by Anna Bright
I nodded, thinking of Torden’s gentle brother, pushing up his glasses as he worked uncomplainingly beside his father. How different he was from his roommates. “Poor Hermódr.”
Torden blew out a long breath. “All the drengs bunk four to a room. Pappa can’t make exceptions for us.”
In time, you will understand how things must be at Asgard.
I swallowed and looked away. Opposite the beds—two of them tidy, two complete disasters—their four desks were stacked with books and papers. One, probably Fredrik’s, was piled with notes in various brands of pretty female handwriting; another held a stack of letters signed Anya. I pretended not to notice them, a bit stunned Bragi would risk leaving them out—unless, of course, he wanted to establish among the drengs that she was off-limits. A third desk was nearly bare, with a map of Europe taped to the wall above.
“Aleksei’s.” Torden tipped his head at the almost-empty desk. He cleared his throat, gesturing to the fourth desk and the bunk I’d been sitting on. “And these are mine, of course.”
Torden had made his bed—not with hospital corners, but neatly enough. His sheets and blankets still hugged the spot where I’d been sitting. On his desk were a few books, an open notebook covered in neat handwriting, and several stacks of memos. I couldn’t read the Norsk reports or the notes he’d scrawled in their margins, but he’d clearly labored over them; his writing, so square in the little notebook, grew uneven and heavily punctuated between the lines of the official documents.
“Plans to renovate the old forge, training strategy updates from the valkyrja.” His scruffy chin grazed the hollow of my neck as he leaned over my shoulder, planting one palm on the desktop and spreading a few of the papers out for me.
“Who are the valkyrja?”
“My father’s top twelve generals. All women, by tradition. Don’t give away our secrets.” He gave my waist a squeeze.
I bit my lip, blushing despite myself. “Luckily for you, I don’t speak Norsk.” I pointed at the notebook covered in his handwriting. “What’s this?”
“My times and training progress.”
I laughed out loud, tipping my head back against his shoulder. It felt good to laugh, after such a long night. “You’re a man obsessed.”
He gathered me more snugly against him, and my stomach began tying itself in knots; his skin was warm against my back. “I’m disciplined,” he corrected me, grinning.
I cleared my throat. “I see that. You’re tidy, too—Fredrik and Bragi are pigs.” I picked up the notebook to try and make sense of his scrawled records.
“Wait—” Torden blurted, too late. A thick sheet of paper sailed from between its pages.
There I was, miserable fuchsia dress, gray velvet chair, blank expression. My portrait.
“This is me,” I said stupidly. Torden rolled one shoulder and scratched at his beard, his discomfort palpable.
“I, ah. I just—had that,” he offered. I waited for him to meet my eyes, but they darted anxiously to the far corner of the room.
I set down the notebook, cocking my head at him. “Why?”
“Why what?” He shifted nervously.
The evening had gone to pieces so quickly, I couldn’t help comparing it to the night I’d left England, hurt and humiliated. But the truth about Bear’s lies had turned my bones to ice, and their coming to light in public had left me raw.
Now, glancing between my portrait and Torden’s face, gone as red as his hair, I felt warmth unfurl in my chest.
And here, it was just the two of us.
Torden wasn’t Bear, and he wouldn’t hurt me.
I crossed my arms. “Don’t you see enough of me all day?”
Torden rubbed at a muscle in his neck. “You must understand, I have lived in the brakker since I was seven. Four boys in twenty square meters is all I know. Even when I told my father I’d court you, perhaps marry you—I could not comprehend it.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Being married?”
“Leaving my brothers, the dirty clothes, the bunk beds. The noise and fights in the corridor. Det er koselig. In its way.”
I cocked my head. “Koselig?”
“You might say cozy in English.” Torden frowned, apparently dissatisfied with the translation. “But it means—home. Simplicity. Warmth.” He glanced around, eyes affectionate, then uncertain. “I could not imagine sleeping in a quiet room, in a real bed, making a home with one person—a woman. But I’ve been trying.”
