s widen your stance.” I flushed as Torden braced my hips and hooked his boot around my ank
le to drag my right foot a few inches. “And . . . straighten the wrist, rotate the front elbow . . .” He adjusted my arms and hands with gentle fingers, rose-gold eyelashes glinting inches away in the morning sun.
A tremulous laugh escaped my lips. “You aren’t going to break me.”
“I might,” he said quietly.
I gulped and cast a nervous glance at his brothers.
Torden put a hand on my shoulder. “They’re not paying attention. And if they were, they would be rooting for you.”
He cared so much for them. Fleetingly, I wondered again how I’d ever ask him to leave them all behind.
I pushed the thought aside and released my arrow with a shaky breath. It hit the ground ten feet short of the target.
“Here, try again.” Torden passed me another arrow. When it flew three feet wide of the wooden circle, he handed me another one, and then another. The third passed within a foot of the target, but the fourth and ninth and twelfth bounced off its painted edge. The thirteenth arrow stuck.
Torden grinned, stretching so his sleeves strained over his shoulders. “Good! Again.” He held out a fourteenth arrow.
It hit an inch inside my previous mark. “Again.”
The muscles behind my shoulders and above my elbows were quivering before Torden strode over to examine my target, now studded with eight arrows. “Selah, I think you’ve found your game,” he called, sounding pleased. I shrugged modestly, but I was thrilled.
Marvelous, I imagined Perrault cheering. A proposal, no doubt about it.
I needed Torden to propose. I was making my own way, as Perrault had said to do. Riding. Fighting. Verbally sparring with sarcastic boys.
I hoped I recognized myself when I was finished making it.
I wanted to want him more than I needed him. And I wanted him to propose to me—the real me.
Anya rumpled J.J.’s toboggan affectionately. “It’s because she has patience, a trait bred entirely out of the Asgard line,” she called to us. J.J. beamed, basking in her attention, nodding as Skop called out pointers—quietly, so as not to wake Fredrik, who lay fast asleep with his face on his arms. He’d slipped away once or twice earlier, I suspected to throw up his breakfast. I had no idea how he’d survived their morning run.
As Hermódr and Bragi kept shooting, I eased myself onto the ground, and Torden took a seat beside me. I knocked him with a weary shoulder. “Done already?”
Torden shrugged. “I practice archery because I should. But it’s not my favorite weapon.”
“You like the sword better?”
He shook his head. “The hammer.”
I nodded, remembering the one I’d seen in his locker. “Can you—don’t be offended—can you actually fight with that thing? It looked heavy, but its handle was so short.”
“Only wide enough for one hand.” Torden flexed his fingers thoughtfully. “We buy most of our weapons from the dvergar. They are master craftsmen, and do not usually make such mistakes. But I like it that way.”
Aleksei winked at me. “Since only he can manage it, none of us ever borrows it.”
“Which I cannot say for most of my possessions. I still want to know what you did with my helmet.” Torden glared at his brother. Aleksei tore up a fistful of grass and blew it into my hair in reply. I flapped at him, annoyed.
“I don’t think I could fight with a sword or a hammer. I’d rather fight enemies at a distance.” I paused, suddenly a little ashamed. “Being so sensitive is a luxury, I know.”
I could afford to be delicate about fighting. War would almost certainly never come to my doorstep in Potomac as it had to theirs.
Threats to our safety were subtler.
Torden passed a warm hand over my arm. The gesture seemed instinctive, a reflex. “A luxury for which I am grateful, on your behalf. I—do not be offended—would have you far, far from your enemies.” His eyes drifted, thoughtful. “I will fight, if I have to. But if I have to break another’s body, I deserve at least to feel his suffering in my own arm. I think the powerful would love less the fruits of violence if they had to deal it out by hand.”
I stared at him mutely.
Was this really the boy whose siblings teased and scoffed when he protested he didn’t pick fights? Would I ever learn what seeds he sowed that bloomed in bruises on his cheeks? His reputation was so at odds with what I saw that I doubted whether that other boy even existed.
“Lunchtime!” Anya called, rescuing us, as she always did. But I hardly had the energy to eat the food she passed around. Our conversation grew quiet as, one by one, we joined Fredrik in sleep.
I felt every second of the past two days when I woke up in the grass. I lay still, muscles miserably stiff. If I don’t move, maybe no one else will wake up.
But then I heard them.
“Do you think she likes it here?” Torden asked. I froze.
“How should I know?” asked Aleksei. “Do you like her?”
I strained my ears over the wind and the rustling trees, but Torden gave no answer. My heart stilled, disappointed.
