Chapter Thirteen
HE WAS COMPLETELY inaccessible to her now. Whatever had been building between them had shattered the night that his memories had returned. And she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know how to reach him.
But he had shut the door so firmly it was impossible for her to even have a conversation with him.
It didn’t make her inclined to go to his bed, and he hadn’t asked. The one night she had woken up, her heart in her throat, she had gone in and peered into his chamber, and had seen him sleeping on the floor.
A prisoner of the past.
And yet he wouldn’t even acknowledge it.
And this was where she decided to do something that she would never normally do.
She decided to call her brother.
Ricardo was the least awful of her brothers. The middle of them, and extraordinarily handsome. He was also very well-connected. A bona fide man-whore who slept with anything that moved, had extracted information from each and every one of his partners.
He was the most terrible gossip in all the world, and all of that information tended to keep him in the lifestyle that he had become accustomed to.
He wasn’t the least bit trustworthy.
Which was exactly why she wanted to talk to him.
“Hola,” she said, speaking quickly to him in Spanish.
“Fernanda? I’m surprised to hear from you.”
“Not that you bothered to check in with me.”
“You become a whole queen. What a boon.”
“I guess.”
“Are you going to invite me to come and visit?”
“That depends. I don’t know that I want state secrets to end up splashed all over the global news.”
“You wound me,” he said, but he didn’t sound the least bit wounded.
“Well, I imagine that you’ll recover. But I do have something to ask you.”
“A favor? You haven’t even spoken to me casually in ages.”
“I was sequestered in a convent, not that any of you ever asked.”
He sighed heavily. “I’m sorry. I find it best never to ask about what our father is up to. There are certain things I don’t want to know, because I don’t want it to be incumbent upon me to keep any secrets for him.”
“That I can understand.”
“What is it you need?” he said, sounding much softer.
“I need to know if there are any rumors out there about the former king of Asland.”
“Oh,” her brother said. “That is some ancient history.”
“I know. It’s not exactly the lifestyles of the rich and viral. Which I know is much more your specialty.”
“That is true. But I know some people that I could ask. What exactly do you want to know?”
“I’ve just been made aware that there is some reason to believe that the king could still be alive.”
“And what do you think will be accomplished if you do find him?”
“He should pay. For what he did,” she said.
“I see. Well, I’ll see what I can find out. You know all you need to do is drip honey into the right year and usually you can find a trail.”
“I trust you.”
“You probably shouldn’t,” he said.
“Maybe not. But…for what it’s worth, we were both raised in a family with our father. So we’ve both suffered.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone. “Yes. Though you suffered the most. You didn’t have the freedom to leave. Not like we did.”
“Well, our oldest brother certainly doesn’t have the freedom to do whatever he wants.”
“No. That is true.”
“It’s reserved for those of us who are expendable,” Fern said.
“But you were never expendable, Fern. You were something different to him. An asset in a completely different way. And I would never say that it was better. I managed to disappear into the crowd. And there is something to be said for that.”
“I’ve escaped now.”
“Into an arranged marriage.”
“There’s nothing arranged about it,” she said. “I… I want to stay with him. But I have to figure out how to help him. I have to figure out how to help fix this.”
“I am not very good at giving advice. I’m certainly not anyone whose life should be admired.
What I can say is that you cannot help someone who does not wish to be helped.
You could deliver his father to him trussed up like a Christmas goose and if he did not want to accept the gift, he wouldn’t.
If he did not wish for that to heal him, it would not.
Our father doesn’t wish to be a good person, Fernanda.
There is no amount of offering salvation to him that would make him take it, because he does not believe he needs it.
If your husband does not believe he needs healing, then there is nothing that will ever make him accept it. ”
“Is that why you never come home? There’s nothing you can do to fix any of it.”
“Nothing. And so I go and I live my life. Out here in the world where there are no arbitrary rules like the ones our father made. You could do the same.”
She would have thought of this as the brightest, shiniest apple only a few weeks earlier. Now, she wasn’t so sure. Yes, a man like her father was somewhere beyond saving.
But it was different.
“The choice has to come into it somewhere, Ricardo, and I don’t just mean the choice to be healed.
Ragnar didn’t choose this pain. And he had no one to help him through it.
