But what took my breath away was the tree. Arbor Hall was a cloistered forest, but Yggdrasil’s trunk was part of the fortress itself, its branches and leaves spreading higher than the highest chimney rising from its slate roof. Fitted snugly between the summit of Mount Kjerag and the great tree, Asgard was a stern, proud thing, both airy and solid on the precipice overlooking the fjord. Guards waved us through the forbidding gates, and I climbed down after my friends, openmouthed and still as they began to unload our carts.

“Now? Right now?” came Perrault’s voice, irritated. The guard at his side nodded, authoritative.

“What’s going on?” Lang asked, approaching the guard.

Cobie hopped down from her wagon to join him, nimble as a cat.

Lang turned to me. “We’ve been summoned to meet Konge Alfödr in Valaskjálf, the great hall, immediately.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

Perrault pursed his lips, pretty face tense, as if our being beckoned so abruptly had thrown him off-balance.

I had no time to prepare—and no time to fret over it. “It’s fine.” I nodded tightly at the guard and the fortress’s broad front doors. “Lead on.”

Loud laughter and boisterous conversation rang down the fortress’s corridors as we followed our guide toward Valaskjálf, dodging and darting out of the paths of large, broad-shouldered strangers. I slid my trembling fingers over the rosary in my pocket and thought of the suitors’ files I’d studied so many times.

Prins Torden of Asgard was the only one not set to inherit his throne, the loophole in Alessandra’s plan.

He was my only chance if I hoped to meet my stepmother and the Council’s demands and return home with a fiancé.

He was my only chance if I hoped to avoid the Imperiya.

I was jostled out of concentration as a half-dozen or so unruly boys and a girl pushed past us. To a one, they were good-looking and tall—I hardly reached the shoulder of the boy with glasses who apologized as he knocked into Perrault—and most of them were broad and blond. But one boy was fine-boned and narrow-shouldered with a shock of dark hair, and another was redheaded with the coppery scruff of a beard on his chin. I squeezed out of the way as they hurried on, feeling my pink cardigan snag on the corridor’s stone wall. But somehow I caught his eye.

I stopped short, and so did he—the redheaded boy, his jaw tense, raw shock burning in his gaze. The remnants of a greenish-yellow bruise brooded over his left cheekbone.

I knew him on sight.

Halfway down the hall, the pack of boys and the girl halted at a word from the black-haired boy. He held up a hand to them, studying me through narrowed eyes.