Torden put his palm against my cheek. “I have not implied that you’ve been in my bed,” he said, voice low but intent. “I don’t talk about women that way, least of all you, Selah.”

“Of course not. You would never.” I sagged.

He traced my cheekbones, brushing hair away from my face. “What’s wrong, elskede?”

“Everything is wrong,” I whispered. “You, fighting with Aleksei.” My heart felt shipwrecked, sunk somewhere around my gut.

“I’m always fighting with Aleksei,” Torden said, shaking his head.

“And this—impossibility—between us.” My eyes shut, then flew open. “I need to talk to my godmother.”

Torden frowned. “A letter would take weeks.”

“No,” I said quickly. “I have a radio.” Curiosity sparked in his eyes. “But it’s too small to act as a transmitter, unless there’s a radio tower somewhere close by.” I paused, swallowing hard. “I have to talk to her.”

He nodded, eyes focused, somewhere far off. “We’ll find a way.”

I swallowed hard. “Promise?”

“I said I’d never lie to you.”

His lips nudged my temple and my cheek before finding my mouth. We kissed each other like drowning swimmers dying for oxygen, his arms straining around me, my hands trapped in his hair.

But it wasn’t until I’d climbed into bed that I understood why I’d felt less passion than desperation in Torden’s kiss, that I understood why he’d held me so tightly in the hall outside my room. In the short time I’d known him, I’d never seen him this way.

He was afraid.

53

The others sensed that something was coming. I saw it more clearly with every frantic hour we spent together, riding and fishing and hiking and swimming, moving ceaselessly from dawn till dusk.

Aleksei skulked and avoided us, but J.J. and Cobie came along every day, J.J. basking in Anya’s affection, Cobie intimidating even the boys with her lap times across the fjord and earning shy smiles from Hermódr. She was unusually kind to me, either because she saw how sad I was at Skop’s absence or because, by now, the whole fortress knew what had happened after the bonfires.

But though no one could forget why Skop was gone, why Anya’s eyes were red all the time, what Aleksei had said about Torden and me, the silent war he’d finally spoken of aloud—the boys never brought it up. They left those conversations unsaid, I guessed, for the same reasons that they never talked about Hermódr struggling with their older brothers, about Bragi’s painful feelings for Anya, about Fredrik’s being twenty-three and refusing to take a single relationship seriously. About what had happened the summer before.

Aleksei had been right about the boys’ Asgardian instincts.

They hated to be alone, but they kept everything hard or hurtful to themselves. I couldn’t understand it.