9. Frog Soup
9
Frog Soup
JACOB
“Into bed,” I say, dropping my hands and looking down and up and everywhere.
She chuckles, the sound of it digging into my mind the way my grandfather turns the soil over in his garden. Easy. Effortless. Preparing the ground to plant carrots or cabbages.
“I have to brush my teeth, floss, take off all this makeup...”
“Moisturize.”
We say the word at the same time, the beginnings of a secret language only we speak. Meeting her eyes, I tell myself, for the thousandth time, that she’s engaged. I can’t belong in the corner of her mind the way she already belongs in mine.
“Then bed,” I murmur, backing from the room and pushing through the door.
After I turn out the lights in my own room, I spend the night wondering what the hell kind of boundaries we just crossed. Undoing her hair. Talking. Handing her a couple of tablets and a glass of water. It was twenty minutes, give or take, and she didn’t tell me her life story. We just talked.
I wake before dawn, reaching for my phone and rubbing my eyes. My ears pick out the restless groaning of ancient beams and flooring. Alma is up, too.
I peel back the covers, open the door, and wait. Pink sticky notes dot the room, and the ornate dollhouse is firmly closed. Our no-man’s-land is deserted, but I watch the slow turn of Alma’s door handle and how she tiptoes through the narrow opening. I grin. She’s in a ponytail, wearing the old Harvard sweatshirt from last night and a pair of electric blue running shorts over black leggings. There are a pair of trainers in one hand and a sticker-covered water flask in the other. She pivots carefully and halts, mouthing what I’d bet are panicked Sondish swear words when the old building responds to her shifting weight. Her door swings gently ajar, exhaling a long creak.
I cross my arms and tilt my head, watching her lodge the trainers under the other arm and carefully pull her door shut. This isn’t the face of a woman going for a jog. It’s the face of a woman bent on redrawing smart boundaries, stringing barbed wire and hammering pickets into the ground.
Good. I need all the help I can get.
Alma relaxes her death grip on the handle and straightens. The line of her shoulders looks self-satisfied—the way mine must appear when I measure once and make the right cut anyway. When the room is bathed in perfect silence, I softly clear my throat.
She flails and lets out a squeak, dropping the tumbler with a metallic crash. It rolls in my direction, drunkenly following the irregularities of a centuries-old floor until it comes to rest against my bare foot. I scoop it up, reading the stickers, and my cheek tucks with a smile.
Among the trophies of past marathons, she’s got an anthropomorphic pastry sticker that reads “Donut Give Up,” and a zombie, his clothes in rags and flesh rotting off his face, is captioned “Run For Your Life.”
She bends over to pull on the trainers. “I’m headed out for a jog.”
“Into the city?”
She jerks the laces tight and shakes her head. “Into the woods.” I hand over the flask, and she clasps it over her stomach in a nervous habit she would never let me get away with. “Thank you for your help last night. My head feels better.”
I want to tell her to hydrate, to watch out for roots and patches of ice, to take her hair down if she starts getting a headache. “Sure,” I say, scratching my neck.
She watches me for a long moment and turns, setting her ponytail swinging. “Thanks again.”
When she disappears into the hall, I release a breath. “Anytime.”
Since it’s Sunday, I drive down to church, slipping into a pew of Roslav Cathedral as the service begins. Though I don’t understand a word, I follow the order of service in a program prepared for English-speaking tourists. The Sondish rites are similar to the Vorburgian ones, and my mind wanders to Alma, sitting on a chair last night, a leg tucked under her, head tipped back to look up at me. My ears redden and not only because the cathedral is colder than an ice box.
I set my jaw. This wouldn’t keep happening if I could see her as engaged. When Pietor returns, I’ll have Alma set me up with a friend and give me lessons in royal dating. Maybe we’ll sit on the floor of our common room to play a game of Mangos from Mangos and I’ll see her nestled against her fiancé, trading glances, and speaking their own private language.
Maybe then I’ll finally get it through my thick skull that she’s taken.
