The Beholder

by Anna Bright

  “Fur die Wildnis,” said Hansel. “We will be.”

  And then there was nothing.

  I pressed a hand to my temple. What on earth had I just overheard?

  Witches and woodcutters and languages I didn’t understand. None of it made any sense to me.

  And none of it concerns me, I reminded myself.

  I knew only one thing: I needed to get out of Europe. There was too much danger here. Too many unknowns.

  I needed to get home to Daddy, and to Potomac, where I’d be safe. Where Torden and I could make everyone safe.

  I reached for the radio, tweaking the dial until I found her frequency again. But when I finally whittled my way back to 3.44, Godmother Althea was gone.

  Anya never came back to her room. I lay on her bed alone, running my rosary through my fingers and turning over the strange conversation I’d heard, and went alone to meet her brothers by the stables.

  I found them waiting beneath a moon like a pearl and flickering lamps like a constellation of stars. Skop and Anya were nowhere to be seen, but Fredrik and Bragi were laughing as though nothing was wrong at all. Though I was glad at Fredrik’s return, their whooping and pushing and shoving sent a pang through me.

  I wondered again if Torden could bear to leave them, to live with me in Potomac. Would he be whole without them?

  I wanted to imagine the big brother he’d be to the little brother or sister Daddy and Alessandra had on the way. I wanted to imagine him by my side.

  But watching him play with his brothers like so many overgrown little boys on the hillside, I couldn’t even bring myself to ask.

  “Why so glum, sunshine?” called Bragi.

  I squinted at them, pounding the last few steps down the hill. “Pardon?”

  Torden grinned. “I think it fits.” He toyed with a bright streak in my hair before lifting me onto Gullfaxi. Aleksei smirked.

  Fredrik winked. “It’s because you’re so bright and happy.”

  “And because Torden looks at you like the rising sun,” Hermódr said, teasing.

  Bragi shook his head. “He’s useless till you come out in the morning.”

  Torden climbed into the saddle. I wrapped my arms around his waist and kissed the back of his shoulder. “And I’ll scorch his eyes out if he looks at me too long?” His laugh rippled through the muscles of his stomach, and I grinned, absurdly delighted.

  “Yes,” Aleksei drawled. “And he gets hot around you and you’ll eventually burn him.”

  “Aleksei!” Hermódr’s face wrinkled in distaste.

  Fredrik shook his head, frowning. Torden said nothing, but I felt him tense in my arms.

  Aleksei’s comment twisted in my ears as we rode to a clearing in the forest where thegns and drengs and heerthmen and noblewomen stood silhouetted by huge blossoms of flame. I spotted Huginn and Muninn immediately in their black cloaks, and a crowd surrounded the oldest Asgard boys, their shadows stretching out past the edge of the woods. A group of small boys trundled a wheel along the tree line to whoops from those watching. But as Torden helped me off Gullfaxi’s back, the night and the crowd suddenly pressed in on me, and I wished I could shrink into myself and disappear.

  “Don’t be nervous.” Torden’s beard rasped against my cheeks as he kissed my temple. “Come on. Tonight is going to be fun.”

  I nodded, and as he led me after his brothers through the reeking smoke, J.J. bounded over, grinning from ear to ear. “Hey! Selah! Hey, guys!”

  “You didn’t want to trundle the wheel with the other boys?” Torden rumpled the toboggan on his head, his smile a little regretful. “Or are you too old for that?”

  “I was too late. We almost didn’t come.” J.J. frowned at the protocol officer approaching us, with Lang close behind. “Sir Perrault doesn’t like to go outside.”

  “I wasn’t going to miss it.” Perrault eyed me keenly. He nodded at the nearest bonfire, belching noxious smoke. “Still, can you blame me? They’re burning garbage. And are those—bones?” His pretty lips curled in disgust.

  “To keep the dragons away,” Bragi called cheerfully. Hermódr rolled his eyes and laughed.

  Aleksei leaned close, voice conspiratorial but loud enough for everyone to hear. “The old wives’ tales say that dragons, ah, get excited in the summer.” He laced his fingers together. “When they come together in the air—”

  I clapped my hands over J.J.’s ears.

  Torden cut Aleksei off with a look. “The stench is to keep dragons away so they don’t poison the wells.”