“Trying to imagine living with me.”
Torden nodded silently, winding his arms around my waist again. “I wondered what it would be like to live in a room that smelled like you instead of stinking soldiers. To wake up beside you in the morning.” One warm hand rubbed my lower back. Even through my shirt, his fingers burned my skin.
Down by the Bilröst, Torden had told me he saw that I was trying to be brave, to be open, to stretch, even when it frightened me. I realized now that he was doing the same thing.
When Torden looked at this room, he didn’t see sparse furnishings or gross boys; he saw his family. Marriage to me—a relationship apart from them—would be as strange for him as fitting in among the Asgard boys had been for me. In his own way, he’d been trying, too, the same as I had.
I wanted to kiss him well and thoroughly.
He cleared his throat. “You asked me once if I’d ever seen us side by side. The truth is, sometimes it is all I can think about.”
Pictures flooded my mind.
Torden coming into Valaskjálf for dinner, worn out but smiling, engulfing me in a hug. He’d want to hear about my day, and I’d listen to him talk about his.
Torden kissing me first thing in the morning before he left for his run, wide awake when I was still hazy with sleep.
Horseback riding and reading, training and lying in the sun doing nothing.
Special days and regular days. Anniversaries and children. A thousand other moments that would be perfect because we spent them together.
“That’s distracting.” His voice was uneven as he stilled my fingers against the carved planes of his chest. I’d been absently tracing the ink over his heart.
“Oh. Sorry.” But his ragged grin assured me he hadn’t minded much. I tapped my knuckles against the tattoo, shaped like a letter F with its arms broken. “Torden, what does this mean?”
“Ash,” he said. “It is Asgard’s rune. All our blood wear this over their hearts. And this”—he raised his left wrist, inked on the inside with a letter almost like an R—“is Reid. It means ride, the work and the journey of our lives.”
The tattoos were everything he held dear, everything that made him a mystery to me, everything I admired about him.
But they were also everything that tied him to this place. Everything that meant where I had to go, he could not follow; that he could never be mine.
My chest tightened.
I slid my palms to his shoulders, past two sets of tan lines to his wrists, and swiped my thumb across the soft skin there. “You make me want one, except I bet they hurt.” My voice was broken.
Torden took a pot of ink from his desk, face unreadable. “Can I?”
I nodded. His hands were gentle as he traced the skin over my hectic pulse with his little finger. I studied the shape, like a backward N. “What is it?”
“Sol. This rune means sun.” He lifted my wrist to blow on the ink, and goose bumps raced up my arm, my skin thrilling beneath his breath.
As long as you are mine, he had said, because I am yours.
Asgard was nothing like Potomac, could never be home to me.
But I was beginning to suspect Torden could be.
“Is it possible,” I asked, “that it’s only Friday?”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve known each other for nine days.” I thought of all the tick marks I’d added to the back page of my godmother’s book the night before, correcting my error born of distraction. “Is this too much, too soon?”
> “Everything feels more with so little time.” Torden gestured, as though either English or words in general failed him. “More. Faster. Sooner.”
I shook my head. “I wish we had more time.”
More time to make such a huge decision. More time to reconcile an immovable object and an unstoppable force. If he had to stay, and I had to go, was there a middle where we could meet?
“We have a few days to work it out.” Torden brushed a curl from my face. “Let’s take our time.”
He leaned forward and kissed me, slowly. I let my hands wander back up his arms and into his hair, let my mind drift into thoughtless bliss.
Pounding footsteps and rumbling male voices filled the hall. Their door swung open, and Aleksei stopped short in the entryway, stumbling forward as Bragi and Fredrik plowed into him. “Aleksei, don’t— Oh. Hei, Selah!” Bragi said. Hermódr loped in behind them.
We flew apart, faces flushed.
Fredrik grinned wanly. “Did we interrupt something?”
