29. Coming Storm
29
Coming Storm
ALMA
Are you there? I tap the words out and hit send, watching the phone for any signs of a response.
Jacob???
Why aren’t you answering?
I’m ruined for meaningful work for the rest of the day, squeezing in what I can between checking my phone. I turn it off and on again. I look for a software update and ask my sisters to send me texts. Everything is in working order. Jacob has cut me off.
For good reason. What is there to say? I can’t apologize. I’m handling things in the best way I know.
A team from the palace and a team from the grand duchy agree on a series of pap walks, strategically positioning Pietor and me in places where we’re likely to be photographed. He surprises me with breakfast at La Baiser Chaleureux, but it was Caroline who secured a reservation for the popular bistro. We walk past a line of people who whip out their phones, and I tuck my hair behind my ear, confident that social media will push these posts to thousands. The man behind the gleaming glass display smiles in welcome, even as his confused glance twitches between me and Pietor.
Pietor takes me to a concert in a dress that should have the fashion press talking for weeks. The slit is so high, I fear the wrath of my Lutheran ancestors, and on the ride home I shiver. He never thinks to offer me his coat.
This is a courtesy I wouldn’t have had to teach Jacob. As soon as we got into the car, he would have shrugged out of his coat and draped it over my shoulders. But being a prince, I have discovered, is not the same thing as being a gentleman.
I spend my days toting the opal boil from one end of Handsel to the other, giving Pietor meaningful glances in full view of paparazzi and cell phone cameras. When he puts a hand on my waist, I paste a smile on my lips.
The pictures popping up all over the internet, morning news shows, and on the homepages of every gossip site in Sondmark are convincing. We’re being talked about. It’s no longer about economics and state visits, for me. Over the last few days, my focus has shifted. This is for Jacob. I can’t fail him.
I spend Saturday night sitting cross legged in front of the dollhouse, touching a gentle finger against the tiny spindles of the staircase, moving objects around, and staring at my phone.
On Sunday morning, I wait in the breakfast room, prepared to face the worst. The maid lays the newspapers on the table, and I reach for The Daily Missive , taking a deep breath before I read the headline.
Headlines.
“Princess Alma Making Sparks with Mysterious Man-bun”
“Don’t Break His Heart, Alma: Friends Weigh in on the Hereditary Grand Duke”
“More Scandal Rocks the Royal Family”
Sure enough, page two has the graph of possible Wolffe cousins with percentages under each name, giving the likelihood that the man was a relation—a cousin with a strange mole I needed to inspect. The graph is rendered in color. The conclusions are unscientific but damning.
I pick up my phone, scrolling through my text history.
I can still taste the Pankedruss.
It’s been days. That’s biologically impossible. For the pride of Vorburg…Suck. It. Up.
Clara rushes in, her hair clipped into fat rollers, with Ella hard on her heels. “What just happened? What is this? Do you want to sue?”
Ella snatches up the newspaper. “Is this the reason why you were doing pap walks with Pietor all weekend? Did Mama make you do it? What happened with Jacob?”
I look up, and something in my face—self-pity or bone-weary exhaustion—silences them. “Mama isn’t making me do anything.”
Ella snorts. “All she had to do was ask.”
My lips twist, and I blink.
“Oh, vede , don’t look like that.”
“Like what?” I’m fighting tears.
“Like Superman swallowed kryptonite. You’re the steady one.” She shakes her head. “This will pass. It always does. We’ve had eight hundred years of things just passing.”
I release a slow breath. I’m the steady one. The queen’s right hand. The one who can be counted on. I’m not supposed to need saving. My chin pulls with the strain of self-control.
“I have to see Mama,” I say. An excuse. I need to get out of here.
Clara nods and makes way when I pass. “No one blames you for having a rebound,” she states, turning the knife in my wound. “We’ve all done foolish things.”
The thought catches in my throat. I get it. The thought of him and me…it’s laughable.
The palace elects to make no comment, and we spend the rest of the day pretending six news trucks aren’t parked outside the front gates, gathering man-on-the-street reactions to recent headlines, and prepare to receive Freja, Oskar, and Max to dinner.
We are to dine in the old family apartment where Mama lives in solitary splendor since Père moved out, and I help Una select the linens and china. She entrusts me with the ironing and the table settings. The work is simple but precise and keeps my mind away from full-blown panic.
Dinner is delicious, and though our family has its problems, each member of the House of Wolffe knows how to make conversation and avoid tricky subjects. Freja and Oskar give us a diverse range of topics—updates about the museum, citizenship tests, and the weather in Florence. Max doesn’t try too hard to fill the silences, and Clara holds his hand under the table. He doesn’t bother fighting her off or being awkward about it, but he maintains the bearing of a military officer. Mama will like that, even if she doesn’t want to.