  “I’m not a baby,” J.J. protested, squirming in my grasp.

  “I know, but you’re my favorite.” I hugged him impulsively, then let him escape.

  Lang laughed, clapping a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Girls like her will look different in a year or two, J.J.”

  Fredrik took a drink and cocked his head sharply. “You think so, Captain?”

  Lang coughed, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I only meant—”

  “We also pick mistletoe on Midsummer’s Eve,” Hermódr broke in. His eyes darted around behind his glasses, his smile looking oddly pasted on. “All the old stories say that if it is cut without an iron tool and doesn’t touch the ground, mistletoe picked on the full moon can heal and keep harm away.”

  Aleksei tipped his chin at Torden and me, eyes innocent. “It helps couples make babies, too—I’d be careful.”

  This time, it was Perrault who clapped his hands over J.J.’s ears.

  “Enough,” Hermódr bellowed, the only one of the boys to answer in English, and probably the only one not swearing up a storm.

  Lang’s jaw hung slack. We’d hardly spoken since the first ball. But as he took in Torden and me—his tensed arm around my waist, me curled against his side—an odd pang of guilt rang through me.

  I jutted a thumb over my shoulder toward the woods and glanced up at Torden. “Should we—?”

  “Yes.” Torden nodded firmly. He threw another annoyed glance at Aleksei as we left the fires behind.

  48

  At first, our search turned up only bare branches and the sounds of laughter and bodies crashing through the brush. “The mistletoe near the bonfires will have been gathered up quickly,” Torden said, gently thumbing my knuckles. “We’ll have to search further in.”

  Fewer and fewer people crossed our path as we walked on. Soon the only noises were our boots in the undergrowth and the creak of the lamp in Torden’s hand, its light sweeping the boughs of oaks and pear trees.

  “There!” I suddenly whispered. From a clump of green overhead, white berries shone like moonstones in the dark.

  Torden grinned. “Good eye. Here, take this.” He passed me the lamp and fit his boot into a cleft in the tree trunk, gripping a pair of low branches.

  “What are you doing?”

  He twisted to look at me. “How did you expect we would get the mistletoe down?”

  “I don’t know. Not like that.” I wrung my hands. “Just be careful.”

  Torden’s back and shoulders worked beneath his sleeves, pulling him easily from branch to branch. “Selah, I begin to suspect you consider most of my hobbies dangerous.” There was no mistaking the laugh in his voice.

  I crossed my arms as well as I could while holding the lamp. “Like what?”

  “Like climbing trees with knives in my belt.” I caught a flash of bronze and the snap of stems as he cut the mistletoe where it clung to the old oak. “But you can’t fuss over me. I insist on that rule if we get married.”

  I bit my lip, fighting a smile. “Can I suggest others?”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as . . . no dead animals in our personal spaces?” I asked. “Time set aside just for reading?”

  “More books and no taxidermy in our bedroom? I’ll consider it.” Something in my chest flared at the phrase our bedroom.

  Torden dropped the last five feet from the tree and hit the ground with a thud. I started forward before drawing myself up. “Oh—
sorry, I forgot. No fretting.” I leaned against a tree, setting the lamp down to examine my cuticles.

  He stood slowly, a mischievous grin playing around his mouth. “I said no worrying when I go away. I didn’t say you couldn’t be happy to see me when I got back.”

  Torden sidled over, square jaw, square shoulders, scruffy red beard—so handsome it made me foolish. I scrambled for a reply. “You know, it’s funny, mistletoe in the summer,” I blurted out. “I only remember it at Christmastime.”

  Something flickered in his gaze. “We hang it all over Asgard. Do you use it in Potomac?”

  “Yes.” I twisted my fingers, my voice sounding very small. “If someone catches you underneath it, you’re supposed to kiss them.”

  “We do the same.”

  I stilled as he approached, panting a little from his drop, lamplight glinting on his hair and in his eyes.

  Torden tugged the mistletoe from his shirt pocket. As he dangled it overhead, his free arm snaked around my waist and he bent to kiss me. I was so dazed from his mouth against mine and his hand cupping my face that I hardly noticed the mistletoe slip from his grasp and fall to the ground.

