Page 44 of The Winter Princess
I cross the banquet hall, my nerves on fire where his fingers rest lightly under my elbow. It’s an elbow, I remind myself with impatience. An elbow. But it’s on fire and I worry there’s not an over-the-counter medication for that.
“Uncle,” he says, “meet Freja.”
I reach a hand out towards a gentleman who looks to be in his seventies. He bows at the waist and says with a touching courtliness, “Bom niute, Princess Freja.”
I respond in Pavian, the vowels furring delightfully on my tongue. “Bom niute,Sehor–”
“Fornasari.”
His eyes twinkle, and he lets loose a torrent of words until I hold my hands up laughing. “Slowly, slowly, Sehor. My broken ear must be mended,” I say, using the flowery Pavian phrases Père taught me.
He returns the floweriness, calling me beautiful, magnificent, a goddess. When I encounter Oskar’s raised brow, I fight off a blush.
“Have you met my father, the prince consort?” I ask the old gentleman, reverting to my native tongue.
“Met him?”SehorFornasari bursts. “We’re old friends.”
A booming laugh echoes over the room, and before I have a chance to look for Père, my father reaches past me to pull the other man into a full embrace.
“I would have known that laugh in the darkest dungeon,” he says. The greeting is effusive, drawing eyes as they kiss three times on the cheek, right-left-right.
I bump backward into Oskar, and he tugs me out of the way. I glance up. “Did you know about this?”
“I didn’t know it was true.”
My eyes dart to my elbow, and he lets me go.
“Well,” he says, “I won’t keep you.” He drifts off in the opposite direction.
For more than an hour, I keep my distance, performing my job with an exhausting level of focus. It feels like constantly correcting an articulated lorry that wants to veer off into the Ditch of How Good Oskar Looks Tonight or the Perilous Embankment of Wondering What His Hair Feels Like. In desperation, I glance at an ornate French clock near the exit. Almost a quarter to nine. Almost done.
Relief turns into awareness as I sense the presence of someone behind me. Oskar. I know it without turning around.
He leans forward, stirring the hair at my neck. “You’re starving.”
My stomach gurgles in agreement. I frown. “How do you know?”
He touches the champagne flute in my hands. “For one thing, the level hasn’t changed in more than an hour. Why hold it if you don’t drink it?”
He was watching? “This is easier to do if I’ve got a prop.”
He grunts, looking around the room, hands in his pockets. “You were right about these things. No good food.” His attention swings back to me. “Your father asked Uncle Timo to stay for a nightcap. If you come out with me, I’ll feed you.”
A plate of beef sandwiches is only a phone call away, ready to be whipped up in the palace kitchens the moment I need a night feast. I could tell him this, but I don’t. I stuff the words so far back in my throat that they’ll need a pickaxe and crampons to see the light of day.
“Will I need to change?”
He gives me a long look and I thank heaven for Swiss comportment school.
“No need.”
When the party concludes, I return to my suite, doubling back to meet him in the Grand Hall. He’s conferring with Nils Helmut, our head of palace security, standing under a blazing chandelier in a dark coat and scarf, a shoe softly scuffing the checkerboard tiles.
“A team will follow your car,” Nils says, giving me a brief smile before continuing through the doors. When Oskar sees me, his foot pauses. He straightens.
We live in the Summer Palace for most of the year since the invention of modern heating and cooling systems. Ella speaks of it as though we’re a middle-class family who lives above the shop, but few of the customers ever venture into the family quarters, as it were, calling on the daughters of the house. My manner with them—polite, interested, willing to be amused by the driest anecdote—is entirely useless when presented with a lone man of extreme attractiveness.
Oskar reaches for the wrap I have slung over my arm. It takes some doing, but he finds the top and holds it up for me, head tilted.