I shouldn’t have been eavesdropping; Daddy always advised against it. Nothing good ever came of snooping, he insisted; people didn’t always mean what they said in front of others, and besides, others’ opinions of me were neither my business nor my problem.
But perhaps if I’d snooped a little more in England, I wouldn’t have been caught so off guard.
“Okay, okay,” Aleksei said. “Something easier. Do you think she’s attractive?”
“Of course,” said Torden. “Don’t you?”
Breathe normally.
“We aren’t talking about me. On a scale of one to ten, how attractive?” Aleksei prodded. “Do you think she’s as good- looking as Ida or Janne?”
Torden’s voice came out in a growl. “What is wrong with you?”
“I’m sorry.” Aleksei’s tone was placating. “I am trying to help you sort this out.”
“Ida is gorgeous, but she is such a gossip. It’s boring.” Torden sighed. “And I don’t care if Janne is pretty. She flirted with me for weeks before I realized she was just trying to get closer to Fredrik.”
“So?” Aleksei asked.
“Selah is very pretty,” said Torden. “Her eyes. Her freckles. Very . . . sweet.”
“Too sweet,” Aleksei said acidly.
Torden didn’t acknowledge this. “I don’t know what to do around her. I’m afraid I’m going to ruin her with my clumsy hands.”
There was a long moment of silence between them.
I wanted to reach out to Torden and tell him his hands were just fine. That I didn’t believe he’d hurt me, on purpose or through carelessness.
“I didn’t even notice she had freckles,” Aleksei said absently.
“I can’t stop noticing,” said Torden, and something flickered inside me. “On her nose.”
“Too wide, in my opinion. And so is her waist.”
I flinched.
“I like her waist just fine.” The tiny spark in my chest flared. Torden sounded lazy, sleepy.
“Ah. Speaking of,” Aleksei asked, “has anything . . . happened?”
“No!”
“You haven’t even kissed her?” Aleksei demanded.
“When?” Torden answered, now sounding annoyed. “In front of everyone at the ball? In the lake, with everyone around?”
“You’re the one who keeps telling her not to worry about who’s watching,” said Aleksei. “You walked her back last night. Could have done it then.”
“Anya and Skop beat me there.”
Aleksei’s tone shifted. “Really?”
“Just talking,” said Torden quickly. “Anya knows better. Knows what is expected of her.” He sighed again. “She’ll be married off and gone sooner than we would like, I am afraid.”
My heart sank at his words. Poor Skop.
Aleksei snickered. “Anyway, you’d better get moving before she falls for Fredrik and he swipes her, too.”
“
He wouldn’t.” But Torden sounded suspicious.
“Well, he might if you don’t do something,” retorted Aleksei. “Or she might, if she thinks you are not interested.” I thought of Fredrik turning green over breakfast and almost laughed aloud.
“I don’t want her to run!” Torden groaned. “What do I do?”
“You need to make sure your father lets us celebrate Midsummer’s Eve,” Aleksei insisted.
Torden paused. “After last year? Are you sure that is a good idea? Pappa has hardly—”
“Come on,” Aleksei wheedled. “You’ll get cozy at a bonfire, we’ll split up into the woods, you can sneak some of the imported Bordeaux out of the cellar—”
My eyes went wide.
“All right, all right,” Torden said unevenly. “Aleksei, I’m getting to know her, not trying to trap her.” He sounded as nervous as I felt, and somehow, that calmed me.
“So? You arrange your circumstances.” I couldn’t see Aleksei’s face, but I was sure he was rolling his eyes. “Set the right scene, set the right things in motion, and everything will work out the way you want.”
Torden sighed. “You really don’t think it’s a bad idea? Things are just beginning to calm down.”
“No. Trust me, brother,” Aleksei said smugly. “I’m looking out for you.”
44
Arranged or spontaneous, the next few days were bliss.
I felt at home walking the barley fields with the boys, comfortable by Torden’s side as he talked to the farmers and carefully checked the crop. And when he yanked off his shirt to straighten out a warped beam in a plow, I studied the grain below and the thatched houses all around with just as much care, my face heating as I caught glimpses of Torden’s fair, muscular back and straining arms.
Some days we rode or sailed. Cobie was never free, but Anya taught J.J. to walk and trot, and the Asgard boys taught me to fish for salmon and herring off Fredrik’s boat, Skídbladnir. I even found myself agreeing to come with Torden to watch the sun rise over the Bilröst. “It will be early, by necessity,” he said, baiting my hook and avoiding my eyes. “But it will be worth it.”
