Page 13 of The Midnight Princess
Mama takes her seat behind her desk, leafing through parliamentary papers as she speaks, segmenting her attention like slices of an orange. “He is totally unsuited for royal life, but we can’t afford to be in Vorburg’s debt at this critical stage.” She pauses, hands full. “Did you see his shirtfront?”
I am not expected to answer which is good because, grubby and water-stained as it was, it couldn’t hide his muscled frame.
“If anyone can teach that man how to be a prince, I know you can.” Mama signs a dispatch with her customary flourish. Helena R. Helena Regina. Helena the Queen. “Goodness knows you have your work cut out.”
As it is spoken, so let it be done.
“May I understand why you gave him the impression that I’m engaged?”
Mama’s pen stills but she doesn’t look up. “Are you questioning my judgment, too?”
Too.
Like Clara. Like Freja. Like Ella always has. Like Noah was born to do. Like our father, who has surely earned the right. I’mnot like them. Mama has rigid expectations but holds herself to the same high standard she sets for others. It’s fair. It’s motivated by love of country and love of family. I’ve always understood that.
Question her judgment? “No. Of course not.”
On Christmas morning, I brought her the news that my fiancé had been photographed in a compromising situation with an Italian bikini model, the damning pictures texted to me by a friend of a friend. It had been a bad day to deliver bad news.
No one had slept a wink. Freja’s elopement had just hit the papers, and the palace was in chaos. New drafts of Mama’s Christmas speech to the nation were coming in every quarter hour, each taking a slightly different tone on my sister’s rushed wedding. The queen was commanding a war room.
Mama looked at the pictures and cast her eyes to the ceiling.Dominanstid.
“Will you break it off?” she asked. Any other mother would have grabbed the nearest tennis racket, flown to Lijuela, and beaten the wayward fiancé to death. Or offered to. Mama’s eyes were on the political implications for her country first and the personal feelings of her daughter second.
I nodded.
I blame Clara and Freja for my change of heart—for introducing possibilities I hadn’t anticipated. For making my engagement to Pietor look as cheap as a plastic Christmas wreath next to a bough brought in from the forest with its sharp, bright scent, as heavy in my hands as any living thing. For looking so damned happy.
I watched Mama add my burden to the others she carried that morning, and guilt twisted my stomach. She returned the nod, decisive. “I need a few weeks of quiet surrounding the state visit. Freja’s kicked a hornet’s nest, and we’ll be lucky to avoid a referendum about the monarchy, much less having her tossedout of the succession. Secure Pietor’s cooperation,” she directed, holding her hand over the phone receiver. Something in my face had her reaching for a box of tissues and plonking them down in front of me. She had been sympathetic but distracted. “Don’t worry, Alma. I’ll find someone more suitable.”
With her words to Jacob, the plans have changed. I won’t just have to be quiet about my relationship status. I’ll have to wear the engagement ring on my finger and pretend to miss my fiancé, even within the walls of the palace. I release a breath slowly. There wasn’t a speck of luck in that New Year’s kiss.
“The important thing is that His Royal Highness needs to understand that you are strictly out-of-bounds,” Mama continues. “Mark my words, King Otto is shopping for a royal bride.”
“Bride?” My chin jerks.
She stabs a finger in the air. “If they handed that man the crown, he would lose it inside a week, but if they could frame him as Crown Prince Jacob, son-in-law to Her Majesty Queen Helena of Sondmark, he would not be so easily discarded.”
Mama speaks of maneuvers, and I imagine Jacob and I facing one another across a chessboard. The black knight moving against the white rook. Vorburg and Sondmark. We cannot meet unless in battle—no hope of mutual victory.
Mama returns to her papers. “I will not be Otto’s puppet.”
“What is the king like?”
“Passionate and charismatic. But he’s also a shameless womanizer and drinks like a fish.”
“A bad king.”
She puts her pen down and considers the question seriously. “Nothing as simple as that. He suits the national mood of Vorburg, reflecting their ideals of manhood and leadership. He led them through one of the darkest chapters in the country’shistory and embodied the heroism and resistance they needed to believe they themselves possessed.”
“A good king.”
Her hand seesaws, one of Père’s mannerisms adopted over thirty years of marriage, and offers me a smile. “An effective king.”
I accept her answer as one of the complicated moral calculations of leadership. “Will the crown prince stay in the Tower Suite?” I ask.
Mama raises a brow. “And host him for dinner every night? Heaven forbid. I put him in Noah’s old rooms.”
