1

THE BEHOLDER

A storm was building. Dark birds circled the crow’s nest. Cold salt water surged around us, crashing against the Beholder’s hull and the rocky Norsk coast at our back.

They were ill omens, all.

My stomach lurched as the ship rolled, the deck dozens of feet below me, little but mist and trembling ropes between us. Clouds hung low in the sky, gray as pewter, heavy as lead. They threatened to smother me.

Everything looked different from the crow’s nest. Everything looked different in the aftermath of their deception.

When we’d left England, after everything that happened at court in Winchester, I’d been relieved to find myself aboard ship again. I’d felt safe out on the ocean, my path ahead clear, the Beholder my home away from home.

But I’d been wrong about everything. Lang was a liar, and the Beholder was no haven for lost girls.

I knew the truth now. With every gust of wind, every wash of water over the Beholder’s sides, our route would carry us farther away from my father and my home and the stepmother who had wanted me gone and toward Shvartsval’d and its tsarytsya. Toward the rebellion Lang and the rest had been seeking since before we left Potomac.

But now we traveled east on my orders. Alessandra would never have dreamed of such success when she expelled me from Potomac to search for a husband.

From this height, too, the crew looked different. It wasn’t just that I’d never seen the top of Basile’s head and broad shoulders before, or noticed quite how gracefully Jeanne loped across the deck; from the towering height of the crow’s nest, I could keep eyes on all of them at once.

I hadn’t felt I’d needed to in weeks, since I’d come to trust them.

I’d been unwise.

I leaned back against the mainmast and tried to let the salt wind soothe the betrayal that still burned in my gut. The fear that ran cold up my spine when I thought of how far I was from home. How far I had yet to go. How every moment, Asgard and Torden slipped farther behind me.

Lang stood outside Homer’s quarters, hands in his pockets, chin lifted as he listened to Andersen. The older sailor was arguing with him about something, his hands waving dramatically as he tried to make his point, his gray-gold hair drifting around his thin face in the breeze. Lang settled his hands in his pockets, arching his brows at Andersen as he rattled on.

But his dark eyes darted up to me, as if they couldn’t help seeking me out.

Talk to me, they seemed to plead. Let me explain.

Lang was my captain. My friend. The boy with the sensitive face and the wry laugh and lean, ink-covered hands, who I’d come to trust so easily. But I wasn’t interested in his explanations.

He’d talked on and on after we’d left Norge the night before, justified himself and his choice to smuggle the zŏngtŏng’s weapons to those resisting the Imperiya Yotne and waited for me to say that I understood.

On and on he’d talked. I’d said nothing.

I refused to set him at ease. I wasn’t happy or comfortable; why should he be?

The crow’s nest shifted beneath me. I sat up straight, tensing, then slumped again. “Cobie, you scared me.”

“Well, you’re scaring a lot of people. You really shouldn’t be up here.” Cobie glanced at me sidelong, pushing a lock of shiny, dark hair out of her eyes. “Not that I care.”

“I don’t care, either,” I said, staring straight ahead. “What are you doing up here, anyway?” Cobie Grimm was our rigger; the maze above deck was her rightful place, and I was an interloper. But I didn’t care about that now.

Cobie squinted at me. “You’re aware there’s a purpose to the crow’s nest beyond your need for a spot to brood, right?”

“I’m not brooding,” I mumbled.

“Well, you’re not keeping an eye on the horizon for obstacles, either,” Cobie said wryly. She arched an eyebrow. “Are you all right?”

I stared down at my hands clasped in my lap, at the ring Torden had given me. It felt heavy on my finger, but that was nothing to the weight of my heart inside my chest.

I missed Torden. I felt every mile between us, stretching taut and painful.

I was brooding.

Fury bubbled in my veins when I thought of Lang and Homer and Yu and the way they’d treated me like a bit of porcelain. Breakable, easily set on the shelf and out of the way. Entirely ornamental to their true purposes.

Torden had never treated me that way. I’d felt strong and free when he looked at me, his eyes steady as the flow of the Bilröst.

Lang hadn’t so much acknowledged my fury as tried to smooth it over, tried with explanations and excuses and repeated protests to convince me I wasn’t really angry with him.

“You have to understand—” Lang had begun again as I’d walked away from the helm.

“Who knew?” I’d demanded, whirling on him.

Lang had swallowed hard but lacked the good grace to look guilty. He’d eyed me carefully, long lashes shadowing his dark eyes. “Some did, some didn’t.”

“That’s not a straight answer,” I’d spat. My gaze had darted between the faces of the crew, uncertain where to land. Uncertain which of them were safe.

They stared at me, expressions strained, nothing like the family who’d sat with me at dinners in the galley, telling stories by lamplight. Homer, who’d felt like my guardian. Vishnu and Basile and Will, who’d been so kind to me. Skop, whom I’d defended to Konge Alfödr of Norge, when he’d fallen for his ward Anya.

