Page 83 of The Winter Princess
“Mm.” I take the shoes out of her hand, hooking them from my fingers.
“Have you seen Erik’s thermometer?”
I nod. There’s a scant week until Christmas, and visits have slowed—little wonder since the weather hasn’t been trustworthy. All of Sondmark is busy with preparations for the holiday season, buying apple garlands for their doors or twists of caramels and straw to put in children’s shoes.
“We might make it,” she says.
Freja looks hopeful, like she trusts every day will be sunny and every wind fresh. I wonder what it’s like to expect miracles.
“I hope you’re right.”
She nudges me with a laugh. “We’ve got the whole night to fill. What do you want to do?”
Maybe locking the doors to the museum has sucked all the air out of the building. I can’t breathe. “What do you have in mind?”
She pivots and walks backward. I imagine her taking me by the hand and winding up in some storage closet somewhere, squashed up next to paper products and cleaning supplies, kissing where no security cameras can see.
“Do you want to play ‘This Like That’?” At my look of confusion, she explains. “It’s that parlor game where one of us says a word and the next person has to find another word that relates in some way, but we could do it with art.”
“You mean ‘Marry the Pair,’” I correct. “It’s a Pavian game.”
“Sondish,” she insists.
“Pavian.”
She bites the smile on her lips. “You start.”
We rove the gallery for the next hour, bouncing from an icon of Mary to a contemporary painting of a sparrow by Mary Nenin, to the sparrows inThe Winter Princess, to a woodcut carved in the same village Cor Hammersmit was born, to a reliquary containing the jawbone of the saint the village was named after. It keeps us busy and distracted. We’re keeping it light.
“You win,” Freja says, peering into a glass case at a carving of an amber bear, a talisman from a long-dead hunter-gatherer found in a car park excavation.
“What’s my prize?”
Freja blushes but she laughs. “The warm satisfaction of knowing you can recall an exhaustive store of information at will?”
I shake my head. We’re firefighters tonight, I decide, both of us holding back the heat of our attraction. “I was hoping for a knighthood.”
Freja drifts to one of the high, sloping benches and leans against it, stretching her back.
“Ah,” she says, closing her eyes. “That’s nice.” Her head tips up, eyelashes resting against her cheeks.
I was wrong. I’m a firefighter. Freja is an arsonist.
“We should try to sleep,” I say. “It will pass the time.”
However, the restoration studio is no refuge. I’m too conscious that there aren’t working security cameras in this space. Too conscious that the quiet she loves so well envelops us as the doors whisper shut.
I banish it with a flurry of activity, preparing the sofa by tossing the throw pillows to one side and laying out a long blanket, tucking it into the cushions.
“Where do I sleep?” she asks.
“This is yours.” I survey the room for more useful things and drag over a chair to act as a side table. Keep busy, I think. Be as stern and Protestant as a Sondishman, born and bred. “I don’t keep toothpaste in the studio, but I have some of those peppermint flossers in my desk.”
Freja begins her own inspection, opening and closing several drawers, and I hear a cry of surprise. She reaches into my snack horde, drawing out an aluminum tin. “What’s this?”
I swallow, remembering her words like she’s saying them for the first time.Kyriekager.The soft kind with the brittle layer of frosting instead of those crispy abominations.
You can’t buy them anywhere. I know. You have to ask Giana if she has a recipe. You have to run up to the inn one Sunday morning and act as her assistant. You have to be willing to receive her broad, amused smiles and overhear her telling Konrad about my newfound love of baking. You have to admit to yourself that Freja matters and that if you can’t have her in your life, maybe it’s enough to give her cookies and watch her face light up.