As the song of a boys’ choir fills the cathedral, I shift in the narrow bench, trying to get comfortable. An impossible job. Oma Gardner used to say that the harder the pew, the stronger the doctrine, and if this is so, these Sondish Lutherans are near heaven. The long, stone-set aisle is flanked by rows and rows of wooden seats, the walls and columns a contrast of creamy white and butter yellow. There is nothing to distract me from piety except the thought of Alma who, if royal news websites and Pixy influencers can be trusted, will walk down this very aisle on her wedding day.
When he finishes, the Sondish priest sends us away with words which even I understand. Peace be with you.
It’s a fragile peace, but I hold onto it until Monday morning when I enter the Chevres drawing room. Alma’s hair is tied back in a thin, black bow, exposing her neck and ears—all the places my hands have already been—and when she stands, I shutter my eyes. She asked me to greet her formally from now on, using her title but bowing as though she were a queen.
I advance. “Good morning, Your Royal Highness.” I take her hand and bow. It’s like using a router jig, I’ve decided. I’m following a course already laid out, limited in my choices but protected from my own stupidity by that fact. Follow the guide, and I won’t screw up.
She clears her throat and glances down.
“You held my hand too long,” she says, tugging out of my clasp. “The press will have their stopwatches out.”
My brow furrows. “I’m not the king.”
My precious spring blossom, her expression seems to say , and she begins to leaf through the day’s materials. “You’ll be an unknown element, so everything you do, especially at the beginning, will be taken as a clue about your character. To the Sondish press, you’re a foreigner, and they’ll want to see if you are about to cause an international incident. They’re rooting for that outcome, actually.” She places a finger against a page and begins to trace her progress through a paragraph. “They’ll sell more papers if you do. A young, good-looking bachelor is a goldmine.”
Her words banish any hope of peace.
Alma continues to leaf through a stack of notes and extracts a magazine, tossing it on the table. The sound restarts my brain, and I focus on the image of Crown Prince Noah staring from the cover of Businessman’s Quarterly.
Shoving my hands into my pockets, I hunch over it like it’s a table full of volatile bomb-making materials. Noah has a slick, dark suit, a square jawline, and tanned skin, under a headline that reads, “The Prince: Sondmark’s Visionary Answer to Economic Progress, Politics, and the Past”. Chol . The man looks serious and impatient—like he has too much on his hands to be dealing with the petty trivialities of a photoshoot, but also like he can’t help the way he looks in a suit.
I plow a hand through my hair. Noah is everything I’m not—educated, polished, at ease—and the idea that we have the same title is a joke. He doesn’t have to work to be a crown prince. He just is.
Alma leans close, and my attention scatters. “His position,” she says, “allows him to shine a light on some of the meatiest topics facing the country, but it also means that questions about the succession are fair game. His dating life is a matter of national interest. Yours is too, until you’re safely married. The spotlight will be intense.”
It’s not what I expected when I agreed to the job. Even knowing that King Otto was my father, I never had much interest in the royalty thing. I was hard at work building my business. The role of the monarchy in Vorburg—lumbering coaches and military reviews, a few times a year—seemed peripheral.
I thumb through the magazine article, which features Noah in a variety of settings. The prince in his office. The prince in a hardhat, touring a recycling plant. The prince in his garden with a dog of some indeterminate breed. There are quotes about “the long-term fiscal outlook” and how “reuse makes as much economic sense as it does environmental.” He doesn’t sound useless and peripheral.
I slap the magazine on the table. “That’s what a thousand years of strategic breeding gets you.”
Alma flips through the pages, landing on Noah in the stables wearing a moth-eaten sweater and muddy boots. He carries himself in the careless way only people with serious money can.
“What do you mean?” she asks, sliding her gaze all over me.
“I wasn’t strategic. I was a failure of birth control,” I grumble, feeling like the bear emblazoned on the flag of Vorburg. “It’s ridiculous to make leadership decisions based on biology.”
“More silly than holding an election and having less than half the country insist that the results were impacted by the weather in key constituencies?” Alma takes a seat and picks up a photo of the queen on a side table. “The prime minister and parliamentarians grapple for votes, but the queen is beyond partisanship. She represents her people in a way no mere politician could hope to.”
Alma sounds like those online lecturers, holding a clicker and telling warm anecdotes set to a slide show. I include the wrap-up she hasn’t. “...so thank you for coming to my BIL Talk.”
