Page 75 of The Midnight Princess
“You’re up late,” she says, greeting me at the door wearing flannel pajamas and a silk robe that trails behind her.
This is the future my father wanted to sign me up for, and I grin as I follow her. There’s that saying about how, if you put a million monkeys in a room for a million years, they’ll bang out the complete works of Shakespeare. Anything is possible given enough time. But as I slip into a gaming chair, I already know that an attraction between me and Princess Ella was never going to happen.
Not that she’s not cute. She’s cute. She’s just not for me. Not bossy enough. Not calm as falling snow. Not watching me every second my head is turned. From the way she’s cueing up the game without giving me more than a cursory glance, I’m not her type either.
We begin a joint operation on Turtle Doom, taking a few minutes to accustom ourselves to the controls. She makes an easy companion, undemanding, answering a steady stream of my questions. How much time do you all spend together? Do these tiara events ever get easier? Do you really like Pankedruss or is it the Great Sondish Lie?
I ask another question and try to make it sound like all the others.
“Why does your family still go in for arranged marriages?”
Ella gives a disgruntled laugh. “Here’s the dark secret of the House of Wolffe. Her Majesty doesn’t take risks.”
My brows lift even as my fingers execute a complex sequence, navigating my fighter through an intergalactic wormhole. “She single-handedly forged the North Sea Confederation in her thirties.”
You don’t have to be interested in royals to know that.
Ella shoots me a glance. “Yeah, but she took the throne very young. Her father had just died, and she had to bear the weight of a nation on her shoulders.” This statement doesn’t elicit a skeptical lift of my brow the way it might have a month ago. “Fulfilling the marriage contract with Pavieau gave her stability and support.”
A doom turtle holds an electrified bow staff to my throat, and I throw him off into a chasm, imagining the punchable face of Alma’s fiancé as he falls.
“Nice,” Ella murmurs. “Your father strong-armed his way into being the one to select the head of an emerging democratic coalition when the communists left Vorburg. He’s lucky it worked, but Queen Helena is about the diplomatic approach. It took her a decade to apply the soft power that made the North Sea Confederation possible, executing a million trades and concessions instead of stretching her neck under the blade.”
I grunt a laugh. A guillotine is not one of my grandma’s plausible metaphors.
“So that’s what it is for Alma and Pietor? They’re a sure thing?”
I wipe a sweaty palm against my jeans, and Ella glances over. I set my jaw, blazing through a defensive position, sending turtle shells ricocheting around the space. She nestles into her chair and puts her slippered feet up on a cushion. Training her eyes on the screen, she racks up an impressive body count.
“When I was at Stanford, I’d go to these Thanksgiving celebrations where maybe the mom didn’t want to do the matching paper plates thing, but she’s hosting a princess and thinks she’s got to be fancy. Then she runs out of matching cutlery, and all the stores are closed. So the top of the table has a matching set of dishes, and it looks great. But by the time you get to the foot, there’s a fork she picked up at the church potluck, the oversized serving spoon, and a butter knife that’s spent half its life getting chewed up in the garbage disposal.”
I grunt a laugh. “You’ve described every Thanksgiving of my life.”
“Well, that’s how it’s been for my mother as we’ve grown up and become independent people. We are an increasingly disappointing series of attempts to present the right picture. Some of us don’t match. Some of us refuse to.”
I wouldn’t match the queen’s perfect picture. The thought hurts, and I rub the heel of my hand over my chest, grimacing. Maybe this is indigestion. Maybe I’ve got heart valve cancer. “Your mom doesn’t seem too mad about Freja getting married.”
Ella gets attacked during a raid on a desert planet—a bad biome for turtles, I would have thought—and fails to account for her flank. A stupid mistake. She respawns in an abandoned village. “Everyone knows you can’t tell Freja what to do. She’s a laggy controller. Press the buttons all you like, but don’t expect her to do what you want.”
“Clara isn’t in an arranged relationship.” If it can happen for one sister, maybe—
Ella laughs. “Nobody expected Max. Not even Clara.”
“And you? Are you going to try to present the perfect picture?”
Her smile is too bright to be real. “I’m an adult woman playing video games and living in her mother’s house. I don’t have anything figured out.”
“How about Noah?”
“Noah is aschpelt.” My brows narrow and she explains. “The nicest translation is that he’s the kind of man who thinks women are as interchangeable as plastic interlocking bricks. There is no way Mama’s going to risk the succession on his good judgment. I bet she’s got some secret lab somewhere with rows and rows of cryogenically frozen princesses, all lined up for him to make his selection.”
I swallow away the thickness in my throat. “Alma and Noah get arranged marriages, The younger two don’t. You could go either way. Why not scrap the whole system?” The controller goes slack in my hands until she elbows me.
“Dude, turtles on your left.” Ella withholds her answer until my head is back in the game. “You can’t dismantle a system you’re invested in.”
“Alma’s invested?” My hands are hot and cold.
She gives me a look, and I swear there’s pity in it. I swear she knows. “Alma has never disappointed our mother.”