As we move into the lounge, Père kisses my forehead and gives me a quick squeeze.
“I like you,” he says, apropos of nothing. How can he say so? I’ve messed up. The prime minister was caught on a hot mic threatening to move up talks over Freja’s place in the line of succession, and the country has spent the whole day dissecting my morals—and not in a good way.
Still, my father’s easy affection warms me.
When the night grows late and our small talk is exhausted, the party breaks up. Noah holds me back as the others disperse, rolling a small measure of whisky around a heavy glass tumbler and eyeing me from the sofa. Though the weight of the crown is on Mama’s head, my brother, as her heir, has the right to take an interest in anything that threatens it.
“Do you blame me?” I ask, leaning against the mantel.
“I would have picked a better time to throw away a lifetime of good press.” He takes a drink and smiles into the glass. “Especially for Vorburg.”
“For Jacob. Do you blame me?”
He looks at me for a long while. “If it’s a matter of the heart, what do I know?” he asks, voice tinged with bitterness. “You have to be careful.” He lifts a hand. “I know you will. But still, things are unsettled. Freja. Clara. Even our parents.” He stands and stretches, pulling me into a careless hug and kissing the top of my head. “Mama actually gave the go-ahead for Freja to visit family in Pavieau. Heaven only knows what will happen next.”
When he takes himself off, I retire. But instead of turning right at the top of the stairs, I find myself outside Ella’s door. She buzzes me into a darkened room, and I find her lying on the bed with a Seongan drama projected on the opposite wall, subtitles spooling out above a chair rail. She pats the bed and I crawl in, reaching for a handful of peppermint puffs, watching the flickering lights, and letting them dissolve on my tongue one at a time.
Within minutes, Clara knocks, and Ella presses a button. Our little sister pushes through the door, dragging Freja along behind her.
“We sent our menfolk off. We haven’t had sister time in forever,” Clara explains, shoving aside the mountain of stuffed raccoons.
Ella glares as they push their way onto the bed, flopping haphazardly as they take in the drama.
It makes no sense. Men with sharp-drawn eyebrows and elaborate up-dos execute a series of gestures in a magical duel. A woman in a contemporary business suit collapses in her cubicle in another dimension. The hero is mortally wounded, falling into some alien, wind-scoured terrain.
“What is this?” Clara asks, scooching me over.
Ella reaches for the black licorice. “It’s a classic called Knight: The Tormented and Forsaken Angel . He’s a thousand-year-old guardian spirit, and she’s the national security analyst who inherits him. Hijinks ensue.”
The desperate heroine shouts into the void, tears streaking her make-up as her lover, standing invisible and mute at her side, looks on.
“These are hijinks?” I bite back a wail.
Ella emits a soft laugh. “We’re way past hijinks. We’re in the part where he’s been banished to a shadow realm for changing his destiny and daring to fall in love with her.”
Vede . I want to grip the edge of a railing and shout across the frozen mountains of Sondmark. Come back. Come back . But Jacob is in the dark heart of Vorburg, and he has frozen me out.
“Tissue,” I demand. Clara reaches to a side table and slaps one into my hand. I stanch the silent tears, only to have the thing almost disintegrate. “Tissue.”
Ella halts the show when I start sobbing. She gathers me into her arms, and I bury my face in her shoulder. Clara wraps an arm around my waist. Freja covers my bare feet while every tear I’ve ever swallowed works its way out. I want to curl up, knees to forehead, but there is no retreating from my sisters. They would only curl with me.
“Tissue?” I ask.
Ella directs Freja. “There’s another box next to my sink.”
A sister slides away and returns.
“Alma.” It’s Clara this time.
“I’m fine.”
“These things go in cycles,” she tells me. “Eventually, the press will ease up.” Clara should know. She’s been the target of enough negative coverage to paper over every surface in the Summer Palace. “When you’re in it, it feels like a hurricane. But the storm will shift.”
“It’s not the coverage.” I press the balls of my hands into my eyes, easing the tight pressure, rubbing away the grit.
Freja’s brow wrinkles and she finds her own answer to the strange sight of seeing her most self-composed sister crack up. “Your engagement is broken, but we haven’t been here for you. I’ve been—”
“It’s not that.” Honestly, if it weren’t for having to look affectionate to Pietor in public and having my name linked with his, I would have forgotten him entirely. When I finished with him, I finished.
Ella stares up at the baroque plasterwork on the ceiling. “This is about Jacob.”
She says it like a scientist holding up a petri dish and diagnosing a bacterial bloom. This is about Jacob. Fact.
