He grinned. “Not bad. Ah, let’s widen your stance.” I flushed as Torden braced my hips and hooked his boot around my ankle to drag my right foot a few inches. “And . . . straighten the wrist, rotate the front elbow . . .” He adjusted my arms and hands with gentle fingers, rose-gold eyelashes glinting inches away in the morning sun.

A tremulous laugh escaped my lips. “You aren’t going to break me.”

“I might,” he said quietly.

I gulped and cast a nervous glance at his brothers.

Torden put a hand on my shoulder. “They’re not paying attention. And if they were, they would be rooting for you.”

He cared so much for them. Fleetingly, I wondered again how I’d ever ask him to leave them all behind.

I pushed the thought aside and released my arrow with a shaky breath. It hit the ground ten feet short of the target.

“Here, try again.” Torden passed me another arrow. When it flew three feet wide of the wooden circle, he handed me another one, and then another. The third passed within a foot of the target, but the fourth and ninth and twelfth bounced off its painted edge. The thirteenth arrow stuck.

Torden grinned, stretching so his sleeves strained over his shoulders. “Good! Again.” He held out a fourteenth arrow.

It hit an inch inside my previous mark. “Again.”

The muscles behind my shoulders and above my elbows were quivering before Torden strode over to examine my target, now studded with eight arrows. “Selah, I think you’ve found your game,” he called, sounding pleased. I shrugged modestly, but I was thrilled.

Marvelous, I imagined Perrault cheering. A proposal, no doubt about it.

I needed Torden to propose. I was making my own way, as Perrault had said to do. Riding. Fighting. Verbally sparring with sarcastic boys.

I hoped I recognized myself when I was finished making it.

I wanted to want him more than I needed him. And I wanted him to propose to me—the real me.

Anya rumpled J.J.’s toboggan affectionately. “It’s because she has patience, a trait bred entirely out of the Asgard line,” she called to us. J.J. beamed, basking in her attention, nodding as Skop called out pointers—quietly, so as not to wake Fredrik, who lay fast asleep with his face on his arms. He’d slipped away once or twice earlier, I suspected to throw up his breakfast. I had no idea how he’d survived their morning run.

As Hermódr and Bragi kept shooting, I eased myself onto the ground, and Torden took a seat beside me. I knocked him with a weary shoulder. “Done already?”

Torden shrugged. “I practice archery because I should. But it’s not my favorite weapon.”

“You like the sword better?”

He shook his head. “The hammer.”