“I need to know if there are any rumors out there about the former king of Asland.”
“Oh,” her brother said. “That is some ancient history.”
“I know. It’s not exactly the lifestyles of the rich and viral. Which I know is much more your specialty.”
“That is true. But I know some people that I could ask. What exactly do you want to know?”
“I’ve just been made aware that there is some reason to believe that the king could still be alive.”
“And what do you think will be accomplished if you do find him?”
“He should pay. For what he did,” she said.
“I see. Well, I’ll see what I can find out. You know all you need to do is drip honey into the right year and usually you can find a trail.”
“I trust you.”
“You probably shouldn’t,” he said.
“Maybe not. But…for what it’s worth, we were both raised in a family with our father. So we’ve both suffered.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone. “Yes. Though you suffered the most. You didn’t have the freedom to leave. Not like we did.”
“Well, our oldest brother certainly doesn’t have the freedom to do whatever he wants.”
“No. That is true.”
“It’s reserved for those of us who are expendable,” Fern said.
“But you were never expendable, Fern. You were something different to him. An asset in a completely different way. And I would never say that it was better. I managed to disappear into the crowd. And there is something to be said for that.”
“I’ve escaped now.”
“Into an arranged marriage.”
“There’s nothing arranged about it,” she said. “I… I want to stay with him. But I have to figure out how to help him. I have to figure out how to help fix this.”
“I am not very good at giving advice. I’m certainly not anyone whose life should be admired. What I can say is that you cannot help someone who does not wish to be helped. You could deliver his father to him trussed up like a Christmas goose and if he did not want to accept the gift, he wouldn’t. If he did not wish for that to heal him, it would not. Our father doesn’t wish to be a good person, Fernanda. There is no amount of offering salvation to him that would make him take it, because he does not believe he needs it. If your husband does not believe he needs healing, then there is nothing that will ever make him accept it.”
“Is that why you never come home? There’s nothing you can do to fix any of it.”
“Nothing. And so I go and I live my life. Out here in the world where there are no arbitrary rules like the ones our father made. You could do the same.”
She would have thought of this as the brightest, shiniest apple only a few weeks earlier. Now, she wasn’t so sure. Yes, a man like her father was somewhere beyond saving.
But it was different.
“The choice has to come into it somewhere, Ricardo, and I don’t just mean the choice to be healed. Ragnar didn’t choose this pain. And he had no one to help him through it. He has no idea how to handle it still. That doesn’t make him bad. And it doesn’t make him broken. It only means it might take a little bit of work.”
“But as far as I know, you did not choose to do this work, my sister.”
“No. I did. I am choosing this.”
“You could also choose to meet me in the French Riviera.”
“I appreciate the offer. But that isn’t going to work for me.”
Love was something she hadn’t seen when she was growing up in the palace at Cape Blanco. What she had seen was her mother surrendering all of herself, her father imposing his will on everyone and her brothers becoming islands unto themselves in order to survive it.
