The Beholder

by Anna Bright

  We are not supposed to be too private, he’d said. But here we were on the edge of the water, alone, far from his brothers and sister and my friends. My hands shook as we clambered across the roots that snaked into the fjord and settled into a wide fork.

  Torden Asgard, fifth of Alfödr’s sons, the boy with his arm around my shoulders. Could I have known, reading his profile aboard the Beholder, how his very nearness would sear my skin, wreck my pulse, blur my focus?

  “Torden, why am I here with you, and not one of your brothers?”

  I’d blurted out the question without thinking.

  “Would you rather be here with someone else?” he asked. He shifted away, his stare so raw and frayed at the edges that I wondered if he was remembering Aleksei’s warning not to let Fredrik too near me.

  “No. It’s just—” I shook my head, mouth going dry as I clawed for words. Torden stretched out his legs, studied his pale, muscled hands, suddenly seeming far away.

  Can I trust Torden with the truth?

  He’d trusted me with his.

  “I haven’t told you much about my home,” I began. “Yours is so different, I was afraid you wouldn’t understand.”

  Torden’s eyes were wary. “What do you mean?”

  “My father’s unwell, and my stepmother wishes I weren’t part of her family. All my suitors were first sons—boys in line for their own thrones.” I cleared my throat. “You were the only exception to that rule.”

  Understanding dawned on his face. “And all my brothers are unmarried, so . . .”

  “So I’m wondering,” I said softly, “how I was lucky enough to be invited to visit you, of all the Asgard boys, instead of Týr.”

  Torden swallowed hard. The pink light blooming faintly on the horizon colored his face rosy and hopeful. “You once told me that you would listen if I told stories,” he said, arm circling my shoulders again. “Does that promise still stand?”

  “Of course.”

  “All of it?” he pressed. “You have to hear the ending, if I begin.”

  “I will.” I squeezed his hand. “I promise.”

  Torden leaned back into the fork and looked off over the Bilröst. “There once was a boy who feared for the fate of a girl who did not even know his name.” He paused. “The boy hadn’t intended to involve himself at all. In fact, his father intended her for his eldest son.”

  I glanced up at him, and his beard grazed my forehead. “Then how did it happen?”

  “How do these things ever happen?” Torden shrugged. Banners of orange unfurled over the horizon, the promise of warmth and daylight. “He was enchanted.”

  My soft, red heart began to riot beneath my skin.

  “I’d been brawling with Vidarr again, more of his—never mind.” Torden flexed his fingers, their nails bitten short. “But I had come bruised to Pappa’s study so many times it hardly mattered. He didn’t even pause his meeting with Týr when I came in.”

  I tried to imagine Daddy summoning me to issue a scolding and couldn’t. Certainly, I’d disappointed him through the years. But he’d always come to me afterward—to talk, to discipline me if the situation required. And then, always, to forgive.

  How my heart ached for him.

  “My oldest brother has been focused solely on learning warfare for as long as I can remember,” said Torden. “When Týr has a spare thought, it is for food. Or drink. But he is twenty- six. My father has been insisting he choose a wife for years, but he could never be bothered. Until one day, when a portrait arrived from across the ocean.”

  I gave a shiver, either from his words or the chill of the rock underneath us. Torden snuggled me against his side. “I stood in my father’s study, waiting for my turn—for my reprimand—as he pressed Týr. The girl was beautiful, Pappa said. Old enough to be married, young enough to have many children. It would be simple.

  “I’m not a curious man by nature,” he mused. “But when neither of them was paying attention, I looked at the file on his desk. And there you were.”

  Torden shook his head. “You had on that pink dress, pretty enough to sway my brother. I could hardly read your information, because I was trying to be—subtle. But what I could read concerned me.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek. “What?”

  “Huginn and Muninn had done extra research,” he said quietly. “Your official biography was marked with their notes—‘quiet,’ ‘withdrawn,’ ‘bookish.’ Their interpretation of what their contacts reported.”

  Shots of white and gold rang through the sky. I grew very still at his side.

