5. Massive Rock
5
Massive Rock
JACOB
Karl drags my duffel bag to the ironing board. “They have me staying in separate quarters, Your Royal Highness,” he says, frowning at the ceiling.
My stomach tightens. My new title produces the same reaction as a small-town bully with a baseball bat standing too near the Coke machine—it’s a risk to be assessed, a gauntlet to be run. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to it.
When Karl unzips the duffel bag, his face spasms. At least life holds these little joys.
“Sir,” he says, lifting the flannel coat I wear in the shop, which has holes everywhere. Tiny shavings of sawdust sprinkle on the rug. “For what occasion did you anticipate the need for this?”
“A gentleman is always prepared for every occasion.” I don’t think Karl appreciates hearing one of his little kernels of wisdom echoed back to him.
He continues his task, and I duck into the common area, picked clean of any signs of a princess save for a few bright pink sticky notes clinging lifelessly to a picture frame, a light switch, a vase. These are a reminder that however long our paths run on parallel tracks, they won’t intersect.
Chol. She should have said something. She should have been wearing her ring. She should have stayed safely in the ballroom where I never would have seen her. She should have been kissing her fiancé, and I should have been disappointing Karl.
I run my hand through my hair, gathering it into my fist. Chol nia. This little dream, this delusion, lasted less than twelve hours. She explained herself—about the champagne and the mistake—with an apology so watertight, I could launch it into the ocean. I’m not entitled to feel betrayed or to ask her what in the hell she was thinking, playing with a heart she found in the wild.
What began is over already. I should be thankful I escaped without any damage.
I make my way to the small kitchen, opening and shutting cabinets, finding basic cooking instruments and dishes. In the compact refrigerator, Alma’s few things are circumscribed on the top shelf, leftovers stacked neatly in matching glass dishes.
A note indicates my things, supplied by some palace servant—a carton of eggs and a container of milk, a few fresh vegetables, cheese, and a hummus dip. I pick up a small glass jar with a gold foil lid, stamped with a word I sound out: “Pan-ke-druss.” Peeling the lid back, I sample the thick, gray, contents with a knuckle.
Gagging, I turn the sink on, plunging my cupped hand under the tap and taking several long swallows. What is wrong with these people? My father, his ministers, and history warned me that relations with Sondmark would be hostile, but I expected a grace period before an attempt to poison me.
“Karl,” I call, returning to my room. The ancient door shudders as I close it.
“Sir?” Karl enters from the closet, a thick wood hanger hooked over his forefinger. Hanging from it is a faded graphic t-shirt.
I close my eyes. “Have you been ironing the t-shirts again?”
“It’s my responsibility to make sure you represent the monarchy well.” He points to a photo of King Otto he placed on the bedside table. Exhaling tightly, I move past him, grabbing a pair of jeans and shirt.
He shouts through the firmly closed closet door. “Sir, does this mean I’ll have a chance to work on your suit?”
He sounds so damned hopeful. Tugging my t-shirt down, I glance at the heap of clothes on the floor with a nagging sense of guilt. I drape the limp blue polyester over the ironing board, placing the white-ish shirt with the graying collar next to it—not helpful but suggesting a certain willingness to be so. I throw on my jacket and jam my wallet into my back pocket.
“Sir?” Karl says, when I return. It’s impressive how much mileage he can get from the word.
“I’m going out to get a feel for the city.”
“Advance work for the state visit. Excellent.” He reaches for his phone. “I’ll notify palace security.”
“No, no,” I turn my collar up. “No one knows who I am. Not for twelve more weeks.”
I escape The Summer Palace, a building which can’t decide if it’s a fairytale castle or an armed fortress. Traditional guards in deep red uniforms emblazoned with the dragon of Sondmark in gold thread keep watch in a frigid wind, feathered caps ruffling as they stand at attention in front of the impressive main gate. Those are for show. The iron bollards, well-armed security officers, and surveillance cameras are the real deal.
At the top of the hill, I catch a Ryde and it drops me in the heart of the tourist district near candy-colored shops and upscale restaurants ringing the harbor. Expensive. Inauthentic. Just as she’d said. Or I’d understood. I pause a moment to wonder what she’d say now that it’s midday and the champagne has burned off. I shove my hands into my pockets. She’d sound like a chamber of commerce brochure, but some part of me believes that no matter what she said, I’d know what she wanted to say.
Heading inland, I circle the park at the center of an expensive square and watch a man in tasseled loafers exit a townhouse.
“Historically speaking, markets in western Europe won’t stabilize until—” He slips into a waiting black town car, off to shape international monetary policy.
On narrow, ordinary streets, there are no tourists, only signs of everyday living—a local bakery, a parish church, a corner shop where I buy a plain white candle—but in every window facing the street, curtains are drawn back, granting a peek into a world of inviting wintertime warmth complete with fairy lights and colorful pillows. The Sondish like to present these little pictures, but they seem fake. When things get too much, I bet they retreat to a washroom and scream into the decorative hand towels.
Turning west, I discover a park where old men have gathered, wearing soft berets and heavy scarves, speaking a language that seems to be some blend of Italian and Spanish, their breath and laughter mixing in the piercing cold.