He has no idea how to handle it still. That doesn’t make him bad.
And it doesn’t make him broken. It only means it might take a little bit of work. ”
“But as far as I know, you did not choose to do this work, my sister.”
“No. I did. I am choosing this.”
“You could also choose to meet me in the French Riviera.”
“I appreciate the offer. But that isn’t going to work for me.”
Love was something she hadn’t seen when she was growing up in the palace at Cape Blanco. What she had seen was her mother surrendering all of herself, her father imposing his will on everyone and her brothers becoming islands unto themselves in order to survive it.
She had never really thought about what love looked like. It wasn’t manipulation. And it wasn’t sitting down and letting another person suck everything out of you.
It wasn’t passive. It wasn’t malevolent.
Love, she thought, was expensive. It had a cost. It took work.
Sacrifice.
Because yes, she could cut ties with everyone and everything; she could go to the French Riviera with Ricardo. She could have lavish parties, and drink her troubles away. She could live alone. Or she could dig in and do the work here. Wasn’t he worth it?
This man who had been betrayed.
This man who had gone through life with no one.
Wasn’t she worth it?
Wasn’t she worth all this hard work?
She was beginning to understand that the most important things in life were hard. And freedom was making the choice to do the hard thing.
The thing that held weight. Had real value. Yes, she had dreams about a little farm. But that was just… It was a dream from an old version of herself. Who hadn’t truly known everything that she was capable of. Who had thought that she could only hear herself, find herself in the quiet.
But she knew different now. She knew that she could stand strong, be the person that he needed and in turn the person that she needed.
“The next time we have a party, I’ll call you.”
“Thank you,” he said. “In the meantime, I’ll see what I can find.”
And while she waited, she would have to decide what she was going to do about her husband.
Would she be like Freya? Waiting and waiting?
No. She was a goddess. And if she was a goddess, then she was going to go and make something happen.
It was late, and she wasn’t quite certain where she might find him.
She had a feeling he wasn’t in the palace, even if she couldn’t say why. She put on a coat, and went outside into the harsh weather. The season was changing, and the harsh climate here was growing teeth.
So of course he would be out here. Of course he would be out here punishing himself.
Sleeping in the stable. As he had done when he was a boy.
She tore across the grounds, and went into the stable, where she saw him, standing by the stable with his horse.
His horse.
The horse meant something to him. Something important. He hadn’t told her. He had come to get her on a horse, which was ridiculous.
“Why did you ride the horse to come and get me?”
He looked at her, his blue eyes shadowed.
“Please,” she said. “Talk to me.”
“For a number of years he was the only constant in my life. My most trusted…friend.”
“See, you have had friends. Soren. Your horse. Me.”
“We are not friends, Fernanda.”
His use of her name hurt.
“You said that we were.”
“Things have changed. I am reminded of who I need to be.”
“Please, Ragnar. I don’t want things to be like this between us.”
“They cannot be another way. I cannot be a different man. I can’t… I have to be the king.”
There was such a weight to those words. Especially with what he knew now. He had to be the king. He had to be beyond reproach. He couldn’t have any weaknesses. Because now he was comparing himself to his father even if he didn’t think he was.
“You are not your father.”
“I don’t wish to speak about that.”
“It’s important that you realize that.”
“I have not spoken to you since we came back. Do you not realize that it was intentional? I am not asking for your advice on anything. I’m not asking for you to heal me.”
Her brother’s words echoed in her head.
“But maybe you should. Maybe you should ask for some help. Goddammit, Ragnar. Maybe you could be happy.”
“Happiness has never been important to me. What is important is fulfilling my duty.”
“And what about me?”
“You were never anything but a means to an end.”
“Liar,” she whispered. “I am Freya. And that means something, it matters. It means—”
“Nothing. Nothing but fractured memory in my fractured brain. It meant nothing.”
He moved away from the stable, and stormed outside, into the wind. She followed. “I didn’t take you for a coward.”
“I am nothing like a coward,” he said, the wind was blowing at his back, the cloak that he was wearing catching the breeze. And she could see that it was the one he had worn to their wedding. With the strip torn off.
“You made vows to me,” she said. She pointed at his cloak. “You promised yourself to me.”