“He spent the last week on my couch obliterating an alien horde.” Fact.
My nose prickles with more unshed tears. No. There is to be no more of such things. I sniff, and a fat tear rolls down my cheek.
Freja shakes her head and points to me. “She would not be overset by a tutoring assignment.”
I open my mouth, and the truth comes spilling out, as though bursting through a crumbling embankment, destroying farmland and wiping out thatch-roofed cottages.
“It was New Year’s Eve, and he smelled so good…Every day he showed up wearing this awful suit and every day it mattered less and less…Tailored menswear can save the world, I swear…If Freja hadn’t told him about Pietor, none of this would have happened…All that training, and he still thinks he can go around beating people up when they call me names,” I cry.
“Pietor deserved the fat lip,” Ella spits. “My only regret is that I wasn’t the one who delivered it.”
“Jacob isn’t supposed to be hitting anyone,” I wail, glossing over my own lapse.
Clara snorts. “Max would have flattened the reporter who stalked us, but I told him it was better to cripple him financially. He only agreed because he likes precision weapons.”
Freja pipes up. “I don’t understand. You’ve been all over the papers this week with Pietor. I thought you two were back on. If not, why are you even seeing him so much?”
Ella whacks her. “Keep up. It’s because of the picture in the papers today. She had to get ahead of the story and protect her reputation.”
I sit up, holding my arms over my stomach. “I don’t care about my reputation.”
My sisters go completely still, absorbing the words until Ella breaks the silence. “Excuse me?”
I scrub my eyes with the heel of my hand. My mascara disappeared a dozen tissues ago, and I’m too tired to pretend. “The damage to me is done. I can’t let Jacob—”
“Oh.” Freja reaches for my hand, feeling her way through her thoughts. “You like him.”
Freja doesn’t grasp interpersonal relationships like the rest of us do. Things have to be an astronomically big deal before she drags her attention away from her pet obsessions. Though it’s a massive understatement, my sister has hit the nail on the head. Yes. I like him.
Ella falls back and stares up at the ceiling. “I thought you were making out and flirting. No judgment,” she lifts her hands. “You needed an outlet. But a Vorburgian prince—” The lyrics of the drinking song come into my head. One Sondish princess, but not one more.
She points at Clara, Freja, then me. “Commoner, Immigrant, Enemy. This is Mama’s nightmare timeline.”
Clara whacks her. “What are you going to do? Date in secret? Outingen Huis is closer to the border. You could meet—”
Bless my littlest sister for thinking of logistics. In happier circumstances, I would need love nest recommendations for my clandestine romance, but Jacob has given me days of radio silence, and I don’t know what to do.
“I don’t have a plan.” We definitely don’t have a plan. “I have to keep things quiet through the state visit so he can be in the spotlight without the added pressure of scandal.”
I look down, twisting my fingers. My sisters take a position on every side of me, arms tight, warm breath stirring my hair.
As bad as Sunday is, Monday is worse.
Caroline finds me working in my suite. Her mouth is tight when I answer the door. After years of service to the Crown, she’s never ventured into the private residential area of the palace, always staying in her place—the admin wing, with her neat, compact office out of which she conducts the affairs of Queen Helena.
“Ma’am, you need to see this,” she says, handing me a stack of newspapers comprising every outlet in Sondmark and several more in a language I recognize as Vorburgian.
My heart rate spikes, and sourness rises up my throat. “Come in,” I say, making my way to the sitting room and setting the newspapers on the floor. I fish The Holy Pelican , the most sedate newspaper in Sondmark, from the pile, and take in the headline. “Bastard Prince a Heartbeat from Throne of Vorburg”. I scan the article, “Tiffani Fawn Gardner of Blackberry, Oregon, U.S.A. was a dancer when she ensnared His Majesty King Otto of Vorburg…”
The story contains salacious elements. A girl running away from a small town and heading to Hollywood. A performer who thought she could catch a king. An unplanned pregnancy. A child raised in exile. A cancer diagnosis. A payoff. Payoff. The word pulls me up. That’s the word they chose to describe a man taking responsibility for his child’s education. The bare details are true, some of them well known in Vorburg, even, but the light shining on them is not the soft glow of positive coverage. This is the harsh illumination of a hit piece.
She doesn’t have anything to do with this.
Those were almost Jacob’s first words to me. I remember it being the first thing I liked about him—his loyalty to his mother and his desire to protect her, recognizing the same impulse in myself. My hands are stiff and cold as I turn the pages over. The world is being introduced to Crown Prince Jacob of Vorburg, future head of state.
“How could the courtiers in Djolny allow this?”
Caroline shakes her head. “They never would. It can’t have come from those loyal to the crown.”
