Page 70 of The Winter Princess
“Well,” she begins, as though she, me, and the entire country are in a tight-knit group at a lunch table. “There they were, huddled up for warmth, everyone piling more and more blankets on little Crown Prince Alfonse who, I am sorry to say, did not repay the consideration of his family by living a long and healthy life.”
“No?”
“No. He allowed himself to be carried to his eternal rewards just ten short years later by an expertly aimed bullet, taken in a duel for the affections of a lady who, it pains me to relate, was not the crown princess, his wife.”
“I’m shocked.”
“They didn’t call him Alfonse the Ever-Ready for nothing.”
I cough. Erik is a genius. Getting Freja in front of a live audience is magic. She’ll end the year with the whole country in love with her. I clear my throat. “As interesting as this rabbit hole is, we have to return to our tale with the sickly, not-yet-lost-to-virtue crown prince and his entire family, huddled together for warmth.”
“After that long, cold night, dawn arrived and the queen went to a window, seeing a long line of Friesian horses coming down a trail over the hill. The firsthand account says they looked like woolly black sheep from a distance, and in her memory, the Royal Mews likes to give them sheep-appropriate names.”
Freja smiles, and a stable worker, dressed in the fancy livery required for this event, leads over the largest land mammal I’ve ever seen up close.
A massive dark head dips between Freja and me, nosing our joined hands and pushing my shoulder. I grip her tightly. “What’s this one named?”
Freja laughs. “Lamb.”
She reaches up with her free hand and rubs the horse’s head, planting a kiss on the soft cheek. “Ellsbach paintedChristmas Rescuemore than a hundred years later. By the mid-1800s, when the Industrial Revolution was upending society, the tradition of marching the animals into Handsel’s central square operated as a romanticized, rural memory for newly industrialized citizens. Change had arrived, and Ellsbach’s painting struck a chord.”
It hits me that this could have been part of her speech—the one at the exhibit launch. The one I called terrible.
Freja pats the horse, and it moves away. She looks up at me with apples in her cheeks and tiny crystals of snow dotting her woolen collar. She wets her lip and squeezes my hand hard.
My turn.
“Did you know,” I begin, clanging into action, “that it was painted on the heartwood of a lime tree?”
A furrow lines her brow. “Is that good or bad?”
“Heartwood is wood at the center of a tree. There’s less moisture there, so the boards tend to be relatively stable. They won’t warp like a wet piece of wood will. One of the things you’ll see when you come into the museum this week is how the back of the board is discolored.”
Her brows lift. “I’ve never looked at the back.”
I glance into the camera. “Here, you can use this to impress your date. Tell them it’s because of garlic juice.”
Freja squeezes in close. “Isit garlic juice, or are we peddling disinformation?”
I look at her. Again, a mistake, but the nation is watching. “Paintings and carvings on wood were susceptible to insect infestations, but some clever medieval cook came up with the idea of spreading garlic juice on the back to keep them away.”
Her eyes crinkle around the edges. “Oh, it’s like loading up on garlic bread and onion rings if you don’t want to be kissed.”
I frown into the middle distance. “That’s not going to put off someone really determined.”
Our glances meet, holding a shade too long. I tug my gaze away just as the bells grow louder. I hear shouts and whistles as the Friesians begin to move. Fire emojis erupt from the margins. We need to get the eyes of the nation away from our faces.
I tap the screen, flipping the camera. “Let’s watch for a while.”
24
Follow Me
FREJA
The temperature gets colder and the nights get longer. Lynda starts wearing her singing Christmas tree earrings. Oskar and I broadcast from a Christmas market, and I watch his eyes light up while we eat hot stroopwafels. The fickle gods of social media giveth and taketh away. One day the museum is packed. The next day is a Dragons game or a massive weather event or it’s Tuesday and no one wants to go to the museum on a Tuesday.
Progress toward our goal is made in frustrating stops and starts.