When the sun sets, when I have more memories of Sondmark than the upturned face of a girl reaching for a kiss, I return to the palace, grateful for cold ears and a red nose. I push through the common room door to find Karl waiting next to a sturdy gateleg table in the sitting room. He greets me with a bow.
“Knock it off,” I mutter, but there’s no heat in it.
He pulls out a chair and I frown at it. He frowns back. I drop into the chair, and he smiles. “I’ve prepared a dinner of French onion and beef stew, Your Royal Highness, with a side of—”
I can’t do this for the next three months. “I’m more than capable of looking after myself.” I tap the spoon on the bowl. “Don’t you have some Sondish interests to subvert? Some sleeper cells to contact?”
Karl’s brows tent. “It’s never a good time to jest about covert operations, sir.”
“Too soon?” His mouth pinches, and I laugh. “All right, here’s the deal. You bow and scrape from nine to five, but I need to turn off the royal protocol at the end of the day.”
“There is no on or off for a crown prince,” he insists. “You are the crown prince.”
Not yet, I’m not. While at the Summer Palace, I exist in limbo, in a kind of workshop situated between the virgin forest and the ancient castle. I’ve been sawn away from my roots, fighting and straining as I fell, only to be carted to a mill. I’m full of knots and raw edges and the marks of the saw. There’s no telling what I’ll become. What I’m certain of is that Karl can force these honorifics on me, he can iron my t-shirts and serve my dinner, but it hasn’t made me a crown prince yet.
“I’ll text you when I’m coming down for lessons,” I say. “You can pick up my laundry and leave it outside. Otherwise, I’m on my own.”
He leaves, possibly offended, but I can’t let him be the one to decide how much of Jacob Gardner remains when this is all over. If that means I’m in charge of the care and washing of my original Zombie NaBombie t-shirt, so be it. When I do my dishes, a podcast about bronze age societies plays over the Paige device. I’m content to hold on to these normal things.
I treat the rest of the night like I’m in my flat back home. Using the candle, I apply wax to the door frame, eliminating one nuisance. I call my mom. She laughs when I describe Karl traveling in wintertime conditions. I lay out my carving tools and scroll through my phone, looking for a project. When I climb into bed, wind shakes the windows. Just before I lose consciousness, I remember what I’ve been trying to forget.
Alma . I have to stop thinking of her, and I make a resolution. She’s just another one of these uptight royals. I won’t like her. I’ll keep my hands to myself. I’ll keep my thoughts away from that kiss.
That’s the plan. Remember who I am. Forget the princess.
When morning comes, I grab some fruit from the kitchen and my suit from a hook outside the front door. I brush my teeth, spitting my toothpaste out to repeat my name in the mirror three times like one of those games meant to conjure a vengeful ghost. Jacob Gardner. Jacob Gardner. Jacob Gardner .
I don’t meet the princess until Karl escorts me to my lessons in a drawing room on the main floor. This is going to be an ordinary occurrence. I’ll see her every morning for hours. The sooner I can make peace with these facts, the faster I’ll build up an immunity to being around her. I look deeply, exposing myself to the highest dose, wanting to get it over with. She’s wearing close-fitting slacks and a high-necked sweater that drapes over her curves and brushes the underside of her jaw.
I wait to feel nothing.
“Morning,” I say, still waiting.
She smiles—a Handsel harbor smile, tidy and meant for show. “Good morning, Your Royal Highness.” She greets me in English. “I trust you had a good night’s sleep.”
She pushes nutbrown hair away from her face, and I barely register the greeting for the massive rock on her left finger.
“ Chol , is this the ring?” I ask.
She doesn’t glance down. “That’s it.”
Forgetting my resolutions, I hold my hand out. She rests her fingers lightly in the center of my palm. The stone is the same color as the bitter white milk found in a dandelion stem and the fittings look ancient, curling over the rounded corners of the gem like a pair of venomous fangs. I brush my thumb over its face, and it slips to one side.
“Used?”
She takes a shocked breath. “Heirloom. It’s eco-conscious.”
It’s ugly, is what it is.
She withdraws her hand and indicates a couple of chairs for Karl and me, offering refreshments.
Karl sets a thick packet of material on the coffee table. “His Majesty King Otto wished to supply you with all the pertinent details, ma’am.”
No. I intercept the binder and ruffle the pages containing testimonials from former teachers, several pages of photos, the financial details of my bespoke woodworking business, the results of several clean drug tests, and a whole section about my mother.
I give Karl a cold smile.
“You won’t be needing these,” I say, isolating the pages about my mom. I rip them out, slipping them into my pocket before spinning the binder back to Alma. “Who are you working for, Karl?”
My one-man sleeper cell gives me a bland smile. “Vorburg. Of course.”
Alma opens the book and runs her finger along a line of text. “His Royal Highness Crown Prince Jacob, formerly known as Jacob Gardner, is half-American,” she reads. “Born in Blackberry, Oregon to Ms. Tiffani Fawn Gardner—”
“She doesn’t have anything to do with this,” I cut in.
