Page 60 of The Midnight Princess
Karl looks at me for a long time. “Wear the clothes,” he says, “sir.”
That evening, after a solitary meal eaten standing up in front of the fridge, I retreat to the gym and scroll through a roughly translated Sondish gossip site for news of Alma’s day.
PAPZ has already posted several still images and a short video clip of her and Pietor attending the wedding. When she walks on the short path from the parking area to the small Lutheran church, she has her Sondish wedding handbag in a tight grip, the opal ring front and center.
In the video, Himmelstein fusses with his lapels, wobbling the umbrella over their heads. Alma has to skip to keep beneath it.
The contrast between her and her sister—the one on the honeymoon—couldn’t be more stark. Not once has the camera caught Pietor glancing at her, touching her arm or elbow. Sliding his arm around her waist to keep her close under the beating rain.
In one article, the PAPZ headline reads, “Pietor Got Jacked: Elegant Princess Alma arrives at the wedding of Count Aloysius Fogh van den Schackenborg andVrouwLaura Fisker with fit fiancé.”
I descend into a plank position, forearms resting along the rubber mat, phone stopwatch counting off the seconds. The phone rings, and I tap my ear bud.
“My son and heir.” My father’s gravelly voice booms through the tiny speaker.
My jaw sets. “Your Majesty, how good of you to call.”
He doesn’t regard the distance I’ve placed between us. “Have you talked to Tiffani?”
“You mean my mother? Yes. She calls her son from time to time.”
“What do you mean?” he barks. “I call my son. I’m calling him now.”
“Is there something you wanted?”
My relationship with His Majesty King Otto of Vorburg is cool. He doesn’t mind that, he tells me. A number of Vorburgian kings seized the throne from their fathers. Drawing and quartering them in the aftermath was a family tradition. We’re doing fine.
The king cuts to the chase. “Karl reports that you’re not wearing the clothes they made for you. He says you’re fighting them every step of the way.”
My grandma would sit Karl on the bottom step of her staircase for being such a loathsome tattletale.
“I’m doing everything that’s being asked of me.” I’ve spent hours familiarizing myself with the fussiness of royal protocol. The bowing. The forms of address. The endless practice that has me mirroring every gesture Alma makes, watching her move, feeling it drive me insane.
“You haven’t cut your hair, son.”
“I’m not cutting my hair, sir.”
The old man growls. “You want to look like a girl?”
I look down at my muscled thighs, the sweaty tank top, and work-callused hands.
“You’ll look like a fool when you take your place on the world stage,” he barks.
This is rich coming from a man as gaffe-prone as my father. There’s video footage of him on stage at a music festival, wearing a dress shirt and tie, pumping his arms like the wheels of a locomotive. It’s one of the most famous GIFs in the world, and people use it when they want to specify precisely how drunk they got last night.
“Since when does Vorburg submit to Sondmark?” I ask.
A pause. I can almost visualize the internal wrestling. In the end, national pride wins out over the need to make his sonobey. “I like to hear it. Give thosezeklenSondish royals a taste of Vorburgian will.” His approval is like a dead sun. It doesn’t warm me. “Have you made any progress with any of the princesses? You chose the engaged one to be your tutor.” He releases a pungent curse. “This is no way to get married.”
I can’t talk about Alma and how she’s taken.
“What do you know about getting married?” I don’t know much, but I do know that the only way to deal with my father is to stand my ground and fight.
“Cut it, Jacob,” he bites, his tone a throwback to when his country had an empire.
Vorburgian power came without respect for what Alma would call propriety. I remember a lesson from Karl about a Vorburgian queen, blessing her husband’s mistress on her deathbed and meeting his bastards, blessing them each in turn. She’s hailed as a saint, but so is her faithless husband. There is no contradiction in the Vorburgian mind. Few of my ancestors understood anything about keeping one woman happy.
My Gardner forefathers were different. Carving civilization out of the wilderness is all they knew. Along the staircase in my grandparents’ house, generations of them, Scotsmen and Germans with full mustaches and piercing eyes stare into the camera from the bosom of a large family.
