21. Million Monkeys
21
Million Monkeys
JACOB
Alma hasn’t checked her phone once. She hasn’t excused herself to the upstairs bedroom to carry on a low-voiced conversation with Pietor as they work it out together. She’s been with me the whole day.
“Let’s get you home safe,” I say.
She nods, but I don’t release her. For a second, I keep her folded against me, her strong arms around my waist, and the cottage door, lightly rattling in the wind, at my back.
I kiss the top of her head and pull away.
We return the same way we came. I wave to the security detail at the head of the drive and bounce onto the main road, grinning when she complains about being thrown around.
At the palace, she slithers through the gap between the front seats almost as soon as I stop. “Thank you,” she breathes.
Alma hops out the door and heads to her mother’s quarters, and I drive the truck around to the workshop and spend several hours working alone. I eat dinner alone. My session in the gym I spend alone.
At the end of the night, I hear her soft-footed return. Punching a pillow into shape, I stare hard at the door that divides us, willing her to tap on it, to whisper an invitation to talk.
I roll to my back, covering my face in goose down, emitting a frustrated, barely audible growl.
I glare at the door, and my gaze sharpens until I can trace the rough and sinuous grain of wood. Giving sleep up for lost, I reach for my phone.
“Is the offer to game still open?” I text.
Princess Ella responds immediately. “Of course. What’s your poison?”
“I need to explode some reptiles.”
“Console or PC?”
“Console.”
*clown emoji* “Come on over, old man.”
It’s nearly one in the morning, but I do.
“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 a schpelt .” 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.”
“Never?” I murmur, knowing very well what the implications of that are. The queen is a reflection of her people. What is it the crowd sang at the football match? One Sondish princess but not one more. Even if her daughter wasn’t already engaged, Her Majesty wouldn’t want Alma to get involved with a Vorburgian nobody, even if he is a prince.
I push the thought away.
Ella stretches. Her eyes are apologetic. “Alma doesn’t like risk any more than Mama does. She’s got to be certain about something before she makes a leap.”
Her words are unequivocal. Uncompromising. Tough luck. Move along. I get it. Chol , how transparent have I been?
“It’s a ridiculous way to live. I won’t let my father arrange my marriage.”
She shrugs. “Easy to say you wouldn’t bend to pressure when you’ve never felt it on your back.” She delivers this morsel of wisdom as she methodically obliterates a boss in a complicated series of jumps and flips.
We rest through a cutscene.
“So, who can we expect to be the next crown princess of Vorburg? What’s your type?”
I give a mirthless grunt. “Taken.”
I train my eyes on the screen, intent on hacking apart marauding turtles. Ella’s gaze bores into my skull. Finally, she performs a hard pivot.
“What did Alma say about the leak?”
“She said she’ll handle it.”
I return to the suite, pausing by Alma’s door and moving on. When morning comes, I shower and dress in a dark suit, doing my best with the tie. By the time I make my way to the administrative offices, it’s late.
The hallway is full of aides and secretaries striding with purposeful steps in every direction. Tablets are displayed, cellphones are hovered over. I see Alma coming from the end of the corridor, and I stop in her path, waiting for her to see me. It comes so late that she has to go up on her toes to stop herself from bumping into my chest. I steady her with a light touch, and she steps back.
She’s wearing the ring, touching the tiny top button of her blouse. Not undoing it. Just letting her finger slide off the little pearl over and over. Flick. Flick.
Yesterday she slipped into my arms like she belonged there.
“Do you want to do this today?” I ask. I’ll run away with her again. I’ll do it every day, if she wants.
Her lashes flicker. “No reason to cancel.”
No one disturbs us all morning. Mr. Tumwater messages us about the tuxedo but plans to stay in the workroom. Karl is monitoring the chaotic creation of the palace’s official response before it’s pushed out onto an unsuspecting public. Taking notes, I expect. Vorburg is a relative backwater while Sondmark is in the big leagues.
