I strode across the hall and began to open the window curtains, going down the row. “I do not think you’ve made the journey so that we can all sit in silence.” I used the activity—the time—to try to gather my thoughts and set them in order. If Sigrid was still concerned with Elin’s comportment, particularly in front of courtiers, then she assumed Elin would still be marrying her son. She did not yet know that Simeon was missing. (Fists of dirt covering his fine clothes, his well-cut jaw.) It was impossible to guess exactly what Otto had said, or shared, upon his return home, but the safest course of action would be to presume that, in the queen’s mind, we had only just come back from successfully blockading the elopement. I had expressly gone against Sigrid’s wishes by interfering. She had threatened the future of me and my family, and she would be furious I had dared to test her wrath. But the very fact of her arrival, at Bramley, in person, revealed something else—she still desperately needed Elin. In her own mind, at least.
Confirming my suspicions, Sigrid did not sit, but followed me along the row of windows, protesting like an agitated bird. “Stop that,” she commanded. She had probably never opened her own curtains. “I told you,” she said, when I turned, “what would happen if you obstructed the wedding.”
“So I have done all I can to preserve just that: a wedding!” I dropped the curtain pulls and faced her fully. The trick would be to perform obstinance, but of a much lesser sort than murder. It was easy to cast myself back to the mindset of two days before, easy to start believing, already, my own lies. For they weren’t fully lies, but rather truths of an earlier self. The conversation might have been genuine if Simeon had not appeared in the entryway the night before. “Your son may be a prince, but he cannot abduct an unmarried girl on a whim.” I fixed her with a stare. “Certainly, we can agree an elopement in a backwater hovel doesn’t serve anyone’s purpose.”
Sigrid pulled herself upward, to her full height, the gesture belyingsome inner weakness. “I am not concerned with your purpose, and you’ve explicitly contradicted mine.”
“Forgive me, but your purpose, made clear by obfuscations that aid and abet your family members, is to keep good standing in the public eye. Is that not the reason for all this?”
Sigrid, not accustomed to being addressed in such a manner, swelled, ready to spew some venom. But she stopped herself, with great effort—feeling her need of me—and instead turned to look out the window.
Quietly, I added: “And however aligned or misaligned our purposes may be, I’ll remind you that your family needs mine behind which to stash your secrets.”
“I almost married my cousin,” she said, after a minute. “Sibling isn’t so different, is it? People make all these rules. It’s only the appearance of abiding that makes a difference. They’ll forgive anything if it’s behind a shut door.”
She had almost married a lot of people, by my memory, but I did not think it wise to say as much. “Nevertheless, you wanted Elin to be the door itself. And so she shall. But the door only remains effective if it believably appears to be a door! There must be an actual wedding.”
“To have a wedding there must be a groom, and he has not returned.”
“Maybe he’s taking a few days to nurse his wounds and treat his flea bites.”
“You just left him there?” Sigrid cried. “Like a common pauper?”
“We felt confident he could get himself home. After all, he’s the one that led the whole expedition in the first place.”
“Where is he?” she demanded.
Elin listened, face swiveling back and forth as we spoke.
“I haven’t the faintest notion. I’ll admit,” I continued, beginning to untie the strings of my cloak, “Elin’s retrieval was not without some resistance.” I took the cloak off, let it fall to the floor. “But Simeon came around. In the end.”
Sigrid paled, then turned a shade of green. I looked past her, to the mirror above the mantel, and saw: As I’d expected, my neck was mottled and purple, bruised and welted. The queen put a hand on her own neck, looking faint. I wondered how many times she had felt similarly. How often she’d had to face the unsettling, belly-turning evidence of her son’s wrongs. Or maybe that was just it—she’d never had to see any kind of real evidence. Her own point had been that transgressions were much easier to overlook, to ignore, when they were abstract.
“He seems capable of taking care of himself,” I added, to fill her silence.
“You will not tell me what happened,” she instructed in a whisper. Her face paint had begun to crack about her mouth. The rouge on her cheeks looked violent.
“Only a moment ago, you were insisting upon it.”
“He is not a villain,” she protested. “Just a boy. Unaware of the force he wields.”
“A boy old enough to marry is a man.”
The door opened at the far end of the room, pushed by Wenthelen bearing a tray of refreshments. Rosie and Mathilde close behind, faces carefully blank.
Sigrid smoothed her hair, remembering herself, but did not acknowledge them. “Well,” she said, “he will return. He will return and we will plan the wedding.”
“Certainly,” I said, the lie as easy on my tongue as a glug of oil. I turned to the tray, to Wenthelen, to my daughters, as they made their way across the room. “Ah, look—something to eat. But, Your Majesty, I must warn you before you settle in—it really is not safe for you to be here. With the damage to our roof, the structure is not sound. We could not have anything happen to you here.”
Sigrid shook her head and regained her haughty composure. “I’m taking my leave,” she declared, as if the idea were her own. “It seems your entire household is hanging on by a thread.”
“Now, now,” I told her, laying a soft hand on her arm. “Let us notresort to insults. If all goes as planned, we will soon be sisters, after all. That is the word you used, is it not?”
“In name only.”
“Yes, well.” I walked over to the door and held it open so that she might pass. “No one really cares what happens behind closed doors.”
The queen was denied the satisfaction of a dramatic exit. Her retinue had to vacate the driveway in reverse order of its arrival, and Sigrid’s carriage was the last to leave. I did not wait to watch the slow maneuvering, the climbing and turning of horses, the reversal of the carriages, though I could hear the noise—the shouting of men, the hoofbeats, the creaking and jangling of coaches and wagons—as I went up the stairs.