  Torden’s voice was a low rumble when he spoke again. “I told myself it was nothing more than chivalry. You would lose the chance to be queen, but I could not watch a gentle, unsuspecting girl be crushed under the weight of Týr’s thoughtlessness.”

  I remembered his older brother that first night at dinner, shouting and shoveling food into his mouth. I could never have reciprocated his feelings—if he’d managed to produce any.

  “Pappa had almost convinced Týr—after all, he might never find a wife so easily again. He was nearly ready to move forward.”

  Move forward. As though I were a village to attack and the oldest Asgard brother were organizing troops. “So what happened?”

  Torden wet his lips. “I asked Pappa to let it be me, instead.”

  A pause. My voice wobbled treasonously. “What?”

  “I asked Týr to defer to me,” Torden said. “Potomac was furious, because plans had already begun, but in the end, they conceded.”

  In the end, I thought, it had mattered most to Alessandra that I go.

  “The visit might end in nothing, but I hoped at least to spare you two hideous weeks with Týr. He is not very inclined to marry, so he agreed. Pappa just looked at my black eye and said that maybe a woman would do me some good.” Torden cracked a grin.

  My humorless laugh echoed off the rocks as I shifted away from him. “I guess it’s lucky for Týr and me that you felt sorry for me.”

  “Stop,” Torden said evenly. “Wait for the end. You promised.” His arms didn’t restrain me, but his tone held me fast.

  “Fine.” I avoided his eyes, choking on confusion and embarrassment. “Finish.”

  “I called it chivalry in the beginning because I didn’t know any better,” he said. “I didn’t know how it would be.”

  “How what would be?”

  “How everything would change when you arrived,” he said heatedly. Torden scrubbed a hand through his hair, gleaming red gold in the sunrise. “Your portrait was a weak still life. But when I saw you face-to-face . . .” He shook his head. “It was all over for me.”

  The sun stole over the horizon, stretching across the water, and Torden dragged in a breath as though he were coming up for air. “I never needed anyone before. Not me, on my own,” he said quietly. “I had my brothers, my kingdom. But you told me that first day you would listen to me. You let me lean on you, and not because you had to.”

  My blood stuttered, but I held my silence, fearful to speak and break the spell.

  “You’ve been hurt,” he said. “And we seem nothing alike.”

  “We are nothing alike.”

  “That isn’t true.”

  I breathed a mirthless laugh. “Have you looked at us side by side?”

  My pulse was the brittle tick of an old clock. But there they were—the words I’d dreaded saying, the truth I couldn’t avoid when I remembered my stepmother’s criticism.

  Boys like Peter. Boys like Torden.

  I realized I’d been waiting for this moment, this inevitable point when he would look at me—soft, scared, unremarkable—and see that he could do better.

  Torden was a tempest on the edge of the dawn, a self-contained thunderstorm as he gripped me gently by the elbows and forced my eyes to his. “The things we like are different. The things we love are the same.”

  A strangled noise escaped me. “What does that mean?”

  “Courage is
the heart of me,” he said. “The thing I pray to be. And I see it in you. It’s in your eyes every time you tell me something you are afraid to say or try something you are afraid to do.” He took a breath. “You are so brave, Selah, and so beautiful, and I want you beside me always. I will keep you safe, and you will be my home.”

  Torden shifted around me, curving my body against his, and I found myself sheltered beneath his arm. “I have seen how we look side by side,” he whispered into my ear, “and it has changed how I imagine my life. With you, I see a wider world.”

  I forgot how to breathe as he ran a thumb over my cheekbone. “Would it work?” My voice was desperate. “Could it possibly?”

  “Who can say? But I am not afraid to try.” Torden pressed my palm to the hammering in his chest, voice growing fierce. “My heart is not a liar.”

  “Mine’s beating just as hard,” I whispered, laughing weakly. Torden smiled and leaned his forehead against mine.

  “It will not be easy, but we could build something good together. Something that would endure.”

  Something that could save Potomac. And Daddy.

  My heart rose.

  The sun made its way over the horizon, its advent coloring the Bilröst and the cliffs and Torden’s face warm with light.

