Chapter 24 #2
I don’t see what’s funny. Ella is half naked, while the seamstress seems to be doing a very poor recreation of a traditional Seongan dress with its close-fitting, wrap-around top and billowing skirt. The usual shape skims the ground, but Ella’s shapely legs are on full display.
“Is there a bottom to that dress?” I growl.
Alix rolls her eyes. “Marc, you are being elderly.”
“Queen Helena will have something to say about this,” I insist. “One little breeze and you’re going to launch another succession crisis.”
Ella glares at me. “We can weight the hem.”
Alix taps her lips. “No. That will drag the shape out of it.” She gives a throaty sound of irritation. “I hate it when he has a point.”
“Truly the worst,” Ella agrees.
Alix snaps her fingers. “So let’s give this look to Dahlia,” she directs the dressmaker, “and reverse the effect for Ella. It’ll be full-length but low-cut and we’ll give you something strappy up here.” Alix’s hand flutters in a way I consider wildly irresponsible.
“She’s a princess of the blood,” I say. “For the dignity of the nation, she ought to be covered.”
Alix’s brows gather. “Now he sounds like Noah. Honestly, Marc, you’d think Sondmark was on the brink of collapse. Our country won’t rise or fall with her neckline.” She sweeps her hands at me. “Turn around while I get Ella out of this.”
The sound of fabric dropping bores into my brain, but the dressmaker works quickly, creating a quick mock-up of the traditional silhouette married with a summer dress.
“You want to know what else I hate? How much I love this,” Alix says. “You can turn, Marc. Dearest, you almost look tall.”
Ella twists a strand of hair, tucking it into a loose updo. “Sold,” she laughs.
“Not sold. Not. Sold. Nobody is selling anything.” I shake my head.
How is this better? The skirt is long, but the crisscross top should be a dozen centimeters higher.
I drag air into my lungs. Where in the Sondish Sea have the sleeves disappeared to?
I want to pound my head against some antique woodwork.
Ella’s eyes linger on my face. “I’ve always wanted to be tall.” Has she missed me as much as I’ve missed her? I try to detect a trace of it.
“Let’s have a pair of narrow straps tie right at the point of her shoulders,” Alix murmurs to the dressmaker, her focus elsewhere.
Why doesn’t anyone care that Ella is brewing a national scandal? “This is so much worse. It exposes—”
Alix lifts her head, nailing me with a look Amma would surely recognize.
“This is my best friend, Marc, and I won’t have your loyalty to Noah ruining this for her.
She has to dress like a middle-aged public health minister when she’s doing her job, but this isn’t a job.
It’s a wedding, and it’s completely reasonable.
It just is. I refuse to send her down the aisle looking like she’s wearing a sack. ”
I take an unsteady breath, and Dahlia pokes her head around the door. “Is this where the party is?” She gets one look at Ella and whistles.
“Come in, come in,” Alix gestures, swinging her gaze to Ella, her hands pressed in supplication.
“Be the best maid of honor and take him off my hands for a few hours before he shrouds all my bridesmaids in shapeless bedsheets? I’ll sort it out with the dressmaker.
I’m so sorry to inflict him on you,” she adds, glaring at me with narrowed eyes.
Ella smiles. “Anything to make you happy.”
After a few tucks and measurements, she’s sent to change, and she emerges from a curtained-off area in a pair of jeans and a Lao Hu Zone t-shirt. The members of the eternally youthful boy band look out at me from the graphic t, each dripping with jewelry, each sporting a different hair color.
I am hit with a wave of emotion—a tsunami.
I have a memory of how Ella turned from an awkward fifteen-year old with a posture problem into an unhinged Lao Hu Zone Lioness with a posture problem.
I remember the slide deck she forced me to watch so I’d understand each nuance between her bias, her bias wrecker, the main visual, and rap line.
“They’re so pretty, Marc. So pretty.” I still can’t keep the members straight.
“Is it June 28th already?” I ask, remembering the anniversary of their debut. “Were you up when they went live?”
“So early,” she smiles, “sitting up in bed, waving my lightstick in the dark like a maniac.”
I am hit with another wave of wishing I had been there, arm hooked around her waist, face buried in a pillow, trying to sleep while she watched on her laptop.
My time in Seong taught me something about tsunamis.
They aren’t just a rush of water. When they roll in from the ocean, they thicken at the leading edge, the wave frequency stacking and building up layers while picking up debris.
Everyone has been knocked over by a wave at the beach, but when seismic conditions alter the sea floor, the wave carries all the flotsam it encounters—the past piggybacking on the present, everything arriving at once.
When a thing like that smashes into you, there’s no coming back.
That damned shirt.
Vede. I have to get out of here because Alix isn’t blind.
“The weather is gorgeous,” I manage. “Wanna inspect some fences?”
Alix makes a sound of disgust. “Teach him some manners, friend, or he’ll be a monk until he dies.”
I hold the door for Ella, and as soon as she walks through, I shut it behind us, catching her by the wrist until it’s just her and me and the ancient paneling of Lindenholm.
It’s been a week and I can’t live this way.
She gives a light laugh and returns the kiss, amused by my urgency, perhaps.
I don’t apologize. Contentment, heavy and sweet, settles in my limbs because she belongs here, our strange edges somehow fitting together.
