Hidden though we were around the corner, we jumped apart, the spell broken, our breathing ragged. “I should probably get back.” I fiddled with my shirt cuff, unable to look at him. “Skop’s fine, but he’s going to have a headache tomorrow.”

But Torden shook his head. “I have to make this up to you. Did you mean what you said, about going down to the fjord one morning?”

I stilled. “For the sunrise?”

“I can be outside your door first thing tomorrow.” Torden’s eyes were guarded but so serious, so earnest.

“Can you miss your run?”

“I’ll run double the day after tomorrow. Besides,” he said, “I never break a promise.”

I bit my lip at the light burning in his eyes.

I didn’t want to just watch the sun rise with this boy. I didn’t want to wait alone for dawn through the long hours of the night. I wanted to leave together, right then, to spend the night talking under the stars wheeling over the Lysefjord, coaxing truths out of him until the sun rose and kindled the black sky.

But Torden wouldn’t abandon a friend, and I wouldn’t, either. “I can’t wait.”

When I stood up on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek, it felt like standing on solid ground.

Lang bid Torden a distracted good night when we met him around the corner, and the prins left me with a small smile.

I turned to the captain, hoping my flush wasn’t visible in the dark. “Skop?” I asked. “Cobie?”

“Cobie went to check in on Perrault,” Lang said. “And Skop’s fine, but I’m going to stay with him, just in case.”

“Wait here.” I slipped into Anya’s darkened room and returned with a pile of fur rugs, pushing them into his arms. “Take these. His room’s cold.”

“Thanks.” Lang rubbed one red-rimmed eye. A long eyelash fell onto the soft, shadowed hollow above his cheekbone.

“I’d do anything for Skop.” I shrugged and gently plucked the fallen lash from his tired skin, blowing it lightly off my fingers and wishing for a clear dawn.

Lang opened his thin lips as if to reply, but for a long moment only our breath disturbed the hallway’s silence. “And for him, too?” The corners of his mouth and his eyes were drawn down, intent and bewildered.

I didn’t have to ask who he meant.

I swallowed and stepped backward into the dark of Anya’s room. “Good night, Lang.”

“Good night, Selah,” he finally said.

I closed the door behind me.

46

My nerves roared to life with Torden’s arrival in the small hours of the morning. I dressed, trembling, in Anya’s still-dark room, wringing my hands as though my fretfulness could be shaken off like water.