  Through this whole affair, I’d been yanked like a marionette from one place to the next. I’d left Potomac on my stepmother’s orders. Bear had deceived me. Even as I believed I was making my own decisions in England—following my heart, taking risks when I dared—I was merely reacting to circumstances tailored to control me.

  Torden, my only suitor not set to inherit a throne, had felt like a foregone conclusion before I met him.

  I’d thought I had no choice. But Torden had chosen me.

  He had given me the truth. He was offering me himself. And that meant everything. It changed everything.

  Something molten and glowing crystallized inside me, in my chest or my guts, and I wasn’t scared, for once, to do what I wanted to do. I took Torden’s face in my hands, brushing his hair from his forehead. His wonderstruck eyes held mine only a moment before I stretched forward and kissed him on the mouth.

  Dawn over the Bilröst was rosy and mild, but our kiss was thunder and lightning, burning my body. And in that instant, I didn’t feel even the faintest trace of fear. I could have fought Alessandra, scaled Yggdrasil clear to the foot of Asgard, tied myself to the prow of the Beholder with my arms outstretched and dared the wine-dark sea to defy me.

  Torden lifted me easily onto his lap, gathering me in. I was awkward at first, out of sync, but his lips were so steady, his hands so certain as he slid his fingers into my hair, that I fell into his rhythm.

  When we drew apart, flushed and smiling uncertainly, I shook my head. “That was . . .”

  “Beautiful.” Torden glanced down at me, panting. “You’re beautiful.”

  Shaking, I kissed him once more, softly this time, and leaned my head against his chest. “I’m glad you chose me,” I said. “I’m so glad it was you.”

  “I may have chosen you, but I hardly had any choice in the matter,” Torden said into my hair. “It was clear as day to me from the beginning that you were the one.”

  My heart ached with the rightness of his arms around me, of his voice in my ear and his hands in my hands.

  He was my rescue. And together, we’d save my father.

  As the sun climbed over the water, I knew with as much conviction as I’d ever felt that I belonged with Torden, and he belonged with me.

  47

  Our kisses and our confessions opened a floodgate.

  I told Torden about my momma, about my godmother and Daddy and Potomac. He told me about growing up at Asgard, about visiting his uncle Heimdalr, who guarded the mouth of the Bilröst, about life before and then after Anya and Fredrik and Aleksei came along. He even told me about the scuffles he still insisted weren’t his fault. “They insulted our mother!” he’d protest, or swear he was only backing up his brothers.

  I held up my palms. “I’ve never had the urge to hit anyone.”

  Bragi laughed at this. “Marry him and you’ll come to know the feeling.”

  We only held hands in front of his brothers—and that alone was enough to invite their mockery. But when the others weren’t looking, he’d catch me around the waist and kiss me until I was dizzy, upright only because of the constant echo of his heartbeat in my chest and his arms around me.

  When the konge announced that Midsummer’s Eve would be celebrated on Friday, two days thence, Hermódr, Bragi, and Aleksei became more cheerful and boisterous than ever. We passed two more perfect days together, tromping through the woods and the barley fields, riding and practicing swordplay and archery until my arms ached. The afternoon of the bonfire we sailed across the fjord just to play in a waterfall. Torden never let go of me as we shouted and splashed beneath the rainbows that rose through the mist, Fredrik and Anya and Skop the only missing pieces to our happiness.

  We finally rode back to the fortress when the sun got low, the wind so strong at our backs that it whipped my hair out of its pins. I was next to last to return, faster only than Aleksei, who wasn’t trying, but my legs didn’t wobble when I jumped off Skeithbrimir’s back to let Hermódr and Bragi and Aleksei lead our mounts into the stables.

  Torden sidled near, eyes narrowed in the fading daylight. “Are you excited for tonight?”

  “Mm-hmm.” I nodded, pinching my lips around my hairpins while I looped my hair into a tidy knot.

  He wound his arms around my waist, grinning mischievously. “You open yourself to attack when you raise both arms at once.” His voice was low, his nose and lips nuzzling my ear. “Your sides are defenseless.”

