My shoe caught on a rock, and I stifled a gasp. Aleksei seemed not to notice.

“Baldr was dead before we found him. Hodr had screamed himself into hysterics.”

We were walking so quickly I’d begun to sweat, but ice skulked over my skin.

“It was tragic,” Aleksei said. “Baldr was a beautiful child, with black hair like Dronning Rihttá’s and a face like a cherub’s. No one in Asgard would have ever done him any harm. The tsarytsya herself came for his wake.”

The tsarytsya. In Asgard. Anxiety jolted so sharply through me I felt it in my teeth. I closed my eyes and took a breath.

“And . . . what happened to Hodr?” I asked.

“He was sent away.”

“What?” I blurted. “Where?”

“A monastery, somewhere in Iceland.” Aleksei shrugged.

I shook my head, stomach churning. “But he was a child. It was an accident.”

“Hodr wasn’t a child. He was fourteen. He knew his vision was impaired in the dark.” Aleksei’s sidelong glance dragged a shiver up my spine, and his voice grew hard. “Alfödr cannot afford to suffer fools.”

I stared, his hideous words scraping goose bumps over my skin. Fourteen made a child, whatever Asgard thought.

Perhaps it didn’t matter to Aleksei. He hadn’t been allowed to be a child for a very long time.

“Baldr had been the one to keep peace between us brothers, the reason Týr and Vidarr and Váli could accept their father’s marriage to another woman,” said Aleksei. “But the kongen could hardly look at Hodr after he died.”

Horror trickled into my stomach like cold water. Dronning Rihttá hadn’t been watching J.J. because he reminded her of her dead son. He reminded her of the living child who had been ripped from her arms.

It may have been Midsummer, but I was suddenly freezing.

I stopped short, limbs trembling, as Aleksei walked on. “I want to go find Torden.”

“Torden’s inside,” he said, irritated, not turning. In the bobbing lamplight, the nose and teeth of his wolf tattoo snarled above his shirt neck. “I’m supposed to take you back to the bonfires.”

My pitch and my pulse spiked. “No. I want to go find him now.”

“Fine.” Aleksei pointed in the direction Torden had jogged earlier. “The fortress is that way.”

Panic gripped me by the throat. “I can’t get there alone in the dark.”

Aleksei held the lamp out to me without a word.

49

Our ride to the woods had been brief. It took much longer to reach Asgard’s gates on foot.

As I stole through the night, jumping at the cries of owls and the croaks of ravens, at the snap of every twig beneath my own feet, Aleksei’s story took form in my mind.

Baldr lying dead on the forest floor, his delicate bones broken.

Hodr, blind and alone and shrieking into the dark.