I’d thought he was my friend. I’d thought they all were.

And yet, there I’d stood on the deck again, feeling just as I had on the day I’d left Potomac, the water choppy enough to throw me off-balance, friendless and alone and an utter fool.

Except this time was worse. Because my place beside Torden and my place aboard the Beholder were homes I had chosen for myself.

They were all in ruins now.

“Say something,” Lang had said, voice low and soft as moonlight. He’d drawn near to me, as if he had any right to lay a hand on my arm, to touch me like a friend.

I’d pulled away.

“I don’t know what I can say to you right now that I won’t regret,” I’d answered tightly. I’d hardly recognized the tone of my own voice.

Out of the corner of my eye, I’d noticed a rope ladder swinging loose and uncertain from the mainmast, leading to the crow’s nest. I’d stomped across the deck and taken the rope between my hands, gulping down my fear.

“Selah!” Lang had dashed after me and wrapped a hand around the rope, just higher than my shaking grip. “Selah, stop. What are you doing?”

“I need to clear my head.” I’d suddenly been dying to get away from him, dying to find a quiet space above all the noise, though my palms were growing clammy at the prospect of the climb. The crow’s nest was a dizzying height above deck.

“Selah, don’t be silly.” Lang’s cheeks had been pale as the clouds overhead, his bowed mouth shadowed by his upturned nose, his eyes dark, dark, dark.

“Silly?” I’d demanded, my anger rising. “Is that what I am? A silly girl, too occupied with falling in love at court to notice you lying and lying—”

“No!” Lang had burst out. “No, it’s just not safe for you to be up there.”

“Not safe?” My words had been bitter as bile. “Not safe—like sailing a powder keg across the Atlantic? Like not knowing who my crew members are really working for?” Another step toward him had put us mere inches apart. “Like navigating the English court blind while you hunted for rebels, or passing Asgard’s gates not knowing my crew are smugglers?” I’d studied him, desperate for some hint of remorse in his face, but I’d found none. “I’ll do a better job looking after myself, if that’s the best you can do.”

With that, I’d turned away from him, grasping the ladder again in my hands, and begun to climb.

“Selah!” Cobie had called from the deck. “What are you doing?”

I hadn’t been able to answer her and climb and keep breathing. So I’d chosen climbing, and breathing. I’d concentrated on the rough feel of the rope between my fingers and not on the way the ladder twisted and swung in the wind blowing straight through my clothes, sharp as my own anger.

My ears had told me that all movement on deck below me had stopped. I hadn’t paused to look down.

The landing at the top of the mainmast was about six feet by six feet, a square with a small lip at its edge. I’d hoisted myself up onto it, out of sight of the crew, feeling it pitch beneath me like the mist swirling in the fjord.

But the roll of the sea and the fog had been nothing to the rage churning in my stomach. To the angry tears dripping sideways across the bridge of my nose and pooling beneath my cheek as I huddled on my side.

I lay that way now, curled up toward Cobie, studying the ring on my finger. Its cluster of stones was as blue as the Bilröst and the Asgard boys’ eyes, its rose-gold band the color of Torden’s lashes.

I’d left him behind. Torden. The only thing I’d been sure of in months.

How I loved him. How I longed to feel his hands in mine, to feel him at my side, close as breathing.

But Asgard was at our stern, not our prow. And Torden had promises to keep. To Asgard. To his father, whose only concern was defending their home against the Imperiya Yotne. To his stepmother, who had lost one child to death and another to exile.

I had promises to keep, as well—to my crew, as they searched for the resistance, but also to Potomac and my father, whose sadness and sickness weighed constantly on my mind. I’d marked the days as they passed in the back of the book my godmother had given me before I’d left; the marching army of tick marks never failed to make my chest grow tight with worry.

Time loomed vast and substantial behind and before me. So many days, so many miles, and my father’s fate still unknown.

I thought of the bones that pressed at Daddy’s skin, of the tremors that ran through his limbs. Of the heaviness that had seemed to weigh on his heart for so long.

I believed he would want me to help others defend themselves. I hoped I would get home in time for him to tell me so.

Always seems to be so much noise, he’d said to me the night of the Arbor Day ball.

Only the crow’s nest seemed to be above all the clamor.

“No.” I shook my head. “No, I’m not all right.”

Cobie wet her lips. “It won’t kill you,” she said. She crossed her arms and leaned against the mast, black shirt flapping in the breeze.

My head knew she was right. The fear and the pain and the emptiness: they would not be the death of me.

But the depth and the breadth and the height of my loss felt as boundless as the ocean I’d crossed to reach this place. And my heart found it hard to believe her.