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.