Alma holds her finger in place and looks up. “She is the mother of the next king of Vorburg,” she says, stating a fact I haven’t come to terms with. Mom doesn’t care about all that. “We are your team. If protecting her privacy is important to you, we can plan for that, but to do so, we need a full picture of what we’re dealing with in order to smooth your transition into royal life.”
Her words are stripped of judgment, but she has a notepad next to her teacup. Even upside down, I can read the bullet points. How to hold his tongue. How to enter a room. When to touch. She’s already aware of my shortcomings.
She gives a crisp nod. “Shall we proceed, sir?”
“Jacob.”
“Hmm?”
“Jacob.” I give her a slow smile, liking the way my name has thrown her off balance. “You’re on Team Jacob.”
Her cheeks wash pink, but when she turns to the next tab in the binder, she’s in command again. “You attended Little Duckies Preschool and Blackberry Elementary.” The sheer volume of information this skims over is impressive. “Then you enrolled at Skip Middle School.”
Does Karl’s dossier tell her about how Blackberry Elementary doesn’t feed into Skip Middle? About how I moved up to my grandparents’ property on the Nehalem River when Mom had her cancer treatments in Portland, spent my summers fishing and building leaky boats out of scrap lumber, and my winters in grandpa’s single-wide tool shed inspecting dozens of mixed nuts containers from the food warehouse that he’d repurposed to hold random keys, flange head screws, eye bolts, and wads of bungee cords. How I can still hear the blended sounds of rain beating on the roof of the trailer, the AM radio crackling in the background, and the scrape of a carving tool.
“The next record is your enrollment at the Royal Academy of Vorburg at the age of fourteen.”
Another vast store of information is buried in the white space between the black lines.
She picks up a pen, touching the tip lightly to the page. Her eyes meet mine, and I feel the powerful drag of attraction. I wait for it to pass.
“How is your Vorburgian accent?”
I grin. “Karl?”
My aide clears his throat. “It’s quite good, actually. Not perfect. It’s most noticeable in the sound of his soft H and how he flattens some vowels. His vocabulary is as extensive as mine, however.”
Alma makes a notation.
“Not quite that extensive,” I correct, tipping my chair back on two legs. Alma watches the angle and makes another note. I tip a little farther. “Karl calls me all kinds of names I don’t understand.”
“Sir.” It’s as close as Karl will come to scolding me in mixed company. He turns to the princess. “I said it wouldn’t do to get a reputation for being tovorny —recalcitrant,” he supplies for her benefit. He glances at me. “It means—”
“Obstinate toward authority. I know what that means in English.”
“It will have to be perfect in less than three months,” Alma directs. “Perhaps you could make that your priority, Pane Nowak? It must be absolutely flawless and include idioms, slang, and humor.” She adds a bullet point on her notepad.
Alma’s brow lifts when she reads over my transcripts from the Royal Academy of Vorburg, discovering a failing mark in History of the Early Middle Ages.
“How versed are you in Vorburgian history and the history of northern Europe?”
Her pen is ready to record and repair.
“I think it’s pretty good.” Grandpa still listens to AM radio in his woodshop, but I listen to audiobooks and podcasts, mostly nonfiction topics ranging from history to classical literature to economics.
She looks at me with serious eyes. She kissed me. The memory intrudes when I don’t ask for it. “Want to test me?”
Her lips, I know how soft, purse. “Royalty isn’t a pop quiz. Do you—” A knock on the door interrupts her.
She calls out in Sondish and conducts a brief exchange. It’s like I’m hearing the language for the first time. Textbooks will tell you that Sondish is a cousin of English with a higher degree of throatiness. From Princess Alma’s mouth, it’s strong and nimble. I wonder what it sounds like when she’s whispering in the dark.
“The Royal Academy of Vorburg is one of the most academically rigorous private schools on the continent,” she says, interrupting my thoughts. “They don’t typically accept transfers from Skip Middle School.”
Karl spins the explanation. “Even before the confirmation of Crown Prince Jacob’s royal parentage, His Majesty concerned himself with his heir.”
I watch the slight lift of Alma’s brow, an expression on the edge of a smile. She sees right through Karl’s public relations, and when she looks at me, I start answering a question she hasn’t even asked.
“My mother reappeared in His Majesty’s life with compelling evidence of my identity. When faced with the…reality of my existence and the potential disaster it constituted, he threw money at us. Quite a lot. You can call my father a lot of things, but you can’t call him cheap.”
She nods. “Your grades weren’t outstanding, but given that you were a graduate of the Royal Academy, you could have gone almost anywhere.”
Again, I feel the question rather than hear it. Nice royal girls take you right to the edge of a cliff and wait until casting yourself over the edge seems like your own idea.
“I didn’t go just anywhere . I apprenticed at Appe and Sons for more than eight years. I worked hard to master my craft and learn the business. Within the world of restoration carpentry and bespoke furnishings, it’s a name that commands respect.”
Not with Karl, though. “He also attended école Sciences.”
I shake my head. “Half a semester hardly qualifies—”
Alma makes a note. “That helps.”