  “Any excuse to kiss you, or none,” he said, voice husky against my lips. “Christmas or Midsummer, under the mistletoe or at a church altar or somewhere alone in the dark. As long as you are mine, elskede, because I am yours.”

  His mouth was a bonfire that set my skin aglow. As Torden kissed me, warm and relentless, I wondered if it were possible for two people to fall in real love as quickly as we had thrust our hearts at one another.

  I wanted it to be. I wanted to keep his red-blooded heart, rough and strange and good as it was. And I wanted him to keep mine safe for me.

  Torden held me, and we held the dark between us until we heard the crack of twigs nearby. He glanced up, arms taut around me.

  “What is—”

  “Shh.” Torden’s jaw grazed my temple, breath tense against my cheek. “I don’t—oh.” He suddenly relaxed. I followed his gaze to Aleksei, standing beneath a scraggly dead tree a few yards away.

  “Aleksei!” Torden’s embarrassed laugh shook me. “No mistletoe around here. Keep walking.” I buried my face in his chest, smiling.

  But his brother didn’t answer his good-natured grin in kind. “Dronning Rihttá is asking for you.”

  Torden cleared his throat and cut his eyes at me. “Right now?”

  “Look, she needs you, all right?”

  I winced. Aleksei’s tone was caustic.

  I shivered at Torden’s sigh in my ear. “This is a difficult night for my mother. I need to make sure she is all right. But I meant what I said.” He bent his forehead to mine and kissed me again, lips certain, lingering. “I’ll come to you later tonight. We have more to say.”

  I nodded, knowing full well my heart was in my eyes, not caring if I looked foolish.

  I knew what I wanted. I wanted Torden to propose to me, to take him home to meet my father, to show him the place that I loved. To love him as long as I lived. If only he’d ask.

  “Finished?” Aleksei’s arms were crossed, one long, skinny leg jiggling impatiently.

  “She’s back at the fortress?” Torden asked. The other boy nodded wordlessly. “See that Selah gets back to the bonfires, would you?”

  Aleksei bobbed, rolling his eyes. “Would you just get going?”

  Torden gave my hand a squeeze before he took off through the woods. I watched him jog off, feeling forlorn.

  Aleksei sized me up. “So.” He barked a short, humorless laugh.

  “So.” I stuffed my hands in my pockets, ignoring the edge in his tone. “Why did Dronning Rihttá need Torden?”

  Aleksei picked up the lamp. His hair was black as pitch, his skin ghostly white beneath its glow. “Selah, you’ve heard Baldr’s and Hodr’s names whispered here and there since you arrived.”

  Disquiet unfurled in my stomach, like blood twisting faintly in water. “Yes. They passed away last year, didn’t they?”

  “Yes and no,” Aleksei said. “Baldr died last Midsummer’s Eve in a horrible accident.”

  “He died a year ago—today?” I stared at him openmouthed, stumbling over a fallen log, my words faltering as my feet did. “And you pushed the king and queen to throw a party?”

  Aleksei’s voice was sharp. “People expected it. Tradition is important. Keeping up morale is important.”

  “Dronning Rihttá and her son are important,” I said, my voice likewise carrying the hint of a barb. I shook my head. “H-how did it happen? Where’s her other son?”

  “Baldr and Hodr always wanted to look for mistletoe on Midsummer’s Eve. They said the wheel trundling was for kids,” Aleksei said. “Hodr was a skinny, clinging little thing. Idolized Torden and Fredrik. Baldr would wake up screaming and sweating and thrashing around from nightmares. He worried Dronning Rihttá, so she tried to keep Baldr close, protect him,” said Aleksei. “But what twelve-year-old can endure that?”

  A bush off the path covered in thorns dug at my skin. I winced, swiping at the blood that rose on my forearm. “And?” I asked, feeling sick.

  Aleksei wet his lips. His eyes were liquid in the dark. “They took off on their own last year when no one was watching,” he finally said. “Baldr probably fell twenty feet out of that pear tree. Hodr didn’t know what to do.”

  My lungs turned to stone. “They were out in the forest alone?”

  Aleksei ignored me. “Hodr couldn’t see very well during the day, but at night he was totally blind. He heard something hit the ground, and he knew something was wrong when Baldr didn’t answer him.”

