Page 27 of The Winter Princess
She looks skeptical but holds her palms up, a wise sage’s final pronouncement. “I’ll tell you this—put his face in the frame and those videos will go viral. It won’t matter what he’s talking about.”
10
Lightning Strike
OSKAR
I register Rik’s squinty glare from my peripheral vision and take my seat at the foot of the conference table. He wants me gone and probably feels my position should go to someone Sondish. Who’s really happy to be working with a Pavi? Marie. Others tolerate it. Still others make few distinctions between families who fled the dictatorship and ones who ran it for decades.
Marie claps her hands several times, silencing the room. “We’ve got an update and then a short presentation,” she says, calm and trustworthy, taking on the persona of a flight attendant explaining what to do in the event of a catastrophic water landing. She looks to Freja. “Ma’am?”
I’ve been trying very hard not to look at Freja, having spent the night fending off memories of the way she consumes Chinese noodles, but turning off my attention is not as easy as turning off my phone.
She’s wearing another of her vintage princess costumes—a blue dress with a soft collar, buttons from neck to knee, and a belted sash. Professional but particular. The Sondish preference is for women to wear dark unisex pantsuits or, if they fancy themselves creative, leather clogs, layers of linen, and wooden jewelry. A hollow forms in her neck when she takes a breath, and I look away, inspecting the grain of the wood paneling on the wall.
“Prime Minister Torbald was good enough to meet with me yesterday,” she begins. Freja presents a cool, confident pose but looking more closely, I notice the fingers smoothing her notes and hear the tiny catch of hesitancy in her voice.
“…and he agreed,” she wraps up. “If we increase visitors, we keep our funding.” Freja catches my gaze. Here it comes. I give her a small nod and she takes a short breath, leaping. “Two hundred thousand by the end of the year.”
Half the room—Rik, Agnes, and a dozen other staff members—erupts in a burst of anger and noise.
“Two hundred thousand?!”
“How on earth—”
“I just bought a boat,” Agnes shouts, a hair’s breadth away from calling for pitchforks and rough justice.
My gaze swings to Freja, alone at the head of the table, and her eyes lock on mine. She’s not asking for help, but her color is uneven. I catch the moment her chin tightens. This is how the royals get you. It’s hard to watch dignity brought low. I tuck my lip against my teeth and give a sharp whistle. The noise drops like a bird in mid-flight.
“No amount of shouting will change the facts,” I say, my voice low and civilized. “What Her Royal Highness—”
“Freja,” she corrects, cheeks a shade paler than they should be.
She’s granting me the right to use her name. This is how the royals get you. “What Freja did is lay down a marker Prime MinisterTorbald can’t wiggle out of,” I say, glancing across the room. “Two hundred thousand is a hard number, but he has to respect it. He’s tied to it now.” I meet Freja’s bright eyes.
“We’ll have to make sure he chokes on it,” she says.
My lips twitch. I can’t imagine any other circumstance in which I would get an honest opinion from a princess about her mother’s prime minister. Maybe it’s a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, like a comet or chicken pox.
“You have some ideas to meet that figure?” I ask. Together we are acting out a pantomime, that I’m absorbing this shock for the first time along with everyone else, that I’m not feeding her lines.
“I do.” She slips over to her computer, and Marie flicks the lights off. As the first slide illuminates the room, Freja glances over and catches me watching her.
“Thank you,” she mouths. The sudden wish to hold my arms open and have her walk into them hits me like a left hook to the chin. I shift my gaze, crossing my arms over my chest, the text on the slide blurring before me. Freja has only to walk into a room for people to fall all over themselves for her. I’m not one of them. My eyes are open. I won’t be one of them.
I blink, and the words snap into focus. I need her plans to work just as much as she does. More, even.
The slide reads:Cancel Romantics Exhibit,Art Twinning, Curator’s Corner, Pixy (Informative Slides and Quizzes), Live Events, Social Media Backdrops, Behind the Scenes, ASMR videos.
“What’s this about the Romantics exhibit?” The words jerk out of me. The exhibit was the only thing she cared about.
Her lips are dry, and she wets them. “It’s asking too much of the museum to stage an exhibit at this time. Agnes was right,” she says. I recognize one of my tactics. Agree with your biggest critic. Knock them back on their heels. “The numbers aren’t great, and the attention it’s going to require will be too much, don’t you agree?”
She sounds certain and calm, like she’s not losing anything that matters. It mattered enough to make an ally out of an enemy.
“Now,” she says, turning to the screen, “if we want to get patrons into the museum and spend very little money doing it, social media is the best tool we have. I’ve been trawling through the online presence of every major museum in the world, and this is a list of some of their most effective campaigns. No matter how silly some of them sound, we aren’t in a position to pass up any opportunity to get bodies through the door.”
“Curator’s Corner,” Roland says in his guileless,Would you like to look at this Mesopotamian coinage I found jangling in my pocket?way. “That’s from The British Museum, isn’t it? Videos of Irving Finkel going on about cuneiform? Riveting stuff. Are you suggesting we try something like that?”
