“Yotne-born, but he’s lived at Asgard since he was seven. His father was the tsarytsya’s ambassador to Norge until he died.”

“And he stayed here after?” I asked.

Anya frowned, dropping her gaze. “In the Imperiya, few parents raise their children at all; the tsarytsya claims and fosters most of them, some in her very house. Alfödr didn’t want to send Aleksei back to her, so he adopted him—Fredrik and me, too.”

“That was kind of him.”

Anya nodded. “Aleksei had lived in Asgard for several years by then. Who knows what he had learned about Norge in that time?” She shrugged. “Alfödr was kind to adopt him, but it was a strategic decision, as well.”

I nodded, fiddling with a pair of pajamas. Thoughts of the tsarytsya made my stomach tight with anxiety; but Torden and the others had seemed at dinner to look on Aleksei more as an endearing annoyance than anyone dangerous, or even upsetting.

How must it be to have your enemy’s son for a brother?

But if Aleksei hadn’t lived in the Imperiya since he was a boy, surely that made him more a son of Asgard than a son of Yotunkheym.

I glanced back at Anya, passing her another dress. She hung it. “So you just live here like brothers and sisters?”

Anya bobbed her head side to side, as if she were thinking. Her eyes and her smile were so bright, I almost didn’t notice the way she tugged at her gold necklace as she cleared her throat. “Something like that.”

She was asleep when the transmission came.

Anya’s breathing had long gone steady beside me when I heard my godmother’s voice, muffled through the leather covers of the book and the trunk around it.

Hey there, sweet girl. I hope you can hear me; I just got back from services.

I crept silently out of the bed and sat on the floor to listen as Godmother Althea made quiet, one-sided conversation, as though I were a sick or elderly relative, too tired or confused to respond. My failure to reply didn’t matter; she was simply keeping company with someone she thought might be lonely.

So on and on she rambled, about how the lector had lost his place during a reading, about the flowers they’d arranged on the altar that week.

It was almost as good as being at home.

They, ah, brought a wheelchair along for your daddy this past Sunday, Godmother added. Just in case. They do that a lot now. My throat tightened.

Did Torden and his brothers know how lucky they were, to know only their father’s strength and power? To know he would always be there, would never fail to protect them?

But he’s carrying on, sweet girl, she added. I hope you are, too.

I am, I thought at her, wishing she could hear me. And I will.

39