My hands shake. “Did my mother leak this?” I have to ask. I hold my breath, waiting on the answer. If she has, I won’t forgive her.
Again, Caroline shakes her head. I sense her gentle pity. “She doesn’t want unnecessary drama to overshadow the state visit.”
“Karl? He looks like a weasel.”
Caroline flashes an expression that tells me I am unworthy of that thought and she will pretend she didn’t hear it. “He’s a loyal servant to His Majesty The King. Vorburg needs things to go well, even more than we do.”
Who else even knew Jacob was in Sondmark? My mind spins through the possibilities, a kaleidoscope of faces and names, until it comes to rest.
Of course. “Pietor.”
Caroline looks like a teacher, tapping the tip of her nose when I find the right answer. “I have no confirmation of that.”
Never trust a reptile. Never turn your back on a snake. I take a breath and allow myself to see the whole picture—the mess of newsprint, the number of words dedicated to tearing into Jacob’s heart and ripping the crown from his hands.
What protection will he have from his father? Heaven knows. I can’t trust it. Who else will fight for him?
My hand balls into a fist, crushing the limp, gray sheets of the Daily Worker (“Newest Royal Set to Overturn Oppressive Trad-Fam Norm”). This is my fault. Like a skyscraper, rigged with explosives, I seem to collapse in on myself in a blast of dust and smoke. I have come, at last, to the truth.
I love Jacob.
These headlines make me want to grab ties and push people down stairs in Jacob’s defense, no matter how many cameras are pointed at me.
I wade through the headlines (“Dancer High Kicks Her Way to the Crown” from The Daily Missive ) and perch on the edge of the sofa. Holding a hand over my mouth, I try to make sense of the change. I have lived for my mother’s praise, expecting a bright red ribbon with a portrait of my queen as my reward. It could never love me like he does.
“I was fighting him,” I say, the words strained, “the whole time. I was trying to force him to see that the country needed to come first. Not sometimes. Always.”
I don’t look at Caroline, and she doesn’t ask for explanations but stands, ghostlike, on the edge of the room, crowded around with dozens of other shadows—my ancestors, pressing close to hear their child discover a novel idea for the House of Wolffe.
A laugh chokes from my throat. You’re not supposed to change for love. That’s the idea. Advice from every women’s magazine and opinion piece is that love is something you have to walk into after you’re fully actualized, killing it at work, and with a year’s saved wages or a real estate portfolio. An iced Americano you grab on your way to some other destination.
This isn’t like that. I didn’t want to love him—I was fighting—but now I have new eyes that can’t unsee my government’s backroom dealing, my family’s shoddy alliances, and the emptiness of living like an arm of the State.
He refused to put me second to anything.
I cover my eyes but still see it. What a mess. I spent all my time worrying about Jacob’s introduction to the world being perfect, but if he stepped into this room right now, he would fold me into his arms and kiss my head. He’d say that now is the perfect time to tell Sondmark that he’s my man. He’d refuse to come second to a country.
Okay. I nod my head briskly. New plan. I’m going to war.
“Caroline,” I say, getting to my feet, “I’m putting out a statement.”
She nods. “I’ll call your mother.”
“No, this will come from the office of Her Royal Highness Princess Alma, Duchess of Lowenwald,” I say, using my most formal title. I sound polite. But I also sound like I could sever the heads of my enemies without a drop of regret. “It’s nothing to do with my mother. I’m not asking for permission.”
She nods and lifts her pen, prepared to take dictation. “Yes, Ma’am.”
“No,” I repeat. “I don’t want to get you into trouble. Just forward a list of email addresses. Oh,” I say, holding a finger and darting into my room to return with the opal monstrosity in a small red box, “and send this back to Himmelstein via the diplomatic pouch.”
She takes it with a tiny smile. “Right away.”
My statement goes out less than an hour later with no input from courtiers or secretaries. It’s simple. “Her Royal Highness Princess Alma and Pietor, Hereditary Grand Duke of Himmelstein have mutually decided to go their separate ways. During this difficult time, they ask for privacy as they look forward to the historic visit between Sondmark and Vorburg. No further comments will be given at this time.”
I forward the email to several news outlets and Pietor.
Mama is going to explode, but my nation will have to build its economic policy off someone else’s back. The trade negotiations will be shoved off the front pages as the press continues to speculate that I’ve been cheating on Pietor, but so will news of Jacob’s past and parentage.
I have no realistic expectations of privacy. The press is going to be vicious, but my finger didn’t hesitate to hit the send button. For once, I don’t think about all the people I might be disappointing.
I see the storm coming, but I think of the submerged amber forest, waiting to give up its treasure when the waves begin to pound.