Page 41 of The Winter Princess
He holds up a hand and ticks off his fingers. “Children plus parents, plus grandparents, plus godparents, plus siblings.” He scratches his beard thoughtfully. “I wish Sondmark had a higher birth rate.”
“I’ll bring that up with Her Majesty,” I laugh. “I’ve been in the basement working with Oskar.” I pause before saying his name every time, needing a kind of spur to take the leap. And each time I do it, the sound sends my mind spinning off onto strange tangents.
The tangent I am spinning on now is that I can’t remember the last man who kissed me. Cambridge grad night but I can’t recall his name. Something about the dim memory tastes bland and anonymous, but my personal life has never absorbed me much. When the time comes, Mama will present me with a list of acceptable matches. I’ll pick one.
“Come see the Guests Visited thermometer,” Roland says, tugging me down the hall. We fetch up in front of four pieces of printer paper stuck together with tape. The pages aren’t even, and the marker ran out of ink coming down the final stretch. I tamp down the wish to reconfigure it, spacing each 10,000 visitors hashmark with more precision. Perfection isn’t important, I remind myself. Because of all those lovely citizens in the lobby, we’re filling in that intimidating expanse of white.
Erik appears at my elbow, his blond hair flopping over on one side. “I uploaded a teaser, using only the images in the actual video.”
“Nicely done, Erik.”
“This one’s going viral too.”
Viral without the suggestion of a royal romance? This is progress. I navigate to The Nat page, pressing the phone almost against my nose, and spreading my fingers to magnify the image. I groan. “Erik, for the love of Erasmus’s cap, can you stop making it look like we’re about to make out?”
Erik leans over my shoulder, resting his chin on it. “You told me to take a frame from the video. If you didn’t want to look that way, you shouldn’t have looked athimthat way.”
I do not like his logic. I thought I was looking at Oskar with the benign friendliness of a cooking partner on a morning news show. Instead, I look like a teenage fangirl about to squeeze his bicep.Show me how you fold in the cheese, Oskar. You do it so well.
He’s looking at me like I’m a Waitrose Christmas sandwich.
My stomach growls.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Erik reassures me. “Physical attraction is healthy.”
I tap the video and groan again. Erik did one hell of a job teasing this video.
“I thought you were going to edit me out,” I say.
Erik leans over my shoulder again. “Your faces are right next to each other. You looked like this the whole time. What am I? A warlock?”
14
Goblin Lover
FREJA
When I return to the Summer Palace, I head straight to my suite, a set of rooms reminiscent of a British manor house library with tall mahogany bookshelves and a crackling fire. Even though the weather outside is furious and rain lashes the windows, I can take refuge here. More importantly, I can take tea, settle into a deep chair to read a book, and listen to overwrought operatic sopranos going to their graves, singing of doomed love.
This recipe never fails to soothe me.
It fails today.
An entire pot of tea has been unable to quench the restlessness kicked up in the wake of my hours at The Nat. My hours with Oskar. After opening and closing several books, I give inner tranquility up as a lost cause and begin preparing myself for this evening’s event. After doing my hair and make-up, I slip into a close-fitting velvet sheath, the high collar topped with a tiny ruffle, and step into the hall.
“I like that,” Clara says, sure-footed, even in impossibly high stilettos. To balance out the shoes, she’s wearing a basic cocktail dress in light blue. “I never think to wear black to these things, but you look…” She searches for a word. “Sexy.”
I catch a glimpse of myself in a tall mirror as we pass, seeing the over-large mouth, the interesting nose, and the jawline that means business. My sisters say I have the looks of a woodland fairy, but this is a kindness. I bear a striking resemblance to sculptures of Magda the Great who was famous for the fact that all her bad parts combined to make something striking.
There are worse things. I laugh. “I’ve been spending too much time drinking at the fetid trough of social media to believe that. Anyway, I haven’t had a date in over a year,” I remind Clara.
“That’s only because you live in a walled castle.” My sister slips a hand into the crook of my elbow.
“You manage to date, and you live in a walled castle.”
“Max is a one-man siege engine.” My sister pauses, grins quite stupidly, then jostles my arm. “You look like a goddess who won’t put up with anything short of being worshiped. That’s always sexy.”
We’re still arguing the point when we join the others in a small anteroom. Mama, going over some notes with Caroline, lifts her head, does a quick perusal of me and Clara, and, giving a brisk nod, returns to her whispered conference.
