Page 5 of The Winter Princess
I stride away and hear her sharp intake of breath. I imagine my father chasing me down, fingers pinched together, waving both hands under my nose in eloquent fury. “That a son of mine—a son of mine—would do such a thing!” He would give me a glancing blow up the back of the head and speculate that I was raised among cattle. He might even twist my ear and drag me in front of her to apologize.
A boy in trouble as often as I have been knows how to make a good apology, but my father is not here and, for once, I refuse to hear his ghost.
I reenter the main gallery, carving a path around the dance floor and the cringe-inducing sight of bureaucrats keeping time to the beat. Two hours. Director Knauss demanded I attend for two hours—three if I want a favorable budget review. A waiter offers a glass of champagne and I take it, checking my watch again.
It’s too late to make the gathering of more than a dozen other expats in Uncle Timo’s ground-floor apartment for Pavian Independence Day, joining an assembly line making freshly rolledpanzein his too-small kitchen, and toasting King Gilles’s health with measures of colorless distilled spirits. The sound—a clink of heavy glasses, liquid splashing over fingers, a swallow, and hearty laughter—returns me to my childhood.
By now, they’ll have started singing sentimental songs. “Pavieau, My Home Forever,” “Orange Flowers on the Mountain,” “Full Nets and Fair Winds.” The old ones laugh whenever they hear my Sondish accent and used to tell my father he didn’t teach me properly. He used to tell them it disappears when I sing.
The sound of a blaring pop cover erases my ability to hear myself think, and I shift away from the speakers, pacing through the gallery.
Today is just another day in Sondmark. There’s no sign that in a tiny country on the Mediterranean coast, flower petals rain down on parades and street parties, celebrating the twin miracles of the nation’s founding and the overthrow of a brutal regime.
The gatherings at Uncle Timo’s are smaller now that returning to Pavieau is no longer a choice between life and death, and in the past five years, many from our community have been repatriated. My father never spoke of it. He seemed to understand that my home was here in Sondmark instead of in a country I remember only as a series of bright, truncated memories.
For me, the celebration tonight would have been more about my father than about Pavieau. Hearing the clink of glasses was going to signal a pilgrimage, the first gathering I could bring myself to attend since my father passed nine months ago. I wanted to imagine him perched on the end of a sofa, picking a lap harp, accompanying Cousin Emelie’s concertina in an off-key rendition of the national anthem.
Instead, I’ve been compelled to act as an extra in a Sondish royal production without even the satisfaction of being a citizen.
No. I won’t ask Princess Freja to forgive me yet.
I take a swallow of champagne and grimace, passing the glass off to a waiter. The movement rustles an envelope in my breast pocket and my lips thin. The Sondish Office of Immigration has one thing going for it. They get scores back promptly.
When I failed the citizenship test this afternoon, a woman named Mies printed off a copy of the results from each of my three failed tests and penciled in an appointment for a final exam on the last day of December which, if I fail once more, will result in deportation to my country of origin.
I haven’t lived in Pavieau since I was five.
Mies was wearing purple glasses and likely brands herself as “fun” and “helpful” on employee self-assessment forms, but it’s a Potemkin politeness. She can’t mask the fact that the rules for citizenship in Sondmark are harsh and draconian. My father was a Provisional Citizen, his refugee status granted during a wave of political purges bloody enough to rally the sympathies of the international community and open Sondmark’s fortified borders just wide enough for him and his small family to slip through.
As long as he was alive, I could live and work in Sondmark with few restrictions. I couldn’t vote, of course, but I could pay taxes and avail myself of the healthcare system with a small subscription fee.
When I began the citizenship application process, I knew the risks. I would be given the chance to take the test four times as long as I was a productive, employed member of the immigrant community. If I failed each of these, I would be deported. This didn’t matter because I would pass. Of course, I would pass. I’ve lived here since I was five.
Thanks to Prime Minister Torbald, the tests are far harder than they used to be, and though I consider myself culturally Sondish, no one else does. I’m a mere Provisional Resident, even if my home is in Uncle Timo’s kitchen with the plastic, flour-dusted tablecloth. It’s in my apartment, three stories up from his, with a view of Horst the Invader in the harbor. It’s with the tight-knit community of expats gathering their families in the summertime to playboccein the park until dusk.
Familiar anger rises—at the government, at the grueling process to prove I’ll be an asset to Sondmark, at my father for dying. It’s too much, so I drop my gaze, looking for nearer targets. Let me be angry at the stupid expense of tonight, at the money being spent to massage a royal-sized ego, at the princess with the bright red hair who lifted her chin as I vented my fury.
3
Lone Wolffe
FREJA
“My prepared remarks contained a page and a half of citations!”
I want to shout this at Oskar Velasquez’s retreating form. I want to run up to the administration wing, print out the original speech, tie him to an office chair, and make him listen as I work over every major event heralding the rise of the industrial era.
Vailys.It’s not lost on me that he’s probably the first grown man in ten years who hasn’t at least dipped his chin in a bow when taking his leave of me. I’m not a stickler for protocol but I take note of the slight.
I take note, too, that he had his hands in his pockets the whole time. I wish—with the heat of a thousand desert suns—that it made him look hunched over and juvenile, like a high schooler waiting for a train on a frigid winter’s evening. Instead, he looked the way some men do when they’re standing on a tarmac in a full suit while helicopter wash gently lifts the hair from their brows.
Oskar, with his excellent grooming habits and tailored menswear, has always been appealing to me on an aesthetic level. I’ve had to remind myself again and again over the years that his frustratingly handsome wrapper is like a wasabi throat lozenge passing itself off as green apple hard candy.
“I’ve been praying for your soul.” Ella jostles my elbow, and color floods my face.
I take a deep breath. “I’m going to need it. He heard everything I said about him. The paint fumes, the hermit—”
My sister laughs. “Perfect. He isn’t your type, anyway.”
