Page 33 of The Midnight Princess
“You shouldn’t get ideas about my sisters, either,” I say when I’m sure I can speak.
“I don’t have ideas about your sisters. Is this good?” he asks, rubbing the muscles at the nape of my neck.
I’m shaking. “It’s good.”
9
Frog Soup
JACOB
“Into bed,” I say, dropping my hands and looking down and up and everywhere.
She chuckles, the sound of it digging into my mind the way my grandfather turns the soil over in his garden. Easy. Effortless. Preparing the ground to plant carrots or cabbages.
“I have to brush my teeth, floss, take off all this makeup...”
“Moisturize.”
We say the word at the same time, the beginnings of a secret language only we speak. Meeting her eyes, I tell myself, for the thousandth time, that she’s engaged. I can’t belong in the corner of her mind the way she already belongs in mine.
“Then bed,” I murmur, backing from the room and pushing through the door.
After I turn out the lights in my own room, I spend the night wondering what the hell kind of boundaries we just crossed. Undoing her hair. Talking. Handing her a couple of tablets and aglass of water. It was twenty minutes, give or take, and she didn’t tell me her life story. We just talked.
I wake before dawn, reaching for my phone and rubbing my eyes. My ears pick out the restless groaning of ancient beams and flooring. Alma is up, too.
I peel back the covers, open the door, and wait. Pink sticky notes dot the room, and the ornate dollhouse is firmly closed. Our no-man’s-land is deserted, but I watch the slow turn of Alma’s door handle and how she tiptoes through the narrow opening. I grin. She’s in a ponytail, wearing the old Harvard sweatshirt from last night and a pair of electric blue running shorts over black leggings. There are a pair of trainers in one hand and a sticker-covered water flask in the other. She pivots carefully and halts, mouthing what I’d bet are panicked Sondish swear words when the old building responds to her shifting weight. Her door swings gently ajar, exhaling a long creak.
I cross my arms and tilt my head, watching her lodge the trainers under the other arm and carefully pull her door shut. This isn’t the face of a woman going for a jog. It’s the face of a woman bent on redrawing smart boundaries, stringing barbed wire and hammering pickets into the ground.
Good. I need all the help I can get.
Alma relaxes her death grip on the handle and straightens. The line of her shoulders looks self-satisfied—the way mine must appear when I measure once and make the right cut anyway. When the room is bathed in perfect silence, I softly clear my throat.
She flails and lets out a squeak, dropping the tumbler with a metallic crash. It rolls in my direction, drunkenly following the irregularities of a centuries-old floor until it comes to rest against my bare foot. I scoop it up, reading the stickers, and my cheek tucks with a smile.
Among the trophies of past marathons, she’s got an anthropomorphic pastry sticker that reads “Donut Give Up,” and a zombie, his clothes in rags and flesh rotting off his face, is captioned “Run For Your Life.”
She bends over to pull on the trainers. “I’m headed out for a jog.”
“Into the city?”
She jerks the laces tight and shakes her head. “Into the woods.” I hand over the flask, and she clasps it over her stomach in a nervous habit she would never let me get away with. “Thank you for your help last night. My head feels better.”
I want to tell her to hydrate, to watch out for roots and patches of ice, to take her hair down if she starts getting a headache. “Sure,” I say, scratching my neck.
She watches me for a long moment and turns, setting her ponytail swinging. “Thanks again.”
When she disappears into the hall, I release a breath. “Anytime.”
Since it’s Sunday, I drive down to church, slipping into a pew of Roslav Cathedral as the service begins. Though I don’t understand a word, I follow the order of service in a program prepared for English-speaking tourists. The Sondish rites are similar to the Vorburgian ones, and my mind wanders to Alma, sitting on a chair last night, a leg tucked under her, head tipped back to look up at me. My ears redden and not only because the cathedral is colder than an ice box.
I set my jaw. This wouldn’t keep happening if I could see her as engaged. When Pietor returns, I’ll have Alma set me up with a friend and give me lessons in royal dating. Maybe we’ll sit on the floor of our common room to play a game ofMangos from Mangosand I’ll see her nestled against her fiancé, trading glances, and speaking their own private language.
Maybe then I’ll finally get it through my thick skull that she’s taken.
As the song of a boys’ choir fills the cathedral, I shift in the narrow bench, trying to get comfortable. An impossible job.OmaGardner used to say that the harder the pew, the stronger the doctrine, and if this is so, these Sondish Lutherans are near heaven. The long, stone-set aisle is flanked by rows and rows of wooden seats, the walls and columns a contrast of creamy white and butter yellow. There is nothing to distract me from piety except the thought of Alma who, if royal news websites and Pixy influencers can be trusted, will walk down this very aisle on her wedding day.
