Chapter Thirty-One #2
I shook my head, to myself. “Why would he, when you are sweet and lovely and go along with every little thing he says? But what of later, when you have a want or need of your own, something that he does not want or need, or worse, contradicts his wants or needs. What would happen then?”
She frowned at me. “I do not understand why you would say such things. Happiness is not a thing to be scratched at.”
I took one of her fragile little hands in my own, a gesture that felt awkward, even as I was making it.
I had never done anything like this with her before.
But I felt the need to offer some kind of comfort, however weak, however middling, as I recounted to her what I had learned.
I told her without withholding the details, working chronologically, from Otto’s first suggestion to Hemma’s shocking disclosure: the subterfuge and planned secret.
The incest. Simeon’s true nature. All the while, I kept one eye on the blank frame of that small window, worried Simeon’s face might appear at any time. I wished Otto would hurry.
While I spoke, Elin’s expression had remained unchanged, as if she were filtering the information to herself slowly, receiving only a fraction of the words. When I was finished, she stayed silent and tilted her head, thinking. “Mayhap someone like him will change?”
Beneath my frustration, I felt a stir of recognition.
Had I not attempted a similar bargain in my own mind?
Hope for an imaginary future allows you to overlook the horror of the present.
Maybe, Simeon would reform. Maybe, he would tame his most base inclinations.
Or, more realistically, maybe, Elin could learn to live with them.
Maybe she could still be a princess, still get, at the end of each day, to call herself a woman in love.
“No,” I said, as simply and clearly as I could. “Not with you. Not for you. Not like this.”
“But,” she asked, “what am I supposed to do?”
“Come home with us and we will figure it out.” It was a false kind of reassurance—I had no more idea how we would move forward, extricate ourselves from this mess of a situation, than she did. But I did know I needed to get Elin away from Simeon, and time was of the essence.
I realized that the noise from the courtyard had gone quiet. It was a hawklike instinct, my body aware a moment before my mind. Something in me coiled.
“Darling,” Simeon said, appearing in the doorway. He spoke directly to Elin. “There you are.”
“Simeon!” She stood from the barrel.
“Your Highness,” I managed. My voice was not steady.
He ignored me. “I had to sell my fur to get us some more money,” he told Elin. “It feels good to shed excess, doesn’t it? A small sacrifice for our life together.”
“Simeon—” Elin said, again.
“I think it best if you go upstairs,” he told her.
“Stay here,” I instructed.
But she took a step toward him. Caught, I think, between the promise of his world and the deception that underlay it.
At last, Simeon directed the force of his attention in my direction.
“You’ve sniffed us out, my lady,” he said to me, a half smile on his face.
I thought about calling out for the innkeeper, but he was likely the one who had sold us out in the first place.
How else would the prince have known to find us in the buttery?
“It’s hard to travel unnoticed in a royal coach.”
“Eh, eh, eh.” He wagged his finger at me. “Don’t say that word.” He lowered his voice to a mock whisper. “We might be found out.”
He turned back to Elin. “Darling”—he leaned in to the sobriquet, twisting it around—“go back upstairs.”
She took another step toward him. “My stepmother has come. I—I must go home with her.”
“Home? What of our plans?”
“Only for now,” Elin was quick to assure him. “I am to be—I am—your helpmeet, but my stepmother, she is right, we must do it properly.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, plaintively.
“I am sorry,” she said, with genuine regret. “It is only for now.”
Simeon’s eyes filled with wet tears. I was alarmed—where had he bid them from?
“Please,” he begged Elin. “I don’t understand. What is happening? Darling—please.” His voice broke on the last word.
“I—I—” She twisted her skirts in her hands. “I cannot,” she said finally. “Not now. I’m sorry, Simeon, but we must talk first. We must—”
He slapped her, across the face, with the back of his hand, something inhuman in his expression.
She stood back, shocked, for a moment. Her cheek turned, somehow, whiter.
Then, a drop of red on her nose, down to her lips.
A little rivulet. A few spots on the chest of her dress.
Her eyes wide. I do not think she believed me, or understood all I had told her, until she felt the force of that slap.
“Yes, yes—your stepmother said things.” Simeon watched us without any effort to control the muscles of his face.
“Your life must be so simple,” he said to me, after a moment.
All the warmth, all the expressive feeling, the full range of human emotion, looked to be extinguished from his eyes like a light snuffed out.
“To pursue me the way you did. You thought: I’ll knock on the door and leave with her. And that would be the end of it.”
“It could be.” I tried to step between him and Elin. I looked at the doorway, which his body was blocking. Where was Otto?
“I am shocked you are here, actually. Your greedy little heart. All you’ve risked. All you’ve given up.” He mused. “I never would have expected it! I was lazy, because why would you pursue us? You had every reason not to.”
“I found out what you’ve done. What you are,” I told him. Looked to Elin, who was silent.
He considered me. “I felt for you when my mother told me that you knew my secrets. Because you’d been reaching. Wanting to be one of us. Grasping. Always extending those hands, reaching, reaching, reaching. And so you caught something. Me! But I’m not what you thought at all. And what to do now?”