  My shoe caught on a rock, and I stifled a gasp. Aleksei seemed not to notice.

  “Baldr was dead before we found him. Hodr had screamed himself into hysterics.”

  We were walking so quickly I’d begun to sweat, but ice skulked over my skin.

  “It was tragic,” Aleksei said. “Baldr was a beautiful child, with black hair like Dronning Rihttá’s and a face like a cherub’s. No one in Asgard would have ever done him any harm. The tsarytsya herself came for his wake.”

  The tsarytsya. In Asgard. Anxiety jolted so sharply through me I felt it in my teeth. I closed my eyes and took a breath.

  “And . . . what happened to Hodr?” I asked.

  “He was sent away.”

  “What?” I blurted. “Where?”

  “A monastery, somewhere in Iceland.” Aleksei shrugged.

  I shook my head, stomach churning. “But he was a child. It was an accident.”

  “Hodr wasn’t a child. He was fourteen. He knew his vision was impaired in the dark.” Aleksei’s sidelong glance dragged a shiver up my spine, and his voice grew hard. “Alfödr cannot afford to suffer fools.”

  I stared, his hideous words scraping goose bumps over my skin. Fourteen made a child, whatever Asgard thought.

  Perhaps it didn’t matter to Aleksei. He hadn’t been allowed to be a child for a very long time.

  “Baldr had been the one to keep peace between us brothers, the reason Týr and Vidarr and Váli could accept their father’s marriage to another woman,” said Aleksei. “But the kongen could hardly look at Hodr after he died.”

  Horror trickled into my stomach like cold water. Dronning Rihttá hadn’t been watching J.J. because he reminded her of her dead son. He reminded her of the living child who had been ripped from her arms.

  It may have been Midsummer, but I was suddenly freezing.

  I stopped short, limbs trembling, as Aleksei walked on. “I want to go find Torden.”

  “Torden’s inside,” he said, irritated, not turning. In the bobbing lamplight, the nose and teeth of his wolf tattoo snarled above his shirt neck. “I’m supposed to take you back to the bonfires.”

  My pitch and my pulse spiked. “No. I want to go find him now.”

  “Fine.” Aleksei pointed in the direction Torden had jogged earlier. “The fortress is that way.”

  Panic gripped me by the throat.
“I can’t get there alone in the dark.”

  Aleksei held the lamp out to me without a word.

  49

  Our ride to the woods had been brief. It took much longer to reach Asgard’s gates on foot.

  As I stole through the night, jumping at the cries of owls and the croaks of ravens, at the snap of every twig beneath my own feet, Aleksei’s story took form in my mind.

  Baldr lying dead on the forest floor, his delicate bones broken.

  Hodr, blind and alone and shrieking into the dark.

  Dronning Rihttá gathering her limp child’s body into her lap, anguish and loss clawing at her skin.

  Dronning Rihttá, stripped of a son who had died and of a son who had not.

  How had it happened? How had two boys who stuck so close to their older brothers sneaked into the dark where there was no one to keep them safe? How had they found themselves alone in this place where no one was ever alone?

  Nausea hit me in waves. I ran panting inside the fortress, grateful for light and dying for company. But tonight, Valaskjálf’s cheerful roar was replaced with one angry, echoing voice.

  I skidded to a stop outside the great hall’s doors and hid, watching.

  They’d clustered into three camps inside, like three little armies in a standoff. The first centered around Skop, looking sick and pale beneath his light brown complexion. At his sides, Lang and Perrault were a shifting mass of restless glances and muttered words.

  Anya stood inside the second camp, encircled protectively by her brothers. The Asgard boys’ arms were clasped behind their backs, their cheeks pale, their eyes trained on the ground.

  At the head of the third camp towered Konge Alfödr, eye blazing like the bonfires outside, flanked by Rihttá and his eldest sons. Huginn and Muninn circled the scene, cloaks flapping, eyes sharp.

  “Koniag, you had no right,” shouted Alfödr, stabbing a finger at Skop. “No right!”

  “And you!” said Dronning Rihttá, arms outstretched to Anya. Her tone was considerably calmer than her husband’s, but she was visibly upset. “Haven’t we taught you better than this?”

  “Nothing happened!” Anya choked. “I did not plan this—to fall in love.”