30. Bring Marshmallows
30
Bring Marshmallows
JACOB
A storm chased us from the East Gate to Djolny, dark clouds visible in the rear-view mirror. We arrived at the castle at midday, and as I waited on my father, I received Alma’s text messages and the photo.
The first time I saw the image of us standing in the window, wrapped up together, I grinned. She’s stuck with me. Further messages complicate the simple idea of that. If we are aboard a sinking ship, she plans to shove me into a safety vest and lash me into a life raft. “Stop being so stubborn,” I type, enlarging the photo. “You’re not alone.”
Before I have a chance to send this message, my father enters a drawing room, breathing heavily.
I bow. Unlike the stilted effort I was capable of almost three months ago, the action is smooth and practiced. He keeps me at a distance, looking me over. I didn’t travel over a snowy pass in leather-soled shoes—I’ll never be that stupid—but the rubber- soled leather boot is a good compromise. Alma would be pleased I’ve paired some well-tailored denim with a brown belt, checked shirt, and wool blazer to meet the king.
“She hasn’t destroyed your animal spirit,” my father says. I lift my brow. “Ideally, a king of Vorburg should look like he could steal your wife but also beat you to death in a bar fight.” He winks from a fleshy, red face. “It’s the duality.”
He turns to Karl. “Confiscate the phone. We’ll leave for the dacha immediately.”
He lumbers from the room. No wonder he has a decent working relationship with Queen Helena. They have the same arrogance. The same assumption of being obeyed.
Karl takes my phone and hands me off to a footman who looks like a bouncer. “This way, sir.” He leads me through a series of convoluted passageways to a side entrance of the palace where three rugged vehicles are parked.
We find Karl, stuffing my duffel bag into the boot of one of the utilitarian vehicles. He catches my look. “The king likes to know he has the ability to outrun armed communists, should the need arise.”
“Where’s my phone?” I say. “Did you pack it?”
He lifts his head. “It’s in a vault. His Majesty is taking you on a retreat.”
No, no, no. “This is a bad time to be off the grid.” Chol. I left Alma hanging in the middle of a crisis. I want to drive back over the mountains, drag her off to Max’s cottage, and spend the day convincing her to take us seriously. I want to do more than talk.
Karl’s brows snap together. “It isn’t a request. This is a command from your king.”
I release a frustrated breath. “This is my first time camping with Dad. Is he bringing the marshmallows?”
We drive hours into the most remote part of Vorburg, eventually bumping along a narrow, rutted mountain track. The cars are streaked with dirt and old snow when we pull up to an ancient timber-clad cottage, not big enough to be a full-sized house. The siding is weathered gray, and the roofline is capped with a small onion dome that sways out of alignment. Thick icicles hang from the eaves. I don’t want to like it. I don’t want to like anything about my father.
The grounds are set in a forest clearing, covered in snow and overgrown grass, brittle and brown. Beyond the house, a measure of land is smooth—a frozen pond with a layer of snow. Around the back I see a large, dormant garden, much like the one Oma tends.
“This is Góra Ulek.” Mountain of Ulek . “This is our heart,” my father says, climbing out of his vehicle. He claps his hands together in large, fur-lined gloves.
For once, his florid language does justice to the feelings I have looking over the snug house, eyes following the bent wood arches framing the doors and windows. He pushes through the gate, but I halt, crouching in front of the carving of a bear topping a post, stroking a hand over the butter-soft carving.
I no longer wish for Max’s cottage.
To anyone else, the building might appear dilapidated, but I touch the joinery on the beams with an experienced hand, running deft fingers along carved panels of wood. It’s strong.
“Ten days to turn you into a prince of Vorburg,” my father says, as Karl brings in the bags. King Otto’s are deposited on the ground floor—a dining room converted into a bedroom—and mine are taken up a narrow stairway.
The courtiers are dismissed. Karl whispers that they will be stationed along the road and in outbuildings, where they can secure the perimeter but leave us to ourselves.
Left alone in the silent house, I expect my father to deliver lessons in comportment, similar to the ones Alma shaped me with. Instead, Father has me chop wood and carry it in for the stove. We prepare a simple dinner and make coffee the Vorburgian way—dark and bitter—and sit in wool socks before the fire. I stare into my mug, thinking of Alma, wondering what she would think of my father’s methods. Uncivilized.
I go to bed, hugging a hot water bottle, and dream that my hand is caught in a blade. I don’t feel pain, but when the hand is long gone, the sensation of having it returns. In my dream, I lean across the table to touch someone out of reach. I keep having to remind myself that what’s gone is gone, but I wake up to an aching loss.
Our days at Góra Ulek follow a pattern. We work in the morning, knocking the heavy snow and ice from the roof, clearing the balcony with its ancient slat design. We read books of poetry and philosophy when the sun goes down, our pages lit by the glow of a candle. Occasionally, my father places a finger to keep the page and makes some remark.
“The occupation was like that.”
“Pruss caught the spirit of Vorburg. When his heroine burns her house down in the middle of winter rather than turn it over to the enemy—”
“Star-drenched midnights. Vorburgian poets are lucky they had such skies.”
But midnights make me think of a Sondish princess and how much I want her in my arms. Alma is with me at every moment.
On the fourth day, he has me chop a hole in the pond with a short-handled ax. We fish for our dinner. On the fifth day, he has me make the hole bigger and walks me to a primitive sauna—hardly more than a shack in the woods—where we strip naked to the waist wrapped in long white towels and hit the hot rocks with dripping branches, grunting in our misery.
