Page 19 of The Midnight Princess
I give Karl a cold smile.
“You won’t be needing these,” I say, isolating the pages about my mom. I rip them out, slipping them into my pocket before spinning the binder back to Alma. “Who are you working for, Karl?”
My one-man sleeper cell gives me a bland smile. “Vorburg. Of course.”
Alma opens the book and runs her finger along a line of text. “His Royal Highness Crown Prince Jacob, formerly known as Jacob Gardner, is half-American,” she reads. “Born in Blackberry, Oregon to Ms. Tiffani Fawn Gardner—”
“She doesn’t have anything to do with this,” I cut in.
Alma holds her finger in place and looks up. “She is the mother of the next king of Vorburg,” she says, stating a fact I haven’t come to terms with. Mom doesn’t care about all that. “We are your team. If protecting her privacy is important to you, we can plan for that, but to do so, we need a full picture of what we’re dealing with in order to smooth your transition into royal life.”
Her words are stripped of judgment, but she has a notepad next to her teacup. Even upside down, I can read the bullet points.How to hold his tongue. How to enter a room. When to touch.She’s already aware of my shortcomings.
She gives a crisp nod. “Shall we proceed, sir?”
“Jacob.”
“Hmm?”
“Jacob.” I give her a slow smile, liking the way my name has thrown her off balance. “You’re on Team Jacob.”
Her cheeks wash pink, but when she turns to the next tab in the binder, she’s in command again. “You attended Little Duckies Preschool and Blackberry Elementary.” The sheer volume of information this skims over is impressive. “Then you enrolled at Skip Middle School.”
Does Karl’s dossier tell her about how Blackberry Elementary doesn’t feed into Skip Middle? About how I moved up to my grandparents’ property on the Nehalem River when Mom had her cancer treatments in Portland, spent my summers fishing and building leaky boats out of scrap lumber, and my winters in grandpa’s single-wide tool shed inspecting dozens of mixed nuts containers from the food warehouse that he’d repurposed to hold random keys, flange head screws, eye bolts, and wads of bungee cords. How I can still hear the blended sounds of rain beating on the roof of the trailer, the AM radio crackling in the background, and the scrape of a carving tool.
“The next record is your enrollment at the Royal Academy of Vorburg at the age of fourteen.”
Another vast store of information is buried in the white space between the black lines.
She picks up a pen, touching the tip lightly to the page. Her eyes meet mine, and I feel the powerful drag of attraction. I wait for it to pass.
“How is your Vorburgian accent?”
I grin. “Karl?”
My aide clears his throat. “It’s quite good, actually. Not perfect. It’s most noticeable in the sound of his soft H and how he flattens some vowels. His vocabulary is as extensive as mine, however.”
Alma makes a notation.
“Not quite that extensive,” I correct, tipping my chair back on two legs. Alma watches the angle and makes another note. I tip a little farther. “Karl calls me all kinds of names I don’t understand.”
“Sir.” It’s as close as Karl will come to scolding me in mixed company. He turns to the princess. “I said it wouldn’t do to get a reputation for beingtovorny—recalcitrant,” he supplies for her benefit. He glances at me. “It means—”
“Obstinate toward authority. I know what that means in English.”
“It will have to be perfect in less than three months,” Alma directs. “Perhaps you could make that your priority,PaneNowak? It must be absolutely flawless and include idioms, slang, and humor.” She adds a bullet point on her notepad.
Alma’s brow lifts when she reads over my transcripts from the Royal Academy of Vorburg, discovering a failing mark in History of the Early Middle Ages.
“How versed are you in Vorburgian history and the history of northern Europe?”
Her pen is ready to record and repair.
“I think it’s pretty good.” Grandpa still listens to AM radio in his woodshop, but I listen to audiobooks and podcasts, mostly nonfiction topics ranging from history to classical literature to economics.
She looks at me with serious eyes. She kissed me. The memory intrudes when I don’t ask for it. “Want to test me?”
Her lips, I know how soft, purse. “Royalty isn’t a pop quiz. Do you—” A knock on the door interrupts her.