“Marc,” she whispers, when I come up for air.
I know. We’re taking too many chances. I pull away but hold her hand, leading her to the mudroom, where I supply her with a change of footwear and a rough coat.
She hops on the back of my quad, and we set off, first touring her past the BLUSH excavations and then driving deep into the parkland.
The weather is windy, and I head straight into it, skirting fields with Ella’s arms banding my chest and her head nestled between my shoulders.
“Are we really inspecting fences?” she asks when I come to a halt atop a rise and cut the engine. A cool breeze from the North Sea buffets against us, and she buries herself into me, snuggling against my back. “Nothing else?”
My arm covers hers. “I can multitask.”
“Why are you irritated with Alix?” she asks, nipping at my waist. “Is it really the dress?”
I shake my head. “It’s not a dress. It’s scraps of fabric that barely cover—”
Ella laughs, slipping under my arm, and negotiates her way to the front of the bike.
It’s not seductive—not with messy hair and a muddy jacket—but she never has to try to make me want her.
I just do. We’re like kids on a swing, rubber boots making us clumsy.
Her nose is rosy, and I press a kiss on the end of it, wishing I could bend time back to the moment I told her this wouldn’t be serious.
“Stop being grumpy,” she scolds, smoothing the line between my brows. She burrows her head under my chin. She cuddles. “Alix values your approval.”
“She has it.”
I pull away and give in to the desire to kiss her. The wind gusts against us, but I hold her tightly, wrapping her into my jacket and warming her where we touch. As usual, I lose my head, but Ella lifts hers.
“Marc, what if someone—”
She shouldn’t be thinking at all. I should be capable of kissing every thought out of her head or I’m not doing it right. I glance around. There are Jutland cattle a few pastures over, but I’m not going to be thwarted by cows. I pull her close again and try to make her forget herself.
She does for a time. When she breaks off, she rests her brow against mine. Shaken. Finally.
“You’re supposed to be teaching me manners,” I say, tracing her jawline with the edge of my thumb.
I realized some things in London, filled with long days without the promise of seeing Ella at the end of them.
In another minute, I’m going to cross a line and tell her what they are.
But Ella hops off the quad and wades through knee-high grass.
For a second, I think she’s going to say something serious, but she only laughs. “Will you miss me when…when I’m gone?”
“What is it this week?” I ask, catching her from behind. “Are you going to move to Florida and launder money through real estate?”
She sinks against me, and the beat of her heart seems to sync with mine. “California has better weather. I’ll wear muumuus and clacking jewelry, and drink the same cocktail everyday at precisely 4 PM.”
My arms tighten and I look over the wide horizon.
If she wants privacy, I can give it to her.
If she wants a place away from the glare of the Summer Palace, Lindenholm is right here.
If she wants to sunbathe in her birthday suit, I could plant a thick stand of trees and sue any intrusive paparazzi back into the stone age.
I open my mouth to say so, take a breath, and close it again. Ella doesn’t want me—not forever—and the great wish of her life is to leave Sondmark. How can I fail to grant it when I love her?
I swallow thickly. I’m in love with Ella. The thought is new enough that it isn’t painful yet, though that will come. It’s been building this whole time, crashing like a wave I can’t escape.
“You’re going to be lonely.” I soften my words with a kiss on the top of her head.
A gust of wind buffets against us, and I hold her tighter. “I have a pile of stuffed racoons to keep me company.”
She hasn’t said anything about missing me.
“Marc?”
“Yes?”
“Are you a vault?”
“Hmm?”
“You won’t go tattling to Noah?”
How do I tell her that my loyalties have shifted so decisively that Noah hasn’t entered my mind? He hardly ever does anymore. “I’m as secure as a Swiss bank.”
“I’m looking into the prime minister,” she admits.
My breathing checks, but she continues. “I was leading a SquadRun campaign this morning.” Oh, I know.
I’ve been sneaking into her sessions. My avatar has been a lone wolf, grinding for experience.
“We were shedding life points until this little runt on our team realized the final boss was so focused on protecting the treasury that he was leaving his flank open. We found his weakness.”
I wish my worst enemies the singular experience of having the woman they love describe them as ‘this little runt’.
“The prime minister is only after Freja because her husband is an immigrant,” Ella continues. “If there’s any hope of getting him to change his focus, I need to know what he would lay his life down to protect.”
I turn Ella around. “You don’t think his political opponents have tried to find his weakness?”
Her jaw hardens and her eyes narrow until I see the medieval queens she descended from. “I think they aren’t me.”
Why is it that the more murderous she looks, the more irresistible she is? “It’s dangerous, getting involved in politics. Someone is going to find out who you are.”
“No one knows who I am online,” she says, like I haven’t been tracking her progress as trashpandaprincess from brIx to Runaway Wagon to Eldritch Crown. If someone else finds out and exposes her... Vede. I’m so worried about her that I don’t even think about the monarchy.
“I’m careful,” says the girl who has been sharing her Friction server, her voice, and her expertise without hesitation for the last month to someone she assumed was an anonymous internet stranger.
“I’ll lay so many red herrings over my tracks that they’ll think they stumbled on a fish packing plant. ”
“I don’t like it.”
Her smile wobbles then firms. She goes on her toes and gives me a quick kiss. “I’m not asking permission.”