“It’s time for ice,” he says. I’ve seen this tradition. I knew it was coming. Vorburgians are hardy and proud of it, bundling their babies and leaving them to nap in frigid temperatures—even in the cities where indoor heating isn’t a luxury. My father casts off the towel and runs in all his royal glory, white flanks rivaling the snow, and jumps into the water with a splash.
He comes up, sputtering a bellowing, hailing me at a distance. “If a fat old man can do it…” he shouts, waving me on. I drop the towel and run. The first rush of cold air is a relief, then a torment. My feet sting as I sprint across the ground and arctic wind whips over my skin. All those weeks Alma spent turning me into a crown prince, and now I’m ready. My steps grow heavy in the thick snow, but I don’t slow my pace. The water is floating with chunks of ice. This is insane. I can’t do this.
I jump. The shock slaps me across the back, waking up every nerve and baptizing me in the embrace of Mother Vorburg. The sky is clear and blue, and my eyes are dazzled by the light.
On the sixth day, Father leans from his chair. “Come here, boy.” I lean from mine, and he grips me around the back of the neck—the thick nape where a bear carries a cub—and brings my nose almost touching his. “I’m the bastard. I admit it.” He exhales heavily, half-drunk. “I don’t expect your love.”
The tang of heavy liquor colors the air between us and his words fur around the edges. “Give it to Vorburg,” he says, pounding his heart with a closed fist. The fist turns, stills between us. “Vorburg.” He pounds the fist against my heart.
On the eighth day, I cut my hair with a pocketknife. It’s ragged, and Karl nearly passes out when he returns to the dacha with the three vehicles, responding to the flag Father raised in the garden.
“Sir,” he says, taking the bags from my grip and stowing them in the car.
“I know, Karl. Have a barber waiting for me when we get back to Djolny.”
“Sir.” He looks like he’s going to cry with joy.
The barber does his work well, leaving me enough to feel like myself but clipping the sides and back, close to the head. I’m never going to look like one of those heads of state Alma wanted me to pattern my appearance after. Father doesn’t seem to want it. Let Sondmark be Sondmark. Vorburg is Vorburg. Chol nia. I’m hearing his voice in my head now.
The rest of the evening is dense with briefings, meeting with men and women wearing dark bureaucratic suits as they go over the logistics of the state visit, teaching me everything my father hasn’t covered. Sondmark has been preparing for this day for months. My father chose to spend more than a week in isolation, throwing the entire royal apparatus into an uproar.
I note the lesson. Government priorities matter, but a king’s priorities may differ.
Karl escorts me to my quarters as the evening grows late, going over last-minute instructions while I sit on the bed and remove my tie.
“I’ve been following the news in Sondmark,” he says.
It only takes one mention of Alma, and the crown prince falls away. I push my fists into the mattress. I’m just a man, and I want her here.
“A compromising photo—”
“I saw it before you stole my phone.”
“May I ask, sir, if it was you in that picture?” Karl has become deferential in a way he never was in Handsel.
I grunt.
“There’s been a firestorm of speculation about who she was with.”
I rub the heel of a hand over my heart. She’s been in Sondmark, facing the press alone. I’m not ignorant like I was several months ago when I first stepped foot into the Summer Palace. I know how these things play out in public now.
“Have they blamed her?” I ask, slipping off my shoes.
He nods. “She’s holding up.”
That’s my girl.
“You have not been identified.” Karl carries my shoes to the closet. “The primary problem for Vorburg is that your name and personal history have been leaked already—information about your mother, your grandparents, and a cousin who owns a junkyard. Again, papers have been—”
“What has been done about my mother?” I cut him off. I walked into this role hopelessly na?ve, thinking I would be able to build a wall between the crown and my life. I thought that if I was firm enough, my mother would escape being insulted in the press. Her son would be a prince. The target would shift. It had to.
But these weeks in Sondmark—around a functional, well-oiled monarchy—have taught me that privacy is hard-won and elusive. Mom has learned that lesson already, I think. I remember how she showed up for court dates with huge sunglasses and a confident, leggy, stride.
“His Majesty flew Your Royal Highness’s mother back to America as soon as he was briefed this afternoon,” Karl rushes to explain. “Upon her request. She said to tell you no journalist has a prayer of getting past your grandfather and that you aren’t to let Blackberry down.”
I swallow and nod.
“Speaking of security, we had to scrub your phone. We’ll get one reissued in the coming days. Now that you’re a public figure…” He trails off.
I close my eyes briefly. “This is the job.”
Karl’s pale face glows with approval. “Indeed, sir.”
He carefully arranges my clothes for tomorrow and turns to go. “One more thing, sir. Her Royal Highness Princess Alma announced that she and His Royal Highness have broken off their engagement,” he says.
Karl’s words land like old-growth timber falling from the axman’s blow, taking out lesser giants, snapping branches in a violent explosion of dirt and debris. I am a forest of stunned silence.
Alma told everyone. Why? For me? It can’t be. Sondmark comes first. Always first. But I can’t keep back a stirring of hope.
“It was a fortunate development, actually,” Karl prattles on. “Your personal biography was no longer front-page news. But, whatever you do, don’t mention it when you meet the family tomorrow. I imagine it’s still a tender subject. Sleep well, sir,” he says, closing the door.
I stare at the ceiling the whole damned night.