“Idiot.” Bragi punched Fredrik in the shoulder and pushed past Aleksei toward his desk. The word—the same in both our languages!—usually delighted me, but as Bragi swept Anya’s notes into a drawer, his regretful eyes sank my heart. I’d assumed Bragi and Fredrik were two peas in a pod, but where Anya’s brother simply chased women—any women—Bragi loved only Anya.
“What’s on your—” Aleksei seized my wrist and snorted, rolling his eyes.
I snatched my arm away. “What was that for?”
Aleksei held up his palms and turned away. “Nothing.”
I stalked after him. “What, Aleksei? What’s your problem now?” A few blond and brunet heads appeared in the doorway, drengs I didn’t know coming back from the bonfire.
Aleksei smirked. “There is no problem. I am only surprised at how quickly you got him housebroken.”
“Selah . . .” Torden laid a hand on my shoulder.
“You just got my friend kicked out,” I spat. “Skop is gone. Did you know that?”
Aleksei rolled his eyes. “I did you a favor. You thought Asgard was all happy days and handsome soldiers? I tried to tell you. But now you know the price of order here. Now you know who our father is and how far his sons will go to defend the ones they love. Exactly how far”—he glanced at Torden—“and no further.”
“Let’s not pretend any of this was about me.” I stared at Aleksei, my teeth clenched. “Or about anyone but you.”
You, and your father, and everything he refuses to give you.
This quest had humiliated me, crushed me, made me sob till I had no tears left. And I ached for Aleksei; I did. But I didn’t feel like crying now.
I closed the distance between us in one, two, three strides, stopping just beneath Aleksei’s pale, fine-boned chin. “Maybe you light fires for fun, or to get someone’s attention,” I hissed, “but consider this your warning to start them someplace else.”
As I stomped off toward the door, Aleksei mumbled something in Norsk. Bragi sucked a sharp breath through his teeth. The boys outside the room stiffened, expressions freezing.
I turned around in time to see Aleksei stumbling backward over a desk chair as Torden pounded toward him.
“Torden—” he stammered, pitch frantic over the crash of wooden furniture.
“Torden!” Fredrik threw himself forward, gripping his brother’s forearm before he could take a swing at Aleksei, who was backed against the far wall. Bragi seized Torden’s other wrist.
Glasses half sliding off his nose, Hermódr snatched their cowering brother up by the collar. “Take a walk, Aleksei,” he bellowed, shoving him toward the hallway.
“Why me?” Aleksei demanded. “Why am I always the one being thrown out?”
“Because you are the one who did this! Again!” Torden shouted. “Because Midsummer is for luck, and you turned it into ashes!”
The room was suddenly cold with silence, thick with stillness, crowded with boys who wouldn’t look at one another. It was so different from the heat of the moment before.
Again?
I frowned a little, glancing between them. Bragi. Hermódr. Fredrik. Torden. Aleksei.
When I met Aleksei’s eyes, he cocked his head, stalking near Torden again. “So you didn’t tell her,” he marveled. “You didn’t tell her. We’re still not talking about it.”
Torden said nothing. His brothers stayed silent.
I was choking on the quiet. “Somebody please say something.”
“Yes. Let’s defy all our Asgardian instincts and say what we’re really thinking.” Aleksei turned to me, spreading his arms out like a ringmaster. “It’s my fault,” he pronounced grandly. “I am the reason that Baldr is dead.”
I stared at him blankly, not comprehending. “But—but you said he fell.”
“He did,” Aleksei said. His mouth was a flat line, his tone almost philosophical. “He fell because he and Hodr were alone in the woods, and they tried to climb for mistletoe. Because they were alone, with no one to look after them. Because I told Baldr and Hodr that I had better things to do than watch them all night.”
I was as cold as a stone, standing in the midst of them. I half expected my breath to fog on the air.
“Aleksei,” I said cautiously. “It was an accident.”
He laughed, and the sound tore at the quiet in the room. “Selah, I already told you,” Aleksei said, bitter and earnest.
He had already told me—that night Alfödr had thrown him out of the ball.
Because you haven’t made a mistake yet and been forced to taste the consequences.