Thinking of my daughters, of Elin, of a kingdom of girls, I couldn’t stop myself. “You are a beast,” I told him.
“I am a king.” Simeon exhaled. “And I’ll let you in on another secret.” He leaned forward—I could feel the thrust of his breath in the still air of the room. “Beast and king are the same. There is no one there to stop us.”
But I did not want to stop him. I only wanted to exit the room. “Let us pass,” I insisted, wishing there was more strength in the request.
He continued as if I hadn’t spoken: “You know—I remember watching you,” he told me.
“All of you. Sitting on a pathetic little carpet in the middle of an empty field. Playthings arranged for my liking. And I felt sorry for you. Then, I saw her. Elin. Like a ghost at the ball. What a sense of humor fate has!”
Elin released a noise close to a whimper and he turned to her. “Your confusion is endearing, really. So shocked and offended. When you were using me, too. Happy to feast on me, really. As if I were a roast pig made of dreams, waiting for you, belly-up. All your hopes on a silver platter.”
She started trembling then, again. I reached toward her with a steadying hand. I could not have her fainting on me. Despite the blood on her face, on her dress, I said: “He won’t hurt you.”
He laughed. “Of course I won’t. Do you know we have a whole team of servants who are rat catchers?
It’s all they do. Trap them. Poison them.
Dispose of their bloated bodies. You are just vermin that scrabbled its way into the castle.
We should have chewed you up and spat you out. But we gave you a chance.”
“Why?” I asked—stupidly. But I wanted to procure more time.
He sneered at me. “Because I live in a castle. And you live in a crumbling pile of rocks. Oh, yes, I know about that, too. Otto told me. Your upper floor a heap of rubble. It doesn’t matter, in the end. You’ll go back home and live in ruin, and I’ll still be a prince. None of it matters.”
“Then let them go,” Otto said, stepping through the door.
Simeon looked back at Otto in surprise. Calculating. Wondering if Otto knew all that I knew. “You work for me,” he sneered.
“I work for the kingdom.”
“I am the kingdom.”
Otto took another step into the room. “You don’t take an unmarried girl, no matter the circumstances. Her mother has every right to collect her.”
Something in Simeon’s demeanor changed. He became playful. Light on his feet. “Now, Otto! Do not stop me from having a little fun.”
Otto looked over at Elin, who was still trembling, and back to Simeon. “No one is having fun.” He extended a hand to us women. “Come.”
“You would defy me?” Simeon asked, eyes narrowing.
“I am protecting you. From your own inclinations.” Otto took ahold of Elin’s hand and helped her across the floor to the doorway. I followed behind, without looking away from the prince.
Simeon addressed me as I passed him. “This”—he gestured around himself at the buttery, the inn above us—“will be the stitch that unravels you. Mark my words, you are undone now. Ruin happens slowly. But you already have the stench of rot.”
“We’re done here.” Otto undid the frog on his scabbard—a version of a threat—and waved us forward. I took Elin by the arm and tugged her through the doorway.
Simeon shook his head. “Rescued by a man with a sword.”
“Sometimes,” I said, quietly enough I was not sure I was heard, “it really can be that simple.”
On the long carriage ride home, Elin required only a physical kind of comfort.
Her hands, which I again clasped in my own, were soft, smooth, and occasionally wet from wiping her tears.
I found that even in this act of solace, I had a little bit of resentment.
That some of the calluses on my palms might have been borne by her instead. That we might have shared more burdens.
As she nosed my shoulder, I thought about all she had lost. A kingdom.
A life. A story. An exit, away from me and my daughters.
She had no idea what I’d given up for her.
Sigrid’s threats were not idle. And yet—what do children do except take without knowledge of the sacrifice behind the giving?
As I held her, proffering pats on the knee and reassuring squeezes of hands and shoulders, I was self-conscious in my offer of comfort.
I had none of the bodily ease I enjoyed with Rosie and Mathilde.
When my girls were small, I would hold them similarly.
So minutely aware of their skin, their pulse, the soft openings and closings of their lips.
I would look over them—their nails, their hair, the thin skin stretched over the bones of their wrists, the rapid rise and fall of a sobbing or sleeping chest—and think, also, of the body that had created them.
My own. I had made them. They were made of me.
Sitting there, holding Elin, it occurred to me that all my empathy, my pain, had been for them, but also for myself.
Perhaps mothers were no different. The you, you, you, my darling, yous were just another way of saying me, me, me, I, I, I.
I let go of Elin’s hand and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. Tried to reassure her, saying inane things that came to my head. I was creating a whole new person to be with her. A new self to love her with. Each gesture, each intimacy had to be learned and earned.
She looked up at me. “I used to think, if I am good, if I am nice, then the world will be good and nice in return.”
“So it should be,” I said, looking down at the white-blond hairs on her head. The wet eyelashes. I resented her for all she had taken from me, and found I was still willing to give her so much more.
“But it isn’t.”
“No, it is not.”
And we both stared out the window, thinking of the gap between should be and is and the morally vague expanse that you learn to make a home within.