The room was overfilled and a bit steamy, like a fantasy that Sigrid had concocted out of magic and will. Citrus bent leaf-covered branches. The clouded windows blocked the view of the winter-barren gardens and the festooned guards. The outside world no longer existed.
The queen eyed me with surprise. I felt the weight of all I had learned. The pregnancy. The molestation. I was speaking to the boy’s mother. And she was the queen. If ever there were forces to ensure you chose your words carefully, these were them. But I summoned all my will, all my fury, all my horror, and announced: “I have come to annul the engagement.”
The ladies-in-waiting quieted, turning to me, glancing back to Sigrid, their attention as jumpy as little morning birds. Sigrid watched me over the rim of her coffee cup. Then she set it in its saucer, decisively. “Oh, what a dirge you have come to sing!” She reached forward and selected a pastry from the top tier of a platter of sweets. The ladies around her relaxed.
I looked at the group of them, sitting in their tabbies and blonds, surrounded by fans and feathered muffs and tiny crystal glasses of fruit juice, sniggering at their queen’s bidding. The whole group of them—Sigrid and her pastries included—disgusted me. All these years, I had thought Sigrid sat beside the sun as it shone on the rest of us, but, really, she had only climbed up into air. Into nothing.
“I know about the babe,” I said.
The queen looked at me for a long moment, measuring, I think, what I was capable of. Around her, the ladies-in-waiting had again begun to make faces, using their fans to cover smirks without any intention of covering them at all. The fans dropped abruptly when the queen said: “Leave us.”
I waited as the ladies stood—floating puffs of violet and pink—and filed from the room, ignoring their resentful looks as they passed.
“You’ve interrupted my breakfast.” Sigrid speared a tiny sausage link with her fork.
“It’s your own daughter.” I spoke quietly, watching as the sausage was ferried to Sigrid’s plate. Her face did not change. “Your son,” I added, and thought I saw the slightest hint of a flinch.
Sigrid steeled herself, her face settling into a mask. She sawed the sausage in two. “As if there is no precedent for royal bastards. We are born to breed, are we not? That’s what us women are for. That’s why we’re married off and so carefully managed. And then after we breed, we protect. To do any differently would be to live in contradiction with your own makeup.”
I tried to hold her eye, but she was still sawing her sausage. “Not if you are protecting a monster.”
She nodded. “Perhaps I am a monster, then. Perhaps so are you. Perhaps we are monsters raising more monsters. It doesn’t change the outcome. A monster, after all, needs a mother, too. This is what we do for our children, Ethel. What we do for ourselves. If you think you and I are any different, I suggest you take a long, hard gander in the looking glass.”
“Having a monster is different than enabling one!”
She dropped her fork with a clatter. “Have you ever loved a single thing more than your own child?” She began tugging on her glove, pulling finger by finger. “Have you ever felt what you feel about those little apples of yours, for a man, or a bird?” The glove loosened and she pulled it off, revealing her hand beneath. The stump of a finger. She wagged those that remained at me. “I would cut off the rest of them myself for Simeon—for Hemma, too. And now I’ve found a solution that suits everyone. Hemma is protected. Simeon’s firstborn will stay in the family, where it belongs. The bloodline isn’t even polluted. And your Elin ends up a princess, no less, with no pain, no effort. A guaranteed child! If only we all had such odds. And even you—and your other black-headed girls—will benefit by association. So I am not sure what you are hoping to accomplish, coming here.”
I didn’t know what I was hoping to accomplish, either. I wanted to make arguments for what was right and what was just, but rightness and justice had little to do with the kind of power Sigrid wielded. “Elin is a young girl looking for love and fairy tales. She will not do well with the arrangement,” I said, voice low. “They will not do well together. You solve your immediate problems and set up a lifetime of trial, for everyone.”
Sigrid laughed. “What is doing well? Elin will have jewels and gowns and acolytes.”
“She will be a puppet!”
The queen shook her head as if I were being foolish. “All wives are puppets until they learn to master the strings.”
“There are other solutions. You need not wall Hemma in—”
Sigrid’s eyes flared. “Do not talk to me of Hemma.” She took a breath. Sipped from a glass of ruby-colored juice. The red marked her lips when she set it back down. “Your protest is boring me. Why all the fuss? Elin is not even your real daughter.”
“She is someone’s daughter.”
“All women are someone’s daughter,” Sigrid replied with irritation. “If you think any of yours will find peace or security without my blessing, you are sorely mistaken.”
My stomach twisted. I believed the threat. I believed in her willingness to enforce it. Sigrid continued, eating her sausage, the stub of missing finger at the center of her fist. “If you want a future for your daughters, for all of them, this wedding will proceed.”
“We have nothing to offer,” I protested. Desperation squeezing the words from my mouth. “We are poorer than we look. No better than peasants.”
Sigrid watched me.
“We are,” I continued, racking my mind for the right words, “not… suitable.”
One of her smiles. The shiftiest, most vicious of her dancing bears. “Don’t embarrass yourself.”
“I speak the truth.”
“I already know all about your pitiable circumstances. All the more reason for you to embrace the wedding.” With a definitive gesture, Sigrid finished her juice. The crystal glass was set back onto the table and she wiped her lips with a square of lace. “You know our secrets now, so do not think you’ll escape our grasp. The wedding will happen. Elin will be a princess. We will fix the sad state of your financial affairs. They willalllive happily ever after. You can use your imagination for what will befall you if you choose the alternative.”
I started to make a noise, but she held up a finger. “I’ll put it to you as I would to a lackwit: You do not have a choice.”