I play along with Alma, pretending not to notice that everyone has lost their minds. I want to make a joke about how catastrophic the situation is. Compare it to nuclear war, a second invasion from the east, or the crack-up of international superstars Lars and Bianca. I observe her pinched, white face, and hold my tongue.
Around noon, Caroline taps on the door and enters, giving her customary curtsey. “I have the response, Ma’am.” Handing over the paper, she waits while Alma scans the text.
Finally, Alma nods. “Good. Send it out.”
Caroline takes off and Alma chafes her arms. “Back to our lessons.”
“You’re not going to tell me what it says?”
She lifts a shoulder and puts on a newsreader’s voice. “In planning for an event of this magnitude, there are many variables. Some of them have yet to be resolved. Her Royal Highness appreciates the interest and warm wishes of our citizens, etc., etc. Final plans will be communicated through official channels. Now,” she wraps up, switching over to her usual tone, “we need to return to history. Where were we?”
“We’re still on the War of the Amber Cross,” I supply. “Why are we going over it in such detail? I know the bare bones.”
She loves putting me right. “Because we hate you for it, and you hate us. You have to know why so you don’t stumble into any tripwires.”
Alma’s phone vibrates and her eyes dart to the screen, lower lip caught between her teeth. The official response has been released, prompting a flood of personal texts.
“It’s going to be fine,” I say.
“Of course it is.” She touches the top button, finger flicking off the top.
“You can be upset. I don’t mind.”
She closes her eyes, her breath hitches, and she drops her head. Maybe she needed permission.
“Hey.” I kneel at her side, and run long passes between her shoulder blades. “Just breathe.”
She stills under my hand.
“The initial skirmish in the War of the Amber Cross was just the crown prince’s personal guard attacking his wife’s kidnappers on the route back to Handsel,” I say, already knowing how she’ll respond to the word choice.
“You can’t call them kidnappers,” she corrects. “Sondmark considers it a rescue. Don’t make that mistake into a hot mic.”
“All right. The princess barely...escaped with her life.”
The Vorburg account is raw, full of grief and rage and, being Vorburg, full of specific ways to enact vengeance. The crown prince writing to his father about how the princess had been stolen in the forest near their castle isn’t a polite, distant read full of “My lady wife” this and “We were beset upon” that. It’s all, “I will tear the flesh from their bones with my teeth. Blood will rain down their fortress walls until the return of my woman.”
“How did they get from a few soldiers to Leif SobeIsen charging through the East Gate with more mounted cavalry than the world has ever witnessed?” I ask.
Alma whispers. “He couldn’t let her go.”
The phone continues to vibrate. She tenses, and I turn it off, silencing the notifications.
“Do you know how amber is harvested in Vorburg?” I ask. She accepts this digression as a natural consequence of trying to teach me anything. “Storms come, churning up the petrified forests under the North Sea, and you go down to the seashore in bright orange rain gear and stand in the howling wind and pounding surf with a wide shrimp net, scooping through the breaking waves, looking for treasure, tossing back the dregs. The worst storms give the best rewards.”
“Are you trying to make me feel better?” Her voice levels out, and her muscles relax under my hand.
“Is it working?” I grin, kneading the tendons in her neck. I won’t be here always. She’ll have Pietor and the royal apparatus to fall back on.
What should be a comforting thought isn’t. Other than her sisters, I haven’t seen any support for Alma as a human being, only for her position. Dozens of people are wearing themselves out today to make sure the palace looks good.
Alma worries about me—about how I might fall on my face as soon as I assume my public role. In the beginning, everything she taught was about protecting me from that humiliation. But somewhere in the last few weeks, I sense a shift. Now she wants to protect me from being hurt.
It’s my turn to be worried about her.
“Do you know what else about amber?” I ask.
“Hmm?”
“It’s full of twigs, bugs, moss.” I lift my hand until it hovers above her hair. She won’t feel this. “It’s a mess and I love it.”