Her smile includes a wince. “Did I get carried away talking about constitutional monarchy?”
I love it when she’s carried away. “You’ve almost convinced me to disregard my deep affection for representative democracy,” I tell her.
“Almost?” She rubs the backs of her fingertips lightly against her blouse and examines her nails. She blows gently on them, casting me a look of innocent triumph. “I’m losing my touch.”
Alma would be so proud if she guessed how many feelings I’m covering up right now. I grip the table. “You can’t beat the Blackberry Fourth of July parade, musicals about our Founding Fathers, and the ease of mail-in voting.”
Her smile disappears. “You vote?”
“Always.”
Alma’s teeth fret her lip, and I crouch in front of her. “Why are you making that face? I thought that would finally be something I’m doing right. You know, ‘Flosses regularly, sings along to the hymns, does his civic duty.’”
“Voting is good.” She shakes her head like it isn’t. “Your father’s ministers will have an official position on your citizenship and how you exercise it.”
I drop my head and swear fluently in a language she can’t understand.
My grandma tells a story about a frog being boiled slowly in a pot. I got into these royal waters when it was cool, but the longer I’m here, the more it smells like frog soup.
“Jacob,” she whispers, touching my shoulder.
I lift my eyes. “How many things do they expect me to change? I’m American. I’m Vorburgian. Dual citizenship is a thing in the year of our Lord twenty—”
“It isn’t for a crowned head of state.” She runs the tip of her tongue across her lip. “My grandmother went into labor with my uncle when she was on a state visit. Very unexpected. The host government had to designate the hospital room as extraterritorial so that he wouldn’t be born a citizen. He wasn’t even the heir.”
“What calamity will befall us if I cast a vote in Oregon’s third congressional district?”
She shrugs, lips pulling in apology. “Loyalties can’t be divided. Something always wins out.”
My fist drums lightly, restrained but rhythmic. “I’m here, aren’t I? I turned over my financial records to the government and shuttered my business. Doesn’t this look like I’m making this my top priority?”
The silence stretches, and I rake my hair back under her steady, critical gaze.
Finally, she clears her throat and looks back to her notes. “Do you want a real answer?”
I nod.
“We need to consider the message you’re sending.”
Understanding Alma is complicated by her royal politeness. “You mean my clothes?”
“Among other things.”
“I’m wearing a suit.” It wrinkles when you look at it wrong. “Isn’t this what you want?”
Her mouth pulls. “It doesn’t matter what I want. It’s about what your position demands. Every decision you make about your appearance tells a story.”
A knock sounds at the door and, without needing to be told, I straighten and pivot away like we’re double agents, passing state secrets.
She makes them wait until she’s collected herself, sharpening the edges of her princessness again. “Enter,” she calls.
Caroline holds the door, and Karl slides a box of binders onto the table I’m slouching against. (The Basics of Posture isn’t on the syllabus until next week.) I read the spines of each as they’re unpacked. Royal Men of Vorburg, Contemporary Royal Men, Influential European Men.
Every road was always going to lead to these binders. “They couldn’t leave me alone, could they?”
Alma’s tongue clicks. “Don’t be a baby. You know and I know that this”—she points a finger up and down and up my frame—“isn’t going to cut it. It says you think this whole thing is superficial and not worth bothering about.”
“Bravo, Your Royal Highness,” Karl interjects with a slow clap.
“It’s no time to start a war,” Caroline says, dipping into a curtsey and dragging him from the room. “Do ring if you need anything more. Sir. Ma’am.”
Alma and I are left with only the company of an ornate mantel clock announcing its presence with a soft tick, tick, tick.
“I’m bothering,” I grit out.
“Don’t lie to me. You look like you’re having as much fun as someone facing a government firing squad.”
“Is this supposed to be fun?”
Alma sighs, leaning back. She’s tired and letting me see it. “Why are you here?”
I could give her the truth but the whole of it is too big to swallow in one sitting. So I give her something small and easy to digest. “Once upon a time, a mommy and daddy didn’t love each other even a little.”
“Jacob,” she scolds. But her eyes dance.