“Alfödr cannot afford to suffer fools,” Aleksei snarled softly. “And I’m the king of them all. And I’m still in his house, but I might as well be exiled with Hodr.”
52
The drengs outside muttered to one another as Aleksei straightened his clothes and shunted past them, looking shaken and furious.
When I faced him again, Torden’s hands were in fists, his expression fierce despite Fredrik’s hand on his shoulder and Bragi’s even, low tones. I suddenly felt childish, out of place in their barracks. “Should I go?”
Torden yanked his shirt off the laundry pile and pulled it back on. “No, wait. Please.” When he crossed to my side and kissed my temple, I nearly burst into tears.
Torden had been respectful of me, so restrained at first and then so steadily affectionate that I’d struggled to imagine him fighting, arriving in his father’s office with black eyes. I didn’t know what to make of this version of him. I didn’t know what to make of Torden’s fury, Aleksei’s bitterness and guilt.
Only his arm around my shoulder felt the same. Everything else felt wrong.
We left the brakker in silence and mounted the stairs. “What did he say?” I suddenly asked. “That made you so angry?”
“I would not repeat it in front of you if my life depended on it.”
“That bad?”
Torden’s eyes tightened. “Obscene.”
“Can’t you just—explain what he meant?” I asked uncertainly.
“No.”
“Torden, I’m a girl, not a porcelain figurine. More important things have come up tonight. And I’ll feel worse if you leave me in the dark about something your whole barracks heard.”
He took a long breath, leaning back against Anya’s door. “Aleksei asked if you’d traded your innocence for my manhood,” he finally said, “because I’d lost all my nerve and you’d found some.”
My skin crawled, and I looked away.
Torden put his palm against my cheek. “I have not implied that you’ve been in my bed,” he said, voice low but intent. “I don’t talk about women that way, least of all you, Selah.”
“Of course not. You would never.” I sagged.
He traced my cheekbones, brushing hair away from my face. “What’s wrong, elskede?”
“Everything is wrong,” I whispered. “You, fighting with Aleksei.” My heart felt shipwrecked, sunk somewhere around my gut.
“I’m always fighting with Aleksei,” Torden said, shaking his head.
“And this—impossibility—between us.” My eyes shut, then flew open. “I need to talk to my godmother.”
Torden frowned. “A letter would take weeks.”
“No,” I said quickly. “I have a radio.” Curiosity sparked in his eyes. “But it’s too small to act as a transmitter, unless there’s a radio tower somewhere close by.” I paused, swallowing hard. “I have to talk to her.”
He nodded, eyes focused, somewhere far off. “We’ll find a way.”
I swallowed hard. “Promise?”
“I said I’d never lie to you.”
His lips nudged my temple and my cheek before finding my mouth. We kissed each other like drowning swimmers dying for oxygen, his arms straining around me, my hands trapped in his hair.
But it wasn’t until I’d climbed into bed that I understood why I’d felt less passion than desperation in Torden’s kiss, that I understood why he’d held me so tightly in the hall outside my room. In the short time I’d known him, I’d never seen him this way.
He was afraid.
53
The others sensed that something was coming. I saw it more clearly with every frantic hour we spent together, riding and fishing and hiking and swimming, moving ceaselessly from dawn till dusk.
Aleksei skulked and avoided us, but J.J. and Cobie came along every day, J.J. basking in Anya’s affection, Cobie intimidating even the boys with her lap times across the fjord and earning shy smiles from Hermódr. She was unusually kind to me, either because she saw how sad I was at Skop’s absence or because, by now, the whole fortress knew what had happened after the bonfires.
But though no one could forget why Skop was gone, why Anya’s eyes were red all the time, what Aleksei had said about Torden and me, the silent war he’d finally spoken of aloud—the boys never brought it up. They left those conversations unsaid, I guessed, for the same reasons that they never talked about Hermódr struggling with their older brothers, about Bragi’s painful feelings for Anya, about Fredrik’s being twenty-three and refusing to take a single relationship seriously. About what had happened the summer before.