  Euphoria clouded my brain. I tripped over my own feet, incoherent, and gave a shivering laugh. All of me is defenseless.

  “You aren’t a threat to me,” I murmured. I let my hair fall, resting my hands on his chest.

  “No. Never to you.” When he pulled me onto my tiptoes, my hairpins fell from my lips, lost forever as he lowered his mouth to mine and I melted like snow in the late-afternoon sun.

  A wolf whistle startled us apart. “We were gone for less than a minute!” Hermódr protested, tumbling out of the stables ahead of an elated Bragi and a gaping Aleksei.

  “What was your hurry?” Torden called back, grinning. My cheeks grew hot; I couldn’t quite meet anyone’s eyes but his.

  I adore you, I wanted to tell him. I’d kiss you in front of them or anyone else and not care at all.

  I’d told Torden all about my godmother. Suddenly, more than anything, I wished I could tell Godmother Althea all about him.

  I cleared my throat. “I should go check on Anya.” I gave him a featherweight kiss and backed away, resuming my efforts with my hair. “See you tonight.”

  Torden scrubbed at his beard and shook his head, casting about for words, as hazy from our proximity as I was. “See you tonight!” he finally yelled back.

  As I turned toward the fortress, the boys burst out behind me, jubilant beneath their mockery. Just once I looked behind me on the scene I’d left: Aleksei was smirking, but Hermódr and Bragi slapped Torden on the back and jabbed earnest fingers at his chest, arms slung around his shoulders. Torden was triumphant, face brighter than the sky overhead.

  I bit my lip, thrilled. Stupid. Happier than anyone had a right to be.

  Anya wasn’t in her room when I got back.

  Nerves surging, I unearthed Godmother Althea’s book from my trunk and turned to lock the door. Except it didn’t have a lock.

  “This place,” I groaned. I flung the book on Anya’s bed.

  My godmother’s voice filled the empty room.

  Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.

  I froze, choking back a laugh or a tiny sob. How many times had we said prayers together? I scrabbled for my rosary, fumbling past the book’s pages as if my godmother herself were trapped in its binding.

&nbs
p; Hail Mary, full of grace.

  Free of its hiding place, I let the radio carry her voice to me from an ocean away, carry the prayers that were my roots and bones, wishing she could hear my voice join with hers. One by one, the beads slid across my fingers.

  With the book flopped open before me, the little rows of hash marks on the endpaper caught my eye. I’d forgotten to keep count the last couple of days. Guilt soured in my stomach as my godmother continued to pray.

  Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.

  Yggdrasil began to rustle in a stiff breeze outside Anya’s window, and I hurried to turn up the radio over its noise. But instead of growing louder, suddenly, my godmother’s voice disappeared.

  “No,” I blurted, almost a whimper. I lunged for the radio and found I’d adjusted the frequency, not the volume. “No, no, no.” I fiddled with the knob, trying to find Althea again, but only a hissing sound came from its mouth.

  I gave the dial one more frustrated twist, and the scratching stopped. But my godmother wasn’t speaking.

  “Gretel,” said a man’s voice. “Gretel, this is Hansel. Can you hear me?” His accent was square-sounding, somehow, sheared of its end rs, as if he were English, but he pronounced his ths like zs.

  There was silence.

  “Gretel?”

  “Hansel,” said a woman. “We’re here. We’ve considered your invitation, and we accept.”

  “Burg Cats?” asked the man—Hansel, I supposed. “Or Burg Rhein—”

  “Hansel, stoy! Ty s uma soshol? Are you crazy?” Gretel demanded. Her voice was sweet and high-pitched, all soft consonants and swelling vowels, but her words were sharp. “Anyone could be listening.”

  “Fine. The witch’s cottage, or the woodcutter’s?” Hansel snapped. I noticed he pronounced his ws like vs. “Tell me quickly.”

  “The woodcutter’s cottage. My people won’t be going anywhere near your father.”

  “Very well,” Hansel said. “When?”

  “Tomorrow. Fur die Freiheit.”